Home decor heroes: Four key designers to watch

During Stockholm Design Week in February, Fredrik Färg and Emma Marga Blanche invited guests to their studio for a reception that included a showing of Longing to Fly, Longing to Fall, an art film consisting of seemingly weightless dancers posing on and tumbling off their furniture. As hypnotic as it was, the movie struggled for the attention of attendees with the actual pieces in the space.

Färg Blanche’s innovatively assembled, arrestingly detailed furniture demands close-up inspection: Their easy chairs for Sweden’s Gärsnäs – Emma and just-released Emily – boast intricate needlework; the items created through a process they call “wood tailoring” involves layers of stitched-together plywood. As Färg and Blanche continue to work with bigger and bigger distributors, including Gärsnäs, Zero and Design House Stockholm, their profile steadily rises. And so it should. They are, after all, master craftsmen, maybe even artists.

To say that Kay likes airplanes would be an understatement. “I’m the guy you see around airports, neck craned to the sky, trying to get the perfect shot of an approaching Airbus or Boeing,” the Toronto-based photographer, artist and designer writes on his website, www.thelairdco.com. “But I’m more than just a plane nerd. I’ve studied planning and design in Australia, Canada and Scotland and have spent 12 years designing wine cellars. These experiences – and romantic memories of overseas travel as a child – are what inform my art.” 

Already varied, Kay’s repertoire has just been expanded to include wallpaper design that indulges his passion for aviation: Look closely at the elegant blue and white print at right and you’ll see that the overlapping diamond patterns are comprised of tiny – what else? – jets. The paper, which can be bought through Kay’s website and is available in custom colours, costs $90 a roll. The sense of freedom, movement and escape it instills? Priceless.

When former Droog designer Antoniuk founded his own label, Question Objects, in 2007, one of the Albertan’s primary objectives was to reflect Canada’s wilderness in the form of “relevant” products. His new collection of tables and case goods, manufactured in Edmonton, more than achieves that goal.  

The two-drawer side table from his Arctic ShoreLine series is a striking tribute to the North’s “contradictory landscapes,” from dense forests to ice floes. The entire collection is available at Urban Mode (www.urbanmode.com).