The Best Furniture at NYCxDesign According to Dwell’s Editor-in-Chief
New York’s design week used to be an insular event, with industry people confined to a convention center or mingling among themselves over warm white wine in a showroom or two. But this year, NYCxDesign ran for nearly a fortnight—with events, exhibitions, pop ups, and parties all over town. The International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) is still the reason for the season, but everything spilling out across the city has given the design world a very public face. Whether or not you can tell a Bellini sofa from an Ikea couch, the mood for the last 10 days or so was that design is officially a thing in New York. And if you weren’t in town to take it all in, don’t worry. I hit the streets with photographer Ike Edeani, who has shot this excellent house and many others for Dwell, to find some of the best work out there.
First Stop: Dumpster Diving With Catalog Sale and Marta Gallery
Let’s all say a final farewell to arched doorways, tasteful pastels, and Memphis-inspired flourishes. The "Millennial aesthetic" that turned our homes into soothing cocoons is starting to give way to something more feral. That was evident at the exhibition Make–Do, a pop up from Los Angeles gallery Marta and auction startup Catalog Sale inside a derelict radiology clinic in Chinatown.
Marta owners Heidi Korsavong and Benjamin Critton partnered with Avi Kovacevich of Catalog Sale to show his collection of chairs salvaged during a road trip across the U.S. Made from cast-off materials and other found detritus, they range from a chair constructed from cardboard boxes to an old tire strung with leather straps.
The results included Sebastijan Jemec & Georgia McGovern’s beaded car seat cover strung on a wooden frame, Chen Chen & Kai Williams’s beautifully unstable bungee cord contraption (titled Pineal Lobotomy), Nifemi Ogunro’s semi-deconstructed wooden chair with an oven-rack back, and Isabel Rower referencing that cardboard chair with her own take on packaging-turned-seat.
Second Stop: Floral Chairs Crawling With Insects (in a Good Way) at Future Perfect
Third Stop: Knockoffs We Actually Endorse at Colony
Next we headed to Canal Street and stepped between blankets piled with fake designer handbags lining the sidewalk to reach Colony for the appropriately named Knockoff Show. Owner Jean Lin and her team invited a group of designers to pay homage to work that has inspired their own by, well, shamelessly knocking them off.
Fourth Stop: The Center of the Downtown Design Universe
More Design Week coverage, right this way:
From Shaggy Rugs to Breccia Stone Tables, Here’s What I Saw in an Afternoon of NYCxDesign
Wall-to-Wall Carpeting Is Back, and Other Surprises from ICFF
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