Handmade Modern

caseycrank

Story by caseycrank

Published on May 21, 2010 in Shop

Photo by WheelersStudio

It’s Design Week here in New York and we invited Kristi Cameron, a senior editor at Metropolis magazine, to share her great taste in furniture here on the Etsy Blog. Kristi comes from a family of crafters. Nothing makes her happier than projects that pair designers with artisans in an effort to help bring new revenue to local communities. She lives in a craft-happy part of Brooklyn.

As a design editor, I see an ongoing parade of mass-produced furniture, so it’s sometimes easy to forget Modernism’s long craft history. Sure, Charles and Ray Eames performed furniture miracles with bent plywood and fiberglass, and those kinds of material experiments live on in contemporary feats like Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec’s Slow Chair. To me, minimalism is uniquely lovely when it bears the fingerprint of the human hand — think of Hans Wegner and George Nakashima, whose poetic ways with wood helped mainstream the movement. Another of my favorite Modern traditions is the clever repurposing of materials: no one did it better than Achille Castiglioni, who made an art of using off-the-shelf industrial parts to fashion his unforgettable product designs. Happily, there are plenty of examples of the handcrafted and the reinvented on Etsy — my digging even turned up a few pieces by the masters themselves!


What style of furniture are you enamored with? Tell us in the comments below.

Etsy Finds: Decor | Handmade Furniture

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