"Burn Lamp," OSO Industries
I’ve been to design fairs in Paris, London, Cologne, New York and Miami, as a reporter and a plus one, and no matter what the locale, I usually walk away with the same slightly depressing thought: impressed by the beauty within the hall followed by the letdown of the drab ordinariness outside and the feeling that I, along with most of the rest of the world, will never possess any of the fabulous stuff inside. That’s why I was the grumpy voice who popped up last week in my wife Julie Lasky’s review of the Milan furniture fair. I rained on the parade as well as the fabulous food, wine and parties by complaining about the disconnect between the glitz, glamour and gilded knickknacks she wrote about and the reality of life as we know it in a time of severe economic dislocation. Okay, I know there’s Ikea, but still.
With that in mind I schlepped over to Brooklyn this weekend (with wife and 3-year-old in tow) to check out BKLYN DESIGNS, the annual jamboree featuring designers who live in (or at least work in) the borough in which, I must confess in the interest of full disclosure, I was born. What, I wondered, did these folks, who according to the design press work in gritty post-industrial spaces and hang out in funky Williamsburg dive bars, have to say about the state of the world and how we live in it? On a humid afternoon, we wandered through St. Ann’s Warehouse in Dumbo, pushing through crowds, to find out.
The mood was what I would call, as we near the 40th anniversary of the famous music festival, positively Woodstockian. Many designers — young, bearded or unshaven, and clad in various stages of decaying jeans — were positively bursting with enthusiasm about their work and dedication to principles of sustainable design. The green theme was everywhere: within minutes, we saw furniture that was recycled and recyclable, salvaged, reused, reclaimed and repurposed, and there wasn’t a whiff of nasty toxic glue anywhere. I fingered hand-loomed wild silk fabric woven by women in the northern Indian state of Assam. I saw a table that converts to a cork-lined seating bench, perfect for those who live in small spaces. The overall look of just about everything was woody and boxy, with rough textures and edges; that’s the green look as far as I could tell. And there was extra effort made to be totally sustainable: a handout from ALS Designs noted that the card was made using 100 percent recycled, chlorine-free paper and soy inks.
All well and good to think green down to the publicity materials; every little bit helps when it comes to saving the Earth. But why does it have to be so, well, dull? And expensive, especially because most of what we saw lacked, for the most part, any genuine sense of freshness and excitement. I’m inclined to think that scrap lumber picked up on the street and fashioned into a lovely polished table top might be cheaper than what you’d pay a bunch for at Design Within Reach. After all, the materials are cheap. To be sure, much work, thought and person-hours goes into creating these eco-designs. Yet there was little on hand that tugged at my wallet, my heart and my green guilt and said, “Take me home now, I must have it, and we’ll save the polar bears too.”
Dining room chairs, Uhuru Design
Typical of this was Oso Industries, which showed pieces (book shelves, a console table, a side table) made with stainless steel rebar and thick black concrete with a mottled surface, which was cast with the texture of charred wood and brought to a high polish. The concrete mold was made from burned wood found in the studio (if I recall the story correctly), as a way of making new things out of disused ones ($2,150 for the console table; $700 for a lamp). In a similar way, Vexell presented a line of outdoor furnishings called "Green on Green" featuring two eco-friendly products in a table — recycled aluminum legs and a top made from “natural stones” cast in epoxy — for the same rough-hewn look ($3,500). Uhuru showed dining room chairs composed of ornate, rounded wooden backs of some Louis-something style that were discarded from a chair factory attached to sleek, minimal metal legs and seat. It came off as gimmicky, and the $18,000 price tag for this limited-edition set of 12 chairs made me swoon.
Hand-printed wallpaper, "Captain Smith Story," Grow House Grow
Okay, no more complaining. Here’s what I did like: stunning carpets by Asha and the beautiful, intriguing hand-printed wallpaper by Grow House Grow, with designs based on historical figures. Prominently displayed was the "Captain Smith" pattern, referring to the captain of the doomed ocean liner Titanic, who was lost when the ship went down in icy waters. At first glance we see what appear to be Art Deco-like patterns and sun bursts, only to discover that we are viewing an undulating underwater world of swirling jelly fish, squid, and opulent sea fauna — according to this narrative, the captain’s new crew, tentacles and all, on the ocean floor. The wallpaper, silk-screened on vinyl-coated paper, is $150 per roll, enough for about 33 square feet, about the size of your average Manhattan apartment. In one sense, the Brooklyn design crowd does recognize the world outside with its genuine commitment to the creed of sustainability, natural materials and locavore manufacturing. That is certainly admirable. But along the way they lost some edginess. And marketing-wise they’re thinking along the lines of organic milk producers — that green-minded buyers will pay any price to avoid hormones. If anyone can fit all these pieces of the green design puzzle together in one nice package, I think they could make a bundle — and hopefully help stop the polar ice cap from melting.
We left the show and returned to the real world of yummy Brooklyn ice cream down at the waterfront, complete with wedding parties and unusually jolly French tourists admiring the view of lower Manhattan. That’s about as real as you can get.
