Inhabitat

PROPELLOR’S PLYBOO PENDANT LAMP

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.

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ECO-FRIENDLY EMIR CHAIR by Trokk 16

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.

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MOSO BAMBOO PENDANT LAMP by Brian Schmitt

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?

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IANNONE ECO-FRIENDLY MOD LODGE FURNITURE

We’ve long been fans Iannone:Sanderson’s amazingly creative and cute sustainable furniture designs. Every year at ICFF we count on seeing several new organic designs in kirei and bamboo from Iannone, and this year didn’t disappoint. Although he appears to have lost partner Sanderson somewhere in the past year, Iannone showed again this year at ICFF with a whole host of gorgeous new pieces, including the eco-fabulous Elk Mod Lodge Sideboard shown above.

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VIDEO: Tom Dixon on Sustainable Design

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.

This video is just a quick snapshot of his thought-provoking talk. For those of you who are interested, watch the entire, unabridged version here at Scribemedia >

+ Tom Dixon @ HauteGREEN

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ARTEK 2ND CYCLE FURNITURE with Tom Dixon

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.

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TEJO REMY’S PLAYGROUND FENCES

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).

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YVES BEHAR LED LEAF LAMP

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.

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RICK LEE’S FOUR SEASONS PLYBOO TABLES

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.

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SUPERSLEEK LED DESK LAMP – Z-Bar by Koncept

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.

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ORGANIC LED LAMP BY MAKOTO TOJIKI

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.

+ Makoto Tojiki

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SALT CRYSTALIZED DOILY BOWL by the Home Project

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.

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RECYCLED BOTTLE CASCADE CHANDELIER

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.

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HauteGREEN BEST IN SHOW: Inhabitat Awards

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…

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MINI DIY DESIGNER BATTERY LAMPS – Designer Emulator Kit

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

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INHABITAT REPORTS FROM ICFF

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.

To see our full spread of photos from the event, check out our Flickr Feed >

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CORONA SOLAR LIGHT

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.

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DESIGN WEEK PARTY PICS 2007

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.

Below are our favorite pics from the parties, for the full set, check our Flickr Feed >

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HAUTE GREEN 2007

xDesign’s fabulous Air-Filter Plant Lamp

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 >

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RECLAIMING DESIGN PANEL: Today!

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!

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BKLYN DESIGNS: Nicholas Furrow Honey Jar Lamp

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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BKLYN DESIGNS 2007: Nicholas Furrow’s Strainer Lamp

We were truly amazed by the variety of products shown at last weekend’s BKLYN designs, where we saw everything from timber tables to skateboards on the floor. We loved how designers seemed to look at waste, scrap and ordinary things and then finding ways to turn them into new items worthy of a second look, such as is the case with this beautifully inventive Strainer lamp by Nicholas Furrow.

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TOM DIXON SPEAKING AT HAUTEGREEN TODAY!

Calling all Tom Dixon fans in New York!
We want to remind you that the renowned British designer Tom Dixon will be speaking at HauteGREEN TODAY, Saturday May 19th at 3pm.

The maverick British design star may be best known for shiny silver Mirror Ball lamps and his role as the creative director of UK design store Habitat, but Tom has a long history of engagement with recycling and sustainability that is equally, if not more, noteworthy. His green efforts include the Eco Ware tableware line, made from biodegradable plastic and bamboo, his EcoPolo for Lacoste, and the publication of a great book called ReThink that highlights the use of re-used and re-purposed objects in design (the theme of our Reclaiming Design panel!), as well as his new sustainable venture with Artek in bamboo furniture. Tom will be speaking about his work in sustainable design with New York design journalist Julie Taraska.

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HauteGREEN STARTS TONIGHT!

People in NYC – Don’t forget that HauteGREEN starts tonight!

After weeks of anticipation, sneak peeks, and announcements about the star-studded lineup, HauteGREEN is officially kicking off its festivities tonight with its opening party in Manhattan! Promising to be bigger, better, and greener than last year, HauteGREEN will showcase the best of the best in sustainable design for the home.

And while the exhibit itself (and the party) are going to be great, don’t forget about three fabulous events happening over the weekend at HauteGREEN:

Tom Dixon: A Sustainable Conversation: Saturday, May 19, 3pm.
Design journalist and editor Julie Taraska will engage London-based design maverick Tom Dixon in a conversation about sustainable design.

Meet the Designers: Sunday, May 20, 2pm.
Graham Hill, founder of Treehugger.com moderates a panel and walkthrough discussion with a group of designers featured in HauteGREEN 2007

Reclaiming Design: Sunday, May 20, at 5pm.
Tejo Remy of droog fame, and NY designers Carlos Salgado of Scrapile and Matt Gagnon, along with Sam Grawe of Dwell, will take a critical look at design processes and the application and implications of using reclaimed materials.

The Inhabitat crew will be in attendance for most of the weekend, so stay tuned for our full report on all the green festivities. And if you see us there, please stop by and say hi!

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MODGREENPOD Sustainable Fabrics & Upholstery

One thing we are especially excited to check out at this weekend’s HauteGREEN show is the new range of fabrics and wallpaper by ModGreenPod. Sisters-in-law Nancy Mims and Lisa Mims design adorable poppy wallpapers and furniture upholsteries that are as eco-friendly as they are easy-on-the-eye. Coincidentally, ModGreenPod’s graphic textiles also grace the seats of the Hi-Five chairs, another HauteGREEN highlight. The fabrics are made from organic cotton and adorned with bright, graphic prints, proving that “eco fabric” does not have to mean “undyed hemp.”

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HAUTEGREEN SNEAK PEEK: Hi-Five’s Apt Chair

This past weekend at BKLYN Designs, we were excited to discover Kiel Mead and Michael Cummings of Hi-Five’s simple but stunning Apt chairs, and were pleased to find out they are made from Richlite, a resin-impregnated paper product that we’ve praised on several occasions before. The Apt Chairs also boast snazzy upholstery thanks to ModPod’s organic cotton fabric line.

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CORE 77’s GUIDE TO New York Design Week

New York Design week is rapidly approaching and we can’t wait. Between the ICFF, HauteGREEN, and a million gazillion design parites, we’re going to have our hands full trying to manage it all. Thank goodness for Core77’s Design Week Guide, the best way to find out about what’s going on, when, and where…

Core77 Design Week Guide >

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UHURU STOOLEN LITE Scrap Wood Table

Uhuru’s scrap-wood creations caught our eye at BKLYN Designs last year, and at this year’s festivities, their Stoolen Lite low table was once again a crowd pleaser. The round coffee table, constructed of collected wood scraps from local workshops, is the second generation of the Stoolen Chair, which is smaller, and encompassed by a found bicycle rim. While we love the simplicity of the circular shape as it cleverly mimics the shape of a tree stump, custom shapes and sizes are also available. Uhuru will also be one of the design teams showing their work at the upcoming HauteGREEN show this coming weekend.

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BRAVE SPACE Scrap Wood Mountain Coat Rack

We at Inhabitat love scrap wood furniture, and we love Brooklyn-based design studio Brave Space. Put the two together, and you get this slightly-kitschy yet oh-so clever scrap wood Mountain Range Coat Rack. One of the eye-catching crowd-pleasers at this weekend’s BKLYN Designs, the design takes advantage of the wood’s inherent colorations to create the snowy white (yet green) alpine snow caps to adorn your wall and hold your coats in sustainable style.

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COPYCAT OR COINCIDENCE? – 4Korners versus Scrapile

While attending BKLYN Designs this weekend, we were surprised to come across a Brooklyn-based design company creating furniture which bears much more than a passing resemblance to our friends Scrapile. While plenty of designers, including Uhuru and Brave Space, use scrap wood in their designs, Scrapile’s striated bands of different colored wood laminated together is their signature look – and a design process that they originated.

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BKLYN DESIGNS 2007: Inhabitat Reports

Every year attending BKLYN Designs is one of my favorite parts of NY Design week. The show is small and curated, so most of the work is very good. The best part, of course, is that all the work is designed and produced locally. Not only is this good in terms of supporting the local economy, it also has a lower carbon footprint than a trade show that encourages exhibitors and attendees to fly out from all parts of the world. It also means that regular attendees will begin to recognize familiar friendly faces if they return year after year. Think globally – act locally!

Here’s what I saw at BKLYN Designs this year…

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