Contemporary Furniture Fair Recap – The Good, Bad & Whoa

As you know last week, like many interior designers, I attended the ICFF as a pre-lude to my participation in BlogFest 2012 – a.k.a. the four days Lisa didn’t write a blog post.  I thank you for letting me off. 🙂  Since I had such great response from my post of a similar title for KBIS – I thought why reinvent the wheel.  From bathroom fixtures to furnishings to lighting to interior surface options here are my picks from ICFF.  International and Contemporary, I get, Furniture doesn’t begin to cover all that is shown.I confess, items which just fit into the logical box captivate me.  Good design is about a good solution, if one arrives at the solution in a creative and articulate way, all the better.  But design for design sake is often purposeless and if one is paying the bill, pointless. For the dining room, bar, or conference table this slim but brilliant fixture by David Dimperio meets the need of lighting a linear area.  They are long enough, sexy enough and above all solve the problem of lighting in a long area.  It is like a big fat duh, use a liner fixture to light a linear surface and a round fixture to light the same. Anyone with an ounce of hip is riding the wallcovering train throughout creative and cool interiors.  Wallcovering is back, big bold and not to be forgotten.  I say this as I have been unable to get this image of the huge James Audubon flamingo out of my head, I covet.  Surface View, from Britain of course, is head and shoulders above the rest in terms of licensed designs reproducible in any size on wallcovering, canvas, plywood board, Formica and who knows what’ll be next.  Un-knot your knickers – they happily ship to the USA!  Seriously, did LP’s have to become almost extinct before someone created a stylish storage cabinet?  This gorgeous piece of furniture is from Symbol Handcrafted Audio and dare I say brilliant.  Wives and girlfriends in America will be giddy at the thought of finally dismissing the LP collection as “wall art”,
as girlfriends love art and anyone can have a girlfriend now a days, even a virtual one and that looks like keyalves as well.
Well, if one has nothing nice to say… show a picture. Really?  Oh, but it looks so much fun to dust. Yes, this is paper-ish – Tyvek to be exact.  Yes, it is constructed much like a cellular shade.  This acoustically perfect room is constructed from softwall and softblock modular systems by Molo Design.  The booth was swarmed with architects clamoring for more.  Yes, it is sturdy enough I even sat on a section.

This is just the highlights of what I encountered.   I’ll offer more detail in the weeks to come so stick around if you have any interest in creating a stylish and modern interior.  My next ICFF posts will cover bathroom fixtures… like I said calling it a furniture fair doesn’t begin to cut it.