Hasta La Ideas

Grace was the name of a classy watering hole in TriBeCa whose oaken bar, it was said, was the longest in all of Manhattan. I never broke out the tape measure but the thing seemed like it was 40 feet. Sadly, I never got to live out my dream of winning a barfight by sliding an antagonist down the entire length of the bar, breaking glasses the whole way; the bar shut down last year.

Question is, where do old bars go to die? (I don’t mean the establishment, I mean the actual wooden counters that craftsmen slave over.) Well, when a drinks joint shuts down, a new owner might buy it and re-open it under a new name, leaving the bar in place. But let’s say the landlord is sick of people trying to win bar fights by sliding fellow patrons just halfway down the bar before succumbing to their wounds, and he decrees no more bars. What then? Grace’s oak masterpiece isn’t the kind of thing you throw up on Craigslist.

As it turns out, there are a host of companies in the business of rescuing, restoring, renting and reselling antique bars. Closest to us here in New York is a company called A Beautiful Bar, which sells items like a primitive cowboy-era bar made from nailed-together boards and a gorgeous 39-foot marble bar from the 1890s out of a warehouse in upstate New York.

A Philadelphia company called Architectural Antiques Exchange—one of the few to have photography that’s worth a damn—sells both back and front bars in oak and mahogany, sourced from the U.S., the U.K., France and Belgium:

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If you design a piece of furniture for mass production, you picture it sitting in a showroom, or coming off of the production line, or perhaps populating some swank living room in an online catalog. What you don’t picture is your piece of furniture completely engulfed in flames while the house around it burns down. But house fires happen, of course, and the modern materials in our sofas, chairs and beds have changed the way those fires burn now compared to fifty years ago.

The traditional way to fight a fire is to first start punching holes in a building, creating vents that allow heat and smoke to escape. But as this article in the Times reports, the New York City Fire Department is finding that this practice may need to change due to the high plastic contents of our homes these days.

Furniture was once made of wood and cushions stuffed with cotton. Those things burn at a certain rate. As cotton goes away and things like poly-fill take their place, the burn rate increases aggressively. The result is that a modern-day fire burns so hot that it sucks up all the oxygen in a room before it finishes burning everything in sight, since a fire needs oxygen. In this situation, when firefighters begin to ventilate a building, the sudden rush of oxygen sends the smoldering fire into overdrive.

The NYFD is seeking solutions to this particularly modern problem—by buying up liquidated hotel furniture and filling abandoned row houses with them. Next week they will set the houses on fire (they’re located on Governor’s Island, well away from any population centers) and experiment with different techniques for containing the blaze.

It’s unlikely that modern-day furniture designers and manufacturers will be swayed in their materials selections by these findings, but we think any designer will be interested to hear about unintended consequences of decisions we make during the design process.

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Just when we think we’ve seen every permutation of common production methods and materials under the sun, someone comes up with a new one. Israeli industrial designer Hilla Shamia’s “wood casting” technique involves pouring molten aluminum directly onto dead tree trunks. The surface of the word gets burned, as you’d imagine, and the molten metal flows into the cracks, “completing” the voids in the wood with a shinier surrogate.

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Bruce Burdick expandable Table, Konstantin Grcic’s Magis Stool_One

With a storied century-long history, Herman Miller has pushed the boundaries of American furniture manufacturing since its founding in 1905 in Michigan. As one of the first companies to manufacture modern furniture, the concept of human-centered design has always been at the heart of the company. As Design Director George Nelson envisioned in 1952, Herman Miller’s permanent collection should be, “designed to meet fully the requirements of modern living.”

Today, George Nelson’s vision for modern living has become a reality with the launch of the Herman Miller Collection. Combing through the century-deep catalog of furnishings for home, office and exterior spaces, the Herman Miller Collection reintroduces familiar classics and forgotten masters to a new generation of design lovers and collectors.

I can’t help but look at what’s on a bookshelf. What three artists do Eames collectors love? Hockney, Picasso and Miró.

To mark the occassion, the company has staged a 2-month retail Pop-Up in New York City’s SoHo. The shop is the first pop-up shop in the company’s history. I loved the newly upholstered Eames Molded Plywood chairs found in a vignette near a low-slung Ward Bennett ash-framed and leather Scissor Chair. Out of the archives, George Nelson’s modular storage cabinets large and small are on display; Ward Bennett’s H-Frame Credenzas have chrome finishes that timelessly belie their age. Quietly in the mix were three new additions to the Herman Miller family: Leon Ransmeier’s AGL table, Industrial Facility’s wire-framed basket Sofa and Konstantin Grcic’s Medici chair for Mattiazzi (distributed by Herman Miller.)

Industrial Facility’s Sofa prototype

Industrial Facility’s Sofa Group is a thoughtful and contemporary addition to the category. With our transient modern lifestyle, the Sofa is lightweight, and versatile—a wire-frame basket is stuffed with a series of free-floating, individual cushions—allowing for ease of transport and maintenance. Additionally, the base of the frame employs a suspension technology that was previously used in Herman Miller’s Nala Harmonic Tilt medical chair.

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Using metal pegs, keyhole-slotted metal plates and a well-thought-out design, David Koch’s “3style Table” lives up to its name with a little elbow grease and no tools.

Here’s how it works:

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