MODERN DESIGN objects are perceived as art by some aficionados and utilitarian by others. Maarten Baas burns furniture, such as a child’s chair, until the wood section resembles charcoal. (Photograph courtesy of www.maartenbaas.com.)

The Baas chair now graces their renovated 1870s farmhouse in Napa Valley, where it shares space with works by Richard Prince, a Koons mirror shaped like a flower and a Simon Starling hanging lamp made of metal scraps. Nora Stone loves letting guests admire the chair up close—and then she urges them to try it out. "What a wonderful thing, to have a chair from a famous designer and then take a blowtorch to it," she says. The burned sections look as fragile as any piece of wood that has just come out of a fire—and not very comfortable at that—but the wood has been glazed to prevent damage. Of their collection of functional design objects, Nora says: "We use all of them. They are not precious objects, although they are precious. They are part of our lives, not just decorations."

Since the first Charles and Ray Eames chairs appeared in the 1950s, collectors, dealers and art experts have debated whether functional design objects belong in the same category as fine art. And if they are fine art, collectors have long been divided over whether they should be used as the common household objects they resemble. Moss holds up a series of handblown glass bells he commissioned from the Brazilian Campana brothers. "I don’t think you should use these bells to call people to dinner or as wind chimes," he quips. Yet, ironically, as the market for such objects heats up, driven in part by design fairs such as Art Basel in both Switzerland and Miami, the utilitarians seem to be winning. Prices for works by the stars of the movement, such as Jean Prouve (Worth, October 2005), Fernando and Humberto Campana (Worth, January 2005) and Carlo Mollino are soaring, just as more of their fans are treating their limited-edition furniture, bowls and throw rugs not as art, but as tchotchkes.

"What a wonderful thing, to have a chair from a famous designer and then take a blowtorch to it."

Design objects from the late 20th century onward appear to be hitching a ride on the rising demand for contemporary art, a market that has shown no signs of deflation at the art fairs and auctions of recent months. However, as demand grows, so does supply. The sheer number of limited-edition functional design objects is increasing, particularly through leading dealers such as Moss and Barry Friedman, who helped pioneer the design-meets-art movement by actively commissioning such works. (The exception seems to be the Eames. Their works have been languishing at auctions of late, because today’s exacting collectors realize the furniture suffers from lack of rarity; it was stamped out in limited runs, but still mass produced.)

For these forward-thinking collectors, design objects made of brittle polymer or stuffed animals would seem to be the next step. But the entire contemporary art market seems due for at least something of a correction, based on the assumption that record prices for art will eventually follow the softening real estate market. When this happens, design objects will likely follow the trend. Sensible collectors will buy such items with an eye toward enjoying them as objects of beauty and, when used carefully, purpose.

One such collector is Al Eiber, a Miami physician who has filled his home with works by famous contemporary designers, but speaks of them as a skeptic. He believes the prices will not climb much higher, particularly if designers simply keep making more objects. "Many of these designers are talented, and I love what they’re doing," Eiber says. "But for $50,000 or $100,000, collectors should consider the established icons of the 20th century rather than these brand-new, limited productions."

Granted, today’s best designers seem shrewder than the Eames about the recherché factor; most limit their production to no more than 10 pieces. The Campana brothers have been known to create up to 20 copies of the chairs they design from found objects, but absolutely no more. French designer Patrick Jouin has created a signed and numbered edition of exactly 30 copies of his "techno-minimalist" Solid S1 stool, which resembles a block of Swiss cheese and is available for $18,000 at Moss.

Frenetic Bidding

MARC NEWSON’S prototype carbon-fiber table failed to sell at a 1997 auction, when its estimated value was $5,000. In December 2005, the same piece went for $186,000. (Photograph courtesy of Phillips De Pury & Co.)

This rarity drives collectors to pay well beyond $100,000—and do so with a smile. Consider, for example, a brief auction history of Marc Newson, a pioneer in unusual materials. In 1997, Phillips de Pury in Sydney tried to sell Newson’s Black Hole, a prototype carbon-fiber table, but could not lure any bidders for the estimate of $5,000 to $7,000. Black Hole eventually sold privately, according to Phillips spokeswoman Trish Walsh. In December 2005, the same prototype table showed up at Phillips in New York, where it sold for $186,000, breaking the high estimate of $150,000. Then, in June, Sotheby’s sold Newson’s prototype for his aluminum Lockheed lounge for a staggering $968,000. The curvaceous chaise lounge, covered with aluminum sheets, not unlike an airplane fuselage, is considered a contemporary design classic.

Postwar limited-edition furniture hit the $1 million mark—and then some—in June 2005, in frenzied bidding at Christie’s over a 1949 trestle table by Mollino. The table sold, finally, for $3.8 million, nearly 20 times the high estimate and well over the previous record of $680,000, an amount paid for both Alexandre Noll’s carved mahogany armchair at Sotheby’s in December 2003, and Prouve’s pair of Porthole doors for the Tropical House in Brazzaville, Congo, one year later.

Not surprisingly, auction houses are now aggressively pushing contemporary functional design. Phillips de Pury, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, as well as smaller specialty auction houses such as Wright in Chicago and Rago in Lambertville, N.J., have been holding design auctions for years, focusing primarily on designers from the mid-20th century and earlier. In the past three to five years, however, the bigger houses have been adding more contemporary and limited-edition pieces. Most of the contemporary objects turning up at auctions have no previous auction track record, but many sold for well over their estimates.

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.

Additional Information
 Broken Dreams