Collection by Shonquis Moreno
London's 100% Design
Albeit with more drizzle and more crowded aisles, 100% Design in Earls Court, London, resembles New York’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair in that it is small and easily digested. 100% Design has its share of big-booth brands and practical tools, materials and production processes for the foot soldiers of the interior design industry but this year, it also featured interesting international contingents from Chile, Norway, Korea and the UK, and a couple of strong examples of booth design, one by Dutchman Ben van Berkel’s UN Studio and the other by Paris-born, New York-based designer and musician Sebastien Agneessens for, of all things, a Turkish real estate developer-cum-design lab called Nef.
Jody Milton of Milton & Mees works days doing exhibition design, so he doesn’t have much time left to create and market the furniture and interiors that are close to his heart. Milton presented the product of his moonlighting—a trio of classically modern and refreshingly simple seating—in the Makers Co. booth. Makers is a rare company that helps take the work of individual designers and small studios to market, doing everything from producing the pieces, suggesting price models and finding distribution to getting them started on business plan, educating designers in the business of design all along the way.
Part of young Chilean studio gt2P’s Digital Crafting Collection, the Gudpaka marries digital manufacture with traditional craftsmanship. It is made from waste Alpaca wool from Northern Chile that is not suitable for spinning or industry that is knit by hand into a felt skin that has been shaped using a CNC-milled mold to create the shade. The shade is lined with faceted tiles of Coigue wood in an unmistakably modern pattern.
Looking for an alternative to noxious plastics, young Korean duo Cho Eun Whan and Shin Tai Ho of Maezm have created a frameless, featherweight chair from the mulberry mucilage used to handcraft traditional Korean Hanji paper. In spite of the seemingly delicate nature of Hanji, which is used in artwork and calligraphy, the chair offers a solid seat.
Shanghai-based Zhoujie Zhang graduated from the Central St. Martins in 2010 and returns to London with a series of faceted chairs cut and folded from a single sheet of mirror-finished steel. Zhang scanned friends’ bodies and then translated these bespoke dimensions into made-to-measure furniture in the computer. His inspiration came from an interest in Taoism and its emphasis on actionlessness and non-interference in nature. “I tried to apply this to the digital world,” he explains, “and let the objects generate themselves.”