ICFF 2015

TREKKING THROUGH THE SHOW

While trying to re-launch our Shaver/Melahn Classics line and then introduce two new benchmade lines along with an e-commerce cottage based line the relevance of ICFF and the importance of taking a look at the market are an annual essential pilgrimage. We put on our track shoes and set off to scope out the miles of aisles of new releases from the major players, the international crowd and the smattering of young and talented hopefuls.

This is no surprise to anyone who has followed us for the last several years of our ICFF tours: Dan Levy and his tabletop and accessories. Dan is a friend but we won't let that color our gushing review of his work. This is the high, and I mean high, end of the tabletop market. If you don't own your own Lear Jet or if your yacht is less than one hundred feet Dan's work is probably not going to fit into your dining room budget. It's definitely not for the Melmac crowd. It's an unfortunate fact but that doesn't stop gawkers and coveters from standing in awe of his booth and his work. It's quality porcelain trimmed in platinum and gold.

His newest entry is in the tile market. Dan is developing a line of tile that just blew us away. I'd be willing to trade  a complete Sub-Zero/Wolf set of kitchen appliances for one line of trim in my powder room.

A real highlight this year centered around wall coverings. There were wallpapers, wall tiles, and new uses for concrete and wood that I couldn't help but drool over. One of our favorite wallpaper vendors was MissPrint. Their bold patterns and rich color treatments were a real breath of fresh air. They offered a wide range of styles but their mid-century inspired designs were whimsical and sophisticated at the same time.

I've referenced Sophie Mallebranche's work before and yet each year there is something so fascinating about the metal work she brings to the show I can't help but reference it again.

Her shimmering mesh is soft enough to be used as drapery that both reflects and defuses light and explodes like sparks from a star filled sky when hit by artificial light. It can also be used as an applied surface or as stationary screens that can turn walls into lightboxes when lit from behind.

B+N has paired up with the artist, Rex Ray, to create these extraordinary infused veneer wall panels. The patterns and color palettes are amazing. They might be a hard sell for residential applications but boy would I love to find a client who was willing to take a chance on a space with these walls. I think you can work with them for custom work. I've no idea of the cost. Oouch!

Concrete both real and faux was another wall treatment that stood out in our marathon tour of ICFF. Several vendors were offering lightweight panels molded out of concrete. The versatility of the material makes three dimensionally formed patterns a possibility that hadn't been explored so thoroughly before. There were so many attendees that were in disbelief about the material, the vendor felt compelled to add a sign of authenticity.

The same could be said of wood paneling that was shown rippled, waved and woven into astounding geometrics

Then on the faux side composites were made to duplicate concrete useable either in interiors or on exteriors. Interlam has just begun manufacturing these panels that can be shipped in ten-foot lengths and at approximately six dollars a square foot...that ain't bad.

I also fell in love with these ceramic panels made to look like rusted steel. The company is called Apavisa and is sold at High Style Stone and Tile in New York City. It can go up on either your wall or down on your floor. If you want an industrial look this tile is a great place to start.

I'm not a big fan of garden walls. As maintenance free as most vendors claim it seems every installation I've seen has gone the way of deadly brown after the first six months. That said, these green walls were pretty impressive.

Another strength of the show was lighting. This wire mesh lighting fixture by Nuvo Lighting was one of my favorites. The new entries Nuvo brought to this year's show were elegant and period inspired but not derivative or copies of other people's designs.

I also found these wall sconces and pendants produced by Archilume to be an interesting take on dimmable LED lighting.

The light effect could be purchased with either a diffused or concentric throw. The simple profile was very minimal and sophisticated.

My name would be mud if I didn't mention lighting designers Paul Priven and Marcia Zia of Zia-Priven and their entry back into ICFF. We have always been impressed with their innovative approach to what lighting can be. You shouldn't make purchases based on personality but two kinder people don't exist.

The missing element at this year's show was the lack of independent bespoke furniture manufactures. The big guys and the foreign manufacturers were all there but what had been the major draw of the show, the little guys with wild ideas, wasn't there. There were a few that I saw that made the show special for me and reminded me of what the show used to be. One was mainstay, Tod Von Mertens. His work always goes a step beyond beautiful.

There were a lot of vendors showing raw edge pieces, a technique that has by now made it to the big box retailers. Tod has put a twist on this feature by using new wood species like this bleached ambrosia maple dining table.

One more small designer with an intriguing idea was FringeStudio out of California with manufacturing in Wisconsin (where else?). They've introduced a line called MIXI, a modular system that includes storage, shelving and audio components that can be configured in more ways than Lindsey Lohan has mug shots. I loved the speaker components. It was an easy way to get music into a room without having to tap into walls for hidden wires and messy components.

These people may have been around for longer than I was aware of but I thought they had come up with a great idea: custom doors for IKEA cabinets. Buy your boxes from IKEA then have Semihandmade upgrade your doors and your look. If you're looking to do things on the down low - here you go.

THE GALLERY

Suite 506, NYC, 2005
Julie Mack, photographer
Represented by Laurence Miller Gallery

FATE, CHANCE, CHOICES UNEXPECTED

THE CONSERVATORY IN CENTRAL PARK

There was a springtime snowstorm, featherweight white petals swirling outside. Mixed by the wind in the trough that constitutes West 89th Street was a salad of serviceberry, cockspur hawthorne, and a dash of tulip tree petals all bathed in a dressing of sunshine. It was a jumble of seasons: a faux winter, the intro of spring and the exit of the year's first season's pastel petals off New York City's blooming trees.

So much of life is about taking a path to the unexpected. You make a choice and travel a road when the possibilities of trails to take are endless. I was postponing going into Central Park to photograph its spring beauty thinking I could holdout for the wisteria in the Conservatory to bloom. It was Saturday. The park would be packed. The weather had turned from warm to hot. The purple pull of the wisteria would have to wait; the itch to join the pack was too strong. I grabbed my iphone and headed out for a sneak peek at the greens and magentas and vibrant pinks of spring.

To get to the Conservatory I have to traverse the park dipping below the reservoir and then up to 106th Street and the Conservatory's wrought iron gate. There's no way on a hot spring weekend that you can do much more than an amble in the park.

The heat, the crowds and the distractions transform your pace to a slow meander absorbed in the discovery behind every hill, underpass or curve in your path. The lucrative nature of the park on a bright Saturday afternoon brings out the caricaturists, the Spanish churros vendors and the buskers hoping to entertain and find their passed hats filled with ones and fives and tens.

The Conservatory opens up with a vista of an immense quadrangle lined with boxwood and cherry trees.

At the far end is a fountain and beyond that the wisteria colonnade that had turned green but hadn't produced its dripping bunches of grape colored blooms.

To the left and right spread more gardens each filled with the fragrance of flowering trees.

A heady weight of spring's fragrant bounty so heavy it seems capable of breaking its limbs with the abundance of its beauty

On either side of the quad are alleys ripe with pink and white blossoms bursting from the knurled limbs providing

a perfect canopy for a family absorbed in taking a portrait of their newborn..

The illusive nature of life could not have been more poignant than the wheelchair bound woman sitting in the dappled shade next to the reflecting pond. She sat facing the Burnett statue listening to the bronze boy playing songs on his lute only she could hear.

There's such a small window between when the blooms on the trees are rich with color and that moment when you can see that the vibrant pink has paled and the trees begin to look more green than pastel.
I hadn't planned on going to the park that Saturday. Sometimes intuition draws you through a door you hadn't planned on opening. By Tuesday the petal storm outside my window was like a love note cut into a million little white pieces announcing the end of that small speck in time when the blooms are perfect.

WEST SIDE COMMUNITY GARDEN

Rick needed a wooden plank brought back to Wisconsin to be repaired. That very small penny-pinching part of me thought I could some how get it onto the plane as a piece of carry-on luggage. There are certain things I'm willing to try but it didn't take me long to see the folly of attempting to board a plane with a fifty-two inch board in hand that when wrapped had the appearance of a military weapon. The board was going to have to make its way back to Wisconsin without me as its seatmate. I searched the Internet for the nearest UPS Store (a note to UPS: your site not only sucks but it's filled with misinformation). You search the UPS site by address and zip code and they then tell you the nearest stores to your entered zip. My closest site was on Broadway, or so I thought. I believe implicitly in the reliability of the Internet, never ever doubting its accuracy. I walked down 89th Street, the most direct path to my destination. Halfway down the block between Columbus and Amsterdam sits a community park I had probably passed a dozen times in all of the other three seasons but not to my recollection in spring.

The park runs through the block north to 90th Street. It's funded and maintained mostly by neighborhood volunteers. Hedges of bushes and vines will eventually obstruct the view into the park but in spring the park's drapery has been drawn back. The tree canopies and the climbing vines that will soon cover the park making it more a secret garden haven't yet unfurled their fabric.

The park for a few short weeks in spring is more exposed and like an exhibitionist sheds its robe and dances the dance of the rite of spring, a tulip spring. More than twelve thousand tulips of both traditional and exotic varieties burst with color along the narrow paths and circular courtyard of the park.

The weight of the plank I was carrying was not going to keep me from taking in the little piece of Holland on West 89th Street.  I walked through the gardens gates and drew in the Technicolor blanket laid out over the garden's beds. I walked through staggering combinations of multi-colored patches of huge headed blooms balanced on slender green stems.

There were double blooms that looked more like peonies than tulips.

Lily flowering varieties that delicately spread their petals, the tips of which looked as if they had been dipped in contrasting ink.

There were parrot varieties exhibiting their stripes,

and fringed tulips that shared their tendril appearance with sea anemones, and the multi-colored Rembrandts named after the man whose painting inspired them. The tulip isn't about its fragrance it's about its magnificent spectrum of color from pastel to vibrant.

I lost the thread of time. It seemed as if I had witnessed the complete growth of these tulips from seed to blooms while I walked around this garden. If it wasn't for the plank I was carrying around I might have forgot about my errand. I had written down the number of the UPS Store on Broadway. It was between 83rd and 84th Streets on the west side of the street. The address was for a building with multiple storefronts but none of them had a UPS sign in the window. The main entrance to the building was for low-income senior housing with dirty tile floors and a reception desk with a big clock and an attendant who spoke only broken English. I eventually found the UPS Store a block from our apartment on Columbus, but if it hadn't been for the faulty info on the Internet I would never have made it to the tulip festival. I went back later that day. It had been a little windy. When I came back most of the petals were lying on the ground. The tulip stems were now only sticks with little yellow pollen tips.
So much of life is about taking a path to the unexpected. You make a choice and travel a road when the possibilities of trails to take are endless. This one led me to a color sensation that even if I had waited a quarter of day longer would have been gone until next year. We all make choices some to unexpected delights some to tragedies. Thursday was a lucky day.

TED

A clint had asked if I wanted to do dinner. We had finished a two-hour session at a Benjamin Moore paint store looking at paint chips for her brownstone with names like Lemon Chiffon and Hathorne Green. I wanted to join her and at the same time I didn't feel up to it. There was laundry and cleaning to do before flying back to Madison on the following day. I tossed a coin in my mind. Duty won out. I said good-bye and headed back uptown. I got off the number one train at Seventy-second hoping for some restaurant with take-out potential. I was hungry but I couldn't put my finger on what I wanted. I cut over to Amsterdam to a stretch of enticing restaurants squeezed between Seventy-eighth and Eighty-fifth streets. I kept thinking something would grab my stomach and send a message to my brain but nothing did. Not the burgers and shakes, nor the lobster rolls or chicken potpie shops had any appeal. I passed up Indian, Sushi and a half-dozen Irish pubs. By the time I reached Eighty-seventh street I knew it was going to be Dominos, no embarrassing waiting at a table for one. As I turned the corner from Eighty-eighth on to Columbus there was a man holding a puppy with another dog on a leash talking to a woman. The little dog was a real showstopper. I could only see the man from the back. As I got closer the man began to look more and more familiar. When we were younger and more concerned with what we might look like on the beach in Mykonos we went to the gym regularly and had a trainer with us at all times. Ted, our trainer, eventually became more friend than fat reducer. We lost touch but periodically one of us would come up with phantom Ted sightings. It never panned out. This one turned out to be the real thing. Low and behold Ted lives around the corner from us and has for the entire time we've lived on Eighty-ninth street.
If I had stopped at one of those restaurants on Amsterdam even to only look at a menu my timing would have been off. I would have hit the corner of 89th and Columbus at a different point in time. The man with the beautiful puppy wouldn't have been standing there talking to a woman about his little dog. It would have been an empty corner, a storefront from Domino's.
So much of life is about taking a path to the unexpected. You make a choice and travel a road when the possibilities of trails to take are endless. This one led me to a chance encounter with a lost friend. We all make choices some to unexpected delights and some to tragedies. Thursday was a very lucky day.

THE GALLERY

Roses, 1970
Irving Penn, photographer
Represented by Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

CHICAGO KDC AWARDS 2015 EVENT

OH SO CLOSE

Luckily we had started out around one in the afternoon, the KDC event wasn't scheduled to begin until 5:30. What we discovered was no matter how creative you are with your departure time there apparently is no good time to drive into Chicago. At just about the point where the roads begin to double and then triple in lane count the traffic slows to a crawl rather than speeds up with the extra added asphalt. The last twelve miles from Chicago's outskirts to the Merchandise Mart took more time than it took to drive from our driveway in Madison to those Chicago outskirts including a McDonald's break for French fries and Diet Coke.

The KDC (Kitchen Design Contest) is an event sponsored by Sub-Zero and Wolf. They've been doing this for almost a decade. The contest is open to designers and the trade who have created entry worthy kitchens using both Sub-Zero and Wolf in their designs. This year the entry categories were themed around style. You had to submit your entries in one of three baskets: Contemporary, Transitional, or Traditional. This was our first time entering. We decided we had two plausible submissions.

We entered our New Jersey client's sleek gourmet chef's kitchen under the contemporary umbrella. Doing most of our design work in New York we rarely get the opportunity to work with this much square footage in a kitchen.

It was a complete gut renovation. We opened the kitchen up to the living room and created two prep areas and a semi-formal breakfast area which seats eight. The main cooking area has a 48" Wolf range, two side-by-side Sub-Zero refrigerator/freezers, and all the bells and whistles any major chef would want.

The second prep area is used for entertaining. A Wolf cooktop, under-counter refrigerator and wine storage are all tucked into a bi-level island with counter seating along the higher level.
Countertops are Silstone and all the cabinets were custom built out of rift-cut white oak with a grey cerused finish.

We also entered a kitchen in the transitional category. This one was a Madison local entry where the design was Arts and Crafts inspired. This was a gut renovation as well. All appliances were Sub-Zero and Wolf products. The cabinets were all custom made oak with art glass inserts.

Our biggest challenge here was to accommodate a diminutive wife who's forte is baking

with a 6'-5" grill master of a husband. There had to be work and prep space where both of them could feel comfortable.

We made it to the Merchandise Mart parking lot with about fifteen minutes to spare. You need to know that the event was scheduled for April thirtieth, the same day as the first day of the NFL draft being held for the first time in Chicago. The competition for bragging rights was not in Sub-Zero's favor. Luckily for us the NFL event was far enough away from the Mart that we were able to slip right in to the parking lot.

The Sub-Zero Wolf showroom is pretty impressive. Located on the main floor the showroom not only highlights their products but doubles as a demo and entertaining venue as well.

There are a slew of mock kitchens decked out in various styles highlighting all three of the contest directions: contemporary,

transitional and traditional.

There's a lounge area,

an extensive demo kitchen where appetizers were prepared for the event

and a full bar.

TV screens are scattered throughout the showroom. For the event they ran a loop of about twenty-five selected entries. Both our New Jersey and Lodi projects were heavily featured. Yes, I am unapologetically, patting us on the back.

Unfortunately, we weren't selected as a regional finalist, the competition was extremely tough but one of the executives did come up to us to say the voting was very tight and we were very close. Given there were over 1700 national and international entries we felt pretty good. Now apparently we've got one last chance to win and with the prize money being very lucrative we're going to lean on all of you out there to help us out.

There's going to be a People's Choice Award where you out there can vote. We'll let you know when the voting begins. So get your fingers ready to push our button and ask your network of friends to do the same. Thanks in advance.
















THE GALLERY

Pie, 1950's
Robert Frank, photographer
Represented by Danziger Gallery, NYC