Milan Furniture Fair

Those outsized imaginations

By Janet Eastman

April 26, 2007 in print edition F-1

CAN size matter too much? A lot of the furniture, lighting and accessories unveiled by the world’s best-known designers here proved this equation: Accessible technology plus bloated ego equals big mistake.

Too often, good design took a back seat to folly at the home furnishings extravaganza. There were ceramic-looking bells blown up to the size of the Liberty Bell, a tiled and mirrored oval serving platter longer than a VW Bug and a tea kettle that could serve 200.

But there were also sophisticated pieces, magnified for artistic reasons and to justify fine-art-level price tags seen at city showrooms and exhibition booths at the annual Salone Internazionale del Mobile and biennial Euroluce lighting show, which ended Monday at the New Milan Fairgrounds.

“We raise these humble objects to heroic stature by enlarging them, by hand-making what is normally an industrial process, by making them in a precious material and by further distancing them by placing them on a pedestal,” said New York gallery owner Franklin Getchell of Moss, which showcased a collection of limited-edition, 5-foot and taller bronze kitchenware pieces – a lantern, cookie tin, vase, mug tree, coal scuttle, mirror and pots – created by Studio Job. The prices for these range from $24,000 to $39,000.

“They are rendered as art, and yet by retaining all their original functionality, they have a duality which makes them even more complex. It’s Brancusi and Koons.”

“It’s Alice in Wonderland,” joked French designer Philippe Starck about his graceful plastic vases made to look like rough antique glass, placed in a prime spot in the Kartell booth at the furniture fair. “It’s fantasy.” He hopes to make his 5-foot-5-inch vases even taller if new rotational molding processes allow.

British designer Tom Dixon introduced his nightclub-sized, polished copper-plated lamp in a space he rented outside the fairgrounds to showcase his “trend stuff.” Super-sizing, he said, is a way to cash in all around: Fill big houses, decorate hotels that want to look homey and offices that want to look informal and satisfy the increasing lust of collectors for limited-edition furnishings.

A simpler explanation – monster-scale makes life easier – came from Dutch designer Marcel Wanders, who at 6 feet 4 inches tall was dwarfed by his 20-foot-high “table lamp” with the girth of a carousel. All a large bedroom needs, he said, is his swelled lamp and in its shadow, a human-size bed. “Then you’re done,” he said, moving his head to one side for a final, do-you-get-it? look and a smile.

He also admitted that over-the-top is good for his reputation. “I do it because I can afford to,” said the prankster whose Moooi group last year introduced here and trotted out again this year, life-size fiberglass animals: a witty black pig with a serving tray on its back (“coffee table”) and a scary black horse with a lamp shade and bulb on its head (“illumination”).

In between having fun with his own brand, Wanders created appealing faceted plastic stools for Kartell in playful colors (root beer) and a mushroom-shaped table for Moroso dubbed Shitake that he says is a “bench for elves.”

Giorgio Armani was the antidote to oversized. His new Armani/Casa collection whispered elegance with an Escher-like pattern for rugs and upholstery and refined resin-coated stucco tables. His style, he explained in Italian while standing on his new silk-blend rug inside the Milan theater where he also hosts his fashion shows, is “sobria sofisticatezza,” (understated sophistication). It’s “semplice ma di lusso” (“simple, but very luxurious”). Not, as we would say in English, showy. Sexy? “No,” he said, shaking his head.

EVERY April, top designers unveil what they consider their best work in Milan. They’re backed by manufacturers who gamble up to $1 million to bring what they hope is an industry-changing prototype, a bestseller, to world view.

New ideas are scattered among the classics and the tried and true in more than 2,150 exhibitors’ booths at the show. Opulent metal finishes emerged as color and accent trends. Armani chose silver threads for his fabrics, spatula-finish metal in the Winchester screen and patchwork satin-finish steel for the Adelchi desk.

Dixon returned to his heavy-metal roots of the 1980s with a cast-iron, grill-top coffee table, copper-plated dining table and lighting with high-tech industrial finishes. His Punch lampshade is stainless steel and his Beat pendant light is brass. He says fashion and furniture are following the international commodity market’s cravings for gold, silver and steel.

A tousled, unmade look was also a recurring theme at the show. Upholstery looked more like light blankets tossed on top of a sofa or chair, fabric ends flapping a few inches beyond the frame, as in Patricia Urquiola’s seating for Moroso and Inga Sempe’s soft cocoon-like Moel armchair for Ligne Roset, its cover held in place by a visible steel zipper.

Over six days, more than 260,000 buyers, design pros and looky-loos paraded past thousands of objects, plus hundreds of often-impressive offerings by new designers who were corralled into a satellite show in one of the halls of the fair. Students from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena created six economic but inventive plastic chairs with 3-D scanning, mold-making and laser-cutting processes.

Many of the innovative designs shown at the fair are likely to be imitated. “You can never avoid copycats,” said Mary Ta, who was there to buy spare modernist Minotti and Cappellini furniture and sparkly Lolli e Memmoli chandeliers for her Los Angeles showrooms. “The best companies aren’t afraid of that. If you do something impeccable, a copy can’t be the same. So much money has been invested to make these perfect. They’re not beautiful by accident. Someone else would have to spend years to match it.”

Some of the more whimsical creators can rest assured that not every idea is worth ripping off. After all, how many homes, hotels and offices are in need of furnishings inflated to the size of Macy’s parade balloons?

“Southern Californians who appreciate design are always open to something fun as long as it’s backed by quality,” said John Ryan, Kartell’s senior sales manager who was whisking buyers through the crowded fair booth. “People still take furniture seriously.”

Here is some of what will be in local showrooms this fall:

* Armani/Casa: Armani designed a collection for the entire house, from kitchen, bath, bedroom, living room, dining room and walk-in wardrobe. The cylinder-shaped Antoinette vanity opens to reveal a dressing table, mirror and champagne-colored seat. www.armanicasa.com

* B&B Italia: Urquiola’s puffy white Tufty-Bed looks like jumbo marshmallows, and Studio Kairos’ Dado storage units are so minimal that without the orange and black paint, they’d disappear. www.bebitalia.it

* Bisazza: Jaime Hayon created a white mosaic vase and marble table with mosaic legs to add to the company’s home collection of lamps, folding screens, consoles, chairs and mirrors. www.bisazzausa.com

* Cassina: Starck’s extra-large square black or white leather sofa called “the Big Island” is not for the prudish. “It’s all about sex,” he says, with padded sections that adjust in height and a visible leather strap tethered to a cushion. Rodolfo Dordoni’s Boboli table tops in glass, marble or wood have twisted aluminum pedestal. www.cassinausa.com

* Kartell: Starck calls this chair Mr. Impossible because it represents a new process in plastics: two oval shells melded seamlessly together; one is transparent and one is colored yellow, black, silver, violet, orange or red. www.kartell.it

* La Murrina: Karim Rashid’s 10-foot-long peanut-shaped Sike chandelier is too big for the Los Angeles showroom, says U.S. representative Renato Matarangolo, but he’ll find room for the orange Glamour from the company’s in-house design team. Matarangolo says the chandeliers La Murrina premiered this year at the lighting show are geared toward hotels and other large spaces, but he still predicts Rashid’s design will attract people who live in “Los Angeles mansions.” www.lamurrina.us

* Ligne Roset: Sempe’s Moel armchair has a chair cover held in place by a visible steel zipper. Marie Christine Dorner’s Crash table has a sheet of broken glass sandwiched between two clear or guava green-tinted pieces of glass. A smaller table on top can be removed. www.ligne-roset-usa.com

* Moroso: A giant mushroom becomes the Shitake table in Wanders’ big-vision world. Also debuting were Ross Lovegrove’s prototype of his yellow Supernatural chair – think plastic Swiss cheese – and Christophe de la Fontaine and Stephan Diez’s punched aluminum sheets bent into tables and chairs. www.moroso.it