At the 2018 Shanghai Furniture Fair, New Products Held Their Standard, and Designers Thought Harder About Young Urban Consumers

Two exhibition halls, more than 300,000 square meters, nearly half an hour's drive apart. Out of more than a thousand brands, we picked the freshest and most inventive things to show you.

Shanghai's furniture design week, held every September, is the high point of the year for China's home furnishings industry. Brands large and small bring out the new products they have spent a year preparing — some as complete, tidy product lines, others as samples rushed straight off the factory floor. In something shown for the first time you can usually glimpse a trend catching on, or a question the industry is currently wrestling with.

The move toward younger design has been running for several years now. A phrase like "New Chinese Style" has faded; it survives mainly as one product style among the choices young middle-class buyers make. This year's designer products break no new ground in material, color, or form, but they hold their standard — and next to earlier years, when shape led everything, they are more restrained and more useful.

We filtered out the great mass of products made for export, made for commercial spaces, or of the kind you would see in a traditional furniture mall, and went looking instead for the freshest, most inventive single pieces and brands at the design show. You can read the shift toward younger design in most of what we found. These pieces suit small apartments: simple, modern, and still able to satisfy an owner's wish for one coherent style throughout. Now and then there is an exception — furniture designed for children to play on, say, rather than a shrunken version of an adult chair or bed.

These products are not beyond criticism. Their fault is a general one: narrowness — narrow in taste, and narrow in the audience they aim at. In the wider setting of the home furnishings industry, though, that is hardly a problem. As one designer we interviewed put it, "The mainstream of China's home furnishings industry is still manufacturers with professional production technology but almost no design capability — no concept of branding, and no concept of design management either."

This may be where the industry stays for years: polishing user needs down to the last detail, needs that cannot be separated from a middle-class setting. However much pressure people are under, making "a home of one's own" is a demand that stretches enormously but never goes away. For a brand, the more ordinary work is to find its own slice of consumers and refine the service it gives them.

Finally, here is what these practitioners at the front of domestic home design have done over the past year. Worth noting: some designer brands familiar from earlier years did not appear this time, or brought no new products.

Stella Works

In a row of by-the-book booths, the one belonging to design brand Stella Works catches a passerby's eye at once. The brand brought in Neri&Hu to design the space, using recycled hollow concrete blocks, I-beams, wood, and wire mesh to build a crisscrossing structure that divides without cutting off — half enclosed, half open, with a sense of depth that comes from the staggered heights of the framework.

The brand's founder, Yuichiro Hori, is Japanese. This time he brought five new collections: the Industry, Bund, and Tripod series, all from the hand of Neri&Hu, plus the Infinity sofa designed by the studio Space Copenhagen and the Arc sofa designed by Hallgeir Homstvedt.

ziinlife (Zhiyin)

Home design brand ziinlife (Zhiyin) has released its 2018 autumn collection, "Design Our Times."

ziinlife, which used to read as light, playful, and arty, has grown up over the past two years. The small playful touches have turned into design details that are more practical, more considerate, more thought through. Its designers are no longer content to strike an emotional chord; they solve real, present-day problems in more interesting ways.

Take its work on modular furniture — the Answer cabinet system. All the storage a home needs, whether a bookcase, display cabinet, sideboard, entryway cabinet, or a small nightstand or side table, can be assembled and stacked from these little cubes.

Or take the Little Gentleman vanity table, which fixes a flaw common to vanity tables on the market: too little storage. Its glass top also hands control to the user, who can build a personal jewelry case and put it on show.

The Flow tea table puts all its effort into a recessed channel more than a meter long, which lets water run in and out easily; the drip tray hides under the tabletop, so the surface stays clean at all times.

There is also a rotating-wood wardrobe designed around the need for light inside the cabinet, and the Mondrian bed, which saves space and lets its tilted backboard double as a backrest. Both are clever pieces of thinking.

ziinlife also brought a lively collaboration with Universal Pictures' Minions to this year's design week: the Minions edition of its Heidou sofa, whose form works the Minions into the shape, so that a comfortable sofa also wears their mischievous, lively expressions.

BENWU STUDIO

Unlike the furniture design studios that have become common at domestic furniture shows in recent years, BENWU STUDIO, which started out in New York, likes to explore new materials and new technologies, always testing the limits of what can be done and playing with experimental things.

It is still a young team, all born after 1985, but its client list already runs to well-known brands including Hermès, Vacheron Constantin, Baccarat, Swarovski, Isabel Marant, Rémy Martin, and Mini Cooper.

This time the studio was invited into the fair's new exhibition section, Creation of Creators, with four sets of work: the Kandalama folding table and chairs, whose form borrows from the tropical modernist architect Geoffrey Bawa; a low-back armchair shaped for a comfortable posture at the dinner table; and a series of ceramic containers with different silicone lids.

The showstopper, of course, is the Bear & Fish bookshelf, made to order for Hermès's petit H — an odd structure that imitates animal forms, with more than a little of the humor of Memphis design.

Mexarts (Yangmei)

Can a piano double as furniture? Mexarts (Yangmei) made the idea real at the show, launching seven concept pianos with Yamaha.

The CODA has soft, rounded wooden lines; it can serve as a work area or a source of inspiration, wrapping daily life in art that is within reach. The MONO is clean and plain — close the lid, hide the keys, and it turns at once into a straightforward home-office desk. The STUDIO comes with a desk lamp and a bookshelf, to meet more needs. The BE·SIDE has a shelf space on its left-hand side, meant for displaying objects with some everyday life in them.

Shi'er Shiman

Over the past two years the output of independent home design brand Shi'er Shiman has been consistently solid, and the new products it brought this time are no exception.

The Pianpian bed does away with the nightstand — the point being to drop the bulky nightstand nobody needs. It has various storage functions built in, and its all-in-one design leaves the bedroom more flexible space. The drawback is that it does not look especially light.

A screen made of two panels, "Catching Shadows" and "Catching Wind," gives the user two different moods through its two differently designed faces: either complete privacy and formality, or something loose, open, and casual. The Welcome Shelf, both practical and good-looking, is a reinvention of the traditional storage hook.

ziia (Zhiya)

At this show, ziia (Zhiya), the children's furniture brand under ziinlife, also made its first formal appearance.

It carries on ziinlife's inventiveness: the designers have turned the home into a playground, safe and full of warmth. The modular storage unit called "Hide and Seek" is like a small room of its own, fitted with cushions, storage compartments, a little ladder. Arranged in different combinations, its modules not only put toys and clothes away properly but give children room to play as much as they like.

The fairy-tale Cloud Castle bed can work as a trundle bed, or split into two separate beds. Used as a mid-height loft bed, the space under the "cloud" becomes a play area on its own.

umin.design

umin.design, a studio founded in Hangzhou in 2015, brought a new Orbit series, its idea taken from the paths planets trace as they circle.

The whole series strips away spare elements, using simple forms to build a relationship between product and user. The best piece is a coat rack: each sphere on it stands for a planet and slides along its orbit. It works as decoration, and it holds clothes. The half-sphere at the foot of the rack, mirrored in polished stainless steel, reads as a whole sphere.

Ling LIVEIN

"Ling LIVEIN" is a home brand under Buer Art that tries to find a balance between the usefulness of home objects and their art.

Among the new products it brought to the show is an incense tray and holder set called "Yang," which looks like a misty lake in the rain, turned to stone. Raindrops and ripples run across the tray's surface. The designer used two hard materials, a special aluminum alloy and brass, to convey lightness and softness. The raindrops are cast in brass in a range of sizes and shapes; set out together, they are fine and playful.

Zhijian

Independent design brand Zhijian also took its 2018 products to the Shanghai International Furniture Fair this time.

Its signature piece is a desk called "Bilin." The designer struggled with it for a long time at first, because he wanted to give it too much to do: reading and writing, cable routing, storage.

In the end he simplified every idea, dropped the cable box, and designed a single thin drawer, which leaves more legroom for a seated user while still holding small things — stationery, a camera, a laptop. On the side he added a detachable hanging panel for whatever magazines you are reading.

ABOVE

Zhijian also invited the young home design brand ABOVE to exhibit alongside it. Its two founders, Lu Xu and Zihan Zhang, both graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and set up the studio last year; their products have a poetic quality — the Float Clock, for instance.

Yiwai Design

Yiwai Design, founded eight years ago, has cut a path in the domestic cultural-and-creative gift business with few real rivals. From showing at 100% Design Shanghai in 2012 to repeated appearances since at the Shanghai International Furniture Fair, the Salone del Mobile in Milan, 100% Design London, Design Shanghai, and Maison&Objet in Paris, Yiwai Design has built out a layered product line, and some of its pieces have won Red Dot awards.

Its products turn up in the MoMA Design Store, the Paul Smith flagship store in London, the Hengshan Heji bookstore, and other design-led select shops.

The "Time" series of pens, in design since 2014, has sold 200,000 units so far. This time the brand brought a new one too: the Little Time portable pen, only 8.3 centimeters long when closed — small, easy to carry, held in one hand, a "pocket pen" in the full sense.

A neat separating design lets you twist out the brass grip and put it back on to reach a normal writing length of 14 cm. Made from red rosewood and ebony with good brass, it is 100% handmade by veteran woodworkers and sanded at least eight times, which gives it an old-fashioned, crafted feel.

DEFRONT

DEFRONT is a design brand founded in 2015 by designers, engineers, and social-science researchers based in London, Los Angeles, and Hangzhou. They concentrate on small objects, paying attention to how those objects feel in use, and have not yet moved into large furniture.

The LUMIA lamp is a typical example. It is built around the different needs of different young households, both what the lamp does and how it looks. Switch LUMIA on and its slowly turning ring of light lets a still room change gradually over time.

Later, the turning ring stops where it was left last time, from "memory," learning the user's habits better as it goes. There is also the CONGO cold-brew pot, which combines ice drip and cold brew in one; a light turn of the body switches easily between the two methods.

WUU

This is the third time independent furniture design brand WUU has taken part in the DOD (Design of Designers) exhibition. Unlike the previous two years, WUU built its stand this time around the idea of a theater, showing everything currently on sale plus three new pieces in a 63-square-meter hall.

Every product plays a part. WUU used eight curtains of staggered heights to give each group of products its own scene; all of them went through the long journey from first idea to final release before stepping onto this stage.

The three new products WUU brought share one thing: glass. The AXIS glass table keeps the AXIS series' fine shape and firm structure — legs machined from a single piece of good aluminum, solid and steady, matched with pale tea-colored tempered glass. The Blueprint table is likewise aluminum and tempered glass. The Fragment wall shelf carries on WUU's usual clean geometric blocks, and suits the display of small everyday objects.

Jinglu

Original solid-wood furniture brand Jinglu released a wide range of categories: dining chairs, dining tables, sofas, long tables, side cabinets, pendant lamps, coat racks, and coat mirrors.

Among them, the Zhiqu magazine cabinet joins a magazine rack to a cupboard. The cabinet below can store things or serve as a sideboard; the rack on top gives magazines a space of their own. The one problem is that not many people read printed magazines now, and as a display piece for a commercial space it feels cramped.

Feixingwu

Chen Pengfei, who studied product design at Tsinghua University, founded Feixingwu in 2012 to draw out what is beautiful in traditional craft and join it to modern technique, making tea sets that feel classical and inventive at once.

Drinking tea usually suggests the slow life, but for two years running Feixingwu has put out portable tea sets, aimed at people who spend their days rushing around out in the world. One is the Wind Chime portable tea set, which won a "China Good Design" award last year.

This time Feixingwu is out with another new product: the Shizhou pocket tea set. Its flat pot body is a break from the usual, small and thin enough to slip into a coat pocket. The hand-polished porcelain is thin and light; the whole set weighs 300 grams. The pot comes with two small cups, and an absorbent tea cloth tucked inside keeps everything clean and tidy.

The tea-set case, made of EVA foam, is very light and both protects and breathes. Its multi-layer bamboo-and-wood insulating layer is durable, insulates well, and is easy to handle.