There’s no comfort like bread and butter – unless you’re sinking into a Faye Toogood sofa. For Milan Design Week, the British designer created Bread & Butter, a new collection designed for Italian furniture brand Tacchini. The series was inspired by Toogood’s personal ritual of baking sourdough each morning as a grounding, tactile act. “Every single morning, I knead, proof, and bake a loaf of bread,” reveals Toogood. “Some people have transcendental meditation or prayer. I have my sourdough starter and half an hour of sticky, squashy, floury, sensory, in-the-present pleasure. There are some days when the world caves in… but I find peace and pride in my relentlessly rising loaf. On the daily bread I can depend.”
Faye Toogood with Butter Sofa model
That daily practice shaped the soft curves, creamy textures, and quietly indulgent palette of the Bread & Butter collaboration. Debuted at Tacchini’s showroom, the collection felt right at home, staged like a lived-in Milanese apartment where every detail invited you to sink your teeth into the buttery dreamscape.
Photo: Andrea Ferrari
Photo: DePasquale + Maffin
True to Toogood’s process, the collection wasn’t just imagined – it was felt. Known for her hands-on methods, the designer sculpted the entire series out of actual bread and Cornish butter, using the pliability of the materials to explore form, weight, and warmth in real time. That playful experimentation laid the foundation for the collection’s star: a generously curved sofa that looks – and feels – like something you could melt into. “I wanted to create a chair as comforting, and as tactile as soft butter,” the designer shares. “Modeling with slippery fingers, the modular Butter Sofa appeared.”
Toogood with Butter Sofa and Bread Table models
In the same spirit, Toogood baked loaves of ciabatta to explore scale and stacking, using slices as models for what would eventually become the collection’s Bread Console and Bread Side Tables. By stacking and balancing the bread in sculptural configurations, she arrived at blocky, architectural forms that still feel soft around the edges. The final pieces, carved from ash wood with a maple inlay, evoke stacked slices of buttered bread, with soft edges and a gentle, golden sheen.
Toogood with Bread Table models
Bread & Butter is a reminder that good design doesn’t always begin in a sketchbook – sometimes, it starts in the kitchen. Toogood’s approach proves that inspiration can rise from the most ordinary rituals and the most unexpected materials if you’re willing to explore through touch, play, and curiosity. As she puts it, “Everyday life is a thing of beauty. Sometimes you need go no further than the breakfast table to find meaning. Slice a loaf of bread. Look at it from a new perspective.”
Toogood with Bread and Butter models
To learn more about the Bread & Butter collection by Faye Toogood for Tacchini, visit t-o-o-g-o-o-d.com or tacchini.it.
Photography courtesy of Tacchini and Faye Toogood.
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