Las Vegas Market defines furniture trends

Every year, tens of thousands of home design professionals gather in Las Vegas for the Winter Las Vegas Market, which ended Thursday. The city becomes the center of attention for new home furnishings as 4,200 lines of furniture, bedding, lighting, flooring, accessories and gifts are on display across 40 floors of event space.

Many style and material trends introduced last year continue to be of interest this year. Chic sofas have massive curves, from the shape of the arms to the entire back, and they work everywhere from formal living rooms to stylishly casual recreation rooms.

Product designers have paired black metal with warm metallic finishes — brass, gold — and this sophisticated look works in living rooms and dining rooms on the back of chairs and in light fixtures. Surfaces that show off the grain and color of wood with highly polished finishes can be found over dining tables and desks.

Adam Dunn is creative director at Four Hands, a leading designer and global importer of lifestyle home furnishings. His company, with products in such retail chains as Crate &Barrel, West Elm, Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware, has a finger on the pulse of how the world is shaping the way consumers decorate their homes. Four Hands introduces more than 1,000 new product styles each year from living and dining rooms to art and lighting.

Dunn is quick to point out that there is no magic ball to forecasting home design trends.

“What we do is curate an exhibit of furnishings and then let our customers discover them,” he said. “Our products enhance the feeling of a room with top-grain leathers, rich woods and intriguing metals that cross a variety of styles while maintaining a sense of uniqueness.”

Dunn said that the process that goes into decor-related product development at Four Hands is a design journey.

“Our team travels throughout the year to international design fairs in India, Germany, Italy and wherever new material and manufacturing techniques are being introduced,” he said. “We gather inspiration and fresh styles and perspectives from around the world and come back with dozens of concepts.

“We then focus on cultural trends such as food, architecture and clothing to learn how those trends might influence us in designing our furniture. We also look at how people travel and which areas of the country are showing greater population growth and how they’re living. There’s a lot of data. We dissect it, and that allows us to create a line of furniture, lamps, rugs and other products that our customers want. We take risks, but it’s worth it.”

According to Dunn, there are different buying habits around the country. He said Las Vegas is a design-savvy market that prefers higher-end design and style.

“Las Vegas customers want new shapes and materials and are looking for the unusual,” he said. “We tend to design on a grander scale for the West Coast, although we offer just about everything in multiple sizes. We showed 90 new designs here last week. The most preferred for the West Coast were lighter woods, something more organic that celebrates the natural character of the material with softer lines and a softer finish.”

Two items on display at the show were the Malcolm chair, a neutral ivory seating of rich top-grain leather framed within a rubbed brown parawood frame with sloped arms, and the Rennie tall queen bed that brings simple elegance to the bedroom with its high-back bed with button tufting for texture. Antique brass-finished legs add modernity.

Dunn knows that everyone’s taste is different, yet one element is constant in the decision to buy, and that one constant is durability.

“We design heirloom pieces of furniture that can be an anchor for the home such as a dining table,” he said. “This is a piece that a person can keep for a long time or else be moved to another part of the home or be moved when moving into a new living space.

“Our pieces are fun, fashionable and flexible, so they can be switched out and adorned with a host of different accessories. We want to think that something bought today is a good investment because it will remain fashionable and trendy into the years.”

The Four Hands showroom is open throughout the year in World Market Center Las Vegas, Building A, 475 S. Grand Central Parkway.

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