When Brianna Nichole Love was a child in San Antonio, she tried to convince her parents to let her keep bees in the backyard (the answer was an immediate no). But, undeterred, she got an internship at the local zoo as an undergrad — and kept studying bees anyway. It’s not surprising, then, that one of the first pieces of furniture she ever designed was the Honeycomb Coffee Table.
The table, with its base of interlocking, hexagonal wood columns, turned out to be the first of many pieces she would make out of the material. The 28-year-old designer started working with wood at Wellesley, where she was studying architecture. But it wasn’t her academic program that introduced her to the material so much as the school’s groundskeepers, who had a facility to make lumber on campus. Love wanted to make spoons for some friends, and the crew delivered the wood she needed directly to her door.
Brianna Nichole Love.
Photo: Elisheva Gavra
After graduating college and working in a variety of jobs, she launched Studio Apotroes in 2021 in her hometown of San Antonio. She admits she didn’t know what she was doing, but her time in the venture-capital world had shown her that most people who start projects don’t, either. Since moving to New York for graduate studies at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University in 2021, she has launched a few other pieces, including a taboret and incense holders, along with chairs for restaurants like Café Mars. Now she’s in her final term, working on a thesis about private equity’s effect on housing while continuing to design new pieces for Studio Apotroes.
Love’s latest collection, the Annie Dining Set, is inspired by the combs and traditional African masks in her grandmother’s living room. It wasn’t just about the way they look, but a desire to “create something that would allow me to sit with her at a meal.” The Annie set has 12 chairs, each designed to look like something that could literally rake through a head of hair. As she says, “I really liked the concept of a comb chair that is actually a type of comb — throwing that existing design typology on its head and being more literal with it.”
Photo: Brianna Love
Photo: Brianna Love
While on a trip with MIT to design spaces used by farmers in Colombia, Love teamed up with a coffee farmer named Carlitos, who was interested in beekeeping. She worked with him to improve his hives and add more native species of bees, and the project grew into something much larger, with Love introducing other members of the community to beekeeping. A few months later, as she cut into a honeycomb at a hotel breakfast in Aspen, the idea for a table came to her. She made a few sketches, returned to the writing and photos she had taken while in Colombia, and a couple years later, in 2021, she finished the Honeycomb Table — a multitiered table that looks like its namesake. “I thought that I was going to sell a ton of these,” she says. “I didn’t realize that I didn’t know how.” But after cold-emailing other designers and design writers, she got a better sense of how to launch her business. It was no deluge of sales, as she had initially imagined, but it gave her the confidence to continue.
The Phobos Chairs at Café Mars in Brooklyn.
Photo: Brianna Love
A few months after moving to New York City for grad school, Love reconnected with chef Paul D’avino, who was tapping a few artists and artisans to build out his new restaurant, Café Mars. Love had met D’avino by chance a few years prior in Boston, after charming her way into a dinner with him and Top Chef judge David Zilber at a book talk. “I think I just said a lot of really unbelievable things to David and he was like, ‘Yeah, this girl should come to dinner,’” she says, laughing.
After coming to Love’s solo show in the city, D’avino asked her to make dinnerware out of the oyster ceramic she was working on, which she made from a mix of crushed oyster shells and other materials. But she felt she wasn’t far enough along in the development of the material to commit. He had seen some of her chairs in the show, so they agreed that she should design seating for the restaurant instead — a set of eight chairs. After a enduring a few stops and starts, one concussion, and the anxiety surrounding a project of this size and scale, Love landed on a design that melded the bright colors of the restaurant with functionality — there’s a slight downward slope to the seat so it’s comfortable enough for a leisurely, multicourse dinner. The chairs are crafted from solid beech, and the legs are painted in a custom hot-pink paint that draws attention to the U-shaped back legs and squiggly legs in front. “I remember when I made the final prototype of the chair, people were like, ‘What are those legs made out of?’ Because they’re so bright and so pink, people couldn’t believe they were wood. That’s the goal, to get people to really change their perception that wooden furniture is boring.” The process was a reprieve for Love herself, allowing her to lean into designing something “a little less serious.” The project also landed Love a commission from Brooklyn wine bar Lise + Vito.
Photo: Elisheva Gavra
All of the chairs in the Annie collection draw from a kind of organic Afrofuturism, but each piece also has its own look and story. “Chair No. 5 is all about bubbles,” Love says. Inspired by a comb that had a similar look, she uses cutouts and negative space to create the look of bubbles rising from the chair. “I wanted to make a chair that was lightweight and felt a tiny bit impractical,” she shared. “The idea of wooden bubbles is also interesting because it’s contradictory; wood isn’t really lightweight, nor is it transparent.” Because of its delicate nature, it took Love a few tries to get the chair right, balancing a surreal look with functionality.
Photo: Elisheva Gavra
“The key part on this one is the repetition of the circles forming the scalloping,” says Love. This chair went through a series of redesigns as well. Love wanted to add a 3-D element to the chairback but realized that it wasn’t really conducive to sitting comfortably. She then thought to add elements to the legs, but through error and experimentation, she came to a more scaled-back and streamlined look. “I loved the idea of having a frame for the back, but it didn’t feel sturdy. So I scaled it back and inverted the piece I wanted to float in the frame.”
Photo: Elisheva Gavra
The most traditional of the collection is Chair No. 8, but it didn’t start that way. The initial plan for the chair was to cover it in a series of engravings, but Love considered how absolutely annoying it would be to clean. So she added a zigzag element to the silhouette for a similar look, pulling inspiration from two separate combs. “Since all the combs are handmade, I wanted to evoke the imperfect nature of chairs that are a mix of handmade and machined. So the imperfect element and the zigzagging are the key parts of these chairs,” she says.
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