Hasta La Ideas

One of last year’s entries to make the 2013 roundup was this piano that was converted into a workbench. Any time you’ve got 300-plus pounds of antique quarter-sawn oak sitting around, it is of course better to recycle it into something useful, even if the music-generating parts no longer work; and the cast-iron parts can be hauled down to a salvage yard for some extra dough.

It looks like a lot of folks are onto this. Vicky Neuman converted an old upright into a bookcase/desk, and exhaustively documented the process, with many photos, here.

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For 2013, one of our most-trafficked furniture stories was a check-in with Hellman-Chang, the Brooklyn-based duo that’s Bringing the Glamour Back into Furniture Design. Dan Hellman and Eric Chang are Core77 faves, as we’ve watched them achieve, in less than ten years, what much larger furniture groups have literally taken generations to reach. And they’ve also managed to accomplish some industry firsts, as we heard in a follow-up video, “ From Small Shop to Big Time, from Small Screen to Big Screen.“

Across the country in Washington State, we heard from a creator of very different types of furniture. Homebuilder Ron Paulk not only told us all about his amazing mobile woodshop, but gave us the story of how he’d created an accidental product design hit with his Paulk Workbench (the plans for which can be ordered here).

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10jours10designers (“10 Days, 10 Designers”) is the name of a recent design competition held by French furniture design house Minimalist Editions. The challenge was pretty simple: Each designer gets an oak slab, 400mm × 250mm × 28mm—that’s roughly 16” × 10” × 1” to us Yanks—access to a CNC workshop and an ebeniste, and has ten days to come up with an oddments tray, or whatever you call that little key-holding dish by the front door of your house.

While the end products are pretty refined, they remind me a lot of those design school projects, where groups of students are given identical materials and yet yield a surprising variety of designs. Check out Lionel Dinis Salazar’s artfully-kerfed “PAVO”:

Pierre Dubourg’s pretty bi-level number leaves no doubt as to what the form was inspired by—it’s called “Super Tanker”:

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When it comes down to it, good design is often more a matter of execution as opposed to the idea itself: Speculate as we might, a product must actually be in production in order for the world to appreciate its merits. And while few among us have the luxury of not having to compromise (Apple, for one, if Leander Kahney’s biography of Jony Ive is any indication), these are precisely the instances in which the vision must remain coherent if the concept is to be realized in full.

Count Moroso among the vanguard of design-led brands. The Udine-based furniture company celebrated its 60th Anniversary last year, but as Creative Director Patrizia Moroso notes, they took the opportunity not to look back but to look forward. She personally toured their factories, “looking for the prototypes an the pieces that never went into production,” for an exhibition in Milan last year. “All the things that go before the ‘birth’ [of a project]”—samples, prototypes, early experiments (some of which were aborted)—”it was very emotional, because I remember when the designer came and changed this detail, maybe he [or she] changed a lot…”

But she doesn’t dwell on that which could have been: When we caught up with her at Moroso’s New York showroom in October, Patrizia was in a buoyant mood (thanks, perhaps, to a few espressos following a flight from Italy), as was Marc Thorpe, whose recent collection for the brand is currently on view at the space at 146 Greene St. Indeed, she was in town on the occasion of the opening of “Blurred Limits,” featuring the young New York-based designer’s “Blur” collection, along with the one-off “Ratio” table and a first look at “Morning Glory,” which will officially debut at the Salone in 2014. We had the chance to speak to the two of them about their ongoing collaboration, which dates back to the “Mark” table from 2010.

“I actually met Patrizia and in Italy in 2009, in the Fiera, but it was very brief,” relates Marc, when asked about how they first met. “And then a year or so later, we were here [in New York] at an event, so I asked very humbly if I could show some of my work to her, and she said, ‘Oh yeah, come have lunch…'” He recalls showing her a handful of renderings and prototypes, but one piece stood out: “That was the ‘Mark’ table, which was produced for a bar/lounge called the Mark.” (“Easy to remember,” Moroso notes.) “So she took everything to Italy and that’s where it sort of began.

“A year or two later, we had the first conversations about the ‘Blur’ collection.”

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Perhaps you’ve seen those pre-fab sawhorse brackets where all you have to do is screw some 2×4s into them. Now Sydney-based industrial designer Henry Wilson is releasing a similar concept, which he calls the A-joint.

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