Hasta La Ideas

The days of the bare sink in the bathroom are long gone, as designers are now running wild with bathroom furniture intended to hide our toiletry clutter and bring aesthetic sophistication into the loo.

Leading the way is Italy-by-way-of-Chicago company Lacava, which combines furniture made in the U.S. with washbasins and faucets from Italy. As they point out:

Europe is a land of small businesses with a long history of fierce competition….each one tries to distinguish itself from the others by developing original designs. This is true in all fields. Bathroom furnishings are one of them. Nowhere else in the world can you find such a variety of artistically designed bathroom furniture and accessories as in Europe.

This explains Lacava’s absolutely staggering amount of products encompassing sinks, cabinets, vanities, and more, in dozens upon hundreds of permutations. Anyone seeking inspiration for matters of the bathroom can spend literally hours browsing their site. Check ’em out here–you’re bound to find something you’ve never seen before.

Use our Essential Guide to NY Design Week 2009 to find the best stuff (Mobile version for your phone too!)

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Monday morning at the Metropolis pavilion marked the beginning of the full day conference on Design Entrepreneurs entitled “Innovate.” Susan Szenasy, Metropolis Editor and Chief, and Bruce Brigham, President of the American Society of Interior Designers, took on the hosting duties.

The first speaker was James Ludwig, the head of global design at Steelcase, the pioneering green furniture manufacturer and majority owner of IDEO. Speaking rapidfire, the clearly enthusiastic Ludwig explained how his planned three year stint at Steelcase grew into a ten year residency. Accompanied by beautifully designed slides that would make a typesetter proud, Ludwig began by talking about “the language of design,” but rapidly morphed into a discussion of usage and production. He drew an illuminating continuum of architectural scale versus user scale showing how large and lasting products needed to be timeless, but small user-scale products could afford to be both timely and personal. From there he discussed Steelcase’s design philosophy (smart, desirable, and viable). As a sign of the times, he listed sustainability under the “desirable” category rather than the more obvious smart or viable, but perhaps that befits a company that received the first LEED Certification for a manufacturing plant. After that framework he broke headlong into several illuminating case studies very rich in both process and slides.

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In all of the discussion about the negative effects of outsourcing, one solution rarely discussed is the hands-on one. John Reeves, founder of a small furniture manufacturing company that bears his name, dealt with the concerns of poor offshore working conditions by moving to Vietnam and starting a fabrication shop in person, building some fantastic, durable furniture along the way. The chairs, tables and benches he produces with his Vietnamese co-workers are cast in aluminum sourced from recycled engine blocks and conduit, and the results are curvaceous, solid and thoroughly modern.

One of the most seductive examples of sustainable manufacturing we’ve seen at the Javits this year, and the sort of object that might, as John points out, be “dug up from a field 500 years from now,” still perfectly serviceable.

>>Use our Essential Guide to NY Design Week 2009 to find the best stuff (Mobile version for your phone too!)
>>View all of Core77’s New York Design Week 09 coverage

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Graypants’ Scrap Lights are made from used cardboard boxes. The pendant lamps range in diameter (depending on the size of the box from whence they came) and come in three different shapes: disc, bell, and irregular.

Use our Essential Guide to NY Design Week 2009 to find the best stuff (Mobile version for your phone too!)

View all of Core77’s New York Design Week 09 coverage

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Up on the eighth floor of the newly-opened Ace Hotel on 29th Street lurked one of the nicest surprises of Design Week so far: the clever, topical and sweetly presented McMasterpieces show, curated by former ID Magazine editor Monica Khemsurov.

The pretext, noted earlier here on Core, is pretty straightforward. Each of the 13 designers or studios submitted an item or collection constructed entirely from parts sourced from the McMaster-Carr catalog of industrial materials, with some surprisingly artful and functional results. Presentation was in keeping with the down-to-earth premise, with a list of parts used (complete with catalog numbers) in a single hotel room decorated in Ace’s humble, comforting style. Todd Bracher’s Stick Lamps, pictured above, are constructed from bent aluminum and steel tubing and LEDs hacked from flashlights; more projects and party photos after the jump.

>>Use our Essential Guide to NY Design Week 2009 to find the best stuff (Mobile version for your phone too!)
>>View all of Core77’s New York Design Week 09 coverage

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