Berkshire Furniture Maker Launches New Collection with Design Icon Rafael de Cardenas

Pictured: Kump Studio Exclusive, courtesy of Raf Cardy's Joyride.

Kump Studio's furniture looks like it goes to work at a high art carnival at night. Ian Geoghegan builds it out of a workshop in Great Barrington using primarily plywood in colors that don't apologize, with a glossy, almost automotive finish. The look owes as much to “Pee-wee's Playhouse” and hot rods as anything he studied at Pratt.

This summer, that look landed him the debut collaboration on Joyride, a new furniture and auction platform from Rafael de Cardenas, an architect on Architectural Digest’s “AD100 list” whose resume includes interiors for Cartier, Baccarat, and Glossier's headquarters, all after spending his twenties designing menswear for Calvin Klein.

Joyride launched June 30, in two parts: a made-to-order collection by Kump, and Catalogue N.°1, an online auction of pieces de Cárdenas has personally collected, including chairs commissioned for the Rothschild Bank cafeteria in Paris and a coat-hanger lamp by Philippe Starck. It's the biggest platform Geoghegan's furniture has ever had by a Berkshire country mile, and it started, more or less, with him not saying hello to de Cardenas at Rubiner's cheese shop.

All Roads Lead Back to Great Barrington

Geoghegan's path loops back on itself. Born in New York City in 1989 and raised between there, Connecticut, and Maryland, he attended early college at Simon's Rock—then still located in Great Barrington—before receiving an industrial design degree at Pratt in 2012. He worked a stint at a lighting firm and in advertising before dedicating himself to launching Kump, which he picked up and moved to Nashville in 2016, in search of rent that wasn't insane.

That worked, for a while. "My rent was 500 bucks, and my studio was 500 bucks, and I bought a car, and that was $400," he says. "All of a sudden my life was a third of the cost." For a few years Nashville had the density of like-minded people that made the scene function, and Geoghegan built a real business doing full custom interiors: houses, a toy store, motels, cabinetry built to order. Then Covid hit, and the math broke. "Zillow came in and kind of bought up all the real estate," he recalls. Rents caught up to New York's without New York's income to match. "It was New York-expensive in the middle of Tennessee. And you don't have access to health insurance."

He and his girlfriend, a tech project manager who works remotely, journeyed back to Great Barrington in 2023. The calculation was a familiar one: close enough to Manhattan to have a career, far enough to actually afford a life. The move also gave him an excuse to stop taking full interior buildouts and go back to what he'd wanted to do at Pratt in the first place: furniture, one-off or small-batch, built to a standard he controls from start to finish.

What's a Kump?

The aesthetic of Kump is unmistakable once you've seen it. Geoghegan has a confidently whimsical love of big blocks of color, theatrical shapes, squiggly lines, and an automotive shine. His work is built primarily and unapologetically out of plywood and laminate, materials Geoghegan picked up originally to hit tighter budgets. Now his reasoning runs deeper than cost-cutting. "The material is not the most expensive part," he says. "It's the labor." Solid wood is inconsistent by nature: it warps, it has to be sorted and sanded, and getting the saturated color he craves out of it means coat after coat of paint. High-grade plywood gets him there faster, with big, consistent fields of color. That said, he insists the process remains "a really labor-intensive thing to do."

The reference points behind the look are wide-ranging and unpretentious: Pee-wee's Playhouse, that stretch of adolescence spent building and airbrushing motorcycles, French Art Deco, and Japanese postmodernists like Shiro Kuramata and Shigeru Uchida, whose sculptural, curved cabinetry from the '80s and '90s shares DNA with his own.

Recent work has shown up at Available Items in Tivoli, The Future Perfect in Manhattan, Plum Gallery in Brooklyn, and as lighting inside Half Rats, the culturally vibrant natural wine bar in Great Barrington.

Which Brings Us Back to the Cheese Shop

Geoghegan had been following de Cardenas' work since a gallery show he attended in 2012—early furniture from a the designer, who opened his firm, Architecture at Large, in 2006. Then, a couple years ago, Geoghegan spotted him in person, in line at Rubiner's. He didn't say anything. "I mean, he's an architect, right?" he remembers thinking. "I don't know if those guys want to get stopped by fans." He followed de Cardenas on Instagram instead, and sent a message. de Cardenas messaged back. He keeps a house in the Berkshires, and had a project in mind: Joyride.

For Geoghegan, working with someone at de Cardenas' level has changed how his own work gets treated, which is, he says, a real gift. "So much of what I was doing before, when I was living in Nashville, was treated like labor rather than art," he says. "The clients would talk to you as if you were ‘the help,’ more than the talent, the designer." This project has felt different. "This is sort of the first time in my career that it's felt like people are asking my opinion and actually listening." 

But with a heightened level of respect comes even greater expectations, and Geoghegan appears unafraid of his blooming moment. "It's really nice," he says, adding playfully, "but it is stressful. If somebody like [de Cardenas] sees something in you, you kind of have to lock onto that and not think that you don't know what you're doing."

Get It While It's Hot

The collection itself runs from sculptural table lamps to statement cabinetry. Kimono-inspired cabinets are the star of the line. Their curved doors cut with gaps and openings meant to draw you toward them like the curtains of a circus tent. One very vertical cabinet, patterned with a cluster of cloudy, tadpole-like shapes, is both a little silly and beautifully captivating. On the slightly more restrained end are Geoghegan's side table, which speak more through their shape and lines than color, Well suited as an accent piece in a spare modern room or a dense, classically furnished one.

Pieces are made to order—what's pictured on the site is representative, not fixed, so dimensions, colors, and finishes shift with the buyer. Geoghegan's smaller lamps start around $800; the more ornate cabinets run roughly $3,500 to $5,000, with larger commissioned pieces priced accordingly.

Further out, Geoghegan has a solo show, "Greenhouse," booked for the Stockholm Furniture Fair in February 2027. But Joyride is the project that changes the math for him right now: a decade-long fan finally getting, in his words, "insanely lucky to be on the radar of a guy like that," and proof that his commitment to a somewhat outlandish design sensibility was right all along.