Jay Osgerby and Ed Barber: Plywood Maestros Win Top Design Award

Jay Osgerby and Ed Barber Plywood Maestros Win Top Design Award
Two young furniture designers whose pieces are described as "instant classics" last night won the �15,000 Jerwood applied arts prize.

Jay Osgerby and Ed Barber, who work as BarberOsgerby, were born in 1969 and hit the design press headlines in 1996 with a deceptively artless coffee table, Loop, which is already in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

They were the unanimous choice of the judging panel chaired by the design critic David Redhead, and including Tamsin Blanchard, design editor of the Observer magazine.

The judges called them: "A design team whose work combines clarity, coherence and beauty. Their work is a real marriage of craft and design, that is both fresh and classic and shows a true grasp of material and form."

Their work had seriously cool credentials, including a tile designed for Stella McCartney's new store in New York and a clothes hanger for Levi's. They also showed the Loop and a modern lightweight oak church pew, created for St Thomas's Cathedral in Portsmouth.

The duo have been credited with leading the growing interest of young designers in plywood, once a despised material seen as fit only for DIY magazine racks. Their rise to international stardom has been as seamless as their curvy furniture pieces.