A cold, hard look at some great design
If you happened to be on Front St. last weekend, you may have noticed the oversized ice chairs in front of the Metro Convention Centre.
The famous chairs — by design greats like Panton and Wegner — welcomed people to this year’s Interior Design Show, which is like a film festival for design lovers. It is where manufactures launch some of their new products, where we are able to see prototypical designs, and where just about everyone in the design world in Canada — and some from the rest of the globe — congregates for a few days.
If you had the opportunity to attend, you would have been proud of the quality and talent and you would have found yourself leaving with inspiration and information. The list of internationally acknowledged trendsetting creators was impressive, and the exhibit floor was filled with great technology, amazing newcomers, innovators and artists.
One of the areas that I often found myself gravitating toward was Design North, where people have the opportunity to show some of the things they have been working on. This year it was filled with talented people creating in- novative wall coverings, furniture pieces combining various elements like steal and wood, glass sculptures, and even animal antlers and glass to create tables and chairs.
One of the booths that caught my eye was Ridgely Studio Works (www.ridgelystudioworks.com), which created a light fixture with a circle of LED lights and a cascade of metal posts that seemed to rain from the fixture, diffusing the light and creating a sculptural element.
Flos Lighting (www.flos.com) also showed some fascinating pieces, including one by design great Philippe Starck called the Long and Hard — a polished metal square tube about 6 feet long creating a rectilinear light source. I was also impressed with the booth by Living Lighting on King (www. livinglightingonking.com), which showed a fantastic fixture created with fine chain in an organic shape that had the look of elegant drapery, hanging over a cowhide sofa.
One of the trends this year is reclaimed wooden elements and a nostalgic nod to the worn and loved furniture of yesteryear. Elte, which had a great space at the show, referenced many elements from the past, including typographical art as framed pieces and a very compelling wall of plates, some of which seemed to be excerpts from old hand-written notes on hotel stationary. I, too, gave a nod to typographical elements with a carpet I designed for Modallion (www.modallion.com) called “Qwerty.” The rug included the centre section of an old Underwood typewriter. The carpet was featured at the show. It may be that the nostalgic look comes from an eco-friendly ideology, where industrial elements are reused to save them from landfill. Some of those highly functional elements — like old cart wheels — have a real beauty to them that should be embraced. At the same time, we see a continued love of natural elements like stone and wood in a more natural way. There were booths that had “live edge” tables, which are essentially finished tables that have embraced the natural undulations of the tree trunk. What may have been considered “blemishes” in the past are now featured and celebrated. A company called Stone Forest (www.stoneforest.com) creates tubs and sinks carved out of stone. I was a little in love with a Japanese-style soaker tub carved out of a solid piece of marble. There were also sinks carved from various kinds of stone that seemed to honour the stone with unpolished exteriors, giving you the feeling of arriving at the end of a tiny water fall that had carved itself a natural reservoir. I was also impressed with some of the plumbing companies that seemed to mix the old and the new. Caml-tomlin (www.caml tomlin.com) created a beautiful roller for a glass shower enclosure that mimicked the rollers found on old barn doors. It added an incredible but simple sparkle to the bathroom. There were also some incredible faucet shapes with Axor (www.axor.com), Hans Grohe (www.hansgrohe.com) and Aqua Brass (www.aquabrass.com). I’m always impressed with many of the new technological features. I was pleased with the newest drawer slide by Hettich (www.hettich.com) called Arcitech, which can support as much as 200 pounds and still run smoothly with a “soft close.” I’m aware that clients want to put more in the drawers of their kitchens, like cast-iron pots and pans in very wide drawers, or cases of soda in pullout pantries.
Many people in the design community, myself included, are able to serve our clients that much better because of the IDS. All of those displays, in combination with lectures from international greats like Karim Rashid and Piero Lissoni, make it a creative recharge for us in the design community and for those who love all things design.
When I got back home after several days of looking, touching, talking, listening and walking, I was very happy to sit down . . . and even happier that the chair was not made of ice. Glen Peloso is a designer who hosts HGTV’S Restaurant Makeover and Take This House and Sell It, is the design editor of Home Décor & Renovations magazine and a regular contributor to Canadian Home Trends and Revive magazines. Glen appears every two weeks in New in Homes & Condos. You can contact him through his website www.glenpeloso interiors.com, follow him on Twitter at @peloso1 or on Facebook.