The Belgian company Behave was founded recently by Marie Querton and Amélie de Borchgrave. For some of their creations, Marie and Amélie worked with Marc Hotermans, a well-recognised expert in 20th century furniture.

The idea of Behave was born in a simple and intuitive way: to reinvent "vintage" in more sober and more contemporary lines.
"We started from a simple observation: vintage furniture pieces often have that extra touch of charm but can be very difficult to find and are often at high prices. In addition their condition is sometimes disastrous! Thus the idea of Behave! Furniture with a pure design, reinterpreting classics from the Fifties, but with a contemporary feel, which allows them a perfect integration in today's interiors."

be happy
This box is one of the central pieces of the collection. Its sober and elegant line emphasizes all the force of the materials used: oak, aluminium, steel and formica. It was designed with the collaboration of Marc Hotermans. It is manufactured in Belgium in a workshop, which confers it a unique and environmentally friendly character.

be cool
Sobriety of the details and smoothness of the lines characterize this shelf in walnut and ash.

be fun
This sideboard clearly inspired from the Fifties, can also be suspended on the wall.

be smart
This desk in birch has its top covered with a lino. Its simplicity gives it its character. It was entirely conceived by Marc Hotermans.

be easy
This piece of furniture can be used either as a bench or as a coffee table.

With Now! Le Off, a space open to young design and the avant-garde, Paris Design Week will make 1200 m2 of the Docks en Seine available to designers, to provide a 180 degree overview of the new French and international generation.

Bina Baitel 'Operio'
The young Parisian designer, associated with the Next Level gallery, will present a series of new furniture pieces. The Operio sideboard is a piece where the material’s fluidity draws on a solid an functional form.

Lamp by Jean Couvreur

In all, more than 60 designers will present their vision of the domestic world, from the most arty-ficial of Frederique Morel’s scenic incarnations, to the realism of free art projects, such as Pauline Deltour’s office accessories, the chinese designer Chenzu Sun’s seating system, lights by Jean Couvreur, Pool discovered at the Nouvelle Vague exhibition in Milan, or the surprising geometric Bistable shelves by Charles Kalpakian, who plays around with our blurred vision.

eliumstudio table 'Do it Yourself'
Initially conceived for L’Express magazine at the request of Marion Vignal, this series of simple tables will finally meet its public after having been put on hold. A table-top, lampshade support and colored cord to unify the whole, it can all be put together yourself! Eliumstudio, too often labelled as "designers of industrial products", demonstrates here a talent and sensitivity towards furniture with elegance and humour.

Glitch Fiction
A collective founded at the Royal College of Art, Glitch Fiction proposes scenery objects for an activist design. It is a border between fiction and reality as enjoyable as it is experimental, which enables the designers to explore fields such as genetic manipulation, biopolitics and the artificiality of nature. During Paris Design Week, Glitch will exhibit all their new projects by Austin Houldsworth, David Benque, Nicolas Myers, Facet, Thomas Thwaites, Nitipak Samsen, The Workers, Nelly Ben Hayoun et Good Wives and Warriors.

Pauline Deltour office accessories in aluminium
A young designer who went through the studios of Konstantin Grcic, Pauline Deltour is currently working with extruded aluminium to create a range of office accessories. Extrusion is the thermo-mechanical fabrication process through which a compressed material is forced through a mold of the piece being created. One can continuously produce a product of uniform shape, with no limitation of length or signs of deformity. She uses this process to obtain different elements from one form. Once the shape is extruded, it is cut on specific angles producing objects with very distinct silhouettes and configurations.

Paris Design Week
Now! Le Off
Docks on the Seine - 34 quai d’Austerlitz - 75013 Paris
September 12 to 18 2011

Heath Ceramics and House Industries are launching Heath house numbers, three-dimensional clay tiles celebrating the legendary Neutra and Eames fonts.

The Heath artisans are uniquely qualified to create a three-dimensional ceramic representation of House Industries’ two-dimensional typographic world. Each clay tile is glazed in a matte finish with a raised, unglazed number. As with all Heath tiles, Heath house numbers are pressed, hand-glazed, trimmed, and kiln-fired. They fuse simple, crisp lines, geometric forms and rich glazes in bold and classic colors. The two companies designed the tiles to be modular and easily integrated within a Heath tile installation, as well as to be displayed on their own with the use of a beautiful, modern track system—available in either salvaged teak or stainless steel.

“Bringing the Neutra and Eames-inspired fonts to life in clay form is so exciting to us,” says Heath Ceramics Creative Director Catherine Bailey. “Forming these beautiful and refined type-shapes out of an imprecise material, like clay, creates a fantastic contrast. The finished piece becomes as interesting as what’s likely to be housed inside the homes where the numbers preside.”

Richard J. Neutra was a rare personality whose character combined an uncommon aesthetic ability with a profound sense of civic responsibility. His physio-psychic architecture linked living spaces to their surrounding landscapes, physically and intellectually enriching the entire being. Impressed with Neutra’s design sensibilities, House Industries consulted with his son and partner, Dion, to produce Neutraface—an extensive font family based on the lettering that adorned many Neutra buildings. Since first releasing Neutraface in 2001, House Industries has continued to expand the family of typefaces with alternative, condensed and slab-serif styles.

Charles and Ray Eames are among the most important American designers of this century. House Industries worked closely with the Eames family for over ten years to gain access to some of the more obscure archive materials, to seek approval for the designs and to get a feel for what Charles and Ray would have wanted in a font family that bears their name. The Eames Century Roman family has eight different weights, from a distinctively delicate thin to a bombastic extra black. Corresponding italics are on double duty with their subtle nod to Ray Eames’ handwriting style while also providing an accompaniment to the Roman styles. Keeping with the Eames philosophy of balancing form and function, House also developed a special stencil version of the heaviest weight of the text family.

The Neutra numbers (3x6 inches) are offered in museum black and mid-century white, while the more playful Eames numbers (4x4 inches) are available in bright yellow, paprika, and museum black.

The Bouroullec brothers have presented some great new products in Milan this year.

Osso chair - Mattiazzi © studio Bouroullec
Working with Mattiazzi is comparable to working with an organic farm. While being a small, family-owned company that has been manufacturing chairs for others since about forty years, Mattiazzi decided to do less yet better. By using sophisticated CNC set of tools and at the same time a greatly refined manual know-how, Mattiazzi has a hybrid way to consider furniture production. We were particularly interested by the fact that all the equipment is powered by solar energy and that the wood is coming from the surrounding areas to be carefully selected without the use of any chemical treatments. They came back to the basics and this is precisely what piqued our interest and our fascination for the Mattiazzi family's endeavour. As designers, we feel involved in supporting such valiant microstructures that are always on the edge as they try to adjust to a constantly changing market. That said, the Osso chair had to be the illustration of what Mattiazzi is in its roots. We designed an object in plain wood but not in regular plain wood, the quality of the wood literally makes the object, like the best piece of meat would make the refinement of a dish. Our intention was to let the sensuality of the wood material - from oak to maple to ash - express itself. The Osso chair invites to be touched, even caressed as it is extremely sculpted and polished thanks to the use of highly sophisticated digital control equipment. The high-tech assembling system of geometrical wood panels allows a quite singular strength while preserving a design balance of the object.


Piani Lamp - Flos © flos
The Piani collection is made of a flat base and a flat top. The base is either a tray so that objects can be displayed in a triangular beam of light as if they were on stage or in its longer version, a shelve so that more objects can be supported by this hybrid design. Piani comes in plastic as well as in oak wood and basalt stone in the shelving versions so that different sensual experiences are suggested.


Aim Lamp - Flos © flos
The general idea behind the Aim design is to propose a lamp that would offer an infinite variety of adjustments to meet one's lighting needs. We came up with a proposal of a new typology of lamp that naturally positions itself in the space - like a plant would do - thanks to the long cables which facilitate the orientation and the height of the light freely. This object in ABS is the industrial version of the Lianes that we presented at the kreo Gallery, Paris in 2010.


Baguettes chair - Magis © studio Bouroullec
With Baguettes, our intention was to design a chair that would be brought down to its minimum, using the least quantity of material and assembling items. The ply wood seat and back parts of the chair are supported by four very thin sticks in solid wood which are maintained together by a structure in injected aluminium that is almost invisible. The back of the chair, like the blade of a knife, subtly comes into the main frame while guaranteeing high support resistance. As the Baguette table that we designed for Magis in 2010, we wanted this chair to be as light as possible, to almost float in the space as if it would stay on its feet by magic.


Oiseau - Vitra © studio Bouroullec

"Nouvelle vague, the new French domestic landscape" is an exhibition with A+A Cooren, Ionna Vautrin, Pierre Favresse, Studio Nocc and Pool at the Milan Design Furniture Fair 'off'.

"Entitled Petite Friture, Moustache, Superette, Specimen and Goodbye Edison. Punchy and easy to remember names chosen to stand out from the plethora of new French furniture and objects producers. France has never known such an entrepreneurial frenzy in the design world. In barely three years, the French design market has seen more producers emerge, but also design galleries (YMER & MALTA, Next Level Galerie, Fat Galerie, Galerie BSL, Galerie Gosserez, etc...) than over the last ten years.

'Rush' Chair by Studio Nocc     -     'Hippo' Lamp by A+A Cooren (Vertigo Bird, 2011)

'Rush' is a chair that is entirely covered with straw using a traditional rushing technique. This technique, strongly associated in popular culture with traditional peasant furniture, is used here to trigger the memory of the childhood chair. The straw is transposed and expanded on the Rush chair to the point where it becomes the main element. Through this process, the memory is transformed into the essence of the chair. Thanks to the inner steel structure, the chair's overall shape is no longer restricted to the bulky aesthetic of the past; it appears light and aerial, maintaining the stiffness that the rushing technique affords. Photo credit : Benjamin Ledu

The 'Hippo' is a series of lamps attached on a magnetic spindle. The rounded glass volume with the reflective metal calyx stays stable by the pull of magnetism. Hippo is easy to set and change as desired by the user. It possesses a sculptural and modern presence with its soft and cozy diffused light. Photo credit : A+A Cooren

'Wryneck' side table by Pool
Borrowed from the forest, the trunk "Wryneck" uses both the craftsmanship of the veneer and industrial technology of the digital cutting to find its place in a domestic space,without renouncing its original state. Photo credit : Benjamin Ledu

"In very little time, their pioneering work, production, and commercialisation of new object and furniture collections has permitted a new generation of designers to stand out and become visible. Their work has also given this new wave confidence. Now uninhibited, polyglot and entrepreneurial, they take risks, auto-produce and are opening out to the world. From amongst these numerous new faces, five obviously outstanding are presented at this exhibition: A+A Cooren, Ionna Vautrin, Pierre Favresse, Studio Nocc and Pool."

Floor lamp 'Forêt illuminée' by Ionna Vautrin
Two trees intertwined, an imaginary animal, a cloud hugging the ground ...
Composed of a luminous cocoon wearing two trunks of wood, this light awakens the imagination.
Two simple wooden cylinders extend as light masts on which lies a misty lampshade in tyvek. Photo credit : Ionna Vautrin

'Torii' stool by A+A Cooren
Inspired by the traditional Japanese Shrine gate, Torii is a comfortable stool made in Ash and Oak wood. The Torii can fit in any small space, and can also be used as an ottoman.
The shelf under the comfortable curved seat can be used as a useful storage space for magazines or books. Photo credit : Anthony Girardi

'Metal band' shelves by A+A Cooren
Inspired by a children's rubber-band toy gun, the wooden shelves are affixed to vertical tube legs by a large metal band. By combining the module elements, the height and width are easily customizable.
The vertical protruding part of shelf prevents books from falling sideways. Photo credit : A+A Cooren

Collection 'Perch' by Pierre Favresse
The Perch Collection consists of several pieces based on the same construction: a reading chair, coat rack, rocking chair, chair and desk with integrated light. With this collection I wanted to show a large family of functionalities working off the same principle. Colour scheme harmony was also an important part of the project with each colour “coded” for a different function, or specific place you would typically find the piece of furniture in your home. Photo credit : Benjamin Ledu

Exhibition: "Nouvelle vague, the new French domestic landscape "
Curator: Cédric Morisset
Centre Culturel Français
Palazzo delle Stelline
Corso Magenta 63
20123 Milano - Italy
From 12th to 17th April 2011 - from 10am to 7pm

La Castellamonte and Adriano Design have collaborated to create Stack stoves, a ceramic line with wood burning and pellet burning fireplaces that reinterprets the archetypal object in a contemporary touch.

On one side, an excellent production that has been able to preserve a handicraft and now industrial know-how of ancient tradition; on the other side, an avant-garde design that has accepted an innovation challenge in respect of the past.

Stack is modular and customizable. The flexible structure allows the “as much as one likes” composition of the stove, thus punctually meeting precise aesthetical, spatial and functional needs. The nine models combine the combustion and heating modular elements with support modules that offer articulated materic, dimensional and functional solutions. The stoves are customizable by adding heating modules in order to create height and power variations.


The building modularity is the result of a sustainable approach, expressed in the rationalization of the production, storage and transport processes and in the consumption optimization, set on the customer energetical needs and on the emissions.

Stack is highly technological, a requirement guaranteed by the hot blast pipes heat exchanger, typical of the stoves La Castellamonte, and the excellent performance levels reached by the wood burning and pellet burning fireplaces.
“The technological innovation concerns every part of the Stack stoves that, with their modular structure, can respond precisely to the needs of the architectural contexts in which they are inserted, by optimizing spaces, consumption and emissions”, explain Davide and Gabriele Adriano, the two Turin designers.

 
Stack stoves has won the Design Plus Award powered by ISH, the international biennal fair, leader for the bath, renewable energies and air-conditioning sectors, that takes place in Frankfurt am Main. The jury has praised the “excellent and particularly innovative design” of the Stack stoves, especially for what concerns the “environment protection, energy efficiency and sustainability aspects”.