Core77

"Decorate Life", Frankfurt's new furniture and gift fair just took place in Germany. Core-o-spondent Aric Chen was on hand to experience the event:

The gray skies and constant shuttling -- to and from the airport Sheraton, where out-of-town journalists had been rather drearily put up -- didn't quite match the exuberance of its name: "Decorate Life." But this massive new furniture and gift fair at Frankfurt, Germany's Messe convention center did its darnedest to put the "festive" back in festival hall.

In fact five fairs in one, the July 4 to 8 event brought miles of hodgepodge products -- from silk roses to Rosenthal ceramics, handbags to high design -- under one sprawling roof. Making sense of it all, Dutch designer Ineke Hans and American Jason Miller were commissioned to create head-to-head "personal shopper" installations, comprising products mostly culled from the exhibitors nearby. The former curated an intimate meditation on objects, set within a neo-minimalist, celadon-green interior, while Miller took a cheekier tone: placing candelabra, bunny figurines and other bric-a-brac within a mossy, faux woodland, the Brooklyn-based designer presented a hypothetical home for a forest gnome. "The rabbit blankets are awesome," Miller, who was himself trolling around with The Future Perfect's Dave Alhadeff, said of his purposefully-chosen tchotchkes. Nature, kitsch and artifice may be design's obsessions du jour, Miller hinted, but the lines between them can be fine ones indeed.

Read more and see images after the jump....

It was perhaps appropriate, then, that you had to walk past booths hawking Christmas ornaments and driftwood birdhouses to get to the fair's Juergen Bey-designed cafe. Part herb garden, part assembly line, it was a rambling field of vegetation, all elevated on metal platforms to evoke industrial production. "The beauty of industrialization is that you can feel something is very natural, even though you make it artificially," Bey explained.

Elsewhere, emerging designers were given ample acreage -- Alexa Lixfeld's Metamorphose porcelain vessels, Sebastian Herkner's Plug lamps and Cocage's 1,2,4 A1 desks stood out -- while a panoply of trend and other installations (a sound piece by Petra Eichler and Susanne Kessler; a bamboo and rattan collaboration between Germany's Karlsruhe School of Art and Design and Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts; model rooms for "Urban Nomads," "Conscious People" and "Party People") rounded things out.

Until, that is, you got to the Festhalle, a 19th-century hall playing host to the fringe Design Annual extravaganza, called "Inside: Showtime." Organized by design conduit Stylepark and conceived by German artists Tobias Rehbergerand Claus Richter, its carnivalesque atmosphere--where everyone from Authentics to Audi showed their latest offerings--is hard to sum up. But picture a post-apocalyptic Coney Island, or a design fair as channeled by Diane Arbus: surrealist love tunnels and kissing booths, animatronic ponies and parrots, actors in bunny suits (bunnies again!)--not to mention jugglers and flamenco dancers sharing a lecture stage with designers Paul Cocksedge, Nitzan Cohen and Ab Rogers. "Quite a sight," said Rogers, surveying the scene.

Bamboo Rattan

Bunny Actors

Cocage's 1,2,4 A1 desks

Jason Miller's personal shopper installation

Juergen Bey cafe.

Inside Messe Frankfurt

Nitzan Cohen and Ab Rogers

Sebastian Herkner's Plug lamps

Inside: Showtime installation

Inside: Showtime installation

Inside: Showtime installation

Inside: Showtime installation

Showtime jugglers