Even after last week’s ICFF live-blogging extravaganza, we ended up with dozens of unpublished snapshots of noteworthy new products and projects from the 22nd annual furniture fair. Here, then, in no particular order, is a final roundup of neat stuff from the 2010 ICFF.

Above: Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance’s Corvo chair, for Bernhardt Design, which we wrote about in the April issue of the magazine.

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Last year, the Japan External Trade Organization arrived at ICFF with a huge exhibition that took up an entire annex pavilion to the main Javits floor. Many curious fairgoers got their first look at products like Naoto Fukasawa’s famed Infobar cell phone, a candy-bar doppelgänger that has been (criminally) limited to Japan. JETRO was smaller this year, but there were still visual treats to be had. We’ve selected a few of the sweetest morsels.
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Hecmec

Bright and cheery, Hecmec’s fold-up plastic chairs for kids have a soft, cardboard-tube structure that protects little fingers. They come in glossy cardboard (for extra durability) or plain (for customizing with your four-year-old’s precocious scrawls). www.hecmec.jp

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In 1999, Benjamin and Thomas Cherner began the Cherner Chair Company to manufacture their father’s iconic molded-plywood chairs. Since then, they have reissued many other Norman Cherner designs according to original drawings and specifications. This year they’re introducing Multiflex credenzas—marking the first time they’ve ventured into case goods. The cabinets are made to order in a tremendous range of configurations and come in either “classic” walnut (the exposed beech core is stained to match the walnut veneer) or “natural” walnut (a clear finish emphasizes the contrast between the beech core and the walnut veneer). The brothers are also releasing a 1968 design for a rectangular tube lamp that sat on a table in their childhood home. Made of cast translucent acrylic and chrome-plated steel rods, it casts a uniform glow and is available in table, floor,  and pendant options. All the products from this family-run operation are made in the United States. Read more…

Sunday night saw a cluster of parties in the Meatpacking District, including the opening of Dune’s Enamored exhibition, with new designs by Harry Allen, Karim Rashid, Claesson Koivisto Rune, and others.

Richard Shemtov is Dune’s president and one of its designers—he created the new Deluxe lounge and sofa. The design was inspired, in part, by Japanese anime, but Shemtov said that the result is also “American in a way—very fat and bulbous.” Read more…

ArtFuture’s booth brought a bit of St. Petersburg to the Javits with designs that played off of the traditional Russian nesting doll, or matryoshka. The shapely silhouette (actually imported from Japan in the late-19th century) was used to great effect in Olga Prozorova’s Button-Table, which is supported by four massive wooden dolls; their white heads poke through the acrylic tabletop, making the shape of a button. Following a similar idea, Anna Pushkareva’s Roundabout table turns nine thin doll shapes, woven together with red cord, into a base for a glass table. The busy, overlapping forms (which would have frustrated Saarinen’s slum-clearing tendencies) are designed to replicate the look of a carousel in motion. Elvira Ziyangirova set the matryoshka on its side, filling a pear-shaped sack with foam and (shades of the Campana brothers) covering it with a layer of felt apples. It is an irresistible form, and passersby constantly stopped to squeeze the felt fruit, as though they were in a farmer’s market sampling the produce. Read more…

The Yale School of Architecture isn’t exactly known for producing industrial designers. (It’s the Yale School of  Architecture, after all.) But Joshua Rowley, who cotaught the elective seminar “Chair as Crucible,” which had students design and build a one-off seat in a semester, thinks the unfamiliarity of the form might have been a good thing. “They feel a little more like there’s nothing to lose,” he says. “We’re trying to get back to the original idea of the architect who designs everything.” The students were asked to take forms they were already working with in their building projects and explore them on a smaller scale. Andrea Vittadini, for instance, created Seated Chair (it appears to be kneeling) with thin, tubular legs that match the vertical strands of a facade he designed. Jacquelyn Hawkin’s CNC-milled Arm Chair (below)—narrow, black, and dour—wouldn’t look out of place in Sauron’s den or in her own building designs, which are full of jutting corners and unforgiving curves. Rowley says it’s “something that seems a bit dangerous but turns out to be comfortable.” Read more…

Our executive editor may have been mesmerized by Naoto Fukasawa’s Shelving System for Artek, but I’d wager that most people passing by the venerable Finnish manufacturer’s booth are more caught up in the live upholstery demonstration being staged there during the fair. Click the play button to watch Artek’s design director, Ville Kokkonen, explain the company’s Dress the Chair campaign.

Video shot and edited by Eve Dilworth; text by Mason Currey

This morning, two of our editors separately filed admiring reports on a pair of new Karim Rashid pieces at the Council booth:

Could you pick this humble desk out of a police line-up? The furniture world version of the blind taste taste? If someone asked me to guess the designer of basiK, Karim Rashid—he of the swoop, the blob, the bubbles, the…wardrobe—would not make even a semi-short list of ten. And that’s a credit to his rigor as an industrial designer, and to his client, Council, the San Francisco-based company that continues to impress me with its taste, curatorial eye, and attention to detail. For basiK, which was just completed two weeks ago, Rashid rests the elegantly proportioned plywood desk atop a thin and playful steel frame. The two forms complement each other in an almost effortless way. At $1,200, this has DWR written all over it. Here’s hoping. —Martin C. Pedersen

You’d never guess that the Careem chair, by Karim Rashid, was once produced by Cappellini. Council has given the design fresh life with the less technical production processes and a new material palette. The upholstered tops still separate from the bases for stacking. The version with wood legs is especially surprising. “It looks like it could be Scandinavian,” says Derek Chen, Council’s founder. A recycled PET shell is in the works. —Kristi Cameron Read more…

This year Patty Johnson is showing designs from 10 Caribbean nations made by 20 different producers. The collection is defined by traditional materials and techniques, all of them socially and economically sustainable, but as usual Johnson has worked with the artisans to develop pieces that have broad appeal. There are objects made of tobacco leaves, leather, and coconut fiber, but the standout is Johnson’s own chair, produced by Liana Cane, a factory in Guyana that is devoted to renewable materials. The chair is made from kufa, “with properties similar to rattan,” according to Johnson, and finished in environmentally-friendly neon shades. They are displayed to great effect in a twisting tower just below the name of the collection: Love Freedom Flow.

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Clockwise from top left: Sushir Kadidal’s Tempo chair; Alexandra Pulver’s Lunch Bag stool; Mike Jozewicz’s Nabolis chair; Esin Arsan’s 142 chair; and Jonathan Gillen’s Primitive chair
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Wilsonart Challenges, a competition that asks a class of design students to come up with a chair to be photographed for an ad campaign, presents an interesting problem, because the winner is more image than object. Though a person does have to be able to sit in it (presumably to avoid nasty spills during the ad photo session), it’s more important that the chair showcase the properties of laminate and bear a recognizable reference to the sample chip (you know, those colorful little rectangles with a hole on one end for a chain to go through). I’ve now judged several of the competitions, and I always find myself torn between what I think is the most commercial design—the one I’d want in my living room—and the one that will best serve the ad. This year that tension was especially pronounced. Read more…