The Salone del Mobile is over, but i’ll keep on posting a few interesting projects discovered there.
Great Brits (part 1)

Eelko Moorer (cf. his rubber bear skin, Bird people project) had a very colourful and crazy installation for an alternative living environment for the contemporary home. In the Jungle Groove is mostly made of jungle vines (green rubber covered rope) to mount on your kitchen or bedroom ceiling and get exercise or just some fun while you wait for the roast to be cooked. You can tie some accessories to the vines: a comfortable cushioned swing, some handles to set out a track, tropical flowers in Epiphyte vases which have long rubber hair, lights, etc. Really liked that one. It’s like having a gym at home, but a decorative, fun one, not some techy treadmill you’d hide in the garage.

&made was showing a few pieces of Climated Objects, a series inspired by climate changes. The designers have embedded dual-functionality into perfectly practical and normal-looking furniture that can morph into life-saving devices. The idea for the “Either Oar”, a solid timber dining table, came after the recent spates of flash flooding. In case of flooding emergency the table transforms into a life raft, the legs and partial table tops are removed to offer themselves as oars.

Peter Marigold exhibited Make/Shift, elements that adapt to and fit into the irregularities one might find in many English homes: pokey architectural spaces, weird under-hangs, and unusable corners (via). Made from a light mouldable plastic foam, the units expand and contract and can even be used as boxes to move house.

A smaller variation can be wedged into window frames – useful for people who can’t fit shelving into walls.

He also had some new pieces that follow the principle “A shape split into pieces will always add up to 360 degrees.” It was a montage of very simple wooden crates which looked like a sculpture (actually, Peter Marigold used to be a sculptor). You could photograph them from any angle, they made a nice composition.

There was also a fantastic example of Prop use. Prop is an element that can hold box shaped objects into corners when no wall fixing is permitted. I should get one of those as i’m currently living in boxes scattered around the appartment.

All the pictures i took at Great Brits.