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Thousands of interiors manufacturers assembled to show their lines, introduce new products, and do their best to dazzle visitors at an annual event. It’s the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF), and manufacturers of materials, fittings, textiles, and bathroom fixtures are all welcome to attend.

I noticed several trends this year. One of them seemed to be common to a lot of new furnishings coming onto the market lately, and that’s the idea of Flexibility. In a show this large, one could notice products exploring flexibility not only in form, but also use and function, and in some cases all three. On the one hand, a single product can reach a larger potential market, but it also means the user can manipulate his/her furnishings according to whim or necessity. Filling a space with products like these, homeowners could conceivably have an entirely different room altogether the second time guests visit and not have to purchase anything new.

Another trend was designers playing with the duality of two- and three-dimensionality. With the advent of sophisticated commu-

@home visits the international contemporary furniture fair

by ryan witte

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&newly brand

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products schmoductsSan Francisco’s CITIZEN:Citizen is a fascinating group of designers whose work may more closely resemble conceptual art or art objects than conventional furniture or housewares. In proper context their pieces could be amazing conversation openers. In other cases, they’re ridiculous extravagances that serve only to make a thoughtful or humorous statement about consumer-ism, consumption, and product value.

Take their coffee tables as an example. Unit #3 Monochrome is a glass box that looks like a paint bomb exploded inside it. The duality here is probably between the sloppy mess on the inside and the smooth, clean, glossy surface of the glass on the outside. Unit #3 White is the same glass table, but filled with down. And the last one, Unit Ice, is the same table, but made out of ice, which they sell in a limited edition for $3,000. This

Unit #3 Monochrome is a coffee table that contains a paint explosion inside a clean glass surface.

Unit #3 White suspends a soft, cuddly material, down, uselessly

inside a cold, hard glass box.

Unit Ice will have to be special ordered and set up by the designers. Springtime installation is not recommended.

Molded from a candlestick the designer found in his grandmoth-er’s house, this wax version is burned down along with the candle.

nications technology very quickly shrinking our planet come new issues for commerce. Products that can be laid flat can also be much more easily shipped to all corners of the globe.

Probably the most astonishing products I saw were using new technologies in the manufacture and also their very form. It’s something of a sign of our times, when technology in design stops being just a gimmicky bell or whistle and can at last be incorporated seamlessly into new products. At the far end of the scale, new technologies can produce forms that were never even possible before and create products with uses that never existed before.

On the pages to follow are a few of what I humbly consider to be some of the most exciting, beautiful, and interesting products shown at the ICFF. Keep in mind, while the products here might not always have immediately apparent aesthetic value, many were chosen because of the direction they point design in the years to come. New ideas sometimes take time to perfect.

one has to be set up by C:C on a custom, case-by-case basis.

Their Aalto Doorstop is cast inside one of the pinnacles of 20th-

Century design, the Savoy vase by Alvar Aalto. Unfortunately, in order

to remove the cast cement from the vase, the vase has to be completely

destroyed. Something tells me they’re not using original vases from 1936, but even replicas of them go for around

$110. Making a similar statement about

consumption and value are their candles. These consist of a classic candlestick and candle, all made of wax but sold for $72. The manu-facture of these pieces is somewhat intensive, but the price makes this interesting. At over four times the price of a typical candle, you’re buying a fairly nice candlestick only to burn it down—consume it—with the candle it’s holding.

Just one more thing for the lovers that I truly thought was so roman-tic. Hidden Eternity is a gold ring with a single .75 karat diamond hidden on the inside. Only you and your significant other will know how much the ring is really worth.CITIZEN:Citizen | 415.695.7748 | www.citizen-citizen.com

The Aalto Doorstop requires the destruction of one of the icons of 20th-Century design to be manufactured.

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peace oF designSoHo’s Robert Rabinovitz Studio is a small opera-tion producing designs with an easy, elegant grace. Drawing on forms from nature but giving them a whole new attitude, Rabinovitz ends up with objects for your home that can inspire a sense of serenity and even fun.

Most literally, his Meditation table has a circu-lar indentation at the center with fi ne sand to play with and contemplate. It’s like your own private

little Zen garden. The sand garden can be covered over with a glass top for regular dining. The accompanying chairs were really intrigu-ing. Their form is no doubt majestic and regal while at the same time modern. But I did wonder how they would feel, so Rabinovitz asked me to sit in one. The fi rst surprise is that the metal poles do actually have the strength to hold me leaning back with all my weight without splitting

apart and letting me spill out backwards onto the fl oor. The second is that, not only are the poles not uncomfortable at all, but are actually quite sooth-ing, like they were massaging my back.

Rabinovitz also does some quite nice sort of kinetic art objects. Symphony has rectangular frames holding orange glass on different lengths of poles, allowing them to sway subtly back and forth if caught in a breeze. I said to him, “Iit’s like a fi eld of wildfl owers…in Mathematics Land.” Then I real-ized how weird that sounded when it came out of my mouth, but he said, “No, but you’re totally getting what I’m going for!” And I could so easily imagine this arrangement in front of an open window, the sun caught by the colored glass and softly dancing across the fl oor as a breeze blows through the room. That’s an option, although the frames are in fact the standard size and proportion for photographs. You might even put pictures in some and leave others open, as you choose.

A smaller version of Symphony is in natural wood and has mirrors instead of the colored glass.

I think this could create interesting moving patterns of light, too, if hit by the afternoon sun. I also like how you could look at it and see yourself at seven years old in a photograph and yourself right now in one of the mirrors. The dark wood picture frames can also accompany a really sleek, modern desk set, with openings the precise size for business cards, Post-It Notes, and so on.

Rabinovitz also offers a couple interesting lights. Whisper has a similar feel to some of the pieces described above. From a dark wood base emerge what have the appearance of tall blades of grass. Lit from underneath, the hand-sanded white acrylic “blades” give off a soft ambient glow. And if you’ve got a spot for something a little more whimsical, he’s also taken metal industrial electrical outlets and turned them into little wall sconces called, appropriately, Outlet.Robert Rabinovitz Studio | 212.431.7087 | www.robertrabinovitz.com

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Like a group of wildfl ow-ers, Symphony is actually topped with picture frames in standard sizes.

A smaller version of Symphony in dark wood can join a refi ned desk set to combine the tools of business with

photos of loved ones.

Hand-sanded acrylic blades of grass cast a soft ambient glow in Whisper.

No, they’re not outlets, they’re lights: a playful reinterpretation of the industrial.

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techno-dazzleYou could see Swarovski’s booth at the front of the exhibit hall glitter-ing from several aisles away, sparkling, beckoning you to its delights like Odysseus to the Sirens. There were diamond and dust-sized crys-tals everywhere. Crystal brooks bubbled through cracks in the marble tile floor. A three-foot-square Lucite pan was filled with diamond-sized crystals like a sandbox that visitors could run their hands through. “There must be thousands of dollars worth of crystals in here!” a woman exclaimed while I was handling the diamonds. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars,” the booth representative corrected. She said they had to be careful of people wandering off with handfuls of them, in fairness probably not realizing they weren’t a promotional gift or that they were in fact real lead crystal.

As unbelievable as their presentation was at the ICFF, most incred-ible was what I found when I started going through all the materials and looking around their website. Their Crystal Palace line calls upon a variety of well-known designers to create spectacular high-end chandeliers that push every boundary of what it means to make a light fixture.

Many chandeliers in the line are simply incredible in their form, like Cascade by Vincent Van Duysen, where long strands of Swarovski crystals fall in an enormous cylinder and land in a huge pile on your

Then I saw it on the DVD. Mediterraneo has motors in the top that control the strands of crystals, so the whole shape of it is very slowly changing, like a gorgeous jellyfish dancing through the ocean. The way the bottom of the fixture softly glitters in patterns as the strands move is something you’d have to see in person. And it gets better. The light coming from this one is actually produced by LEDs, so as the chandelier changes shape, it’s also very slowly, subtly changing color. It also gives off sound, according to Swarovski representatives something like a soothing whalesong. Overwhelmed yet? It gives off the aromas of things like cherry blossom.

Tokujin Yoshioka’s Stardust can project an image across the bottom surface of its 18800-crystal grid. It therefore acts like a chan-delier and a television monitor, all at the same time.

My personal favorite has to be Lolita by designer, Ron Arad. This chandelier is a crystal pixel board, like the ones in Times Square, for instance. Words in light swirl down its spiral shape, any text you might like. Wait, it gets better. Lolita has a phone number. You can call and text-message her from your cell phone, and those are the words you’ll see spiraling down. Just…wow.Swarovski Sales Inquiries | 866.272.5423 | www.swarovskisparkles.com

dining room table. It’s a deliciously ostentatious show of luxury to have such a long chandelier that some of it has to just land on the table. Or Blossom by Tord Boontje, a fresh branch of flowers caught in an ice-storm. But the ways that others of their designers are using technology is truly out of control.

Naoto Fukasawa has used electroluminescent film for Cosmos 1 and 2 (the numbers designating two different sizes) to create his light fixture and encrusted the strands with Swarovski crystals. The technology was discovered in 1936, but this may be one of the first times it’s made an appearance in a luxury-market fixture.

Paul Cocksedge used lasers and one enormous crystal to make Crystallize. Because the chandelier is made out of light, when it’s turned off, there essentially is no chandelier.

Mediterraneo is an uncommonly elegant design by Gaetano Pesce. When I first saw this one in the catalogue, I thought, “Hmm, that’s nice enough.”

Cosmos 1 and 2 utilize the unconventional tech-nology of electrolumi-nescent film to produce its mystical glow.

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Using lasers and a single giant Swarovski crystal, designer Paul Cocksedge created a chandelier essen-tially made out of light.

Gaetano Pesce’s Mediterraneo is an elegant sensory experience encor-porating light, color, move-

ment, sound, and aroma.

On the floor, a mirror shows one of an infi-nite number of images the owner of Stardust could project through its 18800-crystal surface.

Ron Arad’s Lolita is a crystal pixel board you can call and text message from your cell phone.

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magic carpetsHailing from Barcelona, Nani Marquina is doing some truly interesting things with rugs. Her work ranges from startling textures and subtly clever forms to unusual and interactive arrangements.

Where textures are concerned, we can start with Cuks, a wool and jute rug with long, thick yarns, almost like you’re looking at a normal rug very, very closely. Topissimo, is a similar rug of 100% wool, but with short tufts like a field of fuzzy, brightly-colored lichen. Another wool rug, Ovo, has a somewhat organic pattern of circles hand-tufted and raised up off the background. These pieces I felt would be beautiful and interesting in a more modest home, but there were others I found really astonishing. Instead of pile, Roses is covered with soft wool felt petals, like a bed of flowers. And for the really adventurous, Bicicleta is a rug made of loops of recycled rubber but results in a surpris-ingly beautiful floor covering.

Marquina also has offerings that explore interesting shapes and arrangements. As an admirer of Minimalist painting, I really liked Pull, which has a different-colored stripe that appears to have been “pulled” an inch or two out the side of an otherwise normal solid rug. She also has a line called Fit, a group of different sizes of fun, circular throw rugs with a foot-wide border. In a number of rich hues, they could be arranged around the room for splashes of color, or to highlight conversation areas and so on. The Stone-Wool group takes a similar attitude toward throw rugs, with a more natural than Pop look. This one allows you to create a path, down a hallway for instance, out of throw-rug stepping-stones.

An especially ingenious take on flexibility can be found in Crema-Yeras, a highly customizable sort of rug system. It’s a group of approximately two-foot-square wool felt panels in beautiful earth tones: Terracotta, Mustard, Grey, and Brown. Each panel has tiny clips on all four sides that allow you to hook them together. So in whatever dimen-sions, or whatever color combination you like, you can arrange the panels to suit your needs.

And for the room with a sense of humor (or for Steppenwolf fans), there’s her Flying Carpet, a line of rugs with platforms making them appear to be floating around the room. While I appreciate the surrealism, I definitely think these would be a lot of fun in a kids’ playroom.In the New York area, Marquina can be purchased through the Terence Conran Shop. | 212.755.7249www.nanimarquina.com

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Cuks uses unbelievably thick yarns to create a startling texture.

Topissimo is as soft and inviting as a field of fresh mosses.

Subtle but intriguing, Pull plays with the borders of the rug like Minimalist painting.

TOP: A highly flexible design, Crème-Yeras has panels that can be reconfigured to suit your needs or tastes.

BOTTOM: Marquina’s rugs can at times even defy gravity, as with her Flying Carpet line.