icff recap
Week before last, my husband and I hopped on a plane to check out the National Stationery Show in New York. Since the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) is held at the same time in the same convention center, we couldn’t help but stop in and take a peek! A peek is really the wrong word… the trade show booths go on for what seems like miles, and you get really selective about which booth you stop to check out, because there are just so many booths and never enough time. Many of my favorites from my 2010 trip were there, and here is a compilation of images from favorites during my quick walk-through this year.
Juju is a small wallpaper studio located in Portland, Oregon, founded by Avery Thatcher. Juju’s line of wallpapers are beautifully crafted, with as light an impact on the natural environment as possible. Every roll is printed by hand with water-based inks, and in most cases is made to order.
“Primarily inspired by folk art of all kinds, our designs suggest the simplicity of an elegant old-fashioned signature, or the impossibly perfect collection of driftwood and sea glass on the shore.
The word juju means ascribing magical powers to inanimate objects, most commonly objects in one’s home. Everyone has a bit of this in their lives – the coffee mug that you love to reach for every morning, the wool sweater that you can’t seem to get rid of even though you long ago lost the privilege of wearing it in public, the toddler’s beloved blanket. They are all touched with a bit of our own personal magic. The word juju has it roots in West African traditional religions, and was made known to the world as Joujou by French colonials. Avery went to a few juju houses in West Africa fifteen years ago, and when the time came to name her company, she found that she had the word at her fingertips to describe the feeling that she had about the product that she had been developing over the last five years. Good juju.”
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From the Source is a Brooklyn based company, with beautiful furniture handmade in Indonesia.
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Grow House Grow is based in Brooklyn, NY, by illustrator and designer Katie Deedy. Their wallpapers are hand silk screened on clay-coated paper, and each pattern seeks to tell a story about a character, time, or place. In addition to wallpaper, Grow House Grow designs tile (left) and fabric.
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During a Young Entrepreneurs class, four Finnish product design students from Turku University of Applied Sciences founded Season One. Their products range from furniture to small everyday objects, including, as you can see, some textile design.
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Blu Dot was founded by three college friends with a shared passion for art, architecture, and design. After they left college and began to furnish their first homes, they found they “didn’t like the stuff they could afford and couldn’t afford the stuff they liked.”
“We figured we were not alone and we were naïve enough to try and do something about it.
Our goal is to bring good design to as many people as possible. That means creating products that are useful, affordable, and desirable. To make that happen, our design process is founded on collaboration. Not just among ourselves as we play show-and-tell with concepts, but a total collaboration between pencil and paper, materials and machines, even packaging and assembly. We like to think that the form is almost inevitable, a by-product of the process. Our job is simply to help it emerge as beautifully and as efficiently as possible.”
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I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon with some favorites from the National Stationery Show!
—Ellie
