Unique logs are hard to find, hard to acquire responsibly, hard to take down, hard to truck, and generally a serious logistical challenge. But when the wood Santa arrives, it is so very worth it. Here two large black walnuts on the doorstep after a trip cross country. They were sourced from a homeowner who needed to take them down for a new home construction on a tiny lot. Save….!
Not content to receive nature’s blessings, we have decided to push the envelope…. Originally conceived as part of our “Retaliation Collection” (more about that later…), we have taken a selection of extraordinary slabs of wood, and made molds from them, casting them into aluminum slabs. With all the cool beauty of white metals, and the intense living information of the highly character starting slabs, these pieces merit extreme attention. They can also be shaped and folded into standing pieces, book-matched, mixed and matched, and more.
“In addition to our NYC showroom (The Portal to Imagination!), we
have just opened our west coast showroom at the Pacific Design Center
in Los Angeles. Also featuring the Hous Projects gallery, this 3000SF
space is visual caviar, with exceptional pieces of JOHNHOUSHMAND
functional art combined with the work emerging international artists.
The collection gives the viewer a dynamic experience of these pieces
in a setting which reads both display and livable. Please come by,
share our vision, and maybe even a glass of wine. Currently in space
B528, and moving to B222 on February ….
At John Houshmand we like all sorts of toys including Dozuki saws, belt sanders, high-speed drills, huge chainsaws and other dangerous stuff that allows us to make our creations. But we also love digital MP3 recorders, hi-def video cameras, Twitter, Flip video recorders, Adobe Lightroom, Camera Raw and any other technology that helps us tell a good story through multimedia presentations including video and audio slideshows. Click on the image above to see and hear all about our humble beginnings and some of the wild stuff we have been doing lately.
The CLEARLY FUNCTIONAL line came to be from the wish to marry the airy glassine quality of acrylic with the substantial and vital quality of wood. The design world is full of plastic and acrylic products which for the most part we find alienating, ugly, and harsh. It was considered that if we could transform that problem with a natural element, we might get a magnificent synergy and an iconic design as well. As we developed methods of attaching the two materials invisibly and minimally, and as we also experimented with casting a “plastic” into a natural material (live-edge wood), we unleashed a fiesta of exciting designs that hit the mark…extraordinary visual appeal, industrial design pedigree, and a real wood component that takes us into the world of fine furniture. Win, win, win, win, win…fun, fun, fun, fun…cool, cool, cool, cool.
Years ago I began playing with a series of visual languages that emanated from dice…that magical little pair of cubes that has an almost platonic and mystical appeal. A numbering system that jives with a cube-face multi-dimensionality, and all the while screaming the mysterious rules of chance and probability. That resulted in page after page of visual language games that became viral in my mind. It was inevitable that I had a desire to express a line of furniture that was contrasting wood against synthetics. “Solid Surfacing” material is perfect for this. It is similar to this popular stuff found in kitchens and it’s made of an acrylic polymer and something called (according to the folks at Wikipedia at least) “alumina trihydrate” – which is simply a fancy way of saying that you can do almost anything with this stuff – mold it, sand it, you name it. I decided that moving from wood and clear acrylic to wood and white was a natural choice and “Martian Dice” was born. What would dice look like on another planet? What would furniture look like on another planet? The rest is visually self explanatory.
Polarity was a theme that took off as a result of the Martian Dice crap game. Wood has such bipolar visual divergence, the most pronounced being ebony against sitka spruce. Not your best combination for furniture, each being prized for its musical instrument qualities and hyper-rare. However, our Eastern mountains are replete with maple and black walnut. Not a bad ride…The line designed itself, jumping from one piece to the next almost instantaneously. It is a lot easier to channel than to labor, so I went with it. Once they were a family, I hit upon the problem of what to do with those pesky little glider pads that go under furniture. Nothing really works… wood blocks, felt, silicone discs. And then came the shoemaker’s art and the perfect solution. The little leather heel that meets the road beneath every good pair of walkers and stilettos on the planet. A never fail solution and just what a good pair of saddle shoes needs.