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Monday, January 30, 2012

IDS 12- The Interior Design Show Trade Day Report- Part 1

Well, the unfortunate glitch of having our keys and our downloading cables locked in the office over the weekend has prevented us from getting this posted in a more timely manner, but since it is a re-cap of Trade Day, it's not like there is information here that would have been crucial to your enjoyment of Saturday and Sunday's general public days. So if you did venture to the show over the weekend, we hope you enjoyed it, and let us know what YOU though of it. Do you concur with our observations and standouts below? We thought Friday was a pretty successful day, and we must congratulate the organizers of the Interior Design Show for staging yet again a really top-notch event.

Over all impressions? The show continues to solidify itself as the premier residential design show in the city, and probably the country (although we haven't seen their IDS West in Vancouver). Where IIDEX/ NeoCon Canada's annual autumn show is more heavily oriented towards the commercial market (and, indeed, is partnering even more closely with the architectural community this coming year), IDS has over the years continued to focus more consistently on the residential market. And yet, the Azure speaker series at IDS regularly outpaces IIDEX's offerings, even in the arena of speakers with greater appeal to the commercial sector of the design industry. And it is because of those speakers that IDS is a "must attend" event for us.

We'll return to the speakers in our next post, but first some general observations about the exhibition portion of the show:
  • Kitchens and baths probably comprised about 40% of the exhibitors. Some impressive stuff if you're in the market, but uniformly outside of our snack bracket.
  • A good amount of condo furniture as well. It's very interesting to see that a lot of occasional seating is shrinking in scale to fit smaller apartments, while sofas, especially sectionals, continue to get bigger. The trend seems to be towards a living space whose boundaries are defined by an oversized sectional sofa acting as both seating and a space divider. Probably makes sense in open kitchen/ dining/ living environments, otherwise best suited to the Great Room in your Muskoka monster cottage.
  • The rest was mostly a mix of outdoor furniture, rugs, fireplaces, home entertainment, lighting, and an assortment of this and that. Many of these exhibitors are well out of their league by being at this show, especially in a design sense.
  • We noted that Natural Walnut seems to finally be on the wane although, to be sure, there was still plenty of it on view. Lighter and whiter woods are coming on stronger. Keep an eye out for unstained White Oak.
We didn't make it to the  How Do You Live "feature exhibit"- only so much you can squeeze into a day, especially when about 4 hours are devoted to the Trade Talks series. Did you see it? What did you think of the various vignettes presented?
image courtesy blogTO

Our standouts on the exhibition floor?
The Lissoni  Lounge, featuring outstanding products designed for various manufacturers by Italian master Piero Lissoni.
 Photo above courtesy ramblingrenovators.blogspot.com. More of their pictures of the Lissoni Lounge at the end of this post
Stonetile's Patricia Urquiola- designed collection of porcelain tiles for Mutina- these are a couple of years old, but they're stunning!
 Photo courtesy stonesource.com

Jardin de Ville- this new-to-Toronto Montreal- based furniture house has some great contemporary looks, designed for outdoor use, but so sexy they work equally well indoors. They also have a great line of bags made from their outdoor fabric.

The super-hot Biomega bicycles repped by Expedition Toys from Ottawa. We have a serious craving for this "Copenhagen" model.
Brent Comber's Shattered Spheres in the Offsite/Onsite space on the lower level. We've seen beautiful furniture from this BC-based artisan before, but these art pieces are gorgeous!
photo courtest brentcomber.com
 
Many of the low- slung, luxe pieces from Edmonton- based IZM. 
 ...and as always, a lot of the exhibitors in the ProtoType area featuring Canadian small crafters, including this great toy train set from Ayu Larasati
 
 Thom Fougere from Winnipeg with this table using Manitoba's native tyndall limestone
  Aloisi's lovely screen
And a nice pendant lamp from Dystil

The media this past weekend was full of coverage, so no doubt you already have a good idea of what the show was about even if you were unable to attend, but here's a bit of blogTO coverage from Friday evening.

In our next post we'll take a look at the three speakers' presentations we attended during Trade Day- stay tuned!

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