Within the landscape of contemporary Spanish design, few companies have managed to build an identity as coherent as Expormim, the Valencian firm that for decades has explored the balance between artisanal tradition, material innovation and a contemporary vision of indoor and outdoor furniture. Its catalogue has gradually been enriched through collaborations with designers who share this sensitivity towards materials and a conception of objects deeply connected to the experience of inhabiting space.
Within this context emerges Leku, the new collection designed by Javier Pastor, a designer who has maintained a long-standing and especially fruitful relationship with Expormim. The series integrates naturally into the brand’s recent evolution, reaffirming its interest in developing pieces capable of engaging in dialogue with architecture, landscape and the open spaces where much of contemporary life now unfolds.
Its very name —“place” in Basque— reveals the intention behind the project: to conceive the object not merely as a functional piece, but as a space for encounter, a point of connection between people, the surrounding environment and the time shared around a table.
On this occasion, the designer develops a collection of dining and coffee tables that openly engages with the sculptural language of Eduardo Chillida, incorporating into the design reflection concepts that were central to the Basque artist’s work: void, matter, gravity and territory.
The design of the collection
The Leku collection unfolds through two distinct approaches that nevertheless share the same architectural spirit.
On the one hand, the dining tables, available in oval and round formats, are constructed with textured cast-glass tops resting on solid FSC-certified sapele wood legs. The glass, worked with an irregular and organic texture, captures light and reflects the surrounding landscape, transforming the tabletop into a changing surface where the environment is projected and reinterpreted.
The relationship between glass and wood introduces an engaging dialogue between opposites: void and volume, light and shadow, texture and smoothness. Within this play of tensions the sculptural character of the collection emerges. Each table seems conceived as a small architecture open to space — a place designed for gathering, conversation and celebration.
The coffee tables, by contrast, develop a more intimate scale. While maintaining the same sculptural spirit, these pieces adopt a quieter role within the domestic space, functioning as a silent accompaniment to everyday life.
Their structure is built from aluminium sheet, whose form subtly recalls Chillida’s steel compositions. The piece appears to rise from the ground like a mineral root — a structure that supports the cast-glass top while establishing a delicate balance between weight and lightness.
In these tables, light becomes an active element: the glass captures its presence and returns it in soft reflections that shift throughout the day.
Leku within the trajectory of Javier Pastor
The collection integrates coherently into the path that Javier Pastor has developed together with Expormim in recent years. In the Nido collection, the designer explored the idea of refuge through lightweight structures suggesting protection and intimacy, creating pieces that invited rest in open spaces. With Käbu, the language evolved towards a more contemporary aesthetic in which ergonomics and the flexibility of outdoor use became more prominent.
Leku represents a further step in this evolution. While the previous collections focused on the comfort and habitability of seating, this proposal shifts the focus towards the table as the centre of collective experience. The design becomes more essential and more architectural, reducing formal elements to concentrate on the relationship between structure, material and space. In this sense, the collection reveals a more conceptual dimension of Pastor’s work, where furniture approaches the territory of sculpture without abandoning its everyday vocation.
At a time when the boundary between interior and exterior is becoming increasingly blurred, furniture plays a fundamental role in shaping new ways of inhabiting space. Terraces, patios and gardens have become natural extensions of the home — places where domestic comfort enters into dialogue with landscape and outdoor life.
The Leku collection responds precisely to this cultural transformation. The pieces designed by Javier Pastor for Expormim seek to accompany architecture and landscape with a balanced and discreet presence. In that quietness perhaps lies their greatest virtue: a design that understands furniture as part of an everyday landscape, where form, material and use come together to create spaces that are more habitable, open and profoundly human.
Project: Leku Collection.
Products: Dining tables and coffee tables.
Design date: 2026.
Design: Javier Pastor.
Photography: Mauricio Fuertes.
Materials: Tables with structure made from high-strength aluminium sheet finished with polyester powder coating and solid sapele wood legs. Tempered cast-glass top.
Brand: Expormim.
Source: Expormim.
Javier Pastor
Industrial designer Javier Pastor belongs to a generation of Spanish creators who have helped consolidate a rigorous culture of design, closely linked both to academic research and to collaboration with industry. His work has developed primarily in the field of furniture and domestic equipment, with particular attention to outdoor design, where he has built a distinctive language based on formal clarity, functionality and a careful consideration of materials.
Trained in Industrial Design, Pastor expanded his education in 1996 with a Master’s degree in Design and Design Management at the Domus Academy in Milan, one of the schools that, over recent decades, has played a key role in shaping European designers connected to the culture of the project and to the relationship between design and industry. This Italian experience helped consolidate a strategic understanding of design as a tool for innovation within companies.
Alongside his professional activity, Pastor maintains a strong connection with the academic world. He is professor at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV), where he contributes to the education of new generations of designers, while also developing research work within the Design Research and Management Group (IGD). Through this group he participates in research, consultancy and training projects focused on design management and product portfolio development, collaborating with companies and institutions interested in integrating design as a central part of their strategy.
Throughout his career he has developed comprehensive design projects ranging from furniture and lighting to corporate identity and strategic communication. This transversal approach has allowed him to understand design not only as the creation of objects, but as a broader process that connects product, brand and experience.
A significant part of his work is linked to his collaboration with the Valencian company Expormim, known for its contemporary indoor and outdoor furniture. For the firm he has developed several collections that explore the relationship between comfort, structural lightness and durability in outdoor environments, including Nido, Käbu and, more recently, Leku, presented in 2026. These pieces reflect an approach to design in which formal clarity and functionality engage in dialogue with craft tradition and with the demands of contemporary outdoor living.
Beyond furniture design, Pastor has also worked in the bathroom sector with the company Poalgi, designing collections such as Litos, Bül and Dal, characterised by their exploration of innovative textures and by a refined aesthetic that combines material innovation with formal precision.
Ultimately, the trajectory of Javier Pastor reflects a way of understanding design as a discipline that integrates knowledge, industry and material culture, where each object forms part of a broader reflection on how we inhabit spaces and how relationships are built between people and the objects that accompany them.
Project by Javier Pastor
