MARFA — Marfa’s routine silence is broken by the sound of machinery inside a design studio on the east side of town. Inside, Joey Benton and his team design and build furniture with the same sense of place they bring to adobe restoration projects and site-specific installations across the region.
After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design where he studied sculpture, Benton moved to Marfa in 1994 to work for the Judd estate overseeing the appraisal of the estate’s inventory. A 2004 Texas Monthly article credited Benton with helping shape Judd’s legacy, which became key to Marfa’s evolving art scene. The piece also pointed to the broader influx of outsiders whose creative projects were slowly reshaping and gentrifying the rural community. Benton acknowledged the tension in the same article, noting that such shifts could blur “just where [recent arrivals] were living.”
After supporting the Judd estate for three years, Benton founded SILLA in 1997 with a simple principle in mind: design should respond to its environment. In Marfa, that means working with the land, its history, and the tension between preservation and change. “The space is the loudest voice that we have out here,” Benton noted. “That voice guides everything the studio makes.”
Benton doesn’t want SILLA’s work to feel superimposed. “I like things that feel like they came out of their space,” he said. For SILLA, design begins with restraint and continues through attention to materials and longevity.
That sensitivity to place carries over to SILLA’s approach to materials. Rather than impose new elements into its designs, SILLA often reuses what’s already present in a space. “We live in a world where you can’t help but be aware of the value of materials, and a lot of materials that come out of a reclaimed world aren’t available anymore,” Benton explained. “These are trees that aren’t going to be grown again. These are materials that we don’t have access to anymore, and often they’re of much better quality than what we can purchase.”
When tasked to work on the floors of the Hotel Saint George, SILLA repurposed the building’s original roof planks by stripping off tar and remilling them. On a project for Marfa Spirit Co., the studio incorporated stone slabs from a previous iteration of the building into a bar table for the space.
Longevity is a key part of that thinking. Benton considers the lifespan of the materials used in SILLA’s designs. “If mahogany takes 100 years to grow, if you’re gonna make something out of mahogany, it should be around for 100 years,” Benton said. “Real simple equation.”
That emphasis on longevity shapes Benton’s restoration work in West Texas where he collaborates with engineers, historians and designers working to preserve historical landmarks. More recently, he joined a group working to restore the El Corazón Sagrado de la Iglesia de Jesús, a historic adobe church in Ruidosa, Texas. Benton and his crew were instrumental in shoring up a bell tower in danger of collapse.
For Benton, adobe work is meaningful and just as creative as his own design work. He describes it as a low-footprint, meditative space grounded in accumulated knowledge and collaboration. “I think adobe construction, or earthen construction in general, is a creative process,” he said. “It’s about a moment, and it’s about material and it’s about the collective knowledge of the people at that moment. And that has a creativity to it. “So there are decisions made in the original building of an earthen system that has its limitations, and those limitations are overcome with creativity.”
Collective knowledge also influences SILLA’s designs. The small team includes designers and fabricators working to make the studio’s ideas a reality. Designing one chair took the team about a year from idea to final product. The team spent around six months ideating before creating a physical prototype and another six finalizing the design and reworking it. A prototype of the chair sits next to the final design in Benton’s office. Though the differences between the prototype and the final chair are subtle, each change reflects the slow collaborative process.
The most recently-designed chairs feature a conduit frame with wooden armrests, a padded seat, and a matching textile stretched across the backrest. “I would say that 90% of our materials are like real things like steel or wood. We don’t need — almost — any plastics in our world. We’re a pretty simple company in terms of that stuff. We’re kind of moving backwards where everyone else is moving forward.”
“I have a very open idea about how things come together,” Benton said. “One of the things we talk about in the shop a lot when we’re making something new is to have everybody be part of the conversation.”
SILLA’s designer Amalia Attias spent months designing two colorways for the conduit chairs: purple and green with corresponding textile designs. Attias graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2020 with a BFA in furniture and has been working at SILLA since. Their workspaces are next to each other.
“Amalia and I basically sit side by side, and we talk about things that are basic life and chit chat all the time,” Benton said. “And then we have really wonderful, much deeper conversations about how we make things, what the philosophy of things are, how we think about things. And it’s grown into really, kind of out of conversation, into a way of doing things and a way of being, and it feels like it’s our own, and it feels really good.”
During our conversation Benton and Attias discussed the names of the conduit chairs’ colors. They considered calling the purple conduit “penstemon” and the green conduit “lichen.” Though the details have been finalized in the studio, they’re eager to explore the loom’s limitations and possibilities for texture and pattern.
These newer designs mark a change in how SILLA is moving forward. For decades, SILLA worked only on private commissions. But recently, Benton started offering some of the studio’s chairs, which draw from the archive of SILLA’s private work, to the public. “We have this history of objects, and I love them, and they feel like they should have a bigger life,” he said.
Opening the work to the public has introduced a tension Benton continues to grapple with. “The public is a very complicated thing, and one person is not so complicated,” Benton said. When a design isn’t tied to a specific site, the idea of longevity shifts. Now, the owner has to do the work of fitting the chair into their own space.
“If you make an object, someone else has to love it and take care of it — but you don’t,” Benton explained. “You don’t get to hold on to those things once you put them in the world. It has to hold its own. Someone else has to desire it in that way for it to be able to have permanence.”
You can view SILLA’s projects and creations at sillamarfa.com.