Ones to Watch: Kitchen and Bath

In the midst of the jam-packed, 25th-annual

International Contemporary Furniture Fair

, held at New York’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in May, we honed in on three booths that have a lot to offer for kitchen and bath applications, perhaps an unexpected focus for a fair that’s typically heavy on lighting and Brooklyn-style furniture. While these three studios have thus far been flying under the radar, we think they’re about to turn a lot of heads.

The assembly process for IKEA kitchen cabinets may be appealingly simple, but the same can’t be said about their appearance; their style—or lack thereof—could charitably be described as generic. John McDonald, founder of Semihandmade, saw an opportunity to improve on the aesthetics of the product that would cater to the store’s design-conscious clientele.

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Brendan Ravenhill’s new collection is an exercise in tensegrity, where structures are formed by materials that work either fully in compression or tension. In the Cord collection, lightbulbs are suspended in a rigid constellation, like stars in the Los Angeles sky.

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At ICFF, Pete Walker, founder of Proximity Kitchensystem, found himself in the trade-show equivalent of the eye of the storm. The object of curiosity was his elongated sink topped with layers of cutting boards and trays that Walker slid back and forth with the deftness and assurance of a Vegas blackjack dealer.

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