Jake Phipps is a British designer who graduated in 1999 from Parnham College, John Makepeace's furniture design school. He began by producing bespoke, one-off pieces for private clients, and in 2005 opened his own studio in London, turning to designs intended for large-scale production. Since 2010 his focus has been on unique, highly engineered pieces made to order. His work for Riva 1920 is the Love Seat Bench (2008), carved from a single block of scented cedar. The piece takes the familiar two-person seat and resolves it as an ergonomic form within the solid block, so that the shape of the seating emerges from the mass of the wood rather than from assembled parts. Offered at a compact 125 cm length, it is scaled for two and suited to both interior and outdoor use.