Toronto IDS Punches Above its Weight

Celebrating 26 years, Toronto’s Interior Design Show (IDS) is billed as “Canada’s premier showcase of new products, superstar designers and avant-garde concepts from North America and beyond.” This past Jan. 22-26, 391 exhibitors sprawled over the 250,000-square-foot show floor at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre North Building.

“What’s different this year is that we’re producing a lot more exhibitions within the show ourselves,” said IDS National Director Will Sorrell. “For instance, we commissioned a structure, Furniture Forecast, and curated new furniture pieces never seen before in Canada. It’s our own taste and filter about what’s going on in the international design world. If you’re a designer and you can’t get to Milan or Copenhagen, how do you see these things? Do you have to wait for them to be stocked in the showroom?” Also new was Illuminate, a lighting section encompassing 13 different brands; and How We Work, “a feature on the workplace as the central visual with three different takes on the future of the workplace.”

At How We Work, Un/Confined was a concept installation designed by Toronto-based Syllable Design featuring Three H Furniture’s Kynde conference table, Hudson private office, Harris lockers, Sutton zoning and Lady Ev accent table. Three H is based halfway between Toronto and Hudson Bay in New Liskeard. The booth highlights the return-to-work shift from rigid, one-size-fits-all offices to flexible spaces that support autonomy and movement.

“We’re exploring the evolution of work and the colors and juxtaposition of furniture,” explained Three H product manager Emily Hawkins. “The office doesn’t have to be boring and status quo. This is about the change in functionality in going from a static cube environment to a more-open space incorporating plants and touch points where you can collaborate with coworkers.

“If designers have to create spaces to get people back in the office, what amenities will draw them in the most? It can be a little coffee nook where they can go and have their morning coffee or a quiet phone booth where they can take a personal call. If you don’t want to work at your desk, you can work at a table or in a sound-dampening alcove. And there are lockers on the outside so that you don’t need a dedicated personal space, but you can still lock your things. Then you have the flexibility to move throughout the office during the day.”

Facing the main entrance to the show floor was the booth of lighting-and-furniture maker Hollis+Morris, based just five miles away. The booth featured Colour Drench, an in-your-face demonstration of a saturated hue, in this case crimson, repeated on wall, floor and furniture. The firm’s wood-and-metal pendant, sconce and freestanding lighting fixtures were wrapped in sound-absorbing, knitted fabric from Dutch textile supplier Byborre. The booth won the Judges’ Choice booth award.

There was much to enjoy under Furniture Forecast’s mirrored ceiling. As a cinephile who goes to Spanish director Pedro Almodovar’s movies for the set-design color palettes as much as for the actors, I couldn’t resist the playful Disk etagere, part of the Cromática collection by Almodovar and Sacha Lakic for French luxury furniture brand Roche Bobois, with large, stained-glass-inspired discs embellishing the shelving structure.

Occupying center stage at Furniture Forecast and making its commercial debut was Peaks, a sofa in indoor/outdoor fabric evoking a modular, abstracted alpine landscape from Moooi by Swiss-born American designer and IDS keynote speaker Yves Behar. The sofa comprises dual-foam cushions in the shape of extruded triangles. They connect along a long edge with hidden hinges and zippers, allowing the user to flip cushions up and down or stack them to create headrests and other configurations. Just the thing to occupy kids for hours and safer than a jungle gym.

“Peaks came about during COVID,” Behar reminisced. “It was a time of isolation. We were a small pod of family and friends and I wanted to build something that would bring us together. The living room is not typically a place where small kids hang out in because the adults chase them away. But Peaks acted like a conversation pit and we all used it.”

Nearby, also from Netherlands-based Moooi and similarly modular and playful was the Haybale lounge chair and footstool by Brooklyn-based Nicholas Baker. He was inspired by stacked bales of hay, with cotton belts and metal buckles in lieu of baling wire fastening the quilted-leather upholstery.

For an IDS debutant, Moooi had quite a presence. Besides Peaks and Haybale, Moooi boasted a concept booth on the show floor titled Out of Office. It was designed in collaboration with Ste Marie, an interior design firm based in Toronto and Vancouver and so named because company founder Craig Stanghetta hails from Sault Ste. Marie. The booth featured Moooi’s iconic Ron Gilad-designed Dear Ingo task-lamp chandeliers, perched like sinister arachnids ready to pounce on the floor and walls. These were covered in Moooi’s Rive Roshan-designed watery-patterned Fluid broadloom carpet. The booth’s premise, “the transportive space reflects on the changing nature of work in an increasingly remote and hybrid world,” was a stretch unless you were Robinson Crusoe marooned on a desert island. One also pondered the meaning of the vintage cathode-ray tube cabinet televisions arrayed along the walls.

English-speakers tend to pronounce the brand as “moo-ee,” but the name has nothing to do with cows and derives from the Dutch monosyllabic word for “beauty.” “I have taken on the challenge of making sure that everybody knows we are ‘moy’ as in ‘boy,’” remarked Molly Scott, Moooi’s Sales Manager Canada. To that end, your humble scribe suggested that her firm adopt the slogan “Oy, it’s Moooi.”

Meanwhile, over at lluminate, Jeff Forrest greeted visitors to his booth for Stackabl, a line of bespoke yet affordable, sound-absorbing lighting made by stacking felt offcuts and other industrial waste into memorably stylish and original fixtures that evoke shish kebob and the color bands on an electrical resistor.

Previously, Forrest was known as founder and creative director at Toronto atelier Stacklab. They create robber-baron objets such as the Mura coffee table, which retails at New York’s Maison Gerard for (US) $60,000. Launched in 2021, Stackabl, Forrest said, “is a different business, a mid-market-appropriate product. There’s incredible value because it splits among three budget lines: decorative/architectural lighting; acoustics, because all our input materials are sound-dampening; and PET [polyethylene terephthalate or polyester to you and me] recycling.

“Originally, we set out as a conceptual platform that was quite novel. Because it was so customizable, a lot of the people in the trade weren’t sure how to use it. We spent the last year surveying lighting designers, the A&D community and distributors. We tightened up the specification process so that it’s very easy to use. As a result, we’re achieving commercial scale.”

‘Tis the season for ribbed surfaces. Cosentino recently introduced Ukiyo, featuring a fluted material emulating a wood-tambour front that animated the cold faux-stone substance with a warm, woody look—something new for a product category hitherto available only as flat slabs. At IDS, IKEA offered a preview of Terrsjö, a new door front for its venerable Sektion kitchen system, with the sculptural, wavy texture of repeating concavities in a warm terracotta tone.

At the Studio North sector of the show floor, independent product designers exhibit their custom and one-off creations (including furniture and lighting, glass and ceramics, textiles and décor objects) within a gallery-like setting. Among the more memorable exhibitors was IDS debutante Carbon and Iron Metalworks, or C6& Fe20 as their logo puts it, referring to the periodic table of elements. Zac Mahadeo and Natalie Rekai, the firm’s owners (and spouses), are Toronto-based blacksmiths. His Mohawk haircut and tattooed forearms, her long black dress, and the sculptural backdrop of warmly glinting hammer-folded copper panels lent the booth a goth, Mad Max vibe.

Starting in automotive sheet-metal repair in high school, Mahadeo moved on to custom welding and fabrication, then completed the artist blacksmith program at Haliburton School of Art and Design. He makes the hanging art pieces by heating a copper panel over their coal-fired forge, located two hours away in Huntsville, in Ontario’s cottage country. “The process gives it some very interesting colors and textures,” he said. “Then I hammer out each fold on an anvil. Where lines intersect, the texture builds up.”

Finally, taking the palm for tongue-in-cheek funniest booth was Home DeCoors. The name puns on turning hosting headaches into functional furniture. (Then there’s hors conCoors and esprit de Coors — the punning possibilities are endless). After trans social media personality Dylan Mulvaney sparked a boycott against Bud Light while company mascot in 2023, it’s refreshing (sorry) to see a category competitor reaching out so adroitly to its audience. With 63% of Canadians admitting to sitting on the floor or a makeshift seat at least once during a Big Game party, according to Harris Poll Canada, Coors Light launched exclusively at IDS with a booth showcasing a 24-piece home décor collection where every piece —s eats, tables, ottomans, plant and TV stands — was a case of Coors Light. The venue was created not by an interior designer or decorator, but by Becky Wright and Kelsey MacDermaid, founders of DIY and interior design influencers the Sorry Girls. “We aimed at tackling the hosting challenges of too many people and plates,” Wright explained. “Some may call it improvising, but Coors Light calls it innovation.”

Editor’s Note: David Lasker is president of David Lasker Communications and can be reached at david@davidlaskercommunications.