Hasta La Ideas

It seems strange that a region renowned for its surfing culture routinely sees old surfboards find their final resting place at the city dump. Architect and designer Lawrence O’Toole is giving new life to Kauai’s favorite pastime. O’Toole knew he was onto something after a conversation with an old-time surfboard shaper. “He mentioned that back in the ’70s, as smaller boards became fashionable, they would take old long boards and reshape the foam into smaller outlines,” O’Toole says. “To do this, they would strip the fiberglass off the old board, reshape it, recolor it and finally re-fiberglass it so that it would be good as new.” That bit of insight and an encounter with an eye-catching mid-century Scandinavian side table—”The soft rounded edge reminded me of a surfboard”—were all the inspiration he needed for his colorful OTables.

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