NEW YORK DESIGN WEEK
New York Design Week is a series of parties, gallery showings, installations and off-site events, with the Javits Center-based International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) serving as the main draw. As a follow-up to July’s edition of Window Fashions, here’s even more designs featured during New York Design Week.

To ensure ease of installation, the company guarantees that the handblown pieces fit selections from the Highland Forge drapery hardware collection.

Table on the Fly
Vancouver-based furniture designer Dan Planko worked with local custom wallpaper company Roll Out to create a limited-edition side table. On The Fly uses a motif from one of Roll Out’s most popular artist-designed wallpapers. The screen-printed birch ply table comes flat-packed in its own canvas tote and the three pieces are tension-structured, meaning no tools required¬—perfect for picnics and alfresco cocktails.

Experiencing Siam
Rosemary Hallgarten—known for crafting rugs that provide the “experience of texture” through a contrast of pile, fiber and weave—is also a supreme colorist. The tightly edited Siam collection includes just three patterns (Dragonflower, Guenevere and Gio Ponti), each offered in three or four distinctive colorways.

Shown here is Guenevere, inspired by a William Morris painting, which combines hand-knotted New Zealand wool with Thai silk in the sophisticated Junebug color combination.

Custom Laminations
Artist Lu Hopkins, who turned 40 immediately prior to her recent New York Design Week show, says the event was “the best birthday present I could ever ask for.”

Hopkins was hired by Custom Laminations, a third-generation materials and surfacing company, to rethink and reinvent core aspects of its business, an interesting story in itself.

Working from her photographs, collages, drawings and other inspirations, Hopkins developed SpectraMotifs, a collection of wallcoverings, window coverings and panel track materials on a wide range of media: mylar, Type II vinyls, recycled vinyls, polymesh, translucent laminated mesh and more.

The combination of the patterns, scale and repeats Hopkins created are unlike anything else on the market, and the production capabilities of Custom Laminations allows for nearly limitless customization options.

Keeping It Light
Artist/sculptor/designer Matt Kotlarczyk presents his limited-edition home products under the Refined Sugar label, reusing and repurposing found and everyday objects with an almost pop-art sensibility.

ICFF was his first show, and he confessed he had no idea how the audience would react: “I went in figuring they would either love it or hate it, because my stuff is a little odd for this environment.”

Post-show Kotlarczyk is thrilled with the response, mentioning the great feedback and serious conversations he had with several big-name architecture and design groups.

Although his small stand housed plenty of treats, the Eat Me table proved to be among the most popular items. A reclaimed claw-and-ball table is topped with nearly 2,000 LEDs programmed to randomly sequence the words “Eat, Fat, Meat, Me” and more. The lights can be triggered either through an adjustable time delay or a microphone that reacts to increases in the noise level.

Decorative Function
Having burst onto the design scene in 2004 with a stunningly gorgeous radiator (yes, a radiator!) for his senior project from the famed Design Academy Eindhoven, Joris Laarman has stayed true to his motto of “reinventing functionality.”

His most recent design, WirePod, is perhaps the most decorative extension cord/surge protector you could imagine. The flexible power strip unfurls into four scrolling arms, each with a single three-prong outlet—when fully extended WirePod reaches 12.5 feet and can be curled up to less than 16 inches. It is the first in a series of Wiremore pieces from Artecnica.

Wallpaper Mural
The sister design team behind PaperMills, a line of hand-blocked wallpapers, has become known for their slightly tweaked take on classics. For this market they developed their first wallpaper mural, a riff not on a particular pattern or motif, but on the history and heritage of wallpaper.

“We didn’t actually start out to do a mural,” explains Amy Mills. “It started because I was experimenting with different color combinations and was looking for a pattern they would work with.”

Croton, a nine-color, eight-panel mural, is based on artwork Mills created more than a decade ago, and that has been in storage ever since. “We weren’t sure what our regular customers would think, or that new people would get it, but the response has been tremendous.”

The British Are Coming (And They’re Bringing Wallpaper)
The British contingent at ICFF is always worth checking out, and this year was no exception. Several young designers previously spotted in London and Paris were showing for the first time in the United States (Emerald Faerie, Rachel O’Neill and others), and it was interesting to talk to them and hear how their design careers are progressing.

But even more exciting were the new talents ready to be discovered. Kevin Dean, an established artist and illustrator, showed his first wallcoverings—a lovely, romantic collection of English rose patterns based on his watercolors.

Equally romantic, but in a more graphic style, was the wallcovering and textile collection by Katja Behre. A former studio designer with Designers Guild and Colefax & Fowler, Behre creates her highly customizable looks under the Elli Popp brand.

And yet another British newbie with a wallcovering line was Annette Taylor-Anderson whose bold, graphic patterns were a 180 from those of her compatriots. Taylor-Anderson showed, in addition to the wallcoverings, a selection of cushions, tiles and vinyl flooring.

Updated Pyramids
During the height of “tulipmania” in mid-17th-century Holland, ceramicists began creating pyramids—3- to 6-foot-high vessels design to show off hundreds of blossoms in a deliberately ostentatious display of wealth.

In 2007, Royal Tichelaar Makkum, a Dutch ceramic company that traces its roots back to the same time period, was asked by the Rijksmuseum to restore its collection of antique flower pyramids. The company’s craftsmen, in addition to the restoration work, also completed a full-scale contemporary replica of one of the museum’s most decorative pyramids.

Inspired by the project, Jan Tichelaar, the company’s current managing director, commissioned (clockwise from top left) Studio Job, Hella Jongerius, Jurgen Bey and Alexander van Slobbe to reinterpret the pyramid for today. All five pyramids were part of design week work on display at Moss in Soho.

Repurposed
The KUPE collection by Uhuru Design was shown at both Brooklyn Designs (a smaller, borough-centric event) and at ICFF. Made of reclaimed bourbon-barrel staves and other re-purposed materials (for example, the Bilge chair uses 18-wheeler leaf-springs as its base and support system), the line was hit at both shows, but for different reasons, according to partner Jason Horvath:

“At Brooklyn Designs, it seemed to be a more green-conscious crowd. At ICFF, the hospitality industry really loved the story, the bourbon tie-in,” he explained.

Winning Website
Down at the Finnish Hardcore Design presentation in the Meatpacking District, the BonBon Kakku display was a refreshing burst of fun and color in a strong, but perhaps overly severe, installation.

Bon Bon Kakku is a democratic textile design website, recently launched by the Finnish textile company Vallila. Anyone can submit a design to the site, based on certain production parameters, and any visitor to the site is eligible to vote for their favorite design, as well as leaving comments for the designers and other visitors.

Once a month the votes are tallied and the top design goes into production, with the pattern then available for sale on the site.

Fresh Fabrics
While showing their new items for ICFF, the team at Carnegie was quick to point out there was another new collection on display at the HD show in Las Vegas, and that the studio was still busy putting last-minute touches on yet another new collection scheduled to debut at NeoCon. That’s a lot of product development to squeeze into the first half of the year!

At ICFF, Carnegie showed its new Bijou collection of upholstery fabrics as well as an innovative update to its perennially popular Xorel line. Xorel Embroider features eight patterns embroidered using Xorel yarn on Xorel fabrics, keeping the entire line free of PVC, chlorine, plasticizers, dioxin and ozone-depleting chemicals.

Shining Star
British design company Tom Dixon worked with a metallic theme for its 2008 product collection. The company’s eponymous head designer, who had introduced a line of hammered copper lamps in 2007, said “… I am happy to be working with material that feels like it has the permanence and the authority that objects should have in the 21st century.”

The Punch light, available in both pendant and table top versions, riffs on the classic pleated lampshade with a surround of polished stainless steel fins. The result is a surprising combination of solid industrialism and genuine lightness.

Illuminating Corian
Innovative designers have long being using Corian®, DuPont’s popular thermoformable material, in myriad applications for years, and lighting has long been a popular category. For 2008, DuPont has introduced the first collection of Corian developed specifically to be used with lighting.

The Illumination Series consists of six “ice” colors that change dramatically when backlit, and like all Corian products, it can be engineered into a wide range of two- and three-dimensional designs.

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