Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: Alejandro Ramírez Orozco, Playinghouse, Simon Leung, Natalie Kovacs and Ashlee Harrison, Concordia
Over the past few years, independent furniture designers have gravitated toward metal. It’s a bit of an about-face in the midst of an era dominated by light woods and textured ceramics. The precision-forged material is not only affordable but also forgiving, a straightforward way to create clean forms. Aesthetically, it’s more malleable than one might think; it can read as austere and streamlined in a minimalist collection, but it also has the potential to look baroque and extravagant. At this year’s New York offshoot event of Collectible, the Brussels design fair, it leaned more toward the latter with metal enlisted in a return to ornamentation.
