The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

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.

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.