Rascal — Memphis-Style Cartoon Beagle, Milan Design District

The showroom sells Italian furniture from the 1980s. They came to us with a beagle, a colour card and a very specific fear: that their dog sculpture would look like something from a garden centre.

The brief, in their words

Make it look like a piece from the decade we sell. Which meant going back to the Memphis group’s rulebook: mint, hot pink and lemon, black as a structural colour, and decoration that refuses to sit still.

Where the pattern is allowed to go

Memphis on a flat surface is easy. Memphis on a curved animal needs a rule, or the piece becomes noise. Ours was that the painted graphics describe the form rather than fight it. Squiggles run along the long axis of the back. Triangles sit where a plane changes direction. Circles land on the flat of the ears and the haunch. None of the graphics cross the eyes, because that is where the piece stops being a character.

The black is doing more work than the colours. Four black lines — the brow, the ear edge, the back, the tail — carry the whole silhouette at a distance; the pink, mint and lemon only tell you what kind of object it is.

Build

Fibreglass over a steel frame, satin rather than gloss so the courtyard gravel light does not wash the pattern out. The graphics are hand-masked and sprayed, not printed, so the edges stay slightly soft, which is how the originals looked.

What it does in the courtyard

It is the one thing in the courtyard that is not for sale, and it is the thing people photograph. The showroom has started running its opening-night parties around it, which we did not plan and are happy about.