In interior architecture, nothing begins with an object. It begins with a brief. What happens here. Who uses it. What time of day. Furniture arrives late in that process, and by the time it does, most of the decisions have already been made.
RIB started the same way. Before there was a base or a cup, there was a list of briefs. The side of a bed. The corner of a desk where the day is actually run. The console by the door where keys land and then disappear.
Seven of those became sets.
A set is a guess. A considered guess, but a guess. It assumes your entryway holds keys and a wallet rather than a dog lead and three pairs of sunglasses. It assumes your desk runs on pens when it might run on brushes.
At the fair in July I watched how quickly hands went to the table. Pieces were lifted off one arrangement and set down on another. Nobody asked permission. The sets I had laid out were being rewritten in front of me, which was the most useful thing that happened all weekend.
So, the configurator.
An isometric base, every component, and the ability to put things where you want them. Move a cup to the left. Stack coasters. Drop a Root into the medium cup and see what it does to the composition. It is the same drawing I would make for a room, at the scale of a surface.
On price
The one thing I did not want was for this to become a calculation.
If building your own were cheaper, the sets would read as a trap. If the sets were cheaper, the configurator would read as a penalty for having your own opinion.
So the price is the same either way. Four or more pieces, 15%. Set or self-made. There is no better deal hiding somewhere else on the site.
Four is not an arbitrary number. It is roughly where a group of objects stops being a group of objects. One cup is a cup. Two is a pair. At four, on a base, things begin to relate to each other. Heights, gaps, what sits forward and what sits back. That is an arrangement, and an arrangement is what the system is for.
Below four, the price holds. That includes the sets. The Bedside Set is three pieces, so it is priced as three pieces.
What the sets are now
They stay. For a gift they are usually still the right answer, because a gift is a brief about someone else and it helps to have one already written.
They cost the same as they would if you built them yourself. A starting point somebody else has thought about, nothing more and nothing less.
Everything after that is yours.
