A Day at the Fair: The International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF)
The design world’s favorite trade show, ICFF, is back at the Javits Center this year. The fair is famous for showcasing furniture, lighting design, wallcovering, and textiles. Notably, they also feature the work of student designers from many prestigious schools, such as SCAD, Parsons, and RISD. Mixing in student work and other young furniture makers and designers keeps the fair from getting stale.
Cork seems to be a popular material these days, and a lot of designers were working with a coopering technique. Similarly on trend are metal or wood pieces that look like they’re woven , or objects that showcase visible build lines from either milling or 3D printing- not surprising considering the upsurge in integrating technology into traditional craft. Below are some not to be missed stand-out booths.
The Best Table
Natuzzi’s Uragano table greats you immediately upon walking into the fair. The base is made from hundreds of pieces of laminated olive wood, resting on a single, hollow leg. The table is topped with a thick piece of clear glass that gives you a view down into the leg of the table. While the form of the work is interesting, what makes the table amazing is that each laminate isn’t cut in a straight line- but a zig zag gesture that is perfectly mirrored in the piece its glued to. It’s a subtle touch, but once you see it you can’t look away.
The Prettiest Glassware
Miror Lab’s booth was namely dedicated to lighting design, but the real showstoppers were the small bowls and plates featured in the centre of their space. The artisan who makes these beautiful pieces uses crushed pieces of enamel to melt and reform each plate, with the help of single use molds. Casting glass is a notably time consuming endeavour, and each of these small plates takes 90 days to make.
Coolest Wood Finishing
Hamilton Holmes’ shaker chair is crafted as well as anyone else’s at ICFF, but their finishing technique is truly unique. Each piece that they showcased had been treated with a hand applied oxidation technique that they named “OXALINO.” The application looks almost like a milk paint, but up close you can tell that it has set into the wood, like a patina. Some of the patterns mimic woodgrain, others are striped, they are all mesmerizing.
Overall Favorite
Sawyer Made is a second-generation woodworking studio based in Vermont. Earlier collections show cased traditional Windsor furniture, but the past few years have taken on a sculptural bent, like building a bench that travels up the wall. More recently, they’ve been experimenting with coopering- a barrel making technique. They’ve also seemed to enlarge the standard shaker bench, resulting in a piece that could happily double as a day bed.
