There was a fireplace that floated in midair, a cake plate that knew how to divide and a French guy who seemed to walk on water. A circus in its own right, the International Contemporary Furniture Fair gave the design world its latest, greatest show last week in New York.
With a focus on contemporary home furnishings, the ICFF is a four-day trade fair held annually at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center (425 exhibitors this year; some 17,000 attendees; the public gets in the last day). And throughout the city that never sleeps, furniture stores, art galleries and at least one bar got into the act by staging their own design-related events and parties.
While the ICFF comes on the heels of the vastly larger Milan furniture fair in April, the New York show has established itself, over the course of its 14 years, as an important American encore to the happenings overseas. This is where North American talent gets launched–and where more and more European and Asian designers and manufacturers are flocking to tap into the still-mighty American market.
This year, a sense of playfulness–albeit a sophisticated and intelligent sort of playfulness–wove its way around the show. The standouts were not static hunks of furniture. Designers explored the possibilities of furnishings that could be interactive, mutable, flexible or just darn clever.
“Our goal is to change the whole fireplace industry. There is a lack of good contemporary fireplaces on the market,” says Andrew Markow, a plastering contractor from Prospect Heights who, in his first ICFF appearance, delivered one of the show’s most spectacular pieces. His Fireorb is a “regular, radiant, wood-burning fireplace” that is suspended off the floor via its flue. Its hearth does tricks too: The firebox can be rotated 360 degrees to face whatever direction you like.
Markow collaborated with Chicago architect Doug Garofalo, who is known for turning existing (and quite ordinary) suburban ranches and split-levels into wildly contemporary dwellings that resemble nothing of their former selves. The idea here, Garofalo explains, was to break the tradition of fire being on the ground and instead to “float it” and to do “something sleek and elegant.” As is typical of him, Garofalo designed Fireorb on a computer and thus the graphic punch of the form.
Let them eat (the same size) cake
Believing that equal cake means equal happiness, 28-year-old Yu-Jui Chou of Taiwan approached his design for a cake pedestal with a similar sense that the object could do more than the obvious.
Chou, a (recently graduated) student from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., proposes both a Modernist “stage for your cake” made from chrome and gold-plated steel and a clever system for dividing the dessert into equal slices for 2 to 16 guests, including the odd numbers. A series of inconspicuous dots that correspond to the number of guests being served decorate the chrome rim. The inner gold plate rotates. You simply make a first cut into the cake from the center to the point-of-origin mark and the second cut to the dotted number that corresponds to the total number of slices desired. Thus, Piece of Cake No. 1. Then you rotate the inner gold plate and do it again, and again, and again.
Chou’s Division pedestal was part of a group exhibition of poetic tableware by the students at Cranbrook (and sponsored by Nambe, maker of metal alloy and crystal tableware). Cranbrook was one of only four design schools invited by ICFF officials to showcase the works of their students. And, as always, these young designers offered up unbridled creativity.
From the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., whose exhibition explored themes of flexibility and interactivity, there came a See Saw sofa (yes, it rocks) and an Orange Lamp, quite literally.
Nadine Anne Schelbert, 31, from Switzerland, came up with the citrus delight. She created a cylindrical lamp made of translucent acrylic into which you drop a fresh orange–after first inserting into the fruit’s base a glass tube housing a 20-watt halogen bulb. The acrylic cylinder glows orange and emits the sweet smell of citrus. The lamp comes with an air pump attached to a foot switch. It blows air into the orange as part of the cooling mechanism. The orange stays good for a few days, longer if you water it–Schelbert also incorporated a system for doing that expediently.
French twist
While the student designers were hoping to be discovered by a manufacturer with money to sink into producing their designs, Christian Biecher is living the young designer success story.
At age 38, Biecher is France’s hottest rising design star and seems to be able to do just about anything these days. An architect as well as an industrial and interior designer, Biecher did fashion designer Issey Miyake’s headquarters in Tokyo. He got the coveted commission to design a fancy restaurant (opening this year) at the Louvre in Paris. And at the ICFF, he made his official American debut with a collection of upholstery and tables for Bernhardt Design of North Carolina.
Shunning the European tendency for creating all-too-slim seats, Biecher wanted to “give the idea of comfort and generosity” even before sitting in his Abra (as in abracadabra) sofa, which is the right name for this piece.
Biecher managed to create a robust, social sofa that is also sleek by hoisting the form onto slender aluminum legs. He angled the back corners inward to turn sitters toward one another and to give them an armrest where, actually, there is none.
Bernhardt showed the sofa in a juicy red leather, and it was appropriate amid this year’s color explosion. Big color, little pastels–it was all about some color, any color. Some designers went so far as to turn color into the whole point.
Look good, feel good
Lost City Arts, a retailer and manufacturer based in New York, showed a cocktail table whose top is composed of five interchangeable and colorful lacquered panels that spring-load into the table’s maple frame. The look of the table can be changed at whim by simply rearranging the sequence of the color panels. The table was originally designed in the mid-1950s by furniture designer Edgar Bartolucci and graphic designer Robert Cato.
And from Montreal came Snowlab, a young company with a bright new idea for mixing color into light. The product is called Therapie. And it is essentially a colored light painting that hangs from a wall and gives a nod to the concepts of color and light therapy.
Designed to illuminate a room and your spirit as well, Therapie consists of soft PVC canvas stretched around an aluminum frame; a fluorescent-neon tube at 40 watts that rests behind the canvas; and three sheets of multicolored acetate that has a special UV coating.
To get the desired mood or color, you lift the canvas off the wall and wrap an acetate strip around the tube bulb, securing it with Velcro.
It was clever and artful.
But if one product could sum up the exuberance of this year’s ICFF, it was Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara’s tabletop clock presented by Bozart, a Philadelphia-based maker of sophisticated, artful toys that appeal as much to grownups as they do to kids.
The flip clock has 84 original, cartoonlike drawings by Nara that are housed in both the hour and minute windows. With each passing minute, a new piece of art flips into view, a new cartoon unfolds.
And an ordinary piece of home furnishings becomes joy.
Where to buy
Here’s how to buy or locate the items from the International Contemporary Furniture Fair shown on our cover:
– Fireorb fireplace is made of black painted steel and costs between $5,600 and $6,400, depending on the length of the flue. It measures 40 inches in diameter on the bottom; the flue is almost 9 inches in diameter. A stainless-steel model is being developed. Call Andrew Markow at 847-454-9198.
– Abra sofa by Christian Biecher measures 89 1/2 inches wide by 32 inches deep and 29 1/2 inches high, with prices starting at $2,300. For more information, call Bernhardt Design at 866-634-0191.
– Bartolucci/Cato Table from Lost City Arts with the interchangeable and reversible, lacquered panels has a solid maple frame and iron finished legs. It measures 60 inches long, 19 inches deep and 15 1/4 inches high and costs $1,400. Call 212-375-0500 or send an e-mail to info@lostcityarts.com.
– See Saw Sofa from Yuen Tung Chiang of Hong Kong was part of the student exhibition by the Art Center College of Design of Pasadena, Calif. It has a wood frame and is upholstered in Neoprene–but is not currently in production. For more information, call Chiang at 626-390-8967 or send an e-mail to tungdont@hotmail.com. Or call the school at 626-396-2394.
– Orange Lamp from Nadine Schelbert of Switzerland was among the products shown in the Art Center College of Design student exhibition. It is not currently in production but may be soon. For information, call or fax Schelbert at 626-797-0350 or send an e-mail to design@schelbert.com. Or call the school at 626-396-2394.
— Karen Klages
