The irresistible rise of make-believe furniture

Enter the halls of Design Miami and you will find tables built from organic matter and building detritus, dancing on ill-matched legs; a chair that looks like a giant ant; a series of ceramic tables like upside down mountains and a multicoloured shelving unit constructed from melted carpet. This has always been the fair where design explores its wildest edges. But today perhaps more than ever, it seems there is a growing public for these fantasies.

The fair was founded in 2005 by Craig Robins, the Miami-based entrepreneur, real estate developer and collector of art and design. At the time, a few iconic pieces of what was called “Design Art”, a genre of contemporary sculptural furniture, were beginning to fetch high prices at auction — Zaha Hadid’s tables curved like sand dunes, Marc Newson’s aerospace-inspired 1988 Lockheed Lounge chair, Ron Arad’s playful punk pieces created from salvage. But it was still a wayward niche within contemporary design. The sector needed an ambitious platform to open collectors’ eyes to a startling array of experimental pieces that used function merely as a starting point, their true purpose being the expression of desires, the realisation of fictions, the telling of tales. As Zesty Meyers, co-principal of New York’s R & Company gallery, puts it: “It’s making dreams come true.”