Photos courtesy of Coounterpoint, Boffi, Kartell and Jimmy Cohrssen

If you were one of the more than 15,000 retailers, interior designers, architects, and members of the public who flocked to the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) in late May, you couldn't ignore the message. Visitors descending into the somewhat claustrophobic depths of New York's Jacob K. Javits Convention Center were greeted by a monolithic white scrim that seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see the backdrop for an extravaganza of Italian furnishings. At the largest ICFF yet tallies for number of exhibitors, attendees, and square-footage were all up more than 10 percent from last year the Italians made a bold, unmistakable statement. With this year's show, almost a third of the fair's floor space was devoted to exhibits by more than 40 firms from a nation that, for many, has long represented the international gold standard in furnishing design and manufacture. Anyone who still had any lingering doubts about Italy's favored-nation status in the design world simply had to gaze down the pristine aisles lined with ultra-chic, expensively engineered model living rooms, kitchens, and bathrooms to realize that the Italians were making a proclamation: We invented this universe and we're still its masters.

The invasion didn't stop there. During the fair, in a program hosted by the Italian trade commission and an umbrella group, Federlegno-Arredo, that represents furniture manufacturers, ICFF attendees could tour a dozen showrooms normally off-limits to the public that featured Italian furnishings. Visitors were also treated to a slew of ICFF-related mixers and parties, including an uninhibited nighttime bash thrown by lighting designer Ingo Maurer in a Harlem theater. The same week, at Ace Gallery in downtown Manhattan, a display of visionary domestic environments by an A-list of Italian designers and architects provided a philosophical backdrop to the fair's merchandising orientation. By the fair's end, Italian manufacturers had walked away with a third of the ICFF's 15 Editors Awards.

Since this marked only the second time that the Italians had shown at ICFF as a group, it's fair to say that their high-profile presence was long overdue. Italy is the foremost furniture exporter worldwide, accounting for an impressive 20 percent of the industry's total global turnover. The value of Italian exports to the U.S. in this category has increased within the last year by nearly 20 percent from $980 million in 1998 to over $1.2 billion in 1999, according to U.S. Department of Commerce estimates. Why does Italian furnishing design today have such a commanding presence? It's a combination of factors visual sophistication, fanatical attention to detail, and strong craft tradition. There's also an intangible: Italy's unique design culture. Historian Mel Byars, the host of DesignZine, a Web site devoted to international furniture trends, credits "a kind of synergy that has gone on since the end of World War II" with helping to establish the nation's preeminent design status.

Byars, who visits the Milan furniture fair each year and has extensively interviewed designers and manufacturers, sees this synergy as three-fold. First, he notes, Italy has a strong tradition of design education; second, the furnishings industry there enjoys the enthusiastic support of the government and finally, it has access to cooperative media. "The press there is much more nepotistic than it is in the U.S," Byars says. "And that goes for the magazines, the newspapers, even the book-publishing houses." History has also played a large role. At the end of World War II, Italy was a nation in ruins. Widespread devastation created an instant market for new furnishings, for the simple reason that consumers had lost many of their possessions to Allied bombs. At the same time, Italian architects found themselves out of work in the crippled post-war European economy; furniture design suddenly provided a profitable outlet, as well as helped to redefine a national identity that had taken a severe beating. "When it comes to design they're fiercely nationalistic," Byars says of the country's cultural elite. Yet with Italian national pride comes a sense of vulnerability. "They're very afraid someone's going to take away their position. They do use foreign designers, but it's always just to retain their position. I think if they had a choice, they wouldn't use anybody from outside the country." It's an insular, rarified culture that in spite of its global reach exists nowhere else in the world. During the postwar years, influential publications like Domus, published by the revered architect and designer Gio Ponti, helped establish an international presence for Italian furnishings at a time when design publishing was still in its infancy. Ponti's multiple role reflected the European model of the *diteur, a kind of design curator, knowledgeable in matters of taste, who was also a manufacturer.

"Other countries just don't have that same level of sophistication," Byars says. Lighting manufacturer Artemide's aggressive marketing of Richard Sapper's masterly Tizio lamp made it a classic and its creator a design icon. Kartell has done much the same thing for Israel-native Ron Arad, as has Cappellini for Brits Ross Lovegrove and Jaspar Morrison. Although some Italian designers do quite well at home by aggressively marketing their own small lines, Byars says, "most manufacturers don't pay designers very much money." Foreigners who've designed for Italian companies tell Byars that what they don't earn in fees they make up for with the worldwide recognition that goes along with prestigious Italian manufacture.

The Italians have long understood the importance of the vast American market; for years the problem was learning how to tap into it. Only recently have Italian companies taken to retailing here under their own brands. In the past year or so, Boffi, Cappellini, and Kartell opened New York stores and have announced plans to expand nationwide. (All three have operated Manhattan showrooms for more than two decades.) Kartell is represented by some 150 independent retailers in the U.S. and is currently planning its own stores in a dozen cities.

While firms like Kartell are still scouting future locations, lighting manufacturer Artemide, which for years had shops in Manhattan, Chicago, and Los Angeles, now has retail outlets in Atlanta, Dallas, Minneapolis, and San Francisco (soon to be followed by Miami, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C.). Guido Buratto, CEO/VP-marketing for Artemide in the U.S., credits the firm's market penetration to persistence. "This is a very intelligent, educated market," Buratto says. "You really have to take the time to establish your credibility." Yet in spite of Artemide's popularity, and the relative affordability of its product line, there are limits to how fast, and how far, it can afford to expand.

"We're still addressing ourselves to a fairly small niche," Buratto adds. "The U.S. customer at large, the mass market, remains very detached from the word 'design.' But in the metropolitan areas that we've been pursuing, recognition and public awareness are improving." Why now? "Products like ours rely heavily on a robust economic climate," Buratto adds. "It's very much a determining factor in whether somebody pays $100 or $300 for a lamp." While Italian manufacturers have struggled for a long time with brand recognition many consumers are still baffled by a string of unpronounceable company names they were further stymied in the kitchen and bathroom categories by differences in building cultures. American developers usually install kitchens and bathrooms. This is not the case in Europe, where homebuyers typically shop for their own fixtures once they take ownership. But the rash of U.S. loft conversions which began in New York's SoHo district in the early 1980s, where most of the Italian furniture retailers are currently quartered has brought with it an influx of new homeowners suddenly faced with new buying decisions.

Ivan Luini, Kartell's U.S. representative, estimates that roughly 50 percent of his walk-in business in New York comes from his Soho neighbors. The nationwide downtown-loft boom and the popularity of unfinished properties that allow occupants to choose kitchen and bathroom fixtures have opened the door for highly designed, better-built imports. In a market driven by high-end real estate, developers are getting into the act, too, retrofitting entire building conversions with 20 and 30 sets of fixtures at a time.

Steven Salt, an Englishman who is Boffi's on-site architect in Manhattan, finds that, as first-time buyers, Americans "are pretty nervous about taking any kinds of risks. After all, these fixtures will last for 15 or 20 years, and they're a big investment. So they tend to go with the things they can see in front of them. They buy our display combinations and put a lot of trust in our advice. Most of them don't really have their own ideas." Although the market is "opening up," according to Salt, with the existing showroom system yielding ground to stores, "it's still architect- and interior designer-driven." Once seen by the general public as prohibitively expensive, Italian designs have recently become more affordable as U.S. products have grown more upscale. Add to that an unbridled affluence of the kind that finds customers, says Boffi's Salt, "ripping out brand-new $50,000 kitchens so they can put ours in," and you have the tear-down mentality coupled with the irresistible lure of the trophy kitchen. What better way in today's crazed home-design climate to declare that you have arrived?

"I think they've gotten smarter, too," Mel Byars says of the Italian manufacturers he tracks. "Exportation used to be a terrible problem, because some of the things they made became over-priced with all the freight charges." Container shipping as well as new methods of prefabrication and assembling has helped to bring down the price of high-end lines. The bulk of Italian exports, however, is still lower-end furnishings, the kind you find at retailers like the ABC stores and Jennifer Convertibles. According to Kartell's Luini, Friuli Venezia Giulia, one of the country's foremost furniture-producing regions in Italy's northeastern-most corner near the Austrian border produces "a lot of very nondescript wooden furniture that is imported by American importers and manufacturers and then maybe finished and labeled here. It is then sold as American, but in reality the core of it is Italian."

Italy's strengths in the budget market lie in the manufacturing process. Its extremely specialized factories, with access to plentiful amounts of raw materials in nearby European forests, are geared to producing wooden furniture components by the millions. Sales figures for generic furniture of this kind have jumped, but the numbers for high-end components are even more impressive: Kartell estimates that its U.S. sales doubled last year and will double again in 2001. "It's not just coincidence, or fashion, or something that's happening because of the economy," maintains Luini, who has more than a decade of retail experience in the U.S. market. "We've heavily invested in the North American market."

It's no accident that the biggest ICFF ever coincided with the recent Italian explosion in the U.S. Both events have been a dozen years in the making. Yet in spite of what is seen as a revolution in design-consciousness in America, the bulk of residential furnishing here remains mired in the kind of countrified traditional styling that graces the advertising pages of shelter magazines. Still, it's hard to imagine that the Italian influence will wane anytime soon. In fact, now that the heartland is being introduced to riskier European design (witness the Droog retrospective that's touring retail outlets in 14 U.S. cities), Italian manufacturers seem poised to change the look and feel of the American furnishings market.