There’s nothing else quite like it. Tightly packed booths flooded with the newest–and often most innovative–furniture and the feasting eyes of editors, architects, designers and buyers. This year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF), held from May 14 through 17 at New York’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, was packed with over 24,000 attendees hoping to find that perfect something. VandM pounded the carpet to select 10 favorites from the wares of 500 exhibitors–and that’s not even counting the smaller ones at satellite venues like Wanted Design and Model Citizens. Here’s what got our attention:
Hailing from Barcelona, Jordi Mila’s Secret Dune credenza is part sculpture and part functioning furniture. Inspired by desert sand formations, the buffet features two side compartments and two central drawers. We’d want this in our dining room any day. www.jordimila.com
Inspired by the shape of a fire hydrant lid iQenvironment’s studio’s Ismael Quintero found on Wall Street after 9/11, the Odyssey Suspension light has been reintroduced in green glass, 70 percent of it taken from recycled beer bottles. The material’s innate variability is reborn in each lamp, some of them with frosted interiors. http://iqenvironments.com
Palo Samko works over by the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York, and we definitely picked up on that industrial vibe. Furniture, mirrors, clocks, and lamps also had a “steampunk” feeling, but our eyes were glued to the tiny gears, bolts, and tiny hardware pieces that Samko embeds in his hefty wooden tables and cabinets. www.palosamko.com
Designer Debra Folz showcased her brand new line of Strung shelves over at Model Citizens, a satellite space set up at the Chelsea Art Museum. Photos don’t do justice to the dimensionality of her Strung modular shelves fashioned from ½-inch-thick clear acrylic and rubber cord. Also look for her embroidered tables, which incorporate steel, acrylic, fishing line, and nylon embroidery thread. www.debrafolz.com
Korean industrial designer Junggi Sung introduced the Ember lighting series for Lunar, a San Francisco-based creative collaborative. For the pendant fixture, acrylic stems housing LEDs drop from wooden “chambers,” as the designer dubs them, to adjustable heights. The further each stem drops, the more light you get. www.lunar.com
Pratt’s industrial design program teamed up with Italian furniture maker Cappellini to introduce the Perpetual Motion furniture studio, asking students to design for the future. Graduate student Li-Rong Liao’s Folded Felt Table was a result of her thesis work experimenting with folding profiles. Liao uses a mathematical formula, but we’re pretty sure there’s a dash of incalculable talent in there as well. www.pratt.edu
Also over at Model Citizens, Plywood Office’s charmingly scruffy, coffee-sipping Chris Jamison took up shop in a prime corner of the Chelsea Art Museum. On display were Hammy, a stable outdoor hammock with an integrated bench, flower planter, and platform for personal storage; the Horsey Desk in bent walnut and maple plywood, with sawhorse legs that remove for easy shipping; and the elegantly minimalist Tealight Totem in concrete and maple. www.plywoodoffice.us
-by Meghan Edwards
