What is Matek - and why we built a cohort around it.
Matek is Mater's circular composite - coffee husks, sawdust and recycled e-waste plastic, pressed into a material that behaves like stone but carries traces of its origin.
Most new materials announce themselves through performance: harder, lighter, cheaper, stronger. Matek introduces itself the other way around. It tells you, in its surface, where it came from.
A composite with provenance
Matek is the circular material developed by Mater. Its three principal inputs are coffee shell waste collected from coffee production, sawdust from the wood industry, and recycled e-waste plastic. Pressed and finished, the result is dense and tactile - somewhere between terrazzo, compressed stone and industrial composite - while still carrying flecks, tonal shifts and irregularities from its organic side.
The proportions and finish can be tuned. Turn it on a lathe and concentric strata appear, almost geological. Cast it as sheet and you can score, hinge and collage it the way a painter would treat a found panel. Polish a face and it reads as monolithic; leave it raw and it reads as excavated.
Why we built the 2026 cohort around it
For Project Materia's 2026 edition, we invited a cohort of artists, designers, architects and craftspeople to take Matek on its own terms. The brief was deliberately open. We did not want a uniform product line. We wanted the material to be challenged - lathed, hinged, pixelated, brutalised, rooted back into wood.
The pieces that came back from the cohort include Cathrine Raben Davidsen's three-panel PARSIFAL screen, Sophie Dries' turned Stria candleholders, Willem van Hooff's Archive Cabinet, Lea Colombo's modular ATOM Stool, Onno Adriaanse's Pyrite Side Table, Jacob Egeberg's Monolith Table, Forever Studio's Patos stools, Filippo Andrighetto's Space Invader and Oliver Thygesen's Rooted coffee table.
Across the cohort the material does very different things. That is the point. Matek is not a finish to be specified. It is a substrate to be argued with.
Where to see it
The 2026 cohort is presented during 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen with Tableau, and travels onward through the year. The objects are limited editions, made in small numbered runs.
