Washington, D.C. isn't exactly a hotbed for new design. But that began to change this winter, with the opening of Industry Gallery--one the only galleries in the country that exclusively exhibits contemporary design. On Saturday, the gallery opened a new exhibition, Hands On, featuring the work of Dutch designers Tejo Remy and René Veenhuizen, which runs through May 8. Fast Company spoke with the duo, as well as the gallery's founder, Craig Appelbaum, about the works on display and on Appelbaum's big gamble.

Tejo Remy (left) and René Veenhuizen (right).

Remy was part of the generation that launched contemporary Dutch design: Two of his works for Dutch furniture maker Droog--the Rag Chair and his chest of drawers--were immediately hailed as masterpieces. Remy first designed these in 1991, when he was just a student. Go-go 80's consumerism was newly crushed under the early 1990s recession. "These pieces were about rebuilding a paradise, using what we already had at hand." That type of whimsical rigor still typifies Dutch design--as well as the work Remy's produced with his design partner, René Veenhuizen.

As Veenhuizen expains, the Accidental Carpet was originally created for a medical center for epileptics. "Everything inside was solid and hard," he says. "They build a whole building, but nothing related to the patients themselves." Their idea was to create a little slice of home: A carpet that invited laying...

...the carpet itself is made from a classic symbol of homey comfort: Old woolen blankets, which the designers scavenged themselves. These were then folding into strips and sew together, to create a totally original form, with a familiar feel.

The Tennis Ball bench, originally commissioned for Rotterdam's modern-art museum, is a metaphor for the collection itself. "The museum grew like an organism, from one object into hundreds of thousands," says Veenhuizen. So they created a bench that grows from a single "cell." For that, they chose a tennis ball--because it happens to be one of the only tiny items out there that comes already upholstered, just like furniture.

Tasked with designing a bench system for a school Remy and Veenhuizen created a club-house with built-in furniture.

Eventually, the benches took a modest form, but the complex shape allows all kinds of seating arrangements.

Nature--from branches to leaves--has been the origin of design's decorative motifs, for thousands of years. You can see it in everything from Ming vases from 1435 to Art Nouveau chairs from the 1895. For the Leaf bench, Remy and Veenhuizen sought to elevate a decorative motif into the very structure of an entire piece.

The duo gathered leaves themselves, placed them on a photo scanner, and eventually produced a design cut into sheets of aluminum. Veenhuizen likens the effect to the reverse of the shadows you'd get on a picnic blanket, under a tree on an idyllic afternoon.

Their concrete series of chairs and benches began with a thought-experiment about concrete itself. It surrounds us, but usually we're never really conscious of its almost miraculous transformation from liquid to solid.

Typically, drying concrete exerts pressure on its mold. But molds are usually stiff to compensate. The duo flouted that by placing liquid concrete into flexible molds--thus allowing the concrete to express the physical transformation it undergoes. Thus, the furniture line is a physical manifestation of the material's essence, which you'd ordinarily never see.

The Bamboo Chair, made of elegantly bend sheets of bamboo.

Craig Appelbaum, the founder of Industry Gallery, is a tax-lawyer by day. But a decade ago, he stumbled on high-design by accident--on eBay. "I saw this chair that was way more expensive than anything else," says Appelbaum. "I lost the bid." Researching more, he discovered it was by Ron Arad--and he then discovered a new world of design. "I always thought 'contemporary' meant Eames and the 1950s." He started going to auctions, and quickly realized that there's almost no where in America dedicated to the works he was buying--and definitely no where outside of New York, San Francisco, and LA. Is there a market for this stuff in D.C.?