Betting It All on the Farm

If design acts as a responsive gauge of the moment, what can we expect in reaction to this period of economic distress? The furniture and lighting designs that debuted at the Stockholm Furniture Fair last week—and those expected at the more influential Milan Furniture Fair in April—show clear stirrings of a new style that borrows its imagery from farming and rustic subsistence, a style informed by the fear that we can no longer rely on banks or other impersonal institutions. If early examples are any indication, the new austerity is spawning a preponderance of stringent furniture with farmhouse virtue, and signs of the human hand in stitching and other details. "When people get scared, their impulse is to strip away everything from their previous lives and go back to basics," says William L. Hamilton, founder of Thomas Cave's Tattoo (thomascavestattoo.blogspot.com), a Web site launched last month that treats the recession as a potential renaissance of homespun skills like biscuit-making. "The simplest way to return to life before it became corrupted is to return to the farm."

The New Rustic look was on prominent display at the Stockholm Furniture Fair. Danish designer Søren Ulrik Petersen presents the Big Claus bench, a modernist spin on the old mudroom perch. A brawny wooden picnic table and chairs by the young Dutch designer Ineke Hans looked like something Goldilocks might have created if she'd gone to an arty design school.

The wind was already veering in this direction at last April's Milan Furniture Fair, where the young Dutch firm Studio Job presented 24 cast-bronze farm objects, including a pail, shovel and pitchfork, and a line of stout Bavarian farm furniture laser-cut with colorful images of pigs, chickens, cows and sheep, all displayed in a stylized barnyard. Among the highlights: an intricately detailed high-backed bench made of Indian rosewood. Nynke Tynagel and Job Smeets, the principals of Studio Job, spun their country decor as a tribute to Dutch tradition, but it's more luxe than lowland utility.

In the same vein, the German fittings manufacturer Dornbracht last year sent a pop-up pavilion called the Farm Project to design events in Europe and the United States. In each case, meals were prepared in a crude kitchen surrounded by penned pigs, goats, rabbits and chickens—an arty exercise in reconnecting the kitchen to the reality of butchering and food preparation. There are echoes here of survivalism, and of the fashionable farm-to-table movement that encourages eating locally.

More recently, Jen Fager created the rough-surfaced RAW rocker by cutting Swedish pine on a band saw to give it a crude effect, like a cartoon sketch of farm furniture.

Fager, like Studio Job, placed ironic quotation marks around its farm imagery, akin to a smiling gallery owner costumed in overalls. That worked cleverly when the economy was still on its feet, but crisis tends to squelch irony, and the New Rustic will likely take a turn toward the earnest. We may be more inclined to find beauty in bare function, like the classic bentwood furniture created more than 70 years ago by the Finnish designer Alvar Aalto.