Four Collections from BằNG, a “Made by Hand” Vietnamese Brand

Header: BằNG

BằNG is a Vietnamese furniture and lighting brand that makes table lamps, mirrors, trays and short tables in acrylic, stainless steel, perforated steel, bamboo and linen. Everything is designed and made in the brand’s workshop, a 5,000 m² space in the Bình Dương province, about forty minutes by road from central Ho Chi Minh City. The machines there are traditional, and a large share of the work is done by hand, to the point that the craftspeople make their own hammers in sizes that suit their hands and the job in front of them.

The brand was founded in November 2021 by Thomas Bình-Minh Vincent, a French designer who studied applied arts and industrial design in France and then moved to Vietnam in 2016, and by Marc Bregeault, who runs it as chiefexecutive. Its name comes from a Vietnamese preposition meaning “made by” or “made from”, the word that appears in everyday phrases such as “làm bằng tay”, or “made by hand”, and “làm bằng sắt”, or “made of steel”.

Lớp sculptural lighting

Lớp (which means “layers” in Vietnamese) is a table lamp built from a set of parallel acrylic sheets held apart by polished stainless steel spacers, with a matte opal glass sphere positioned right in the middle of the stack. The sphere holds the bulb and works as the light source, and because the acrylic is translucent, each sheet picks up a reflection of it. This ends up creating a fun illusion: one stationary sphere appears as a series of repeated spheres, which gives the impression of movement. The lamp comes in four sizes and takes a standard E14 G45 LED bulb at 3000 Kelvin.

Dreamy Lớp is the most recent version, built with dichroic acrylic, a plastic whose coating splits light so that the sheet changes colour depending on the angle you look from and the light falling on it. In sunlight, for example, the piece casts a shadow tinted with soft rainbow colours. The name comes from an iridescent sky Vincent saw over Saigon one May afternoon, a phenomenon that occurs when sunlight diffracts through ice crystals or water droplets high in the atmosphere and scatters into shifting colours.

Đan catch-all

Đan (meaning “weave” or “plait”) is a small tray made from two bands of uncoated linen and a set of slender bamboo sticks pushed through them in alternating directions. No glue holds it together, so the sticks stabilise the form by the direction they are inserted in, and hand stitching keeps the linen bands in place. The tray can be reshaped by hand or stood on its side. The bamboo is soaked in lime to resist mould, and the linen comes in nine colours.

Qua mirror

Qua is a wall and table mirror whose reflective surface is made of a sheet of high-grade stainless steel polished to a mirror finish, set at a slight tilt. It comes in four sizes named after paper formats, from A6 to A3, and its name means “through” in Vietnamese. The tilt was chosen because of the visual effect it creates, as it picks up things behind and above onlookers, like a painting on the far wall or a cloud passing outside the window.

The main sheet is machine polished to get an even, precise reflection, and the frame is finished by hand, with the edges sanded and polished using handheld tools. Each piece is different from the next due to slight variations in the polishing, which is a consequence of how difficult stainless steel is to work at this stage. The Grand Palais boutique in Paris commissioned an exclusive straight version, without the tilt.

Điểm furniture and accessories

Điểm is BằNG’s first furniture collection and includes nesting tables, round tables, console tables, stools, a wall mirror, a table lamp, an edge table, bookends and a pot, all made from perforated steel sheet covered in matrix-like perforations – which refer to the pattern of lit windows on Saigon buildings at night. Each piece is cut, sanded, bent, rolled and welded from as few sheets as the studio can manage.

The proportions come from how people sit in Saigon, on low stools in cafés and on pavements, so the pieces are built at those heights and can serve as a seat or as a surface. The finishes include black and cream indoor powder coating, raw steel with varnish for indoor and outdoor use, mirror-polished stainless steel and brushed stainless steel.

Vincent works to four stated principles: that a product should be understandable, open to being appropriated by its user, innovative in what it does with standard materials and processes, and built with common sense about manufacturing, use and what happens at the end of its life. His motto is “Design ain’t no office job“.

Project information

Design Company: BằNG
Lead Designer: Thomas Bình-Minh Vincent
Other Designer: Marc Bregeault
Location: Vietnam