"Going With the Grain - Craft Turns Heads at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair" in @nytimes

DESIGN NOTEBOOK

Clockwise from left: the May chair in teak by Miles & May; a credenza with aluminum-nail ornamentation by Peter Sandback; and Rope Lights by Tanya Aguiñiga.

By JULIE LASKY

 

Published: May 23, 2012

ANDREW MAU had a man bun — or rather, two of them. “A bun and a thing,” Mr. Mau said, referring to the stylish knot of hair perched high on his scalp and the smaller tuft gathered near his collar. If it’s not the coiffure you associate with the ancient vocation of woodworking, you clearly did not spend time at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, which on Tuesday ended its annual four-day run at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.

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Hand Made

The Corliss chair by Studio Dunn.

Mr. Mau, 25, a founder of Studio Dunn, a two-year-old furniture company in Providence, R.I., was part of an army of youthful exhibitors who were rocking on the heels of their pointy-toed leather shoes or fuzzy polka-dot sneakers as they introduced updated versions of such hoary designs as Shaker chairs and gentlemen’s valets.

Studio Dunn’s Corliss chair, for instance, was a supple handmade fusion of cast-aluminum back and maple seat and legs that paid tribute to George Henry Corliss, the inventor who improved the steam engine.

“All of our new pieces are named after game-changers in industrial design and transportation design,” Mr. Mau said.

At Richard Watson’s booth, one looked in vain for the wrinkly codger who produced an 18th-century-style highboy and accompanying stool. But it turned out that Richard Watson wasn’t elderly. In fact, Richard Watson isn’t a person at all, but a New England furniture brand that bears the surnames of its female founders, Brooke Richard, 34, and Laura Watson, 33.

“My initial inspiration was preciousness,” Ms. Richard said, indicating the $18,000 highboy’s white bronze pulls, hammered by a jeweler, and the contrasting walnut fronts and maple sides intended to give each drawer, when removed, the appearance of a keepsake box.

For as long as factories have efficiently spat out objects, craft has been an antidote to the chilly uniformity of mass production. Fragrant knotty furniture of one variety or another has always appeared at this fair, along with the occasional woven tapestry and thrown pot. This year, however, craft, with its quirks and nicks, threatened to overshadow the sleek machined goods that are a calling card of the 23-year-old event.

Wafting through the convention center and satellite design exhibitions around town was nostalgia for preindustrial and early industrial technology. Members of the British group Designers in Residence, which presented the exhibition “Tools for Everyday Life,” were typical in their adoration of gleaming brass rivets, which they embedded into lamps, and the gauges and shims used at machine shops, which they turned into building blocks.

Where were the cheeky midcentury motifs of recent years? The bathroom hardware company Lefroy Brooks’s Belle Aire tub faucet, with fins like a 1950s automobile, looked as out of place as a poodle skirt on Louisa May Alcott.

Vintage charm is one thing, but craft really seized attention this year by turning itself into theater.

At Wanted Design, an exhibition in Chelsea that ran concurrently with the fair, the furniture company Bernhardt Design sponsored a blue-jean-making demonstration. Employees of Raleigh Denim stitched on antique sewing machines that had been transported to New York from their workshop in North Carolina. The buttonhole machine, which dated to 1940, had leather belts and produced the sound of a machine gun, appropriate for a tool made during World War II, pointed out one of the company’s founders, Victor Lytvinenko.

At the Standard hotel at Cooper Square, one of several sites that made up the pop-up NoHo Design District, James Carroll, a woodworker with the Dublin company Makers & Brothers, sat in front of a plate-glass window, hewing chunks of Catskills ash to make three-legged stools.

And back at the convention center, Hellman-Chang dramatized the struggle between human and hand tool by setting up a workbench, where the furniture company’s publicist was spotted trying to sculpture a table leg with an implement intended for shaping wheel spokes. “It’s pretty safe,” Eric Chang, a founder of Hellman-Chang, assured an onlooker. “I’m more worried about the wood.”

With a workshop in Brooklyn, Hellman-Chang exemplifies the growing self-assurance (and visibility) of that borough’s design community. The fair featured a record 51 exhibitors from Brooklyn this year, about 9 percent of an international crowd that included Denmark, Spain and Japan (not to mention Manhattan).

Brian Volk-Zimmerman, who builds furniture in Red Hook, Brooklyn, under the company name Volk, displayed a child’s stool with the name Abigail embedded in round vintage typewriter keys, and a walnut dresser and hutch with a sliding panel of Harris tweed.

“It’s got to be the will of the public,” Mr. Volk-Zimmerman said about the popularity of handmade furniture. “I’m succeeding at making money, although it’s a difficult business model.”

Heirloom pieces are appealing purchases, Mr. Volk-Zimmerman suggested, because they’re forever. And forever is another word for sustainable.

In the Venn diagram of the modern American marketplace, the intersection of lovers of luxury and friends of the environment is growing. Refinement, authenticity and restraint define the products that are coveted in this territory. Which explains the appearance of so much natural stone at this fair, like the slabs of white marble topping both an austere wood block in Phase Design’s Nemesis coffee table and a wire basket in Blu Dot’s Scamp table. Such materials offer both elegance and the appearance of green cred, even if they are clawed from the earth.

The business of craft is taking off well beyond Brooklyn, too. On view at the convention center was British Bone, a ceramics collection directed by Emily Johnson, a fifth-generation scion of a family that began manufacturing porcelain in North Staffordshire, England, in 1882. Working with the designer and curator Suzanne Trocmé, Ms. Johnson is reviving the region’s industry by producing contemporary pieces by herself, Ms. Trocmé and the British designer Max Lamb.

By no means was industrial technology absent from the fair, but much of it assumed an attitude of humility, seizing every opportunity to hide itself. Big Ass Fans tucked a direct-current motor into the core of its new Haiku ceiling fan to achieve a slimmer profile while increasing efficiency so dramatically that the fan is said to consume roughly $5 a year in electricity. Equally striking were the periodic gusts of air Haiku emitted, which mimicked natural breezes and which the company literature describes as a Whoosh. But that, too, was invisible.

Similarly, the lighting company Pablo introduced an LED ceiling fixture called Cielo that integrates the transformer required to dim the light, rather than exiling it to a bulky external box. And even a lamp as attention-getting as Humanscale’s Halo, a glowing brass ring hung from a wall peg and controlled remotely, is a “look, Ma, no wires” invention.

On the whole, exhibitors kept things simple.

Colin Cobb, a fabricator in the studio of the New York lighting designer Lindsey Adelman, used technical language to explain the process of assembling lamps with bespoke brass components and blown-glass spheres. But the small band of spectators at the convention center who watched him work had no trouble following his descriptions, perhaps because of the terminology he used. Each suspended glass globe had a slightly different weight, Mr. Cobb said. So in order for the lamp to balance, “It has to be zhuzhed just right.”

Designing a Better Design Week

EARLY last Saturday, Takeshi Miyakawa, 50, a Japanese-born furniture designer, was hanging illuminated shopping bags in trees in Brooklyn when he was arrested on the suspicion that he was planting bombs. Mr. Miyakawa protested that he was preparing an art installation to coincide with what is informally known as New York Design Week, a cluster of exhibitions, lectures and parties that take place during the International Contemporary Furniture Fair. Nevertheless, he was held in police custody for four days before being released.

It is a sober commentary on the stature of New York design that Mr. Miyakawa’s arrest was Design Week’s most newsworthy event. But that may change now that influential designers, business owners, cultural leaders and local government officials are uniting to promote the design industries’ prominence.

Design Week NYC is the working name of a city-supported initiative, set to begin next year, that would enlarge the scope of the annual New York design festival, making it comparable to popular design weeks in Milan, London and Paris.

The idea of bringing together architects, designers, manufacturers and sellers to create a more robust public presence is not new. This latest effort emerged last fall from conversations among representatives of local design organizations, including WantedDesign, a two-year-old exhibition and event program that takes place in May, and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Then, on Feb. 9, Christine Quinn, speaker of the New York City Council, publicly declared her support for an annual design event along the lines of Fashion Week. Citing data from “Growth by Design,” a report on the economic contributions of New York’s design industries released last year by the Center for an Urban Future, Ms. Quinn said: “We have more designers than any city in the United States, with nearly 40,000 New Yorkers working in everything from graphics to movie sets, architecture to interior decorating. We’ll grow our design sector by stealing an idea from the fashion industry.”

On April 9, 55 designers, design leaders and journalists met with representatives from her office and from NYC & Company, the city’s marketing and tourism bureau. The discussion hinted at the difficulties in uniting the variegated and disparate strands of New York’s design professionals. Attendees challenged everything from the initiative’s proposed name to its communications platform.

It took Fern Mallis, the founder of Fashion Week, to galvanize the assembly. Ms. Mallis, who established a progressive but ill-fated design center in Long Island City in the 1980s, recounted the struggle to make the semiannual fashion event and its allied Fashion’s Night Out program a success. (Today, they attract 300,000 visitors and reap more than $800 million in revenue.)

Later, Ms. Mallis compared the relative dedication of Europeans and Americans to design. “In Italy and France, it’s a part of the culture from the get-go,” she said. “There have been hundreds of years of caring about those disciplines.

“It’s not an American thing. It needs to be.”

Her prescription is to “identify the key talents and players and make them sexy, make them like the fashion designers.”

First, though, the initiative needs leadership — and financing.

 

Tom Dixon Makes Things Better in @wsj

By HELEN CHISLETT

[mag0512tom1new]Photograph by Henry Bourne

WORK THIS WAY Designer Tom Dixon outside his studio on Portobello Dock, with some of the pieces he launched at April's Salone del Mobile in Milan.

In a Venn diagram of superstar British designer Tom Dixon, he would occupy the space where design, industry, craft and technology all intersect. That intersection is most apparent at his mini empire at Portobello Dock, a converted Victorian wharf, which he moved into three years ago.

This deceptively peaceful spot, with tall windows overlooking the glittering Grand Union Canal, brings under one roof all that Dixon loves. There's a tea shop, Tart, where we sit on a sunny spring day to chat about his 30-year career over old-fashioned English tea, complete with vintage china teapots, loose-leaf tea and homemade cakes.

The Dock also houses Dixon's design studio and his eponymous shop, where he sells the lighting and furniture he makes next door. Then there is the restaurant, Dock Kitchen, which he co-owns with rising-star chef Stevie Parle, 26, who trained at the River Cafe and Moro. The eclectic menu is also a merging of worlds, drawing on traditional English cuisine, as well as food from Sri Lanka, the Middle East and Japan.

As for Tart, it is his first Dixon & Daughter enterprise, run by his elder daughter, Florence, and her business partner, Aoibheann Callely. I put it to Dixon that with his love of food, texture and music, he is something of a sensualist. "A sensibilist?" he recoils. "Absolutely not!"

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Courtesy of Tom Dixon

The intricately patterned Etch light

You can blame that miscommunication on a mouthful of Tart's delicious meringue, but there is truth to the idea that Dixon prefers tangible pleasures to purely conceptual ones. Successful designers often inhabit a rarefied world, far removed from industry. Dixon, by contrast, is hands on. He may no longer weld the furniture himself—the process that first brought him to the design world's attention—but he visits every factory he uses and familiarizes himself with every stage of production.

There is nothing in his fashion sense—rumpled tweed jacket and jeans—to suggest his significance on the world stage of design, either. His whole demeanor is understated, as though he wished he could remain quietly anonymous. It is something of a wonder that Florence is now part of the Portobello Dock landscape; for years Dixon refused to say a thing about his home life. It goes without saying that he doesn't much enjoy the spotlight of an interview, but he is generous with his time when you do pin him down. The fact is, he is someone who would much prefer to be doing than talking.

Part French, part Latvian, but mainly British, Dixon, 53, was born in Tunisia but has lived in West London since he was a toddler. The home he shares with his wife, Claudia, and two daughters is not far from the Dock.

At 20, Dixon enrolled in an art-foundation course at Chelsea College of Art & Design but hated it. "Art was too conceptual for me," Dixon says. "I liked making things." Six months later a motorbike accident brought his formal education to an abrupt end and also resulted in a gold tooth that glitters when he laughs. When he recovered, Dixon went out to work—first as a technician, later as a junior animator—before embarking on a brief flirtation with the music business as the bass player in an early-'80s lineup called Funkapolitan (one album and three singles).

As strange a detour as it might seem in hindsight, Funkapolitan taught him more than Chelsea ever did. "There is a do-it-yourself attitude in the music business that I love," he says. "You learn that you don't really need any skill. You can teach yourself an instrument, promote yourself through leaflets, do your own production. All you really need is an attitude." In a funny twist of kismet, Portobello Dock is the former headquarters of Virgin Records, and Dixon's shop was once a studio where the Sex Pistols, Spice Girls and Rolling Stones strutted their stuff.

In 1983, Dixon began to express his own attitude by "tooling around" with welded, salvaged furniture. Soon the raw, rusty work began to attract the eye of the then tiny design community in London. "For me it was alchemy," he recalls. "I was amazed that I could take something that was regarded as rubbish and turn it into cash by the end of the day. I wasn't making much money, but there was a satisfaction and a joy to the work."

London gallerist David Gill remembers going to Dixon's first-ever show, "Creative Salvage," held above a hairdressing salon on Kensington Church Street. "To be honest, I thought it would be a waste of time, but it was so fresh I was really impressed," says Gill. "There was all this furniture made out of reusable metal pieces—old pots, pans and cooking utensils—but I remember thinking it reminded me of Roman shields. It had its own language and identity from the very first."

Not only was Gill among the earliest to commission pieces from the edgy, young talent, but he later collaborated with Dixon on a show at the Frankfurt Furniture fair called "Plastic Fantastic." Dixon transformed plastic salad bowls into geodesic domes and in doing so elevated them to high art.

By the late '80s, Dixon was no longer playing punk outsider to the big boys of design, but rather working with the Italian giant Cappellini, for whom he designed the iconic S-Chair in 1991. He founded his own company, Eurolounge, in 1994, and that same year cemented his position as an established designer with a stackable, four-pronged lighting piece called Jack, which he has described as "a sitting, stacking lighting thing."

The "thing" won him international renown. In 1998 he was appointed head of design at Habitat, then later creative director, staying on as a consultant even after founding his eponymous company in 2002 (he left Habitat in 2008). Ever the multitasker, he was also creative director of the renowned Finnish brand Artek from 2004 to 2009.

Dixon's own brand has yielded quite a few internationally lauded hits, among them the Mirror Ball light (2003), Fresh Fat Chair (2004) and Wingback Chair (2007). He enjoys stripping down forms, emphasizing silhouette or material, as with the voluptuous Plump sofa (2008), a streamlined, space-age version of the classic Chesterfield, or Bulb (2011), an overscaled, energy-efficient lightbulb designed to challenge the aesthetics of most CFL (compact fluorescent lamp) replacements.

His connection to Habitat has often prompted comparisons to Sir Terence Conran, who founded the homeware retailer and is famed for bringing modern design to the masses. And certainly Dixon is a democrat at heart. After all, this is a man who gave away 500 designer polystyrene chairs in Trafalgar Square six years ago. Known as the Great Chair Grab, it was sponsored by Expanded Polystyrene Packaging Group and floated the notion that furniture, like network television, was something you could give away by selling advertising.

He repeated the exercise this April with his metal Stamp Lamp during international design fair Salone del Mobile in Milan. It was there that Dixon orchestrated MOST, an ambitious multidisciplinary festival at the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia, which he called a "Glastonbury for design."

“I can see the irony of being driven to give away chairs when other people are selling them for a million dollars apiece”

The remarkable thing about this giveaway was that Dixon made all the Stamp pieces on site using radical laser technology, created with German company Trumpf. He is evangelical about the innovation's possibilities. "Stamp is the 2CV [Citroen's famously low-tech car] of design—very basic and crude—but I wanted to show the magic of designing, making and distributing all in one place," explains Dixon.

The Trumpf machinery allows a piece's size, shape and pattern to be changed to order, making mass customization possible. "It is like the rebirth of the medieval high street," explains Dixon. "In the future, people will tailor-make things for you at a local level and it won't cost that much." Indeed, it challenges the current acceptance of furniture being made halfway around the world and then shipped back at huge cost to the environment, and that's important. Though Dixon wears his eco credentials lightly, his crusade to make low-voltage lighting attractive is second to none, as illustrated by Luminosity, a collection of lamps, lights and shades that he also presented last month in Milan.

He is also well aware that we live on a planet full to bursting with consumer goods. "Each designer has to take his or her own stand on that," he says. "Back in the '60s, it was probably OK to design products that were about newness for the sake of it. I like to think my own work is more about durability and permanence, hence my experiment with cut-steel furniture, which came with a thousand-year guarantee. Or for that matter, the accretion-process chairs."

The latter is a reference to the fact that somewhere off a beach in the Bahamas, there is a colony of undersea chairs, not abandoned, but actually growing.

Dixon has harnessed a process known as mineral accretion—a tool of bioengineering—to subject the chairs to low-voltage charges of solar power that encourage the growth of limestone at something close to three times the usual rate. Once they have acquired a beautiful patina, he will fish them out and let us all share in the magic. He adds, "The scientist [Wolf Hilbertz] who developed this method intended to use it to develop bio concrete. You could literally grow cities in this way."

It's highly imaginative thinking for a designer who still feels some level of outsider status after all these years. He has always been half in and half out of the establishment, and is amused at times by how at odds his ideas are within the elitist field of limited-edition design. "I feel good about my own aesthetic, which is quite raw by comparison," he explains. "But I can see the irony of being driven to give away chairs when other people are selling them for a million dollars apiece."

He admits to never having had a master plan, "but things always seem to work out slightly better than I hoped they would." In truth, his optimism is founded. Backed by Swedish investment company Proventus, he has exported his name and designs to more than 60 countries worldwide. Dixon has weathered the recent stagnant economy, and even grown, increasing his retail presence in North America by roughly 50 percent over the past couple of years. And this month, while showing during New York Design week, from May 17 to 22, he will open a pop-up shop at 45 Bleecker Street, with online design hub Fab.com.

Perhaps not having a plan is an ideal strategy in a field that's always in flux. Certainly, Dixon has seen considerable changes during his career. "On the plus side, it is now universally recognized as a valid, even glamorous, thing to do," he says. "On the minus side, it is not used by people in government to make real change. The planet is full of problems, and who better to harness problem-solving brilliance than designers?"

Corrections & Amplifications
An earlier version of this article gave the incorrect address for the pop-up shop at New York Design week.

via online.wsj.com