The Root Table, 68 x 68 x 22.25 inches, inquire for pricing
Whatever happened to the good ol’ days when you saw something you liked and went into a store to learn more about it or called to inquire? It seems the transition to an online culture is inevitable for a business, and so we have decided to strike out into the mix of social networking to spread the word about the wild work we do. If you are on Facebook, you can become a fan of John Houshmand Design on our fan page. If you are on Twitter, you can follow the latest observations and news from our team. Or if you are Linked In, please come link to us. Spread the word and encourage your friends and colleagues to delve into any or all of our interfaces because each pulses in a different manner. Or…if you like to do it the old fashioned way, please call us at 212.965.1238 or email us atinfo@johnhoushmand.com. We look forward to meeting you on line!
It will not surprise anyone to learn that John Houshmand studied sculpture with Irwin Hauer at Yale in his undergraduate days. His furniture design reflects qualities he learned with this tutelage, and John continues to pursue making sculpture inspired by his roots. His sculptures are created to evoke a resonance within the viewer’s mind and body. Each piece’s essence is a primordial form with a specific psycho-emotional power. These forms are then executed within a material selection that is at the same time sensual, natural, and insistent. A specific signature is added to each that might be the cast hand of the artist’s own, or the addition of a tiny tree as an origination device.
The intention is to create an experience of creation and bind it to the unique personal act of self-remembering. What is given is essential form or template, manifestation into the world, and then personalization. The forms are actually geometries of the spirit, melodies of the invisible, vectors of the primordial. Real forms that have real force and power. The arch, the spiral-helix, the ladder, the tree, and the bow are all archetypical forms, each with an eternal and insistent imperative.
The seed becomes the tree becomes the seed becomes the tree. As above, so below; as within, so without.
The work is currently on view at hous projects gallery until June 18 so run, do not walk, over and discover a new dimension of John Houshmand.
Ladies and gentlemen of the design world all know the beacon of the spring season is the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York. The 2009 edition of ICFF will run Friday, May 16 – Tuesday, May 19 and here at John Houshmand we will be welcoming all parties to a cocktail hour on the evening of Monday, May 18 from 6 to 8 pm.
What a better way to cap off a weekend choc full of inspiring ideas, networking and fighting the crowds like an aisle salmon than to join us to relax with a glass of wine? You will also be able to mingle with brand new pieces we are ushering in exclusively for the soiree. Look for our acrylic line, Clearly Functional, as well as a preview to the Saddle Shoe Collection and fresh off the shopbot stellar dining tables. Our trademark No. 0094 Starfire Open Glass Low Table with Black Walnut Slabs will also be making an appearance and she likes attention so be sure to say hello!
Weighing in at a ton…in this corner…the White Brick Club Chair.
Blurring the line between outdoor and indoor furniture to the hilt, the club chair was designed in a continuation of John Houshmand’s material-led style. Moreover, it was also conceived in reaction to a flood of live-edge wood design that hit the market a few years after John resurrected the concept. In-house the line was deemed…The Retaliation Collection! (More on this in a future post…)
Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, John envisioned the design after eyeing a literal pile of bricks that had been cast aside from an installation at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York. Since John and Mary have been cohorts through his building her home as well as galleries, she was pleased to see them taken into his hands for a rebirth.
Striking in its physical presence, many a visitor to the showroom has skeptically sat down only to become awash in shock and awe at its comfortable grip. There is even a certain individual who attends all our openings and events who beelines with a glass of wine in hand to relax in its embrace and remains there for the duration of the party like a king holding court.
Do note: there is a sly inclusion of wood amongst the rank and file bricks. Perfectly placed on the lower right side, a solitary Black Walnut brick enters the mix to bear the chair’s style and edition number as well as John’s signature. Like all of our pieces, each work created is an individual and marked as such for provenance and posterity. And like all of our pieces, we love wood just a little too much to see it a total absence of it in any one of our designs.
Perfect for an urban garden or the living room, the White Brick Club Chair is solid as a rock.
At John Houshmand, we believe in getting out of the office – way out. That’s why, in addition to our New York showroom in SOHO, and our state-of-the-art workshop in the Catskills of upstate, we also have a marvelous hideout called Tierra Adentro in Mexico. Located just seven miles north of the famous artist enclave of San Miguel de Allende, the house was designed by architect David Howell and it’s one of our favorite places to dream-up new furniture designs. The house is always available for rent when we are not using it. You can find out more about it here.
The Nobu project was originated in the design world of the Rockwell Group, with an intention to bring the beauty and soul of wood into this very specific urban space. Of course the influence of Japanese aesthetics and their affection for wood was a paramount piece of the paradigm. From the slab wood and glass door nestled in a portal of black walnut “timbers,” to the natural edge wood bars and their complement of back-lit onyx panels, the entire project required a sculptor’s hand on the wood combined with an extraordinary degree of technical ability never before attempted.
The timbers – large and small – had to actually be made as hollow assemblies owing to the need to place lighting, air conditioning, and wiring within. End-grain pieces ranging in size from 6″x6″ to 24″ x 36″ were cut and super dried by microwave, and then laminated onto stable substrates to eliminate cracking and degrade failure. These end grain plugs were then deftly mounted in the hollow “timbers” which were then assembled into portals and towers. The glass door was made by radically reinventing the door-making process. We started by scuttling the engineers’ design of a steel frame with glass and slab wood sections affixed into the assembly.
Instead, a 4′ x 9′ glass door was made with extreme capacity hardware. A magnificent slab of black walnut was peeled in half, and the inside face of each half was scored lengthwise in consecutive slots or “kerfs” that went 3/4″ through the 1″ thickness, leaving the outer faces virgin. These kerfs were then filled with structural silicone and the entire inner face of each slab was buttered with the silicone as well, and the two slabs were clamped together with the glass in between. The kerfing eliminated any “memory” and reaction stresses the slab might have introduced, in effect neutering it so it would act as a passive decorative skin.
The project grew aesthetically and technically, resulting in a visual tour de force that could not have been accomplished without these radical interventions.
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.
The OneTree Project was born out of an extraordinary sequence of events…a meeting between Eric Poncon and John Houshmand in New York where they found their paths in a curious parallel (and a promise to “do something exciting together someday…”), the devastation of 3 million acres of forest lands in northeast Nicaragua’s indigenous frontier region (RAAN), Poncon’s appreciation for the work at JOHNHOUSHMAND, and our mutual love for great design, natural materials, and a philosophically sound interface with reality. And we do mean reality. Nothing unreal about sending a lawyer into the Nicaraguan frontier to search titles for 24,000 acres of small property holdings, negotiating fair purchase of these lands, obtaining IFC assistance, setting up extraction teams and a 12,000 board feet per day sawmill facility, reforestation programs and much, much, more…
Poncon, with architect and designer Matthew Falkiner (Morgan’s Rock eco-hotel, Simplamente Madera furniture company, and more…) invited Houshmand down to the frontier to see firsthand the devastation and the operations, and plan a series of joint ventures which will include projects such as: The “Handshake Collection” of extraordinary pieces designed and fabricated in our New York facilities using amazing wood elements from the immense salvage operation; the “Deep Roots Collection,” designed by Houshmand and Falkiner and made in Nicaragua comprising high design values, affordability, and increasing the training and viability of the local milling and artisan woodworkers; the “OneTree Collection,” a project to put pieces of two giant trees in the hands of 10 Nicaraguan and American artists respectively, and the works to travel as bonding collections. Another germinating concept is another eco-hotel with cabanas designed by guest architects/designers, each getting one tree for their creation. Other projects include value added use of the wood such as wall treatments, prefab housing, gluelam beams, countertops, even balsa surfboards… All FSC certified, all returning profits to reforestation, social, and educational projects, some of which are already falling into place. More to come! There is much more to come as well as an audio slideshow of my most recent trip to the jungles of Nicaragua.
The OneTree Project was born out of an extraordinary sequence of events…a meeting between