30 April 2007
Last Week, I was at the Metropolis Magazine Next Generation Design Competition held here in San Francisco at Herman Miller’s showroom, and I ran into my friend Derek Chen. He has spent the last several years building the most beautiful wood vases among other design objects. We talked for a bit, and it turns out that he has founded a contemporary furniture company called Council Design that will debut in a few weeks at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF)! This is really exciting because building a collection is no small feat. The collection is extremely solid as well, and I just wanted to point you in the direction of a few pieces in the collection that is purely addictive design crack.
First, I would like to point out a couple of pieces designed by the extremely adept group called One & Co. This group designed three pieces for the collection, one of which is the Aura Credenza pictured above. It’s best described as a floater because it seems as if every piece of this credenza floats in the air. The lines are simple, rounded, and… iPod-like if I do say so. But the piece that blows my mind designed by One & Co. is the Periodic Table.
The Periodic Table (pictured above) is unlike any furniture I’ve seen. No, this image is not in black and white. Those large wood chunks are painted with a proprietary technique to make the piece glow silver. I honestly think, as simple as this piece is, that this will be one of the hits of the show. When you see this piece in person it just looks unworldly. It’s like hyper-nature, and I’m excited to just be the first blogger to even really get a hold of this piece. I can’t wait to see how this does at the ICFF.
Finally, I’d like to put in a good work for my boy, Derek Chen. His piece is not unlike the vase that has been so popular for years. But, this piece is in a much larger scale and can be used for seating or storage. It’s called the Mitre. Again, this is one of those pieces that needs to be seen first hand to really be experienced. It’s essentially one big piece of aluminum tube, cut with miters, and painted or surfaced with an expert finish. It’s got the dynamism of a Sacha Lakic piece, but much more subtle and graphically striking.
June 14th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
[...] in Early 2007, Council Design came out with a fabulous new collection they called “Optimism“. At that time, they were just prototyping the periodic table which they showed on their [...]
July 2nd, 2008 at 1:31 pm
I really like the periodic table with the comment “No, this image is not in black and white”. Indeed the image is in black and white, and the table too.