Walk Through M&O Asia at Singapore Design Week and Meet These Brands With Ideas

M&O Asia may be a miniature M&O Paris, but it still has plenty of good design and home decor brands with ideas.

Another highlight of Singapore Design Week 2016 was Maison&Object Asia, the Asian edition of Maison&Object Paris, Europe's well-known design fair. Like M&O Paris, it centers on contemporary design, with exhibits spanning the whole of home decor: furniture, lighting, wall decor, bath and kitchen, decorative materials and more.

With the Asian market growing and the region's hotel and restaurant industries highly developed, M&O expanded into Asia in 2013, bringing many of its Paris exhibitors to Singapore. Some exhibitors, and even the organizers, see M&O Asia as a condensed or miniature version of the original, yet its standard is still well above the furniture fairs in China and Southeast Asia that we usually attend (though those are more trade-oriented). M&O Paris is dominated by European brands; M&O Asia pays clear attention to local ones, and about 30% of its brands are Asian. If the Paris fair is both an exhibition and a buying platform, the Singapore fair may put more weight on the exhibits themselves.

When M&O Paris took place in February, QDaily's "Great Design" column ran a feature picking out the products worth watching. Unfortunately, many of them did not make it to Singapore. Still, we found plenty of good design at M&O Asia, and the products are a good way to get to know these brands with ideas.

Bull&Stein

Next to the other, carefully designed booths, the German brand Bull&Stein's booth was fairly simple, built around how pieces of different sizes were displayed. Yet it did not look "plain" at all, because the brand's main products are large installations that catch the eye on their own. Bull&Stein worked with the Brazilian designer Lisa Pappon on a series of fruit installations. You read that right: fruit made of ceramic, copper and other materials, with distinctive colors, textures or patterns, and far larger than the real thing. Pappon believes fruit can also express emotions, desires and ideas, and that is why she made these works.

Lisa Pappon is a friend of Marcus Bull, Bull&Stein's founder and CEO, and the two began working together more than ten years ago, when the brand was founded. Bull came to Singapore in person this time. He told us their customers are mainly property developers and people in the restaurant business. Picture installations this colorful suddenly appearing in the atrium of a mixed-use building: they would add some fun and life.

Marcus Bull said their products are now sold on every continent. China is still a very new market for them, but they already have a distributor there and hope to expand. This September they will also come to the Shanghai international furniture fair. "We want the whole booth to be impressive, and we'll show a very big apple," he said, sketching the size of the piece in the air for us.

Schema

M&O has always had plenty of standout lighting, much of it distinctive in design and finely made. Even so, the Philippine home decor brand Schema stood out at this show, and its large pendant lamps (part lantern, part cloud) stopped many visitors in their tracks.

The lamps are all made of different kinds of metal wire, each hand-woven by the company's in-house designers, and they look very fine. Besides lighting, the brand makes chairs, tabletop objects and more in the same style. Its website spells out its philosophy: furniture should be decorative as well as functional, and it is furniture that gives every home and every space its personality and life.

The Rug Maker

The booth of the Singapore rug brand The Rug Maker felt full of nature, which may sound odd given how heavy we usually imagine rugs to be. Many white paper cutouts hung above the booth like a flock of birds taking off; their patterns are in fact different kinds of leaves and other natural forms. On the display table below lay neat rows of leaves and petals in every color, all of them species native to Singapore.

In the large rugs hanging on the wall, you can faintly pick out the colors from the display table. The rugs are richly layered in pattern, color and the texture you feel under your hand, and they have clearly been specially treated. Judy Heng, a designer at The Rug Maker, told us the patterns and colors are inspired by natural things commonly found in Singapore. People take these things for granted, she said, but they offer new options and ideas for products. The brown rug on display, for example, was inspired by tree bark, while the pale pink rug on the far right came from a leaf whose edge looks exactly like that.

The Rug Maker also offers custom work; customers with special needs or a particular pattern in mind can bring them to the design team. Asked about the hardest project she had done, Heng said it was abstract patterns or abstract paintings. They need not be rendered in fine detail, but grasping the concept behind them is the hardest part.

The Bubble Baby Bed

The cutest exhibit at the show was The Bubble Baby Bed, a crib shaped like half a bubble. Nearly every woman who walked past stopped and said, "Oh, how adorable!"

The little bed looks like a two-layer transparent bubble and is made mainly of acrylic. Taken apart, it consists of an inner "baby basin," lined with a mattress and bedding, where the baby can sleep or play, and an outer layer that is a bigger, rounder bubble. The crib can be rocked gently, but it quickly steadies itself.

Its designer also came to M&O Asia. She said the idea came from hospital baby cots: transparent, safe and easy to clean. A baby can sleep comfortably inside, and parents can see clearly how the child is sleeping. Once the child outgrows the crib, the bubble can become a place to store toys or a small play space.

Henry Dean

"Is it because they are handmade that people always want to touch them?" So asks Henry Dean, a Belgian family business that mainly makes glassware, on its website. It is phrased as a question, but it sums up well how the products strike (prospective) customers. The glassware comes in rich, layered colors and looks smooth and glossy, and you want to reach out and touch it.

The person running the Henry Dean booth told QDaily that every piece is made of hand-blown glass, mostly recycled, usually from the window panes of high-rise buildings. That is an interesting detail in itself.

Marunao

Chinese designers who make small everyday objects and handicrafts might look to the Japanese brand Marunao. Its tableware and small wooden goods are elegant and refined, staying true to tradition while giving very traditional products a touch of modernity. Everything is made by hand.

Marunao was founded in 1939 in Sanjo, Japan, originally to carve fine decorations for local shrines, and gradually moved into tableware and other small wooden products. Its best seller is wooden chopsticks; with comfort in the hand in mind, it developed octagonal and even sixteen-sided pairs. Some come in bright colors and plaid patterns that suddenly make chopsticks look lively (without looking as dated as the floral-print chopsticks we often see). Besides chopsticks, it also designs other tableware, such as teacups and coasters.

Uashmama

Fashion accessory brands sometimes look to materials for a way into the market, like Freitag, which we have covered before and which makes bags from truck tarpaulins. This M&O Asia also had a brand making bags from an unusual material: Uashmama, from Australia, which uses paper (it calls it "washable paper").

The bags are covered in creases, feel rather stiff and wear well, so your first thought would never be that they are made of paper. In fact the process is much like that for leather: the material is stretched and dried to make it tougher and washable. The person running the Uashmama booth explained that the paper is made from a special fiber that the company cultivates and grows itself. Once the paper and other materials are ready, the pieces are designed and cut, then dyed in different colors.

NI Parasol by Foxcat Design

The parasol designed by the Hong Kong brand Foxcat Design has won industrial design awards such as the iF and Red Dot. As an outdoor sunshade, it is far more high-tech than the parasols we remember: it glows. Light sources are built into the ribs, and the handle carries a touch switch and a dimmer. Its best feature is that it lights a space well when switched on, yet with the light off it looks much like an ordinary umbrella.

The person running the Foxcat Design booth told us the team had a background in bathroom products and knew waterproof materials well. They also wanted people to be able to enjoy light outdoors at night, so they worked out how to build lighting into an umbrella. Buyers are mostly high-end restaurants and resorts, along with wealthy private clients, mainly from the United States and Australia.

Lekker Architects

In one corner of the M&O Asia hall stood a handsome gold-and-white bench with armrests, designed by the local architecture studio Lekker Architects (which also won this edition's Rising Star award). The bench is part of a public seating series Lekker designed for Singapore's newly opened National Gallery, whose building links two older ones, the former City Hall and Supreme Court. The gallery commissioned Lekker to "upgrade and remodel" the traditional furniture the buildings used in the 1950s. The resulting series keeps the elegance of the old furniture while suiting contemporary taste.

Andre Fu Living by Andre Fu

Every year, the Designer of the Year award at Maison & Object Paris draws close attention. M&O has brought the award to Asia too; last year it went to Neri&Hu. This year, M&O Asia's Designer of the Year went to the Hong Kong architect and interior designer Andre Fu.

Andre Fu was born in Hong Kong and went to school in Britain at a young age. He graduated in architecture from the University of Cambridge in 2000 and set up his own studio the same year. He has designed a string of high-end hotels and restaurants, including Four Seasons hotels, The Upper House in Hong Kong and the Fullerton Bay Hotel in Singapore. What runs through them may be open, airy space planning and an overall refinement and luxury that is at the same time very restrained.

Last year, Fu launched his own home brand, "André Fu Living," and has made home products with the publisher Assouline, the carpet maker Tai Ping and several other brands. This year M&O gave him a dedicated area, its walls lined with photographs of his interiors and its center showing the products he designed, such as bath fittings, perfume packaging, rugs and books, which carry over the refined style of his interior work.

Image sources: photographed on site, Bubblebabybed, Maison & Object Official Facebook, Schemaproducts, BullStein, Marunao1939, Busyboo, AFSO, indesignlive