Space craft
Words | Virginia Blackburn Is it art? Is it architecture? No, it’s contemporary furniture design, and the true innovators in the field have acquired star status among cultural critics and collectors alike for their covetable, outré creations WHILE ANTIQUE FURNITURE seems so last season, its offspring, contemporary design, in collecting terms, couldn’t be more of the moment. In fact, contemporary design is [...]
Words | Virginia Blackburn
Is it art? Is it architecture? No, it’s contemporary furniture design, and the true innovators in the field
have acquired star status among cultural critics and collectors alike for their covetable, outré creations
alt="A table for Vitra and red metacrylic bowl">
WHILE ANTIQUE FURNITURE seems so
last season, its offspring, contemporary
design, in collecting terms, couldn’t be
more of the moment. In fact, contemporary
design is becoming almost as important as
contemporary art as far as collectors are concerned – the
great difference, of course, being that it also has a use. The
architect Frank Lloyd Wright famously said that “form and
function should be one”: in modern design, in the shape of
chairs, tables and so on, you have both. The major names in
the field (and this list is not comprehensive) include Londonbased
Israeli designer Ron Arad, Australian Mark Newson, the
Brazilian-born Campana brothers and just about anyone who
has worked at the Amsterdam-based Droog Design. In some
cases, the prices are already astronomical, but in others, they are still in the
low thousands of pounds.
According to Tania Buckrell Pos, a director of Corfield
Morris, advisors in fine art and antiques, the level of interest
in modern and contemporary furniture has rocketed in recent
years. “Ever since the new century began, when the 20th
century became in people’s minds ‘last century’ and pieces
thus acquired the kudos of antiques, there has been steadily
growing interest and an accompanying rise in values,” she
says. And, of course, even people with no real interest in art
have become very intrigued by the idea of good design.
Tom Dixon, OBE and former rock star, who turned to
furniture design in his spare time, is one of the foremost
names in design of his generation, producing spectacular
designs for his own company, as well as being the creative
director of Habitat for over a decade now.
“People find the ideas behind design easier to comprehend
than contemporary art,” Dixon says. “It’s more related to
everyday experiences. And British design is marked out by
the fact that designers have to try harder, as there is no
manufacturing base here and until recently, no collectors.”
Best known for his extraordinary take on familiar objects,
at the Basel Design Fair last June, Dixon held a sort of
performance art exhibition, creating a series of chairs using
extruded plastic. This entailed draping and redraping a
continuous string of liquid plastic over the wooden form of a
chair, until the plastic hardened and dried out, and became a
chair in its own right. The finished product is both comfortable
and striking: chairs made in the same way, called Tom Dixon
Fresh Fat chairs, now cost £5,000, and while past performance
certainly can’t be an indicator of future success, it is worth
pointing out that some chairs Dixon made and sold for £600
five years ago are now valued at up to the region of £15,000.
alt="Il Hoon Roh table (glass removed)">
It is very difficult to pull together themes that the designers
have in common across such an eclectic field, but Liliane
Fawcett, the owner of Themes & Variations, a specialist in
post-war and contemporary furniture in London, believes
many were very influenced by what happened after 1945.
“Post-war, a great deal of furniture was designed by people
who had trained as architects, and they brought that ethos
into the field of design,” she says. “That aspect has continued
until the current day, and you still have people like Zaha
Hadid who are primarily architects but still design furniture.”
Such is the growing popularity of modern design that
more traditional antiques
fairs have had to remake
themselves in a more
modern image. In 2007, the
Spring Fine Art & Antiques
Fair at London’s Olympia
morphed into FORM, an
annual modern design fair.
This year it had 16 galleries
devoted to modern design
alone, one of which was
L’Équipement Des Arts and
one of its directors, Michael
Mohammed, also sees a link between contemporary furniture
and architecture. “The best pieces are sculptural, almost
timeless,” he says. “They transcend modern art and design.”
alt="Chair by Sebastian Brajkovic from the Carpenters Workshop Gallery">
One designer his gallery showcased at FORM is Jean-
Marie Massaud, one of the rising stars of French design, who
is currently working with ONERA (France’s equivalent of
NASA) on an airship called the Manned Cloud. This intends
offering 40 passengers three-day cruises through the clouds
at about 170km an hour. L’Équipement Des Arts is selling
a limited edition of Massaud’s Ad Hoc Gold Chairs. “The
shape is a merger of organic form and technology,” explains
Mohammed. “It’s like a flopping leaf.” The price is £5,500.
Another designer the gallery champions is Max McMurdo
of Reestore. A UK-born designer, he has created a series of
daybeds out of old cast iron baths, which he calls the Max
Sofa. The iron is cut away from one side of the bath and
the inside is upholstered in a variety of fabrics, including
Mongolian sheepskin and lime green embossed velvet.
“It’s a twist on the idea of a daybed,” states Mohammed.
“People lounge back in a bath, and now that it’s covered in
luxurious fabrics and fur, they can lounge on the bath as a
daybed, too. People ask how to sit in it, but when they get in,
they sit back and say, ‘Oh!’” The daybeds cost from £2,400,
and they are, if nothing else, quite a conversation piece.
HOW TO START
The best place to start is at a modern design fair to see the range of what is on offer:
- FORM is an annual modern design event, and throughout the year, information can be
found on its website www.form-london.com – it also has a list of furniture galleries. - Design Miami has two shows this year: Markthalle, Basel, Switzerland, 3-5 June and
Miami, USA, in December. Find further details on the website www.designmiami.com - The Design Museum in London is an excellent source of knowledge. Its website –
www.designmuseum.org – also has a comprehensive list of modern furniture designers. - Design specialists Themes & Variations is located at 231 Westbourne Grove, Notting Hill,
London, +44 (0)20 7727 5531;www.themesandvariations.com - Find out more about designer Tom Dixon on www.tomdixon.net
- L’Équipement Des Arts’ website is www.lequipement.com, or contact the gallery on
+44 (0)77 0768 1264. - For more information about the work of Jean-Marie Massaud, visit www.massaud.com
