Design shows need new look
HOME furnishing designers and manufacturers in this city may know how to stage a room, but they need to figure out how to put on a show -- one that reflects the respect that Los Angeles’ design community has earned worldwide.
While last week’s back-to-back interior design exhibitions, Westweek and CA Boom, saw double-digit percentage increases in attendance, the shows were short on clout and buzz.
Westweek, the Pacific Design Center showrooms’ version of a couture atelier presentation to the trade, imported New York designers, magazine editors and cast members of Bravo’s “Top Design.” The more populist CA Boom, relocated to the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, was bustling with designers and house-proud consumers pushing strollers. Still, the shows seemed somehow anticlimactic, especially coming on the heels of Mercedes-Benz L.A. Fashion Week, which generated more hype than glory.
Of course, it’s impossible to design a chair that can pump its arms and legs down the catwalk, shaking its supple seat at the celebrity front row. CA Boom did have a DJ spinning tunes, and at Westweek, the fashion designer Joseph Abboud sent male models strutting through the showroom of Kravet fabrics wearing clothes made from his new line of textiles. Even so, neither event seemed to galvanize L.A’s disparate community of design obsessives.
That isn’t right.
“Next to New York, we have the A-list of sophisticated interior designers,” says Los Angeles decorator and furniture manufacturer Barclay Butera.
In an era of increased offshore production, the city is a center for made-in-Southern California home furnishings. Los Angeles has also given birth to popular decor styles such as Palm Springs Modernism, Hollywood Regency and the lush hippie look that might be called Malibu Moroccan.
“I have had German architects tell me that Los Angeles is the design center of the world and that we don’t even know it,” says Charles Trotter, founder of the 4-year-old CA Boom. He would like to see a Los Angeles design week that embraces events such as the Avenues of Art and Design promotions in West Hollywood and Culver City and the Pasadena Museum of California Art’s California Design Biennial exhibit. Organized under an umbrella design week, registrants would attend everything with an all-access badge.
In a geographically diverse city known for competitive individualists, that kind of collaboration “will be like herding cats,” says Eames Demetrios, the director of the Eames Office in Santa Monica. “One of the reasons people come to Los Angeles is to pursue their own dreams. They often find success without having to create a community.”
Marc Yeber, a partner in the contemporary furniture firm EM Collaborative Studio on Melrose Avenue, thinks L.A. designers and exhibition planners would profit from strategic alliances. In 2003, he displayed his stylish resin furniture and lighting at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York, where events were coordinated to “really make you feel like you’re in design week.”
Yeber also noticed pavilions of international designs subsidized by government trade commissions and has since organized Left Edge, a nonprofit coalition of 15 California designers that will exhibit at ICFF in May. “The Italians are masters at promoting design,” he says, pointing to the country’s success at the New York show and their Abitare Los Angeles design walk of Italian furniture showrooms in December. “If another government can do it successfully on our soil, why can’t we?”
Demetrios agrees: “A good host anticipates the needs of the guest. Los Angeles needs to become a good host to design. Anything that can be done to make L.A. focus on design is smart.”
That could mean more than furniture fashion shows and an organized design week. Pointing to the well-attended Westweek programs on green design and the many booths at CA Boom devoted to prefab housing, solar energy and sustainable building materials, Demetrios thinks these emerging trends offer great opportunities for corporate and government support of design exhibitions. He even imagines initiatives and events reminiscent of the 20th century’s World’s Fairs, perhaps even a Los Angeles Solar Design Challenge.
“Good design provides solutions,” Demetrios says, “and whoever develops the breakthrough products is going to lead the technology and become the center of design. We are so famous for our sunshine we should be seizing the opportunity.”