LIMITED-EDITION furniture, such as this Favela chair by Brazilian brothers Fernando and Humberto Campana, has been selling at record prices, as have other design pieces such as glass bells.(Photograph by Davies + Starr.)

Last December, Sotheby’s sold a Campana brothers chair made out of teddy bears for $66,000, after an estimate of $8,000 to $12,000. At the Phillips auction in December, a prototype chandelier by Dutch designer Tord Boontje, called Come Rain Come Shine, made of ribbons and fabric flowers, fetched $16,800. A prototype light by Yves Behar, on which the Swiss designer sculpted electroluminescent film onto formed aluminum, went for $13,200 at Phillips. At the same auction, a prototype Aqua table, featuring a top made of translucent, liquid-looking silicon gel, created by architect/designer Zaha Hadid for Established & Sons in Milan, sold for $296,000, nearly three times the original price paid just a few months earlier.

An aspect of this movement that continues to attract collectors is the infinite variety of materials being used. Contemporary designers tend to eschew wooden furniture, unless they do something very distinct or unexpected with it. No substance is too bizarre for the Campana brothers, who have used tissue paper, toys, hoses, even waste materials. A particularly striking paean to the eclectic juxtaposition of design materials interspersed with contemporary art appears in the SoHo, New York, loft home of Thea Westreich and Ethan Wagner, the husband-and-wife owners of Thea Westreich Art Advisory Services. Next to their 1991 Koons painted-wood sculpture of a caramel-colored poodle, titled, appropriately, Poodle, is a Baas burned Antoni Gaudi chair that the couple bought in 2004 for $12,000.

VALUE JUDGMENT The market for contemporary functional design objects is soaring. Despite the bizarre nature of some of these pieces—a chair made from rag dolls, for example—even conservative modern art collectors are paying astronomical prices for these works. While debate rages among collectors and art experts over whether these pieces should be considered fine art or utilitarian objects, others question when this market will experience its seemingly inevitable correction.

Amid artwork by Cindy Sherman and Diane Arbus is a Multidao chair, one of the Campana brothers’ signature pieces, made of rag dolls stitched together onto a steel frame. Weistreich and Wagner purchased it for $7,000 in 2004. The same model now sells for $18,000 at Moss.

Other designers are using high-tech materials that drive the objects into the realm of high-cost production, often higher than even bespoke furniture. Jouin experiments with rapid prototyping, or stereolithography. He maps the initial drawing on a computer, which translates the drawing into a three-dimensional object with a laser that sculpts the object out of liquid polymer; when the laser strikes the polymer, it turns into a solid mass.

At Miami’s Design.05, Ron Arad, an Israeli designer who lives in London, showed a series of 69 highly polished stainless steel, amoeba-shaped sheets that were part of a site-specific installation titled Paved With Good Intentions. Placed in an empty, white warehouse space, the steel sheets appeared to float like islands. The works cost between $30,000 and $50,000 per piece. A generic panel of mirror-polished stainless steel might sell for $20, but not one cut by Arad. Buyers have turned these particular pieces into functional items, hanging them as a wall mirror or mounting one or more on a base to create a coffee table.

CARLO MOLLINO’S 1949 trestle table sold for $3.8 million in June 2005, more than 20 times the high estimate. (Photograph courtesy of Christie’s Images Limited.)

Moss staged a show called "Layers" this summer that he commissioned from Hella Jongerius; it was a series of five installations heavy on fabrics and reminiscent of details in an American country house interior circa 1950. "It grew," Moss says, "out of discussions focused on the fact that Hella’s work often involves applying patterns and motifs from one medium to another, deepening and evolving with each generational shift." The layers included prototypes for felt and woolen fabrics that Jongerius designed for Maharam, the world’s largest contract textile firm, along with wood, cast bronze and ceramics. The installation called Jackpot Field, for example, selling for $90,000 includes items such as an upholstered sofa, a table in oiled walnut wood and a glazed earthenware vase with a bronze medallion.

Michael Maharam, the creative principal of the company, happens to be a collector of Jongerius’ work. He regularly uses her limited-edition bowls, vases and plates, which cost between $2,500 and $10,000, as everyday objects. "I cherish them more over time, as opposed to mass-market junk, and intend to pass them on," he says.

Ernest Beck is a freelance writer based in New York.

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 Broken Dreams