Armadillo Furniture Clads 'Friendly Monsters' in Reused German Shingles

Designers Lukas Wegwerth and Corinna Dehn have unveiled six new Armadillo furniture pieces at the Companions exhibition at London's Gallery Fumi, opening 6 October and running to 21 November 2026. Every piece is clad in wooden shingles salvaged from buildings in Germany's Vogelsberg region.

The new works include two cabinets, a sideboard, a birdhouse, a dining table and a stand-alone screen. Older pieces from the Armadillo series join them. All refer to Vogelsberg's traditional shingled architecture.

Where do the shingles come from?

The story starts with a renovation. Wegwerth and Dehn became fascinated with the material while renovating Wegwerth's grandmother's house in the region, a building clad in weathered wooden shingles from the 1800s.

"What differentiates a shingle from a piece of wood is very minimal, yet the shingle becomes a system component created from chunks of wood that cannot be used for much else, apart from firewood," the designers told Dezeen.

The shingles in the Armadillo series have three sources:

• Wegwerth's grandmother's house
• A construction site in a neighbouring village
• An older project in which the artists made shingles to clad mobile houses

The duo cleaned, brushed and sanded the old shingles before treating them in different ways. "The shingles are treated with wood stains in various colours, applied in a very wet stage so the colours can blend into each other, similarly to water colours," they explained. Other pieces were finished with linseed oil paints, while some shingles were ebonised (darkened) through successive baths of tannins, rust and slaked lime.

Why 'friendly monsters'?

The furniture's organic, playful shapes evoke woodland creatures covered in scales. That friendly appearance gave the exhibition its name.

"Some of the pieces of the Armadillo series are inspired by elements of vernacular architecture like the timber frame house we renovate, others are more organic and animate, like friendly monsters – companions," the artists said.

Wegwerth and Dehn also point to a living dimension of the material. "A shingled facade is a very vital entity, it's a habitat for wild bees and other insects that live in the rain shadow," they told Dezeen. "Visually, it can create an equally vivid and animated appearance."

What does the curved geometry demand?

The organic shapes complicate the cladding. Vertically curved areas need slim shingles; horizontally curved areas call for short or curved ones. "The shapes and sizes of shingles need to be very manyfold and made specifically for a certain spot on the furniture to make it work," the pair said.

"Going from more flat areas to more complex shapes, the shingles can go from rather big to pretty small, just like you can observe them in the shell of an armadillo or the scale on a fish," they continued.

Because the thickness of the shingle coat varies with the complexity of each area, the artists didn't know the final look until the end. "As a result, the final silhouettes and tonal values only emerge gradually during the process," they said.

Gallery Fumi has form for material experiments; previous shows there included rubber furniture resembling ancient ruins and furniture made from cardboard boxes. Companions runs from 6 October to 21 November 2026, giving London audiences seven weeks to see demolition waste reworked into sculpture-like seating and storage.