Moooi Takes Manhattan with Two New Products and a Refreshed Showroom
When Moooi celebrates two new furniture launches during NYCxDesign, the designs won’t be the only things that are new for the Dutch design brand.
“We’ve never done novelties in New York before,” Moooi cofounder Marcel Wanders told AD PRO in the days before the unveiling of Atelier Van Lieshout's Liberty table, Kranen/Gille's Plant chandelier, and the brand’s newly renovated showroom, which opened its doors this weekend. The brand will also take part in WantedDesign Manhattan, which runs from Saturday, May 18, through Tuesday, May 21, where it will display the BFF sofa, a Wanders design nominated in the residential sofa category at the NYCxDesign Awards.
The new designs include Atelier Van Lieshout's Liberty table, a rugged yet elegant American chestnut piece that extends artist Joep Van Lieshout’s New Tribal Labyrinth series while referencing, the designer has said, the Henry David Thoreau axiom, “Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.” Wanders goes as far to describe the piece as “an architectural masterpiece . . . so different and cool.”
Kranen/Gille's Plant chandelier, meanwhile, is the latest outgrowth of Plant, a project designers Jos Kranen and Johannes Gille have been working on for years. When it came time to create Plant’s most complicated iteration yet, a chandelier, the designers say they knew Moooi was the best brand to help realize their vision. The result, the designers say is, “an industrial manufactured product, mimicking growth as it happens in nature,” one that take the form of a plant “sprouting from the ceiling and splitting into six golden branches each holding a frosted dome of light.”
The collaborations represent the wider Moooi “agenda,” Wanders says, of giving designers a space to express themselves. “We are a design brand; we’re not a styling company. A lot of companies make things that sit perfectly together. We produce objects that really are made by a designer,” he says. “We don’t ask designers what they can do for us; we ask them, ‘What do you really want to realize?’”
The secret is finding “people who have their own opinion,” Wanders says. “Designers don’t only think about objects and products; they think about how we as a culture go forward.”
The new designs represent how Moooi is looking toward the future as well, as each of the pieces will each carry The Button, the brand’s digital certificate of authenticity. (“It’s almost like blockchain,” says Moooi CEO Robin Bevins.)
Perhaps even more innovative from an industry-wide perspective is the fact that the pieces will be available worldwide the moment they launch in New York, a move that’s part of the More Moooi Moments initiative, a strategy that’s seen the brand trade annual collection previews for see-now-buy-now global product launches throughout the year.
“There are so many paradoxes in the design industry. In one way, it’s super future-forward, and on the other it’s super traditional,” Bevers says, referencing the conventional approach of introducing new collections once a year. “I’ve always wondered why the big design companies save all their ideas, novelties, and new concepts for Salone del Mobile in April, when they’re going to spend a whole year bringing things to market.”
That’s why Moooi is setting out to try something new. And with the growing influence of design weeks around the world, who knows—maybe the rest of the business will join them.
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
