Maxwell Sims

   














      Maxwell Sims is a Toronto-based designer exploring how materials, form, and meaning shape the built environment. Exhibited internationally,his projects reflect an ongoing interest in how macro and micro decisions coalesce as physical products. His projects have been featured in publications such as Dezeen and Design Milk.

       He studied Industrial Design at OCAD University in Toronto, and The Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen and his work spans areas such as research and product development.        

For collaborations please use the email below.                  






Contact
maxfsims@gmail.com
+1 647-551-5711 (Canada)

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Lake Como Design Proposal:
Billet by Maxwell Sims


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To download the proposal click here.





Billet Bowl Description


    Billet began with an interest in combining two foreign materials to make a pedestal bowl— not to find a new function, but something more basic: a new tactile sensation born from material contrast. 

    A solid aluminum post is milled and inserted as a tenon through the wooden bowl's mortise. A rubber O-ring creates a pressure fit while managing the wood's natural expansion and contraction. The aluminum is anodized in contrasting colours to emphasize this foreign union — making the connection immediately legible. The weight of the solid aluminum base permits the wooden bowl’s cantilever.

    The border between wood and metal is the project's true subject. Where one material ends and the other begins is not hidden or resolved, but held in deliberate tension — the confine itself becoming the gesture. The engineered aluminum’s proximity to the complexity of the wood’s grain creates a compliment of opposites. The result is an object whose intention can be grasped at a glance: two materials, clearly separate, clearly together.

    The bowls themselves a materialization meant to play with contrast, the series ultimately incorporates different shades of wood that suit different anodizations in a series of trays.













Photo Credit: Alan Padilla




Biography




Maxwell Sims is a Toronto-based object designer currently studying at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen. His work spans lighting, furniture, and small-scale public infrastructure — shaped by material experimentation, sensorial detail, and ethnographic research rather than any fixed material or method. He believes the method shapes the outcome, and so moves freely between approaches as each project demands. 

Exhibited internationally in cities such as New York and Paris, and featured in publications including Design Wanted and Design Milk, his practice operates at the intersection of ambition and curiousity. Central to his work is a critical awareness of what it means to keep making objects in a world that generally needs fewer things.











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