Spotted in N.Y.

If there was any uncertainty that home decor has become the new fashion industry, the newly nicknamed Design Week that kicked off here Saturday put those doubts to rest -- in a streamlined wood veneer platform bed made up with eye-popping 21st century Mod patterned sheets.

Design Week’s centerpiece, the 17-year-old International Contemporary Furniture Fair, now has a juggernaut of accompanying events and spectacles, including a separate pavilion of Italian furnishings and an independent exhibition called “Downtown” for emerging designers.

In a vacant lot in Soho, Target plopped five pre-fabricated houses, one decorated with pale blue, gray and green housewares designed for the department store by Aero Studios’ Thomas O’Brien, who also has a luxury collection for venerable American furniture manufacturer Hickory Chair.

Several events were in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, now a nexus for next-generation design. At least one resident, Scott Braun (www.scottbraunfurniture.com), a designer who works with holly so white it appears to be ivory, brought his couture carved woodworks across the river to the main show at the Jacob J. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan.

Californians made their trek as Left Edge, a consortium of 13 designers from Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Exhibiting as a group for the first time, they made the most of 2,000 square feet of rented exhibition space, showing a strong range of products including ornate vinyl wall decals by Blik (www.whatisblik.com), graphic botanical linens by Amenity (www.amenityhome.com) and colorful woven plastic stools by the new Los Angeles company Lebello.

For Laser Rosenberg, the L.A. interior designer and owner of Homework on La Brea Avenue, the contemporary furniture trade show is more than a chance to view American collections. It is equally important “as a resource for discovering new foreign designers.”

This year, the show boasted a strong contingent of Northern European designers. The Netherlands’ Tord Boontje, whose intricate floral die-cut paper lampshades were a retail sensation last year, expanded his line to create copper vines that can be draped outdoors and left to turn green with verdigris.

Finland’s Eero Aarnio created the plastic canine-shaped child’s chair Puppy in three sizes ($58 to $128, to be sold at www.dwr.com) for the Me Too collection of kids’ furniture by Italian manufacturer Magis.

Carl Hansen & Son of Denmark unveiled the Elbow dining chair and the Shell lounge, two 1950s designs by Hans Wegner that have never been produced. The curvaceous three-legged Shell, lacquered in a color Wegner calls Japanese red, is already available through Jules Seltzer Associates in Los Angeles (www.julesseltzer.com).

A coterie of young designers from the United Kingdom also made an impact. The imaginatively named wallpaper and fabric printer Timorous Beasties (www.timorousbeasties.co.uk) offered ye olde damasks and florals with a decadent rock ‘n’ roll flair, joining an influx of groovy wallpaper vendors that included the psychedelic Flavor Lab from New Orleans (www.flavorleague.com). Dominic Bromley of Scabetti (www.scabetti.co.uk), a bone china manufacturer with a midcentury sensibility, and glass blower Michael Ruh (www.michaelruh.com) turned their work into intriguing chandeliers that, Ruh said, “achieve grandeur in a very modest way.”

Trent Jennings, a former cabinetmaker, switched to recyclable plastics “because I couldn’t stand to see wood used badly.” Jennings’ designs for Blue Marmalade (www.bluemarmalade.co.uk) are inexpensive origami configurations in bright colors that can be stored as a flat sheet when not in use, indoors or out.

Much of the show was devoted to synthetic materials: resins used as architectural elements, wall coverings and even tabletops. Wrinkled, somewhat pliable polyurethane surfaces on tables and credenzas by Garo Jack Hachigan (www.garoform.com) of Del Mar, Calif., had the appearance of a frozen lake.

At the Reality booth, New York designer Harry Allen created gasp-inducing decorative items cast in polyester from real objects -- including his grandmother’s reproduction Napoleonic candlesticks and his own hands -- used as hooks and candle holders mounted on the wall.

“I’m in my Jean Cocteau period,” Allen said. He shared his booth with Ross Menuez, creator of Fauna, a line of pastel pillows with silk-screened metallic-ink images of animals that sell from $40 at Lost and Found in L.A.

Menuez wasn’t the only designer to reference nature in his work. Placing the image of a giant termite across the drawer and atop a rift-cut oak veneer dresser, David Pierce of Ohio Design (www.ohiodesign.com) transformed a simple boxy highboy into $1,800 high-art furniture.

At the booth of Central Station Original Interiors (www.centralstationinteriors.com), Belgian designer Paul Delaisse achieved what he called a “good balance between the organic and the straight line” in recycled teak chairs, petrified wood wall tiles and monumental yet elegant tables of zebra wood with natural splitting on steel bases. Mixed with his sleek designs were the driftwood and stone constructions of Bleu Nature (www.bleunature.com), which had a rustic vigor as well as a classical sense of proportion that recalled 20th century French modernism.

Other trends: Wallpaper vendors crawled out of the woodwork, and L.A. designer Rosenberg noted an abundance of birds, including flocks of light-up pigeons in plastic by Smallpond designer Ed Carpenter and by the Portland, Ore., glass artisans Esque.

Rosenberg shopped the show to find new, unusual designs. He estimated that 20% of his merchandise, about $100,000 worth, will come from vendors here.

This year he found the lighting most illuminating. Ingo Maurer, known for his bare-bulb and wire fixtures with feathery wings, introduced a glass LED-lighted table that twinkled like a starry summer night. Designers used porcelain, crystals, wood veneers and even wineglasses to create chandeliers.

Rosenberg flipped for Jeremy Cole’s fixtures that looked like agave plants, and the classic lines of the Bestlite, a 1930 desk lamp favored by Winston Churchill and now produced in Denmark.

He also stocked up on Gorillaluce, a cute and colorful collection of glowing plastic apes by the London-based industrial designer Shiu-kay Kan.

“With the remake of ‘King Kong’ coming up,” Rosenberg predicted, “they are going to be hot.”