This article was first published in the August 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online

Shay Alkalay and Yael Mer have invented a way to dye wood permanently. "We get curious about a process and then experiment with it," says Alkalay, one half of the Israeli husband-wife collaboration that makes up the Raw-Edges studio. Their new furniture collection, Endgrain, was the result of one such experiment. "We designed the floors of 40 Stella McCartney stores around the world with coloured parquet wood flooring, but wherever there was a lot of foot traffic, the colour would fade," says Alkalay, 39. "We thought there must be a way to inject the dye into the timber, so no matter how much traffic it has, it holds the colour inside." They boiled wood with a dye in huge vats, just as silk is dyed to make Persian rugs. "Cedar wouldn't soak up anything, no matter how long we cooked it and at what temperatures and pressure," he says. Eventually they hit upon two -- southern yellow pine and jelutong -- which they boiled for three days and then cooled. The woods were absorbing dye along their end grain -- the cross section, rather than along their length. "There seems to be a pressure element during the cool-down which helps to soak dye into the grain." They then milled the wood with CNC machines and patterned shapes across it at a 45° angle.

The couple will be creating pieces from the collection for the new Design Museum, which opens in London's Holland Park next year. "Wood suppliers told us we should keep it away from moisture, because any humidity would destroy the wood -- but we soaked it for days in boiling water," says Alkalay. "We went against anything experts told us to do."

This article was originally published by WIRED UK