I won't be designing furniture soon, but it's always inspiring to read about talented designers in any field achieving a breakthrough. In the recent
T Magazine design and living issue, there's a wonderful feature on bright under-40 stars from this year's Milan Design Week. My favorites are BCXSY and Maarten De Ceulaer.
Sayaka Yamamoto and Boaz Cohen, BCXSYThe logo for BCXSY — a name derived from the initials of its partners, Boaz Cohen, 31, and Sayaka Yamamoto, 25 — features silhouettes of the two designers surrounded by a wreath of light bulbs. Bright ideas are BCXSY’s forte. Its Swing Lamp, a swing illuminated from within, appeared on the cover of the spring 2008 issue of T Design even before it had found a manufacturer. (It’s now produced by Slide.) This year, the Israeli-born Cohen and the Japanese-born Yamamoto — who met as students at the Design Academy Eindhoven and set up shop in that Dutch city — showed their Change! collection at the design emporium Spazio Rossana Orlandi. These pieces, made of carved and coated polyurethane foam blocks, ‘‘play with lightness and heaviness,’’ Cohen explained, and gave the designers the chance ‘‘to sketch in 3-D.’’ But, he added, ‘‘the sketches are the product.’’
Philippe MalouinWhen Philippe Malouin moved to Europe to study design at the École Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle and later at the Design Academy Eindhoven, the Canadian transplant was struck by his sudden reduction in living space. ‘‘I am interested in the idea of living with less,’’ said Malouin, 26, who was inspired to cram as much function into a single design as possible. For a student project for Hermès, he devised a bag that could also be used as a stool; his Hanger Chair, which can be used to hang a jacket or can be hung itself for storage, is going into production this year. For the Milan fair, he took standard shelving brackets, inexpensive and available at most hardware stores, and designed a series of clip-on accessories, including a lamp, a bench and a vase. Such pieces expand the use of the system and eliminate tabletop clutter, while making Malouin a sort of Dieter Rams for the D.I.Y. set in the process. ‘‘I just wanted to make well-designed pieces that people can afford,’’ he said.
Alessandra BaldereschiBefore studying industrial design at the Domus Academy in Milan, 34-year-old Alessandra Baldereschi studied art, and never recovered. ‘‘I think about projects as image,’’ she explained. She loves embellishing a straightforward form, as she did with the Soufflé chair for CoinCasa — a clear plastic cover stuffed with colorful cushions — or with her collection of ‘‘four seasons’’ wood cabinets, shown here, for Skitsch. Baldereschi’s minimalist, white-lacquered design features ornate knobs — far more than are functionally necessary — on the doors. She called her first cabinet Winter (it had mother-of-pearl knobs), and Skitsch liked the piece so much that it asked for Spring, Summer and Fall. The designer, who was recruited by Skitsch’s co-art director Cristina Morozzi, searched the Internet for knobs in ‘‘elegant and precious’’ materials, including hand-painted ceramics and glass. Baldereschi loves the ‘‘hybridization’’ of plain and fancy. ‘‘I’m romantic,’’ she said.
Nacho Carbonell The 28-year-old Spanish designer Nacho Carbonell is, at heart, a storyteller — and one with a vivid imagination at that. For ‘‘Craft Punk,’’ the Design Academy Eindhoven graduate brought a heap of discarded Fendi leather scraps to life in a series of beastly creatures (some of which could be ridden or sat upon). His womblike papier-mâché Evolution chairs and benches — handmade from the newspapers that accumulated in his house — are his retreat from information overload. Such ideas are not so much a statement about the environment (though he insists that ‘‘waste’’ is as good a material to work with as anything you could pick up in a store) as they are an attempt to imbue inanimate design objects with an emotional core. For the coming Design Miami/Basel fair, he is making a chair out of leaves and sawdust. ‘‘It’s a chair with a goal,’’ he said: ‘‘It wants to become a tree.’’
Maarten De Ceulaer‘‘I can’t just design something for no reason,’’ Maarten De Ceulaer said. Instead, the Brussels-based 25-year-old graduate of the Design Academy Eindhoven looks for ‘‘a simple, strong, basic concept.’’ His Leather Collection, designed for Nina Yashar’s Nilufar Gallery, explores the dynamism of the modern nomadic lifestyle. Suitcase-like storage components — each one tailored to the kind of clothing it’s meant to contain and evocative of luxurious travel accessories by companies like Hermès and Louis Vuitton — can be reconfigured and transported from room to room. ‘‘I have a big wardrobe in my house,’’ De Ceulaer explained, ‘‘and it’s too big to move. I wanted something more flexible.’’ De Ceulaer, who often works at home, is currently looking for someone to make his Nomad Light Molecule, an electrified ‘‘mother’’ light with detachable, battery-powered ‘‘children.’’ He added, ‘‘I try to find the right people to make the designs. That’s how I learn the most as a designer.’’
Simon Macro and Marcus Beck, Freshwest DesignSince founding Freshwest in 2005, 34-year-olds Simon Macro and Marcus Beck — fine-art graduates and childhood friends who work two minutes from the beach in southwest Wales — have designed everything from a water-blue acrylic ‘‘pool’’ table to a medicine cabinet. No strangers to limited editions (Beck made bespoke furniture, and Macro worked for the mad-genius designer Thomas Heatherwick), the two were surprised last fall when the C.E.O. of the Dutch company Moooi spotted their bamboo-scaffolding-inspired Brave New World Lamp, shown here, and wanted to produce it. In Milan, Moooi also exhibited Freshwest’s Lazy Chair, which collapses when you get near it, and then slowly rights itself. ‘‘It’s almost a psychology experiment,’’ Macro said. ‘‘Everyone reacts differently to it.’’ Gone are the days when the duo checked the surf reports before they checked their e-mail, but success has its upside. ‘‘It’s exciting,’’ Beck said, ‘‘to make some of these crazy ideas we have.’’
