It takes more than renewable materials to turn the head of seasoned sustainable design fans. This is why our gaze fell so admirably on the line of housewares from Domestic Aesthetic while making our way through the ICFF this past week. Domestic Aesthetic’s motto “live well, live right” extends beyond their product line into the surrounding community, with social responsibility high on their list of priorities. With a beautiful line of handcrafted pieces, this truly green-minded company is out to make eco-friendly easier for both buyers and manufacturers, and we have to admit that the results are beautiful.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? Well, as far as mirrors go, Paul Loebach’s Mirror Mirror - which we spotted at this year’s HauteGREEN show - may very well take the cake. Its intricate design is gorgeous, but even better is its clever and uber-efficient use of wood, which produces two mirror frames in a single cut (one is the removed piece of the other).
A few weeks ago, Inhabitat put together an event about recycling and reuse in design, called Reclaiming Design. This event at HauteGREEN in New York was a big success, thanks to the thought-provoking design and insightful discussion from Dwell Editor-in-Chief Sam Grawe and designers Carlos Salgado of Scrapile, Tejo Remy of Droog fame, and Matt Gagnon. Our conversation touched on a variety of issues surrounding the concepts and processes behind using reclaimed materials in different scales of design, and its implications for both environmental sustainability as well as more conceptual and cultural themes.
For those of you who are really into this stuff, the full-length video of the entire discussion can be found here > READ MORE >
You may have thoughts tennis balls were just for tennis - but creative Dutch designer Tejo Remy has found a another use for the bright yellow bouncy felt-and-rubber balls. The same material qualities that make tennis balls bright, bouncy and easy-to-spot make for seating that is comfortable, sturdy, and extremely eye-catching. While many museum goers observe works of art perched upon the usual wooden bench, visitors at Rotterdam’s Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen are able to sit and stare in style on these colorful and clever tennis ball benches designed by Tejo Remy and Rene VeenHuizen.
Making its debut at HauteGREEN this year, Propeller’s gorgeous new pendant lamps demonstrate the potential of combining CNC milling with sustainable materials like Plyboo. What particularly attracts us to the Furrow Parkade pendant light is the simple linear design, with cuts that reveal the inner core of the material, making it equally beautiful when showcased in natural light or when used to light-up a dark night.
If you are looking for a cool alternative to your average, run-of-the-mill upholstered furniture, the latest buzz (and one of the stunners of the HauteGREEN show) is the Emir chair by Lars Urheim of the Norwegian design house Trokk16. A beautiful specimen of classic Scandinavian design, the Emir chair is constructed out of natural latex foam, sustainable wood, wool fabric and woolen felt. The biodegradable Emir is as much about form as it is about substance. According to Urheim, the chair’s components can easily be separated and reused or recycled after its initial use has run its course.
A variety of environmentally-friendly pendant lights lit up the HauteGREEN exhibition last month in New York, but none of them more exquisitely displays our love for bamboo than the Moso Pendant by designer Brian Schmitt. Made almost entirely of bamboo and only three components (shade panels, bamboo frame, and cord set), the Moso Pendant can be flat packed and shipped to your preferred destination and be assembled without the use of any fasteners or glue. How cool is that?
Tom Dixon, design pioneer and all around renaissance man, was one of the big hits of the recent HauteGREEN festivities, where he spoke about issues, concerns and contradictions in sustainable design, including materials, production, recycling and economics. Thanks to the video producers of Scribemedia, we have a great video of his conversation with design journalist Julie Taraska, in which he discusses his own work, sustainability, and his brilliant new Second Cycle initiative for Artek.
At our recent Reclaiming Design event, we were thrilled to see such amazing work and general interest in the integration of reused and recycled materials in the design process. But super-kudos go out to Mr. Tom Dixon, who spoke at our Inhabitat-sponsored HauteGREEN event about his recently-debuted 2nd Cycle line of furniture that is literally bringing vintage modernist furniture back into a new market.
One of the highlights of our recent Reclaiming Design events in New York was Dutch designer Tejo Remy’s presentation. As expected, the Dutch designer spoke about his well known chest of drawers, rag chair, and milk bottle lamp - but he also talked about a few lesser-known projects that wowed us with their playfulness and ingenuity. In particular, his re-interpreted playground fence (shown above) was a real crowd pleaser, and provided an interesting take on “reclaimed” or “recycled” design in which the reuse brought a new interpretation to a vernacular form (the materials may not have been reused, but the language and application was certainly reused and re-invented).
Yves Behar’s graceful and gestural Leaf lamp may well be the best known LED desk lamp of our era. Debuting last year at ICFF 2006, the iconic “eco lamp” won rave reviews and garnered a lot of attention and spots on magazine covers for its lyrical form and use of new technology.
We love designer Rick Lee’s creative use of digital fabrication and CNC milling to create a set of playfully evocative “Four Seasons” furniture, which was on display at New York’s ICFF. Celebrating the cyclical nature of life, each table in the Four Seasons series is a different shape and height, and has a unique style of CNC cut-out from its plyboo base to reflect the season.
While wandering the halls of ICFF this year we came across this beautiful new LED Lamp design by Koncept and were instantly smitten with its graceful lines and clarity of purpose. Koncept’s gorgeously simple Z-Bar is a true testament to the “less is more” philosophy of design. Why have fidgetty little nobs, decorations, and unecessary distraction when the main purpose of a desk lamp is to illuminate your desk with as little energy and heat as possible? Koncept’s unobtrusively sexy form packs a secret punch - behind the flexible stick shape of the Z-bar Lamp is a high power set of 66 LEDs which provide up to 240 lumens while only consuming 8.8 watts of electricity.
When it comes to innovative lighting, there’s cool, and then there’s just plain brilliant (pun intended). Makoto Tojiki’s “Archimedes Dream” seems to fall into the latter category. The glowing ribbon chandelier is illuminated thanks to organic light emitting diodes, or OLED’s. In case you’re not familiar, OLEDs are a subcategory of LEDs that glow thanks to an electroluminescent layer of organic compounds (think glow-in-the-dark paint, but organic, and fancier). The high technology coupled with the simple, gestural form, made for quite the eye-catching booth at last weekend’s ICFF.
While grandmother’s doilies may be an anachronism in modern homes today, the UNBLOSSOM salt crystal crocheted bowls represent a very current trend- that is the re-inventing of products from past crafts for modern-day uses. The-Home-Project crystallized doily bowls breathe new life into a lost craft and are anything but nostalgic. Not that we don’t love the handiwork of thousands of needle loops, but the more visually engaging three-dimensional version is easier to appreciate when sustainably recycled into a piece that fits with the new decor.
When we spotted Michelle Brand’s gorgeous Cascade Chandelier at HauteGREEN this year, we were drawn to the beautiful design like eco-minded moths around a CFL bulb. When we took a closer look and realized that each of the transparent “flowers” in the cascade was actually just the bottom of a plastic drink bottle, we were surprised and impressed. We never imagined that something so simple, cheap and ordinary such as empty water bottles could be turned into a such a stunning and elegant piece of interior design.
Given the overwhelming success of the HauteGREEN show this year, and the increasingly large numbers of designers participating, we felt it was time to apply our ‘editors-choice-awards’ model to HauteGREEN and give a shout-out to the designs that really stood out as shining examples of good green design. Given how many designers participated in this year’s HauteGREEN, it’s hard to narrow down all the awesome green designs to just a few worthy of a Best In Show award, but a few do stick out in our mind as truly exceptional. Here are our Inhabitat-editor-chosen awards for HauteGREEN 2007 Best In Show…
One of our favorite finds from this year’s ICFF is Mark McKenna’s collection of pocket-size do-It-yourself designer battery lights. We’ve seen 9-volt batteries acting as light sources before, as in Richard Lawson’s DIY LED light, but these ‘DEK’ (Designer Emulation Kits) bring iconic design to another (albeit small-scale) level. The kits consist of a series of flat pieces that you remove from the printed circuit board, assemble, and hook up to a 9-volt battery. They come in five models, all representations of some of the most famous designer lamps (Ingo Maurer’s Lucellino, Castiglioni’s Arco and Toio, Sapper’s Tizio, and Philippe Starck’s Miss K). We love the high-design-meets-DIY aspect of these mini-lamps, and at $26 each, they won’t break the bank.
$26 From Mark McKenna
Every May in New York City, the flowers bloom, the cold winter weather becomes a distant memory, and thousands of thousands of avid design fans flock to the Javits Center for the tens of thousands of square feet of the newest and coolest from the design world. We attended ICFF expecting the usual whirlwind, but were pleasantly surprised by the amount of thoughtful, green, and engaging items we found. Like anything else, ICFF is a mixture of the good, bad, and the boring, but we found ourselves pleased by the diamonds in the rough that demonstrated a greener, more thoughtful approach to design. Read on for our highlights from ICFF.
One of our favorite discoveries at this year’s ICFF (and winner of the ICFF Editor’s Choice Award for Best New Designer), was Emi Fujita and Shane Kohatsu’s brand new Corona Solar Light, an outdoor lighting solution that combines a photovoltaic cell, LEDs, and sunflower-esque form to bring a lovely solar-powered glow to your outdoor spaces. The self powered Corona Lamp can be used indoors and out - attached to a wall, staked and “planted” like a flower, or just placed on a tabletop- all without glues or fasteners.
Aside from all the amazing designs- chairs, products, homewares, and spaces- that make NY Design Week such a wonderful whirlwind, when you get right down to it, it’s a week of parties. The beacons and icons of design come from all corners of the globe to grace the galleries, stores, and trade show booths of New York for one week full of shindigs and soirees, their own presence as important as their designs.
All of you NY design fans have probably wondered why we’ve been a bit slow on the Design Week reportage this year… We have been thoroughly attending all the shows and parties of NY Design Week, but since we had a bigger organizational role in HauteGREEN this year, it’s taken us a bit longer to recover and get all our photos downloaded and reports written. Thanks for your patience, and thank you so much to everyone who came down to HauteGREEN this year. The show gets better and better every year, and we were thrilled to be a part of it. If you missed it this year - fear not — we’ll be putting together some videos about the show in general and the different panels. In the interim, read on for our photos from the best and the brightest eco-design show in NYC: HauteGREEN!
For the full set of photos, check out our Flickr Feed >
If you’re in New York City this weekend for the ICFF, we’d like to remind you about our Reclaiming Design event at HauteGreen this afternoon. You can’t miss the HauteGREEN show, so why not combine a visit to the exhibition with a visit to our event, which features Dutch design icon Tejo Remy, Dwell Editor Sam Grawe, and Brooklyn designers Carlos Salgado of Scrapile and Matt Gagnon to speak about recycling in design. Reclaiming Design is this afternoon at 5pm, so come by and check it out!
Nicholas Furrow was showing a few other items at BKLYN Designs, aside from the strainer lamp, and we’d light to show you another one that caught our eye, and nose: The Honey Jar Lamp. It is part of a series of experiments from Nicholas that involve the use of fruits and vegetables and light to obtain some interesting results.
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