Hasta La Ideas

NeoCon 2011 marks an auspicious start to the partnership between furniture brand Coalesse and multidisciplinary California designer Cory Grosser: his “CG-1” won the Silver Design Award in the table category. We had a chance to catch up with him at Merchandise Mart.

Core77: Let’s start with a little background—where you’re from, where you studied, how you got into industrial design?

Sure. I’m Cory Grosser, a designer from Los Angeles. I studied architecture at the University of Buffalo and I have a degree in industrial design from Art Center in Pasadena.

How long have you been working independently, and how long have you been working with Coalesse?

We’re entering our 10th year [but] this is my first project with Coalesse… and we started [working with them] about a year and a half ago.

How did that come about? Was there a brief?

In fact there was; there was a brief for a line of tables that could fit in a lot of different types of space. That was the original brief for the project.

Coalesse’s design office in San Francisco, so I flew up there and we presented about ten ideas. [Of those initial designs,] four were a little bit more interesting for them, and we studied those four and we ended up with the [CG-1].

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