Design Miami Basel director Ambra Medda, with Zaha Hadid's $23,000 gloss-finish polyurethane Premier Collection Aqua table from Established & Sons. The table's prototype recently sold at auction for $300,000.
And not just in furniture. Some would argue that Americans in general are becoming more discriminating. "America is a great, rich country," says Ivan Luini, president of retailer Kartell USA Inc., "but a very busy country. In the past, a certain quality of life was neglected." When he first came to the States in 1989 from Italy, Luini says, he had a tough time finding a decent cup of coffee. Now, he says, great coffee is everywhere, along with better clothes, better restaurants, and better furniture: "In recent years, Americans have learned to live better."
Credit Martha Stewart, if you must, or Michael Graves's willingness to put his talent to work on toilet-brush holders, but once Americans learned to appreciate the joy of a well-turned egg timer, it was only a hop, skip, and a jump to a George Nelson lamp. "We can lay a lot of the credit for that side of the business on the 'DWR effect,'" says Moroso's Watson, referring to Design Within Reach. "They took the mystique out of contemporary furnishings, made them easy to purchase, and made pricing transparent. That brought in a lot of consumers who had been on the fringe of interest."
While contemporary furniture has always had a larger audience in Europe, in the States those fringy consumers have now become a stampede, says Phil Robinson, senior vice president of Little Management, which produces ICFF. He remembers back in 1989, when the show had a mere 112 exhibitors. This year, they numbered 600, and drew 23,000. "Over the last four years, we've seen tremendous annual growth in the double-digit range, in both the exhibitor and attendee side," he says. "American consumers are embracing design."
We've seen this kind of adoption curve before. The same way architects such as Frank Gehry and Richard Meier have become household names, designers are finding a fan base among people who, 10 years ago, couldn't have cared less about Tord Boontje or Hella Jongerius. Just ask Brooke Stoddard, who runs a design consultancy in New York: "Once you're at a cocktail party and people outside the industry start telling you about wonderful designers, you know something's happening."
Linda Tischler (ltischler@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior writer.
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