Our round frame finally has its European patent, which is a strange and lovely thing to be able to say out loud. It's taken three years, a heap of drawings and technical writing, and more than a few eye-watering bills, so it's been a real lift to see a fair bit of local press for it over the past week, and there's something heartening about other people making a fuss of a thing you've poured years into. The obvious question is what pushed us to patent a picture frame in the first place, and the honest answer starts somewhere very ordinary.
It began with us trying to claw back a bit of space in our small workshop. A picture frame, when you really look at one, is mostly fresh air, and shipping and storing fresh air turns out to be a surprisingly expensive way to carry on, so once we'd noticed that we reckoned we couldn't be the only ones with the problem. The round design, and the fact that it packs flat, is the heart of the patent. Flattened, ours takes up roughly a tenth of the space, which works out at about a 90% cut in both shipping and storage, and it's around 85% lighter into the bargain. You feel that in a small workshop, and the courier feels it too.
The frame itself is a single strip of bent birch ply, closed with a small wooden clip that Aran drew from the tusk-tenon joint on the back of an old Sligo chair, spotted by chance while leafing through the Book of Sligo. No screws, no glue, and not a scrap of MDF. Because it's birch the whole way through, when it has finally done its job it comes apart as easily as it went together, a single material you can reuse or recycle cleanly rather than a laminated thing bound for landfill.
The carbon-footprint side is hidden, but something we value enormously. Depending on what you'd otherwise hang on the wall, it comes out somewhere between a third and two-thirds lighter on carbon than a conventional frame, and once you account for the carbon the timber itself locks away, it actually comes out carbon-negative. We've the full analysis still to finish before we'll say that out loud properly, so take the figures as honest estimates for now.
And then there's the simplest thing of all, which is that it just looks nice. Round, balanced, calm, a frame that steps back and lets whatever is inside do the talking rather than shouting over it. Three years of trials and dead ends in service of something you barely notice, which is, I think, exactly the point. You'll find it across our Local Spots maps now, with plenty more on the way.
