The Interior Design Show (IDS), Canada’s largest design exposition and conference, launched into the new decade January 16-19 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Previously a retail show, it became a hybrid show last year by absorbing IIDEX, the big show for commercial design, and relaunching it on a smaller footprint as IDS Contract, two trade-only days at IDS aimed at the A&D community. Show owner, Informa Markets, describes it as “a hyper-curated B2B trade-only exposition and conference focused on all verticals of design including: workplace, healthcare, retail, hospitality, education, public spaces, government and more.”
Herewith, some IDS Contract booth highlights.
Keilhauer
The most familiar office-furniture personage at the show was Mike Keilhauer, president of the seating firm founded by his father. Mike explained why his firm maintained a booth presence, not to mention the Keilhauer Stage, the venue for keynote speakers in the middle of the show floor.
“Toronto’s home and one of our biggest markets. Most of the designers who come down are specifiers, and those are the people we want to work with. We were at IIDEX for 20+ years; now IDS has become a big show. We tested it out last year and our reps said, ‘Everyone comes to IDS.’ It gives us an opportunity to show our new collection all at once.”
That collection, Elevate, premiered at NeoCon last June and has a quasi-residential, crossover look that he ascribes to “the idea of collaboration in the office. We used to be all conference chairs; now we have a huge lounge collection.
“We call our product ‘soft contract,’ not ‘resi-mercial.’ I hate that word. The difference is that we build furniture to the standards of the workplace; it’s not built to be your living room. So even this lounge-ee soft sofa is not as soft as you might expect. It’s a little higher and gives more support so that you can work.”
Indeed, the Garner modular bench seating, designed by Vienna-based EOOS, has firm upholstery conducive to an upright, wide-awake posture, unlike the cushy sink-in feel of the typical couch-potato home sofa.
“You’re having a meeting or sitting with your laptop, but in a more comfortable setting,” Keilhauer explained. “So these pieces are designed for work, but feel like home. That’s the transition we’ve made and we like to call it ‘soft contract’ because we haven’t come at it from the residential side. We’ve come at it from the contract side because that’s our world. We’ve softened our appeal, and it’s what our marketplace is looking for.”
As for the Ellaby mid-back lounge chair with walnut base, also designed by EOOS, its name evokes IKEA monikers of yore while the retro aesthetics recalls Finn Juhl, the Scandinavian who introduced Danish Modern to America circa 1950.
“Wood legs soften everything,” Keilhauer said. “We’ve always done contemporary transitional furniture. It’s amazing how, inevitably, we ended up at this place because Danish Modern is contemporary but has softness. The whole market has gone there, and we’re right in the thick of it.”
Nightingale
One booth over stood another major player in contract seating. “We’re the fourth-largest supplier of chairs to the U.S. government. Steelcase is number one. Herman Miller is number two. Hayworth is three. Nightingale, a Canadian company, is number four,” said the firm’s Egon Szenttamasy, VP of Sales, Canada. Indeed, the Nightingale website home page considerately includes links to the G.S.A., Navy, Air Force and IRS.
The in-house designer, W. R. Breen, also owns the 91-year-old company, based in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga. It won a Silver in the Seating: Ergonomic Desk/Task category in last year’s Best of NeoCon Awards for the NLC (Next Level Chair).
As configured in the Nightingale booth, with sculptural, polished aluminum legs and flip-up arms, the NLC looks handsome, substantial and luxurious. “There’s nothing like our flip-up arm anywhere,” Szenttamasy said.
“We have 140 different products, all made in-house. We’re one of the greenest chair manufacturers in the world, with every credential that you can have. We buy solar power and wind power only. We take nothing back to landfill.” The company is ISO 9001 and 14001, GreenGuard and BIFMA E3 Level 2 Certified.
Also on display was Nightingale’s take on the privacy chair, the Trullo, available as a one-, two- or three seater and named after the charming traditional stone hut with a conical roof characteristic of villages in southern Italy’s Puglia region.
Trullo may lack the hut’s crowning white cone, but the chair emulates other characteristics of the famous dwellings, Szenttamasy said. “You sit down and you feel cozy; you’re surrounded [by the upholstered wings]. It’s modular. You can take it apart and put it together in minutes without even a screwdriver.”
He ascribes the Trullo’s success to its being a Goldilocks product: “There are a lot of similar products out there. Trullo looks conservative but not too conservative, nor too ‘out there,’ and it’s well-priced.”
TheQuietRoom.ca
The child is father to the father at TheQuietRoom.ca. The Oakville, Ont. firm creates architectural acoustic treatments that it sells and installs across North America.
The booth presented an arresting display of ceiling baffles and clouds suspended on aircraft cable, wall tiles, tackable panels, desktop dividers and privacy nooks. The wide array of hues and shapes evoked trellis lattice, stained-glass windows, wafer-cookie sandwiches and flying saucers, all made from sheets of 60% recycled polyester felt.
The firm’s “About Us” story, in turn, evokes Silicon Valley lore of industry titans starting companies in their garage. Josh Thackray is president; Luke Thackray heads sales. “He’s the dad at home, but I’m the boss at work,” said Josh. “I started the company.”
“We always liked to build things in our garage,” said Josh, who lacked a background in acoustics or engineering. “Seven years ago, we worked on a community project where kids came in for after-school programs. The kids’ room was super-loud and fatiguing for the employees. They didn’t know what to do, so we did some quick research and made fiberglass panels from scratch in our garage. They worked; everyone was pleasantly surprised.”
Soon after, Luke helped a restaurateur friend tame his noisy eatery with the panels. Then, as a whiz at web-search optimization, he built the business by driving online traffic to the fledgling firm’s website.
Noisy bistros where one must shout to carry on a conversation are an obvious venue for acoustic treatments. Yet, the promise did not pan out. “For restaurants, everything’s expensive,” Luke said. “There’s a saying: ‘Every restaurant is three months away from going out of business.’”
90% of the Thackrays’ work is in offices, and not just, as one would expect, in open-landscape areas. “Even a 10-by-10 private office will resonate if it’s empty,” Luke said. “Someone in a small office is on the phone and the other person asks, ‘Where are you, in the bathroom?’ So they call us in.”
The advent of teleconferencing and video conferencing has prioritized room acoustics as a factor in workplace design. “Half of our work is because of conference calls,” Luke said. “Companies will pay $10,000 to install nice audio equipment, but there’s too much echo.”
Luke also acts as in-house product designer. A prime source of inspiration is royalty-free images in the public domain. “I’ll go on to Shutterstock and take a vector and have the rights to reproduce it.” (Vector graphics are images that can be resized without loss of quality, making them ideal for CNC printing on a 4-foot-square felt sheet.)
IdySpace/M.R. Walls
Music lovers are used to seeing The Great Wave off Kanagawa, the iconic Hokusai woodcut, on record jackets for Debussy’s La Mer. At IDS, the image made a witty, unexpected appearance as one of the demo CNC-carved Corian panels comprising the IdySpace booth. The panels were made locally by IdySpace, the Canadian licensee and distributor of M.R. Walls, the firm founded by Los Angeles designer and artist Mario Romano.
“We’re showcasing the diversity of repetitive and non-repetitive patterns that can be done to any scale, the diversity of color and the fact that Corian is translucent,” explained IdySpace managing partner Steve Kanellakis.
The panels combine 3D-routered Corian sheets measuring 12 feet by 2½ feet, stacked vertically or horizontally. Seams were slightly visible because the sheets were clipped together to facilitate assembly and disassembly for the two-day exhibition. In actual installations, sheets are joined with epoxy of the same color and consistency as the sheets, rendering seams invisible.
“M.R. Walls are great for feature walls in everything from hotel lobbies to office foyers,” Kanellakis added. “There are lots of applications in residences, such as staircases, and shower walls and backsplashes because it’s non-porous and there’s no mold or mildew.”
Adding to its functionality, Corian is non-porous, GreenGuard- and NSF-certified and Class-A fire rated. The material, even in light colors, is also UV-stable, making it suitable for use indoors and out.
Corian’s translucence bestowed a backlit, punchy, low-key colour that enhanced the panels’ sculptural and tactile appeal. Showgoers couldn’t resist brushing their fingertips along the raised surfaces.
