grain

SLIDESHOW: New and recent work by Seattle furniture and home decor designers. Here, a design from Grain called Spool. The crazily patterned build-it-yourself modular room divider, table base, or whatever can be assembled to suit your needs. The supercool part: Spool is "made of upcycled paper thread spools removed from the Los Angeles apparel industry’s waste stream," say the Bainbridge Island-based industrial inventors. Spool kits include 240 spools and 520 connectors and go for $199.

This weekend, as we pray for sun, Seattle designers from Grain, Greypants, urbancase, and Iacoli & McAlister are shaking hands, answering questions, and negotiating orders for supersmart, good-looking home design and lifestyle pieces in New York.

The International Contemporary Furniture Fair is probably the biggest deal of it’s kind. Imagine stylish, discerning shopkeepers, buyers, magazine editors, and otherwise influential folks strolling lanes of vendor booths scouting for the Next Big Things in useful but beautiful goods.

Don’t you love the idea of folks in Brooklyn, Paris, Barcelona, and Sydney turning over a meticulously crafted, artful something-or-other and discovering the words made in Seattle on the back?

We can’t take you (or ourselves) to New York at the moment, but our slideshow gets you a peek at what the local innovators will be showing off.

Oh and btw, Grain designers tell us that, "During New York Design Week, our work can also be found at American Design Club’s ‘Use Me’ and Sight Unseen’s pop-up shop from May 13 to 16 at The American Design Building as part of Noho Next." Tell your New York friends to go check them out.