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At ICFF and Beyond, Designs That Shine
At ICFF and Beyond, Designs That Shine
Credit Evan Sung for The New York Times
After walking the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, the annual showcase of new design that ended its 26th run at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on Tuesday, I have just one word to say. Are you listening?
Horsehair.
That was the most surprising material I found integrated into a light fixture. Which is saying a lot.
As light emitting diodes have grown cooler in temperature, warmer in color, dimmable and programmable, they have been combined with a startling range of materials to create luminous sculptures otherwise known as lamps. Sometimes you can even read by them.
At this furniture fair, I thought I had seen it all: LEDs embedded in resin pigeons, in classical busts, in paper bags. Then I caught sight of the Horsehair sconce by the New York design studio Apparatus: twin hanks of hair suspended like pigtails from a brass arc, each ending in glowing frosted glass.
Gabriel Hendifar, Apparatus’s creative director, described the light as a “muscular thing, nonchalantly hanging from a hook.” Asked whether you could trim your fingernails by it, he said, “I conceived of it more as an art piece that hangs on the wall.”
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It was only recently (in other words, pre-2008) that a global wave of “design art,” or small-batch expressive work with limited or nonexistent functionality, was the subject of debate. Some loved and collected it. Others called it pretentious.
But there were no apologies for the small-batch expressive lighting, some of it quite beautiful, that I saw this year at the Javits and beyond. Throughout the citywide group of exhibitions and other events known as NYCxDesign, designers argued for the importance of setting a mood in a room, or creating a showstopper. If the word “art” didn’t turn up in these conversations, “jewel” often did.
And more than ever, lighting looked like a young designer’s pursuit, particularly for a knot of professionals who have emerged out of Brooklyn and matured together as collaborators and friendly competitors.
Bec Brittain, for instance, was all over town. The 33-year-old Brooklyn lighting designer showed her angular fixtures at the Javits, while her toothy Seed chandelier was part of a Midtown exhibition by the Brooklyn lighting company Roll & Hill. Downtown, the SoHo design gallery Matter featured Ms. Brittain’s wonderfully weird collaborations with Hilda Hellstrom, a London designer who works in a mottled resin called Jesmonite.
At the same time, Jamie Gray, 46, Matter’s founder and creative director and now a newly hatched lighting designer, was introducing Discus at the furniture fair. This LED system has a language of illuminated circles meant to fit anywhere, floor to ceiling, in homes or offices.
Also at the Javits, Rich Brilliant Willing, a seven-year-old Brooklyn design studio, presented an LED collection that included Mori, a pendant lamp made from a wire skeleton spray-coated with a thin layer of material. At Sight Unseen Offsite, an invigorating new design show in SoHo, it showed a big scribble of a chandelier called Palindrome. And several weeks ago, the company, which has produced all manner of furnishings, announced that it would confine itself to lighting in the future.
“It’s where we think our best ideas are,” said Theo Richardson, 31, one of the three founders.
Jason Miller, 42, who started Roll and Hill four years ago after creating a ceramic lamp cast from deer antlers that became an emblem of Brooklyn design, believes it is only to be expected that young New York designers would find their way to lighting.
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“It fits the business of an independent designer well,” he said, explaining that economies of scale prevent small design companies from producing and selling their work cheaply. They need to make premium goods that consumers won’t balk at, and lighting is looked at as a justifiable luxury.
“That’s the sculpture over the table,” Mr. Miller said. “That’s the jewelry.”
No one thinks of a couch as jewelry, he added. “It’s a practical thing.”
Which is not to say that other kinds of items at ICFF lacked pizazz. My husband, who accompanied me to the show one afternoon, pointed out the impressive number of stylish bathtubs, including a turquoise model from the Italian company Teuco with black, gray and gold stripes.
Decorative surfaces were the order of the day. MT Casa, a Japanese brand of “low-adhesive-strength” tape, set up a booth demonstrating how the exuberantly colored and patterned material can be applied to your walls.
And Trove, a wallpaper company never satisfied with being merely pretty, presented Allee, a fantasy image of a misty formal garden inspired by the 1961 film “Last Year at Marienbad.” (Written by Alain Robbe-Grillet, the film is about many things, but chiefly ambiguity.) The 12-foot-tall panorama was shown in the muted graphite of a pencil sketch being erased.
“I think things are starting to look a little softer,” said the New York interior designer Benjamin Noriega-Ortiz about his impressions of ICFF. “Design has become romantic.”
In his view, Brooklyn designers fitting together raw hunks of wood have long set the tone for the show, but this year a subtler handling of the material was in evidence.
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“Even Ross Lovegrove did this beautiful chair in wood,” Mr. Noriega-Ortiz said, referring to the Anne chair commissioned from the Welsh designer for the 125th anniversary of Bernhardt. “That was romantic,” Mr. Noriega-Ortiz added. “And it was comfortable.”
Those descriptors also applied to a standup desk by the German company Stilvoll, with compartments neatly stashed under the top. Of course, you have to pay for these virtues: in this case, about $8,300 for the walnut version, and $15,000 for the rosewood.
But affordable design was on view as well. Sauder, an 85-year-old company near Toledo, Ohio, that pioneered ready-to-assemble furniture made of particleboard, presented a modish collection of pieces, none selling for more than $650. (Its Objeti table by Joseph Ribic, for example, with a black-and-white painted pattern and compartmentalized top, was about $300.)
ICFF takes the initial standing for “international” seriously. Once again, there were group displays from Britain, Spain, Austria and Norway, among other countries. But Wanted Design, a satellite exhibition in Chelsea, now in its fourth year, was also an inspiring venue for global talent. A small but eloquent division of Latin American pieces was an eye opener, with collections from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Puerto Rico and Chile. Bravo! from Santiago, for instance, showed hollowed-out river rocks of appealing purity.
Another highlight of Wanted was “Nasz,” Polish works curated, and in many cases designed, by Studio Rygalik in Warsaw. “The name means ‘ours,’ ” said Gosia Rygalik, who leads the company with her husband, Tomek. “We didn’t want ‘Poland’ in the title.”
Seeing the simple, pale furnishings, one would be challenged to identify their origins, with the possible exception of a folkloric-style carpet adorned with a picture of an urban scene.
Like the new Sight Unseen Offsite and the two-year-old Collective fair, which ended last week, Wanted Design showed the advantages of concentrating smartly selected, well-arranged design under a single roof. Not everything was of comparable quality, but there was enough excellence to reward making the trek over. More important were the connections and reverberations established among various designs — the way Poland, for instance, converses with Mexico in the language of objects.
Even ICFF, despite the terrible ambience native to convention centers, had many bright spots from its more than 600 exhibitors. O.K., maybe not the aluminum lamp in the shape of a tiny man playing a guitar.
But that did make me laugh.