Chalklate Clock

Chalklate clock by Flavour Design. Not much explanation needed here. A bit of a gimmick? Yes. Still pretty clever? Yes. Although this does seem like the kind of thing that wouldn't get used much after a week or two. Still, I think blackboard paint is something we could use more of. You see it once in a while on kids' products (Offi's Chalkboard Table for instance), but seldom on furniture for adults. I did see a kicthen (in a recent Dwell maybe?) where the owners had installed cheap cabinets, but painted them with blackboard paint. Useful for shopping lists, recipes, phone messages, doodling, whatever. The people had nice handwriting too, so it looked great. More of that please. Oh, this clock is $46, which is pretty out of order actually. It's not hard to imagine this getting knocked off by Target for 10 bucks.

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Raw Design Studio

Raw Design Studio is another custom / short run furniture shop here in Denver. This Glenwood coffee table is a nice little number. Materials aren't specified, but looks like concrete legs and maple for the top. Chunky and solid looking. No price given.

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Dnmark Daybed

I guess having articulated landing gear legs on a daybed is a little unnecessary. But it's still cool. Designed by René Hougaard for Denmark's Dnmark.

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Ango Lighting

Ango is a new company debuting a pretty sweet line of lighting. I can't tell what the shade material is, and Ango's website ain't telling either. Plastic? Ceramic? Silk? Spun sugar? The company has an interesting story too- Brit designer Angus Hutcheson moved to Thailand to develop the product line. Having access to Asian manufacturing should keep the costs in line. Ango will be at ICFF this spring, where we should learn more about materials, pricing, and distribution.

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Tizian Bench

With a design (very) reminiscent of Blu Dot's Clip Top table (now discontinued sadly), the Tizian bench from Austria's ID 360 wouldn't have turned my head, except for its one very clever twist- the "feet" are hinged and adjustable. Granted, adjustable height on a bench is a pretty useless feature, but the ability to fold the thing flat for shipping (and storage) is not useless at all.

The way they've made it infinitely adjustable isn't so hot- to get the bench level, you need to somehow ensure that the two sides are set at exactly the same position. There should be detents underneath to give you discrete positions. And a quicker method of collapsing / adjustment than a screw would be nice too. Still, a good idea, even if the execution has some problems.

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Tortoise: Copper Tea Leaf Container

A great little tea leaf container from Tortoise. Designed 120 years ago by a Kyoto craftman and still made by the same family today. It might look a bit like 2 plumbing caps put together, but it's cool. I have to admit, it does give me "profound feeling".... The description has me fascinated too, apparently if you turn the lid, it slides down inside of the base? It'd be nice if there were a few more pictures to demonstrate this. The price ($139) means it won't be in my kitchen just yet, in the meantime I'll just daydream about that soft brown patina of copper and maybe pick up one of these great puzzles from Tortoise instead...

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Chris Slutter

Chris Slutter is a Dutch guy (funnily enough his site is in Dutch, but it's not hard to figure out even if you don't speak the language), and he's doing some interesting work. His latest is the Grip lamp, a simple little lamp transformed by the addition of handlebar grip tape. It's pretty cool, but this Drubb table from 1997 is the real stunner. The top lifts up for storage, and the base of the storage area is a sheet of rubber, which deforms to take the shape of whatever you put in there. Brilliant.

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Normal Bauxite Table

This is a nice little table from Chicago's Normal. The shape is good, and so is the bamboo top, but what really makes it noteworthy is the use of the extruded aluminum KD framing. I'm guessing this is one of the many off the shelf systems available, but big props to Normal if they've designed and tooled their own. The cast corner nodes make it easy to ship this flat and have it assembled by the user, which would be much harder to do (and probably more expensive) using a welded frame. Speaking of expensive, Normal has no price listed on the website, and you know what that usually means.

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Autoban Starfish Table

Autoban (caution: dreadful Flash website) is a Turkish design studio that does furniture and interior design. Their best product by far is this stunning Starfish table. Getting the legs out of the corners is a great way of squeezing more chairs in as needed- like a pedestal table, but without the ball and claw feet. Although it's hard to tell from the pictures, they may have created a few knee bashers as a tradeoff. No mention of pricing or availability (might even just be a prototype), but it's the usual Baltic birch plywood, so it shouldn't be terribly expensive.

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Gus Modern

Gus Modern is a bit of a strange duck. Most of their business is upholstery: sofas, chairs, that sort of thing. And it's nice enough, but nothing that really stands out from the standard Italian low-sofa-with-short-metal-legs hegemony. Their little accessory pieces, however, are fantastic. Best of the bunch for me is the Douglas Return Bench, a slab of solid douglas fir suspended between two stainless hoops. Should run you about $700.

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Ohio Design: Primco Table

Ohio Design is a SF-based shop that makes some really cool, high quality wood furniture. The Primco table is probably my favorite. The drawer arrangement is fairly clever, and the legs are quite interesting. Just a really attractive little table. Their pricing is surprisingly reasonable as well: $975 for this one.

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David Brunicardi: Sande Line

After posting about Derek Young's stuff, I was looking through some old catalogs and found a card from San Francisco's David Brunicardi. "Hey, that looks familar," I thought. It doesn't look like he's taking quite as much care to maximize the material yield, which could explain the price. ($700 for this end table from Design Public.) Made from "sustainable eco-friendly, hardwood from Equador: Sande."

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