California’s Manhattan Beach hosted an eclectic cast of characters in the early 2000s, according to the designer Brett Robinson, who was born there in 1991. Throughout his youth, the 34-year-old would observe surfers, artists, and aerospace engineers—there’s a Northrop Grumman site nearby—mixing and mingling around El Porto, a popular beach community in the area. “It was this strange amalgamation of the most low-key people and the most high-key people,” he says.
That one-of-a-kind mixture directly influenced Robinson’s first furniture collection—of tables, chairs, sofas, and ottomans, called Halcyon—which was released under his brand, B G Robinson, in a public installation at the Just One Eye store, in Los Angeles, in September of 2022. Pieces such as his XF_8 table, in cast aluminum, merge maritime and aerospace aesthetics.
