03:47 - Source: CNN
NYCxDesign 2017: The highlights

Editor’s Note: Max Fraser is a design expert, curator and special correspondent for CNN Style.

New York CNN  — 

Now in its fifth year, NYCxDesign has firmly established itself as a must-do on the design circuit, offering up three whole weeks of design-related exhibitions, events, installations, talks and parties right across city.

On my last day, I took in a few of the key shows with CNN Style, exploring the large, trade-focused events like Wanted Design, the talent-magnet that is Site Unseen Offsite, as well as smaller exhibitions within permanent design stores Design Within Reach and The Future Perfect.

Sabine Marcelis
"Many of the designers we're interested in right now are exploring the intersection of light, color, and other materials, and Australian-born, Rotterdam-based Sabine Marcelis is at the top of that list. She works primarily in neon and resin, often combining the two to create tinted shapes that seem to glow from within. She also creates resin cubes in candy colors that often pop up in Celine boutiques all over the world. She recently made her first chair -- a V-shaped slice of tempered steel cantilevered precariously in one of those cubes -- that makes us very excited to see where she goes next."
John Hogan
Since co-founding their online magazine in 2009, Monica Khemsurov and Jill Singer have become trusted tastemakers who are credited with helping to reposition New York on the design circuit. Scroll through the gallery to see the work of some of the most exciting designers working today.

The work in the photo above is by Seattle-based designer John Hogan.
Soft Baroque
"Soft Baroque is the London-based partnership of an Australian-born furniture designer, Nicholas Gardner, and a Slovenian-born graphic designer Sasa Stucin -- and their furniture is often a very clear result of that digital and physical mix. One collection of squiggly furniture pieces was based on lines made by a Photoshop brush tool; another was covered in chroma-key blue flocking, onto which they projected a series of textural images. There's a conceptual underpinning to all of their work, and they're constantly pushing the boundaries of what furniture can and should look like."
Deon Rubi x Jonathan Gonzalez
"Miami designer Lucila Garcia De Onrubia works under the name Deon Rubi, primarily as a jewelry designer. But we're so crazy about her sculptural furniture, much of which she designs in collaboration with the Miami architect Jonathan Gonzalez, that we invited the pair to take not just one booth at our Offsite show but two — so they could show both a new fiberglass furniture collection and an old one made from pastel-dyed wood, acrylic slabs, and steel tubes. We're still a bit in shock that Onrubia and Gonzalez aren't better known yet, and we hope to help rectify that."
Guillermo Santono
"The Spanish architect Guillermo Santoma is another one who blew up our Instagram last year -- his freewheeling, super-expressive furniture and whimsical color-blocked interiors are often unexpected, and always total eye candy. Guillermo shows with Copenhagen's Etage Projects, our favorite design gallery, and we predict that the more funding and attention his work receives the crazier -- and more brilliant -- it's going to get. And it's going to happen very quickly, very soon."
Germans Ermics
"Separately, ombre and glass are both huge trends in design. But somehow Latvian-born, Amsterdam-based designer Germans Ermics combines the two to make something entirely fresh and beautiful — gradient mirrors, ombre shelves, and Kuramata-inspired chairs that darken from blue to the deepest purple. We've been tracking him for two years, and he's always surprising us."
Bower
"Brooklyn-based Bower is partners Danny Giannella, Tammer Hijazi, and Jeffrey Renz, whose signature products are a series of geometric mirrors in tinted glass and a collection of mixed material, geometric tables. Their work is playful but sophisticated; they often play with 'opticality' and perception in their work. A collection they created for us at Collective Design last year -- which included everything from an indoor fountain that would be at home in any contemporary interior to an alabaster prayer stool -- shows what they can create when the sky is the limit."
John Hogan
"A Seattle-based glass artist, John Hogan is often the common thread in swoon-worthy, glass-based collaborations with other designers -- he's worked with other emerging talents including Iacoli & McAllister, Ladies & Gentlemen, Grain and Erich Ginder, among others. But he's also an incredible artist in his own right, always playing with the effect of color and texture on glass. He's recently begun dabbling in larger-scale works -- the coffee table itself rather than the piece to sit upon it -- and he released a 70s-inspired light with Roll & Hill we're definitely wanting for our own homes."
Ben & Aja Blanc
"Providence-based Ben & Aja Blanc showed with Sight Unseen Offsite in 2015, and their first big product became an instant classic -- who knew so many people were itching for a half-moon shaped mirror with hairy, fringelike bangs? Aja's background is in fine art and Ben's is in furniture. Together they make consistently beautiful, sculptural work that's on-trend but somehow timeless. They're showing with us this year at Offsite and preparing for a big solo show in the fall with a major New York design player, which is bound to be a huge turning point for them in terms of visibility."
Brian Thoreen
"Brian Thoreen is another designer whose career we helped launch. We brought him to our Sight Unseen showcase at the 2015 Collective Design fair to launch the debut line of his furniture studio, and since then his career has taken off under the wing of Patrick Parrish Gallery, who recently gave him a solo show in New York -- it featured stone, glass, and metal works that were held together by gravity rather than adhesives or fasteners. Brian's does understated luxury particularly well, and he always seems to hit a nice balance between form and concept."
Philippe Malouin
"London's Philippe Malouin is one of those designers whose aesthetic -- particularly his use of shapes and materials -- is so totally on point that almost every single thing he does makes us swoon, from his ultra-fat lounge chair for Established & Sons to his compressed and carved MDF accessories to the slightly off-kilter wood table he designed this year for Resident. All of his work is one step away from being really simple, but always the best step. We're excited to see the series of experimental screens he's launching with Hem during New York Design Week, as well as the interiors he's started doing more and more of lately."
Christopher Stuart
"We're proud to say that we were the ones who pretty much discovered Indiana-based designer Christopher Stuart — we stumbled on his work in some obscure corner of the web and invited him to exhibit at Offsite back in 2015, which is where David Alhadeff from The Future Perfect found him. At the time he was making gorgeous steel benches in intriguing shapes; since then he's upped his game considerably with a line of seats and tables that incorporate software errors into their forms. It was one of the best things we saw last year."
Pedro Paulo Venzon
"Pedro Paulo Venzon is the Brazilian furniture designer whose super-lithe metal chairs, tables, and lights practically broke our Instagram back when we proclaimed him "The hip new face of Brazilian design" on Sight Unseen nearly a year and a half ago. He since went on to release a series of chairs with the tastemaking New York design store Matter earlier this year, and it's only a matter of time before (if geography and his government permit) his work is everywhere."
Masiar Pasquali
"We met -- and featured on Sight Unseen -- Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin of Formafantasma way back in 2009, when they were unknown and about to graduate from the Design Academy in Eindhoven, and we're amazed at how far they've come. Their projects have always been extremely ambitious and well thought out, and it's gained them so much attention that this year they were able to fill a massive exhibition space in Milan with their lighting experiments, including their first commercial products for FLOS. They're well on their way to being household names, or at least as close to it as you can get while still making intellectually driven work."
Ladies & Gentleman
"We've been writing about or exhibiting Ladies & Gentlemen's work since their debut in 2012 -- a collection of chairs and lights in leather, copper, and brass whose aesthetic was a harbinger of the warm minimalism we've been seeing over the past few years. All of their work stems from an exploration of basic shapes and elemental materials, as well as a fascination with balance, and each outing is more sophisticated than the last. They've recently been dipping a toe into the idea of bringing their aesthetic to a whole interiors experience, and we hope there's more of that to come."

I’ve been visiting New York City during its design week in May for more than fifteen years. Recently, I’ve certainly noticed an increase in the energy levels and confidence coming from the US designers in particular. For a long time, it seemed they were living in the shadow of their great 20th century predecessors like Charles and Ray Eames, and cowering under the might of their European peers – it’s no longer the case.

The American designers seem to have embraced an entrepreneurial approach to their practice, designing and producing their own pieces and launching and selling them directly into the market with confidence. It’s exciting to watch.