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Home > Design and Architecture > With spring design fairs and travel on hold, LA designers get creative with constraints
Podcast: Design and Architecture
Episode:

With spring design fairs and travel on hold, LA designers get creative with constraints
Category: Arts
Duration: 00:16:53
Publish Date: 2020-03-12 02:00:00
Description:

In a normal year, many Angeleno designers and showroom owners would be packing their bags soon to head to Milan for Salone del Mobile. But this is not a normal year, Italy is now in lockdown and the massive furniture fair has been postponed, along with High Point Market in North Carolina and numerous other expos, fairs and festivals. 

Salone and High Point, originally scheduled in April, have moved to June, assuming quarantines have lifted. 

So how are Los Angeles designers and showroom owners responding? 

Sean Yashar, a creative consultant representing designers in LA and Italy, says that missing Milan, which he attends every year, is “a bummer on the emotional level”. 

But, it offers the chance to do more with less, and, adds partner Oliver Furth, discover forgotten treasures, like the California countryside and brown English Furniture!

The freeze on travel has them pondering whether coronavirus coincides with a shift in design values — from fast fashion and mass-produced furniture to an era of “post-consumption” — that may help reduce our carbon footprint. 

“Maybe we are hopping on too many planes and seeing too much,” mentions Furth, who says he and Yashar may take a road trip through California in the time they would have spent in Milan. “Maybe we should focus a little bit more on being home.”  

Mary Ta and Lars Hypko, co-owners of MASS Beverly and Minotti LA showroom in West Hollywood, represent 120 European brands that all show at Salone. 

Hypko says they have found one upside to being grounded: a jump on the fair itself. 

“We  actually planned to order some of the products that they were going to show in April. So we're actually going to have a lot of the new collection in L.A. before June, which will be fantastic.”
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