High Point: Now It’s Day 3

My third day at High Point was jam-packed with scheduled items. First up was a breakfast for the Style Spotters to talk about the items that they’d selected as the special pieces that had caught their eyes.

Arranger and PR Gal extraordinaire, Chemmine Taylor-Smith was the moderator of this and the other panel events that I attended. Each of the Style-Spotters had made 20 selections and added them to a special Pinterest page, where the piece with the most likes and re-pins would win its pinner a place on the dais next year.

From the breakfast, I zipped across the square to meet up with the PR person for Austin-based Four Hands. I like their sustainability creed and how they repurpose items into completely different purposes. But they also have new lines, like these brilliant Moroccan lamps.

What is such fun about attending the Market is seeing how all of the showrooms interpret the same pieces – chairs, tables, sofas, beds, etc.

This chair has great vintage lines, while making use of one of the most current trends – men’s suiting fabrics as upholstery fabric. I love the grey pinstripes.

While some of the pieces were just too massive for my wee farmhouse, the execution of them was a lot of fun!I saw other iterations of this elongated wing chair a few other places and in myriad fabrics and leathers and finishes.

This was a terrific piece – I love the three dimensionality of it with the tassel and the sewn-on flags.

But what really struck my eye about the showroom at Four Hands was their incredible creativity in styling the massive black box of a space.Until you look very closely, you don’t realize that this huge piece of wall art is made up of dozens of paper lunch bags!

This piece was made from wine bottle corks, with the ends dipped in paint,while this was made from paint cans acquired from Austin’s waste disposal yard.And what do you do with the used paint brushes? Naturally, you hang them as another art installation!

I then zipped back across the square to InterHall where a lot of the smaller and newer showrooms have their spaces. OMG. I should have started there on Sunday and explored every.single.square.inch. First up was Natural Curiosities. Oddly enough, I don’t have the Cabinet of Natural Curiosities book {hint: I’ve got a birthday coming up!} I keep thinking I will find one at Book Thing!

I loved these hugely exaggerated framed book spines – they measured about four feet long. They are taken from the owner’s personal library. What a great idea. You could scan in some of your own book spines and have them printed out.

They also had book bundles, something of which I disapprove, but when they told me that they were trashy romances that they got before they went to the paper recycler, I took a less dim view.The books in the large frame have been weathered and baked in the strong L.A. sun until they crinkle and turn brown.

From there, it was a few steps to Bungalow 5, where several of the Style Spotters had chosen favourites.This high-gloss marine blue chest had received a lot of attention during the show.  I saw others like this, which I will show in later posts. Orange is a big accent colour again this year. Even though there’s a lot going on in this room, the lamps really stand out because of their clear bright colour, don’t they?

I popped over to Julian Chichester to see something that one of the Style Spotters had featured, which reminded me of something I already have – pieces of cullet or glass remainders – but these were mounted on iron stands. The cullet is leftover glass from workshops which make stained glass. At the end of the day, they just cobble it all together and chuck it in a bin. My friends at Housewerks had tons of this – literally!

The final event was a lunch and lecture with the inimitable Charlotte Moss. I have been a huge fan of her style for years, but had not heard her speak, so this was a huge treat. As you might know, she’s got a new book out – A Visual Life: Scrapbooks, Collages, Inspirations – so she was at the Market with her new book, as well as her new collections.

Funnily, much of what she talked about was what I talked about at the lecture I gave last week – looking everywhere for inspiration. She is a very visual person, as you might expect, and has been making scrapbooks and collages all of her life.

She told one story about how she collects baskets and was looking at them one day, and got the inspiration for some fabric that she was designing, and then for some china and the fretwork on some furniture.

Her love of the forlorn carnation inspired her to design a fabric pattern based on their shape.I really wanted to get her book, which isn’t going to be readily available until the end of this month, but my need to get outta town and on the road, overcame the desire to stand in line with 25+ people and wait to get a signed copy. So I will just get it in a few weeks.

Stay tuned for more trends at the Market!