Patience Jones: Hello and welcome to As Built, the podcast from Graphicmachine about architecture firms and buildings and how both get built. I am your co-host, Patience Jones. With me is Brian Jones. Thank you for joining us. I used to say, as our faithful listeners will know, “with us as ever is Brian Jones.” I'm no longer saying “as ever,” because now that's been co-opted to sell jam. So instead I'll just say hello and thank you for joining us.
We've been away for a little bit and that's what we're going talk to you about today.
One of the events we went to is the International Contemporary Furniture Festival (ICFF), and another event we went to is…
Brian Jones: NeoCon, the giant furniture festival in Chicago.
Patience Jones: It is giant. It is actually more giant than ICFF, which I, having not been to NeoCon before, did not appreciate. ICFF started May 18th in New York City at the Javits Center, and it is run in conjunction with New York Design Week.
There were over 13,000 attendees, which was an increase of 5% over the previous year. That was really interesting because we weren't sure how current economic global situations would impact attendance. Attendance did not drop below the previous year, so that was good.
Brian Jones: The two events that we went to in Chicago: one was at the Merchandise Mart, which was NeoCon, and then there was the Fulton Street Design Days, at Fulton Street Market, and had a number of showrooms and places to visit. NeoCon had many, many floors of things to visit and there were over 50,000 people that attended that show.
Patience Jones: And you said it was like 14 floors or something?
Brian Jones: Yes. Not all, not all of them are occupied, many of them are. There's some service floors in there, but many floors to walk around.
Patience Jones: That just seems overwhelming to me. Was it overwhelming? Was it easy to navigate?
Brian Jones: I mean, it's easy to lose your place. The spaces inside are not necessarily designed for this kind of walking around. You can lose your position if you're not carefully tracking where you are on the floor.
Patience Jones: It's like a casino, a little bit. So why do we go to this besides to get lost?
Brian Jones: The biggest thing is to appreciate what is happening in the design world. What’s on people's minds? What trends are they looking at and responding to? Also to understand what is resonating with people who are attending these shows. Because many of these people will be the people specifying things and projects. What is top of mind for them right now? Did the presentation match what they needed it to match?
Patience Jones: We go for our own edification because we love it and we love everything design, and we love learning new things. And then we go to bring it back to you and to our clients and to be able to make better decisions for them based on what we're seeing out in the design world.
What were some of the things you noticed at NeoCon?
Brian Jones: One of the big takeaways is about acoustics. I think this is in response to so many offices having open floor plans. That was the design trend that everybody ran to. And then we realized, oh, wait a minute, we do actually need some time to be away from all the noise and all the sound.
So it's really trying to not take us back to where we were in terms of all separate offices, but it's creating carve-outs within spaces to reduce the amount of audio noise that you might be processing to make it so that you can have some separation, be it a booth or something like that for private calls and that sort of thing.
What about you at ICFF?
Patience Jones: Similarly, acoustics was very, very much at the forefront and a lot of that is stemming from people going back to an office environment after working from home during COVID. When they were working from home, they got really used to either having their own ambient noise that they would probably call no noise, but is in fact just their ambient noise, or being able to control the music, putting on sounds of birds, whatever they want to do.
Now being back in an office environment, the noises that we used to be really accustomed to are hitting everybody very differently. We saw lots of products designed to accommodate that, and that's not just in the workplace. That's also if you've been at home a lot and you go to say a hotel or you go to a restaurant, what was considered to be a normal level of noise pre-COVID may now seem way, way, way too much. It's too intense. There were lots and lots of products for dealing with that in artistic ways.
And then also scent. Scent was a very big deal at ICFF, the idea of individualized scent profiles for spaces - even taking it so far as custom furniture that is infused with a bespoke scent profile for a particular space.
This is what Las Vegas hotels have been doing for a long time. You walk into the door of one hotel and you instantly know it's that hotel because it smells like that hotel. This is sort of what people are trying to create: when I walk into this office, I smell this thing, or I walk into this store and I smell this thing.
What is so interesting to me also, though, is that there's very much a push for creating spaces that are neuroinclusive and that dovetails with the acoustics and making sure that people who are neurodiverse are able to thrive in a space.
Scent is one of those things that can impact everyone, not just people who are neurodiverse. It can be people who have allergies, people who are prone to migraines. People can have very strong feelings about scent either way. And so I'm kind of struggling to make sense of this idea that you would go to great pains to make something very inclusive and then you would introduce this scent that really may be polarizing or may cause people not to come back.
Brian Jones: When you think about ambient noise or music or something like that in an audio scenario, you can turn that up or down and it changes instantaneously. But if you are changing scent that doesn't just evacuate from the space the moment you disable it. It begins to dissipate, but it takes some time. It seems like the approach with scent is rather limited by that.
Patience Jones: If you turn it down, if it's been going in a space, it's been absorbed by the materials in the space: the chairs or pillows smell like it, or when you turn the air on in the room, it gets pushed in again. It's such a powerful thing. It’s sort of like playing with fire, because our strongest sense that is most evocative of memories is scent. And you could pick a scent that, as a proprietor, you think, oh, this is really great and everybody's going to love it. And it turns out that for somebody that smell has really negative connotations or evokes really unpleasant memories. They may or may not consciously connect those two things. They're just going to know, “I don't want to go in that space. That space makes me feel icky, and I don't know why, but I don't want to go in there.”
Brian Jones: One of the things that I happened to notice was people trying to tackle bringing more organic elements into the space. That gets into the larger sense of feeling connected, in a larger way, to your office surroundings.
From Biome, we saw a waterless plant system. It no longer requires you to maintain it or to water it because it is done for you. It collects the moisture out of the air and waters the plant and makes it a one stop shop.
Patience Jones: Sustainability is a word that gets used over and over and over again until we aren’t even clear what we’re talking about. So I’m considering what we saw to be “innovative sustainability.”
We saw a company called Made with Reishi by Mycoworks, and they make mushroom leather and it's so cool. They have different ages of the mushroom leather and different processes so some feels like an old club chair that's really worn. It's kind of got that soft, malleable nature to it. Others feel more like untanned leather. There are beautiful colors. I don't know that I would be able to tell the difference between this leather and actual cow leather. It was able to be used very successfully in wall coverings and to make furniture. Populus Hotel in Denver actually has, in the bar of the restaurant on the first floor in the lobby, this really beautiful installation of these mushroom leather panels and it's just nothing that you've ever seen before and it's gorgeous. And there's this wonderful smell in the lobby of the Populus and I could not figure out what it was, but it's actually coming from the mushroom leather. It's like this really great, earthy, actually really expensive smell. Very organic, not in an unpleasant way. That was cool. And Made with Reishi did a collaboration with Hermès several years ago where they made a mushroom leather bag. It was really neat.
One of the other things that we noticed was the color palette. Did you notice that, too?
Brian Jones: Yes – a very, very consistent color palette throughout.
Patience Jones: Consistent and brighter. For last year's shows, the colors were a lot of blacks and grays and whites and neutrals. This year we saw a lot of neon, solar colors, bright, joyful, happy, almost like early eighties color palettes, but kind of modernized. I think it's one of the things that the design community does so well, which is trying to lead people to better. This is a way to kind of combat everybody's sadness and malaise by introducing these really bright colors.
Brian Jones: I think that it's one of the many ways that this industry has a strong relationship with fashion. It's easy to think about a piece of furniture and think, how could that possibly relate to fashion or to the larger sense of where we are in time. But the forms, the colors, the patterns, all convey what this moment is about.
There's a period of time that it has a look, and then we move on to something else. Furniture definitely has a longer shelf life, usually, than something from fashion. But the elements that it supports, there's this feeling of belonging that comes from having this be the way that designers choose to express themselves.
Patience Jones: It was a very positive experience. To that end, we are putting together sort of a curated lookbook of the things that we saw that we thought were just really great and really spectacular. If you are interested in receiving that, you can sign up on our site. We'll put the link in the show notes and we'll be sending that out in just a little bit.
One of the things I did want to do also is a special shout out to the Thuma bed frame company. I don't own a Thuma bed frame. They have never given me anything except what I'm about to describe. I thought it was such a spectacular example of wonderful customer service and generosity.
They had done an event for Design Week at their store in SoHo. You could come and look at their store, but they also had a bespoke perfume artisan who could make every single person there their own special custom perfume blend based on what they liked and didn't like. And the line was through the store and out the door.
It was free and they had drinks and they had wonderful hors d'oeuvres, and it was a really lovely time. But about six people before we got to the front of the line, they came out and they said, we are so sorry, but this was way more popular than we thought it was going to be, and we have no more perfume left, so we're going to have to shut this event down, but we feel so badly, please take a tote bag.
And they had tote bags that were filled with Thuma candles and Thuma socks, and I know there were other things in there and I feel terrible that I can't remember it, but it was so nice and unexpected and they could have just come out and said, we're really sorry, please stay and have a drink. We don't have anything left.
Those things that they gave away were not inexpensive, but I am confident that they looked at the situation and thought the goodwill that we will get from treating people this way versus just sending them out the door is worth whatever we have to give away.
And people were thrilled. They were so excited. It completely changed the focus from, I didn't get the thing that I was standing in line for to, oh my gosh, I got this really special thing and somebody thought about me.
I thought that was a great lesson to share and something that we all can learn from. If you're smart about it, you can turn those situations into something that actually really endears people to you.
Well, we hope that we have endeared ourselves to you. We are grateful to you for joining us, and we will see you next time.
