Right from the onset, Furnish seems hell-bent to make sense of deceptively superficial ideas and trends in interior architecture within a deception of its own — this book should come with a disclaimer à la Anya Hindmarch: I’m Not A Coffee Table Book!





Title: Furnish: Furniture and Interior Design for the 21st Century
Publisher: Die Gestalten Verlag
Editors: Robert Klanten, Sophie Lovell and Birga Meyer

It doesn’t help that the big, bold and simple one-word title Furnish belies the strength its fine-print subtitle carries. Neither does filling the majority of the pages with whimsical eyecandy — or thought-provoking experimental objects and spaces if I may — endorse the promise “never judge a book by its cover”.

As it turns out, Furnish is a journalist out to get the truth. The heavyweight 272-page tome explores every nook and cranny in the furnishings industry, investigating negative perceptions and in the process, turns conflicts into associations, before culminating into illuminatingly positive conclusions.

Casting a curious eye into the world of interior art, Furnish emerges with deep insights and refreshing new answers to age-old conundrums. Although the book documents the driving forces of furnishing, its observations are also relevant to the design industry on the whole.

In every discrete discipline under the vast design umbrella, there exists a fear that over-reliance on technology will kill the design profession. However, far from rendering designers, artists and craftspeople redundant, Furnish believes that access to affordable tools — sophisticated applications with extensive capabilities — has given rise to experimentation. In turn, this endows design practitioners greater creativity prowess and the dexterity to cross genres, broadening fields of activity and widening the capacity for collaboration, and break out of the traditional confines of the disciplines they trained or practiced in.

Originally the domain of interior designers and architects, design practitioners of other disciplines seem to have discovered a new channel of creative expression through furniture, creating works simply to address issues, explore concepts or just express their thoughts. Sometimes, these works have little or even nothing to do with commercial value or utilitarian functionality.

So what has been made redundant? The role of a designer certainly does not seem to be eroded; in fact, it looks strengthened. Instead of clipping their wings, technology has set designers free on the technology-fuelled road of re-discovering new creative horizons. On the other hand, conventional labels and categories — the borders and means of identification between creative disciplines — seem shallow and of no use in an industry-wide experience.

As Furnish weaves a thread through these influential events, it unties the little knots of doubts and fears to conclude in somewhat Zen simplicity that a line is still a line; a designer is still a designer.

A line is still a line whether you choose to scrawl it with a pencil or draw it with the computer mouse. Whether the line turns left or right, dips into a spiral or shoots up to a zigzag, it is still a line. New advances in technologies and materials do not eat away the designer’s role or oxidize the definition of furniture. Instead, both grow stronger with purpose.

As in the wake of every new phenomenon, rules get re-written, and might even get abolished, in the rush to embrace new liberating advances in technologies and materials. But Furnish is a reminder to keep the faith that there is always order in chaos. Design is after all a professional discipline — even without the presence of rules, the laws of physics still apply.

If it takes two hands to clap, then hybridization and individualism are two relatives of a curious paradox. How do these remixing, mutating, grafting, splitting and manipulating, redefines domestic living, allow the designer to get personal with the user, produce works of high-value art and still turn the entire design industry on its head?

As always, Die Gestalten Verlag has done a marvelous job keeping their ears to the ground to stay on the pulse of action in the design industry. Designer-turned-publisher Robert Klanten once said: “If I thought something remarkable was going to take off in 2007 (which I think will happen), I will be careful to keep it to myself until the right moment.”

He certainly has a knack for launching momentous books at a meaningful time (Furnish was released, sizzling hot off the presses, this year), all never a-lick-and-a-promise effort. And if his words are to be taken seriously, “space” and “personal” are the buzzwords of the future.














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