A visit to Colas Modern

“When you invite someone into your space, they should see the essence of your intentions,” says David Colas (B.F.A., furniture design, 2012), greeting a visitor to the meticulous Colas Modern design studio. The combination workspace and marketplace proves his point: “I’m in love with order flow and how things get made. When the process is efficient, the pieces speak for themselves.”

Modern Heritage is appropriately eloquent: hand-hewn furniture, stylish and timeless, the collection at the heart of Colas Modern. David and his wife founded Colas Modern in 2014 after Lara, then a local curator, displayed David’s SCAD senior collection in her gallery. Today, the young parents run a burgeoning business where family is key. The Colas lineage of French master craftsmen goes back eight generations, explains David, proudly displaying a prized relic, his great-grandfather’s antique wooden hand plane: “When I hold this in my hands, it’s almost like a mission. I feel driven to do it, on both good and challenging days.”

David Colas:

Everything with Colas Modern is concerned with wellbeing in your home. Our goal is to bring people in to see the Colas Modern marketplace because that’s where you get to see our Modern Heritage collection: the bar top, the shelving units, the stools, the coffee table, that nightstand, everything is part of the collection. All the woodworking and welding, we do in-house. Potential customers can see this is being built here in Savannah and say, “Hey, this is very different than what I could get at Target!”

All our materials are locally sourced. Our wood comes from a supplier in Savannah that I’ve been shopping with since I was at SCAD in 2010. As a SCAD student, I would stay at Gulfstream Design Center as long and late as I wanted, working in the 3D printing and laser cutting and rapid prototyping areas. SCAD students have an incredible amount of technology at their fingertips. That Gulfstream production space has been a direct influence on how I’ve designed our shop and how we maintain it. Everything is cleaned and put away so that when we come in the next day, it’s ready.

My journey to SCAD began when in 11th grade at Mont’Kiara International School of Kuala Lumpur (MKIS). My plan was to play basketball at a Division III college in the U.S. When my class at MKIS took a trip to Petronas Towers to see an exhibition by the artist Latiff Mohidin, it was an epiphany. A recruiter from SCAD visited MKIS, and SCAD became my first choice.

We offer Colas Modern internships for SCAD students that are about real-world practical training and providing a look at operating a small business. Lara posts the internship positions the SCAD portal for employment. One recent intern, Griffin Feeney, we saw his SCAD portfolio and could tell he made everything himself. We’re looking for interns who love the building and fabricating process.

shopSCAD currently sells our Savannah Beehive cutting boards. They’re fun, they’re original, and have a message. The fruit boards include papaya, avocado, and pear, a nod to our favorite superfoods. The Irobo boards are inspired by my West Cote d’Ivoire heritage, with the look of the board based on African textiles.

Ours is truly a family business. If you want to get better at this trade, pay attention to details. It’s extra work to maintain quality, but if you start out that way, it’s not something you build towards, it’s part of who you are.

Visit Colas Modern

Written by Peter Relic.