If you're looking for medicine to help fight the mid-winter blahs, and who isn't these days, the Toronto International Design Festival is one remedy worth trying out.
This gala celebration of what's new in home furnishings begins next week. The centrepiece event will be the Interior Design Show, which launches on Thursday at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
But before, during and after the big exhibition, domestic artworks by myriad Canadian and international designers will be on display in public museums, private galleries, shops and even hotel rooms across the city. (The Gladstone Hotel, on Queen Street West, will feature 11 guest-room installations and 14 public space projects by 44 artists and designers.)
Expect to see less flamboyance than consumers found in designer objects only a couple of years ago. Look for minimalism, economy of means, a fresh sensitivity to ecological and environmental concerns.
That's according to furniture designer Shaun Moore and artist Julie Nicholson, co-owners of Made, their home-furnishings shop at 867 Dundas St. W. Mr. Moore and Ms. Nicholson are also co-curators of Made At Home, a festival showcase for custom lamps and tables and carpets, chairs and much else installed in the apartment over their store.
Original works by 33 designers in 26 studios will be presented in Made At Home, which opens Thursday. Among the objects in the array: a hand-crafted credenza by Heidi Earnshaw ($6,400), a bed on a red-painted steel base by Mr. Moore (around $5,000), and numerous things for the kitchen that are much less expensive. A dining room table created from plywood and laminate by Dylan McKinnon will illustrate the plain, workaday aesthetic that Mr. Moore and Ms. Nicholson admire in contemporary design.
The savvy design shopper, Ms. Nicholson said, "is looking for something that will not expire in a year, for material textures instead of patterning. Longevity is huge." The emphasis on pattern in recent years, she believes, "came out of a good place," as a reaction against the "stripped-down" manner of late modernism. It also emerged from designers' renewed interest, especially during the early years of this century, in the exotic decoration of non-Western weaving, ceramics and so on. But, Ms. Nicholson added, all this "has led to over-patterning, too much that's flowery, brocaded." Mr. McKinnon's dining room table and objects like it embody the current trend in visual style toward "the cheap and portable and versatile."
In his own work as well, Mr. Moore told me, the emphasis is on structure and commonplace products. "I like using rough materials," he said, "pushing them into the fine." The bed he will be showing in the upstairs apartment, for example, has been fabricated from construction-grade steel components, not the more elegant and more malleable cold-rolled steel preferred by most designers of metal-framed furniture. Mr. Moore's favourite word for the stuff he likes is "imperfect," which denotes the materials that suit him perfectly well indeed.
But coming along with this new preference for the proletarian and plain is a delight in subtlety. "Pale colours are coming back," Ms. Nicholson said. "Yellow had a really good blast, but now violets and indigos are on the rise. And people have seen too much walnut, so light woods, such as maple and pale oak, are popular again."
The philosophical tilt of contemporary interior designers, the curators agree, is away from excess and toward what they call "giving thought to what is important." But, it should be noted, not every last designer is taking the New Seriousness all that seriously. Made At Home will present, for example, a chandelier cooked up by Windsor-based Tsunami Glassworks from Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. If thinking about the bottom line is so darned important, this ironic piece argues, then why not hang spreadsheets over the dining room table?
The general drift that Mr. Moore and Ms. Nicholson are observing in the contemporary design world, however, appears to be light on irony and long on sobriety. But to say for sure, we'll have to wait until the curtain goes up on Made At Home and the panoply of other displays in the Toronto International Design Festival. Even if we weren't contending with winter, that would be something to look forward to.
For the full menu of festival events, with addresses of venues, hours of operation and such, please visit tidfonline.com.