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  Pierré Yves Refalo

Feature: Furniture Fair

William Kissel

May 1, 2007

When Hugo França Stares at a giant Pequis Vinagreiros tree stump, the Brazilian engineer, designer and sculptor visualizes a chair or a chaise, not the remains of a centuries-old tree felled long ago. The oleaginous tree roots are of little use to industrial furniture makers, whose machinery can’t handle the excess oils. Even custom furniture designers typically prefer to work with less greasy native Brazilian hardwoods such as imbuia, sucupira and acai. However, França finds the gnarly, often hollowed-out Pequis trunks strangely compelling and well suited for what he calls his "furniture sculpture."

Fahrer’s Commo Traseira chair. Photography by Cláudia Pucci. (Click images to enlarge)

The Atlantic rainforest in the Brazilian state of Bahia is littered with the massive stumps, whose roots plunge into the earth as deeply as 140 to 150 feet, making widespread removal nearly impossible. Nevertheless França found his own ingenious way of dealing with the enormity of the task; he simply roughs out his designs with a clay pencil directly onto the stump and uses a chainsaw to coax out the furniture held within. França says it is sometimes possible to cut away very large chunks and transport them an hour away to his atelier, where the wood is manually sculpted into organically shaped tables, benches and sideboards. But the 54-year-old artisan, who speaks very little English, insists he does his best work on site.

França is among a pioneering new breed of Brazilian furniture makers, including Julia Krantz, Paulo Alves, Sergio Fahrer and Maurício Azeredo, whose one-of-a-kind designs don’t start on a sketch pad but instead appear to have morphed from the wood itself; the knots, curves and discolorations dictating the size, form and decorative nuances of the finished piece. Many have compared their work to that of other important 20th-century Brazilian furniture makers such as Sergio Rodrigues, Joaquim Tenreiro and José Zanine.

Fahrer employs sustainable woods for his Niq coffee table and Paso Doble chaise, which was an iF Design Products Award finalist in 2006. Top photograph by Pierré Yves Refalo. Bottom photograph by Cláudia Pucci. (Click images to enlarge.)

To wit, França’s benches are cut from oversize Pequis stumps, where the wood’s natural peaks and valleys seemingly contour to the shape of human body. Likewise Krantz, an architect who only started making furniture seven years ago, creates sinuous armchairs and free-form dining tables from stacked layers of sustainable hard woods that appear to be molded from clay. "My work doesn’t take geometric form," explains Krantz, whose hand-carved designs have been compared with that of celebrated American furniture designers Sam Maloof and George Nakashima. Whether it is a table, chaise or chair, "each piece is really free and organic because I try to stay close to the original tree," she says.

Top: The Sereia chaise by Brazilian Paulo Alves. Bottom: Alves used vertically inlaid woods to create his Cercadinho credenza. Photography by Pierré Yves Refalo. (Click images to enlarge)

Meanwhile both Paulo Alves and Sergio Fahrer, whose furniture is often linked to mid-20th-century Scandinavian design, prefer to work with layered hardwood veneers—all from sustainable sources—but in completely different ways than their forebears. Alves’ geometric tables and buffets are often modern and modular, constructed in a way that best articulates the wood’s amazing color range. Whereas Fahrer, who started out hand-making violins while a student at Musicians Institute of Technology (MIT) in Los Angeles, manipulates veneers into shapely chaises and bentwood chairs, some of which appear to balance on a single aluminum leg. Fahrer’s first, and still favorite, furniture commission was his Blues chair, which the designer laminated with 500 plastic guitar picks he melted on a stove to get the chair’s multicolored finish. More recently his sleek, curvaceous Paso Doble chaise was a finalist for last year’s iF Design Products Award, one of the most prestigious design prizes in the world. "People tell me that the technique I use is from Scandinavia and I try to explain to them that the lamination technology was actually developed in Brazil," says Fahrer, who uses Brazilian hardwoods and water-based glue, not resin, so all of his organically inspired designs are also eco-friendly.

Top: Architect Julia Krantz, also out of Brazil, put innovative spins on the Tripé chair. Bottom: The Baum table. Photography by Andres Otero. (Click images to enlarge)

"Sergio Fahrer is like the Gio Ponti of Brazil," offers Zesty Meyers, referring to the Italian midcentury modernist. Meyers, owner of the r 20th Century furniture gallery in New York, is the distributor of Hugo França’s designs in the U.S. "There have been numerous articles about new design coming out of the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India and China—because these countries have newfound wealth and their economies are growing. But when you look at culture and taste, Brazil blows all the others out of the water," he says, noting that Brazilian furniture design is on a threshold of major discovery. "The craftsmanship and connoisseurship is there," he says. "And the herd mentality doesn’t exist, so they can devote the time to create really amazing, unique pieces."

One could make a similar case for new furniture designs coming out of the Netherlands, Africa, parts of Asia and, in some cases, even America. Case in point, last December in Miami the Barry Friedman gallery of New York joined forces with Droog (pronounced Drock) Design of Amsterdam to showcase the work of new Dutch furniture makers. The collaboration, called Smart Deco, included the work of Niels van Eijk and Miriam van der Lubbe, who cooperated in the design of an elongated solid wood desk, called Godogan (the title of the Indonesian fairy tale about the frog prince), where more than half of the desktop and side featured an elaborate hand-carved scene of frogs and other creatures from the fairy tale. Equally artful as well as functional, the desk, which was handmade in Indonesia, is one of a limited edition of 20 offered today by the Dutch duo.

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