At ICFF: Muggleton’s Macassar Collection

Macassar Collection. Designed by Andrew Muggleton Furniture and Design.

In more ways than one, Colorado is so very far from New York. We out here in the vast terrain of the west tend to relish our wide open spaces. We embrace the horizontal, the endless expanse of landscape, the swaths of sky and dirt that confound peripheral vision.

Whereas New York—a city of skyscrapers and manufactured shade, of steel and glass, of upended horizons and upturned heads—gleans much of its imaginative aesthetic from verticality. It should be an interesting intersection of sorts, then, when Andrew Muggleton Furniture and Design plys its wares at ICFF this weekend. From the burgeoning and far-flung plains hamlet of Longmont, Colorado, Mr. Muggleton “creates and manufactures innovative, high-quality modern and contemporary furniture by bending and shaping exotic woods and blending other materials such as metal and glass to achieve the desired concept.”

All of his pieces embrace curvilinearity—the soothing circle, the exotic ellipse, the puzzling parabola—in accord with his platonic penchant for natural forms: “Everything in nature is curved, from the smooth pebbles on a beach to an egg. Sharp jagged edges do not make you feel at ease, but a field of straw bending in the wind, that is inviting. This is the reason why his work involves such beautiful subtle curves.”

Muggleton’s pieces are possessed of a dynamic Asian simplicity that suggests movement even as it evokes stillness and calm. His Macassar collection integrates bent laminates of Macassar Ebony—no mean feat since this species of wood is notoriously difficult to bend—with structural and decorative elements including glass, stainless steel, and leather upholstery.

The elements of the Macassar collection have a distinct yin-yang feel: the striated grains, which vary in color from a warm hazelnut to a rich chocolate to the carbon ebony of the name (sometimes along the same piece), are counterpoised to the luminescent steel, the creamy upholstery, and crystal clear glass in a way that emphasizes the play of opposites: curves and straight lines, light and dark, sun and shade, heaven and earth. One look at this exquisite collection and you may think you’ve landed in the former.

Design-Calendar Bloggiamo!
http://blog.design-calendar.com/