Architectural Digest Home Show 2009
If you ever feel that there isn’t that much originality in furniture out there, come to the Architectural Digest Home Design Show in New York and you’ll change your mind. The interior design magazine held its annual Home Design Show at Pier 94 on March 26-29 and it was their biggest exhibition. Over a hundred furniture, accessories, and art vendors turned up to show off their latest and greatest creations.
One of the first exhibits to dazzle your eyes came from furniture-maker, Boca do Lobo or Mouth of the Wolf. Their designers hail from Portugal but their creation is universal. Boca do Lobo seeks to reinterpret the history of past furniture styles and bring it to current times with some technological touches. Their Soho sideboard is a glamorous pastiche using many different materials – from wood veneers, glass, leather and lacquer to brass – all combined into a show stopping piece.
If you want to bring in a touch of nature into your living space, they have furniture for that too. New York husband and wife team Lorna Lee and John Muller brought the forest right into their designs with their Puzzle bed, coffee table and slab dining table. The Puzzle platform bed is made of walnut and is surrounded by odd-size chunks of wood connected together like a jigsaw puzzle – an ingenious solution to all those leftover pieces of wood. The coffee table is made of small size logs of birch joined together. All their furniture is hand-made and carefully selected from milled and unmilled woods around the U.S.
Brooklyn-based City Joinery also displayed beautiful expressions of wood in their furniture. Designer Jonah Zuckerman created Hovering bed, a platform bed made of black walnut or tiger maple that combines the headboard, platform, and side tables into one cohesive piece. The Armored Dresser is an elegant mix of unique-grained poplar and blackened steel. All of City Joinery’s creations are made of solid wood and not veneers.
Another Brooklyn furniture maker is BDDW. Founder and head designer, Tyler Hays, chooses quality hardwoods to build his furniture and proceeds to hand rub its finishes. Highlighting BDDW’s display is the Lake credenza, made of lacquer and holly with steel base, capped in bronze. The attention to detail and the juxtaposition of very different materials is a hallmark of their work.
New York is not the only source of creative talent – Denver-based Newell Design arrived at the AD Home Design Show with sophisticated designs, reminiscent of French designer, Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann. Their Longboard sideboard is an oval shaped piece made of bookmatched macassar ebony and stainless steel pulls. The drawers slide out effortlessly from nickel hinges. The Longboard may be labeled a sideboard – suggesting storage for tableware but it was also built to house electronic equipment and media with a false back to hide cables. Another piece is their Lune commode, in a lacquer finish with bronze, nickel or pearl inlays. Jeff Newell is the owner of this family-run company that started in a one-room home workshop and grew into a large thriving furniture business.
The AD Home Design Show has also attracted newcomer, Parish Furniture from Peru. Parish employs local Peruvian artisans to build their eco-friendly furniture. One of the woods that Parish uses is the pona wood from Peru – a palm tree that is used by the local tribe for various functions including using its soft core as a food source. After they finish using the inside of the pona trunk, they discard its outer shell. Parish artisans then pick them up from the forest floor and proceed to design and fashion various tables and chairs from the veneers. The featured console table is made of slices of pona wood and then glued together to create this table’s surface. The mirror above is also covered in thin veneers of pona, resulting in a snakeskin-looking frame.
Despite this overwhelming array of beautiful wood furniture, other materials were also on display. Atelier Delalain presented a furniture line made of polished steel. French designer and owner, Emmanuel Delalain created Gabrielle, a console table made of steel that has been acid-etched and then hand-grinded to create a silvery-bronze polish. The result is the look of warm leather despite its cold steel material and of course very durable.
The creative spark is truly alive and both young and experienced designers alike are providing exciting new designs. Many of these furniture designers come from small artisan workshops and therefore have great latitude in coming up with the designs. When you take a look at their work, you will come away inspired!
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