Best of Design Miami by Architectural Digest – “People are spending money again,” dealer Todd Merrill told me excitedly on Wednesday afternoon at Design Miami, the function-forward arm of Art Basel that took place last week near the Miami Beach Convention Center. Merrill’s booth—which focused on rare pieces by 20th-century American masters Paul Evans, Phillip Lloyd Powell, and George Nakashima (due to the prevalence of contemporary dealers, he was asked to focus on vintage)—had almost sold out. “Tonight I’m going to re-install my booth with other pieces I brought because so much of what you see here is no longer for sale.”
The sentiment echoed through the halls of the fair early last week, where contemporary functional confections sat with vintage chairs, tables, and cabinets.
But what exactly are they spending money on? It certainly wasn’t the usual crop of Prouve, Perriand, and Royère, and their geometry-driven contemporary spawn. Sure, these perennial crowd-pleasers made their predictable appearances (the Chandigarh chair, it seems, is like a starfish: You chop one up and it regenerates into five!). But ultimately it was the unexpected—the warm, the rough-hewn, the what-really-is-its?—that wowed the market this year.
As I Ubered to the buzzy new Prada space in the Design District on Tuesday night after previewing the fair, the insightful Adam Charlap Hyman of firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero rattled off his running list of what’s in (and out, but we’ll let you decipher that for yourself).
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Source: Architectural Digest