Furniture Designer Max Enrich Doesn’t Use His Massive Scissor Collection for What You Think

I don’t know how I ended up collecting so many scissors, but I know where it started. I remember going to places like the dentist and the car mechanic as a kid and being impressed with the ones they used. Later, going to workshops to develop my practice as a furniture designer, I saw a lot of craftspeople using the kind of scissors seamstresses use. When I lived in London ten years ago, I started looking for a pair like that to start a collection, and my wife bought one for me as a present.

Now I have around eighty scissors. I got some of them online, others from secondhand markets, and a few from workshops I’ve attended. Artisans like scissors for their function, but I like them for how their looks play with contradiction—they are sinuous yet dangerous at the same time. They also never seem to go out of fashion. A 1980s desk scissor perfectly matches today’s aesthetics. If I grab something from my collection that’s from the ’60s or ’70s, you wouldn’t be able to tell which one is more modern. A pair used by a dentist from forty years ago still feels up-to-date, and it still will be in ten years.

In my practice, I am constantly balancing functionality and aesthetics. But the functionality in my pieces isn’t as precise as it is in scissors. Anything can be a side table—the functional side of my work is easy to achieve. So I try to focus more on the aesthetics and try to achieve something timeless, like the scissors.

With design, there isn’t a place you can go to grab inspiration when you need it. It’s something that you build with experience. But by focusing on an object such as scissors, you start detecting subtle changes, like how a straight line becomes a curve. I find so much design language in scissors, and by collecting them, my bookshelf of inspiration grows.

Styling by Ana Domínguez

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