Avenue Design Competition: The Drift by Collin Hnetka

Collin Hnetka has always been captivated by the way ocean waves move, flow and eventually break along the sandy shore. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that, when Hnetka was asked in 2007 to construct an item for his industrial design program at the University of Alberta, he created something that incorporated his fascination with the ocean. “I decided to play with the form that waves take as they hit a sandy beach,” he says.

Hnetka created The Drift, a coffee table whose form resembles waves of water. To create this effect, the table has been built out of 46 individual pieces of Baltic birch. Each piece has been cut out of a single five-foot-by-five-foot sheet of wood, and glued to one another in a staggered, wave-like pattern that resembles ocean swells.

Of course, getting all of the pieces of wood to come together just right was a bit of a pain, requiring meticulous measurements and precise planning by Hnetka. “There was a lot of technical work to make sure all of the pieces fit together properly,” he says.

To get the design of the coffee table just right, Hnetka did countless sketches and even went so far as to make four mini-models 1/10th the size of the finished table. “Originally, the only part I wanted touching the ground was the bottom part of the table where the waves come down, but that design made it too unstable, so I had to give it a larger base and extend the corners down,” Hnetka says.

As for the look of the coffee table, Hnetka took inspiration from the washed-up logs that are usually scattered along a beach. “I went with a white wash to give it the effect driftwood has after it has been bleached by the sun,” he says.

Click here to view the rest of the Avenue design competition winners.