I was eating an everlasting gobbstopper today. Maybe you remember this candy? It is a candy that has a beautiful, shiny candy coating and within the coating are the multicolored strata of candy goodness. I’m not sure why, exactly, but the Waldo/45 table by James Burleigh when I saw it immediately transported me to 9am this morning when the sweet slickness of the gobbstopper rolled back and forth over my tongue. This piece of furniture just begs me to break a piece off and eat it for dessert.

Tubes by Tsunami Glassworks was one of the highlights of ICFF for me. I’m a sucker for contemporary glass design, and this work surpassed all others in my opinion. Each piece in Tubes is hand blown and finished, and each piece has its own character and hue. When all pieces are assembled to make a forest of glass vases a perfect poem is created, but one that can change and evolved to suit the owner’s mood. Also, if you’re so inclined, these green glass vases will make the perfect vessel for the longest of long stemmed flowers. Crazy idea, I know, but why not?

Are you a hardcore graf artist who has made it big in New York and now want to enjoy the finer things in life? Now, Areaware has created a series of plateware for you! The finest of Delft china combine with the heavy old skool stylez of the streets of New York to make the New York plate set. It’z HARD, yo! The plates remind me f a post I did back in the day on beautifully packaged NYC Garbage, but the plates are hella more funkshional.

Ontwerpers, the Dutch Design Duo of Christiaan N.J. Oppewal and Silvijn van der Velden, have created a fantastic chair and shelving combination. This chair is for the serious writer out there. Here’s how I think the chair is most optimally used with the professional author or journalist in mind: First, choose all of the books that you would want to use as either a writing reference book or a book for inspiration. Then, arrange the books on the shelves with the most important books easily within your grasp. Next, set up your laptop on the Cabinet Chair’s desk. You’re almost ready. Finally, take your coffee machine and squeeze it right behind the back of the chair, and take your favorite bottle of liquor and place it directly behind your computer. Now, you got it: the ultimate writing station has been devised complete with favorite vices.

I am in love with this product! These are the unbelievably simple measuring devices by Royal VKB called Balancing Bowls. Royal VKB, by the way, is a young Dutch kitchenware firm with a vast stable of talented designers. Their work really creates new rules for how you can eat serve and make food. It’s quite exciting. The Balancing Bowls are a colorful alternative to using measuring cups and spoons. So what do these bowls do that’s so cool? They have two cups. One cup is weighted so that the cup sits firmly on the table while the other cup is raised in the air. Pour your ingredients into the raised cup, and when the cup lowers to touch the table you know you have the right amount of ingredients. What a beautifully simple concept. The bolds seventies blues, greens, and browns are also quite attractive colors for the bowls. I should say that before you run out and buy the Balancing Bowls it’s quite common in Europe to measure things for cooking by their mass rather than their volume like we do here in America, so these Bowls don’t do us much good.

I included G-STAR RAW to the Crack List simply because I’ve never seen denim treated so expertly. Where I live in San Francisco there are only two ways recognized as fashionable for denim: there is the teenage hip-hop style of wearing jeans around your ankles (how can you run from police with your jeans like that?!), and there is the pencil thin ’80s style of wearing denim where each pair of jeans sold comes complete with a fixed gear bicycle. Now, there is a third fashionable way to wear denim thanks to G-STAR RAW. This company allows me to wear the most comfortable of fabrics as if you were an extra in a 1940’s noir film. The styles for this recent collection are no less than phenomenal. Complex jackets are mixed with fedoras and elbow length gloves all styles that would normally smack of Cory Feldman circa 1989, and fortunately for G-STAR RAW that’s not at all what it looks like. In fact this collection feels a bit more like The Raf Simmons collection I pondered a while back except this one’s in Denim.

I’ve been trying to spend more and more time looking at things that are in the unattainable category simply because its so damn fun to imagine me and all my friends and family enjoying whatever the incredibly expensive item is, and basking in the glory of its opulence. Quite frankly, nothing has piqued my imagination as much as this boat. This boat makes me want to use curse words, it’s so spectacular.

This is the Wally Power 118 super yacht. The boat at first looks as if it’s a high speed cigarette boat used for racing, and in a sense it is a racing boat at it’s core. But don’t let the shape fool you. Inside the boat are three modern staterooms. Above the state rooms sits a glass encased living space that includes gourmet dining facilities and one of the sexiest living spaces on a boat ever. If that’s not enough, the bow of the ship also contains an al fresco dining area sunken into the bow of the ship that makes me dream of the parties I could throw on the French Riviera.

So, on to the first post!: The Claim(p) by Maya Goldblum. Maya is a recent graduate of the Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design. The device is essentially a cup holder with an adjustable clamp integrated into the cup holder. The concept for the Claim(p) is to combine “claim” and “clamp” mashing the two concepts up into one idea: Claim(p). Thus, the name. What Ms. Goldblum is alluding to is that this clamp with a cup holder can claim public space for whatever function you needed by simply wrapping the device around a light pole and claiming that public space as your impromptu coffee spot for the time being. For instance, one could set up a few of these claim(p)s at a sidewalk light pole and have an instant bar for socializing.

In the future, I cold see Ms. Goldblum expanding her idea further to include a small table for writing or eating that could claim a piece of public space for the people that like to further their public street experience. I’m drawn to the idea of the claim(p) because it seems so efficient in its ability to make something out of nearly nothing. Imagine if dozens of these devices are set up on sign posts outside of a popular cafe. It would extend the social space and business area of the cafe by quite a lot while being an advertisement for the business. However, I don’t see this concept working too well in suburbia where you might just get cars passing you where the driver is thinking, ” Why is that guy standing next to a pole drinking coffee?”