Wallpaper* Handmade has a new home at Salone del Mobile. This year’s spectacle was housed at contemporary gallery Leclettico and, for the furth consecutive year, Wallpaper* had assembled an international cast of designers, craftsmen and makers to create a show that is epic in scale and ambition.
This year’s marvels include Snarkitecture’s felt lights and other Woolmark woollen wonders, Gaia and Gino’s enlightening light show, Verreum’s glass master class, Naoto Fukasawa’s umbrella for life, Richard Meier’s chess set, Michael Anastassiades’ miraculous marble chips, and Harry Winston’s hidden gems.
Whilst you will have to wait until the August issue of Wallpaper* to see the full collection, here is a selection of pieces from the exhibition.
Tokyo-based French architect Emmanuelle Moureaux has worked with Schönbuch to create these ‘Mille-Feuille’ storage units with sliding drawers of varying depths positioned up each cabinet. With some similarities to Shay Alkalay’s stack cabinet for Established and Sons from 2008, these cabinets are a vibrant stack of blocks that open to show spaces that you might not have imagined at first glance.
Lola Lely has been working with master patineur, Derek Bayley from Bronze Age art foundry in Limehouse, East London to create the Patina candlesticks. Bayley is experienced in the art of patination and this collaboration resulted in some unusual and striking colour patinas for the lighting pieces.
Design heavy-weight Naoto Fukasawa created the ‘umbrella for life’ with Ombrelli Maglia, an umbrella company which has been producing brollies since 1854 and now working with a modern designer to use their craftmanship and Fukasawa’s design to appeal to a new audience.
Lobmeyr manufactured Pétanque, a vodka set from copper, designed by Tomás Alonso in response to a brief to design a bar set for drinking vodka made from copper and glass. Copper has been used for drinking vessels for thousands of years; the sphere and the cylinder are the only two formal elements used to design the set, allowing the materials and their manipulation by the craftsman to be the centre point of the set.
This marble installation by Michael Anastassiades is representative of chips curling in heat but created in marble on a far larger scale showing the natural movement that these chips would create.
After the success of the Re-Imagined Chair by Nina Tolstrup during the London Design Festival 2012, 19 Greek Street has worked with Tolstrup to develop a complete furniture collection including sofas, daybeds, dining chairs, low chairs, and a variety of tables, all bearing the same aesthetics and honouring the same values of craft, up-cycling and sustainability as the original Re-Imagined Chair. This collection, in collaboration with Marc by Marc Jacobs, also features in the Handmade collection.
Finally we see Welsh designer Bethan Gray working with Lapicida to create a tabletop collection of marble accessories. With a circus-like theme running through the objects, the black-and-white marble juxtaposition is incredibly striking and will be a sure success.
Tej Chauhan who created the iconic Colombo telephone was asked to work with long established Fiskars, famous for their orange handled scissors to re-imagine the traditional tool box and create a series of tools for the home that change the way we think of these practical objects.
Karl-Johan Hjerling and Karin Wallenbeck have worked together previously so coming together to work with George Smith to create the Högalid sofa named after a town within Stockholm. This design collaboration is an interesting direction for George Smith who are known for more tradition, incredibly well-made sofas and by working with these two Swedish designers have created something truly unexpected.
