Market Scape: Thesis in 3-D

-- Interior Design, 5/1/2008 12:00:00 AM

What's the future for furniture after it's designed? For the luckiest, manufacturing and marketing. Giving students a rare taste of that continuum is the calling of Jerry Helling, creative director for Bernhardt Design, and David Mocarski, chairman of the environmental-design department at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. For three years, Helling and Mocarski have team-taught an interdisciplinary course that takes concepts from classroom to production line.

After undergoing the same critiques and revisions that any designer withstands before a piece hits the marketplace, five undergraduate students from the class of 2008 were taken to the manufacturer's North Carolina headquarters to oversee prototyping and production. The final samples debut officially as Studio III at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York. Then they travel to NeoCon in Chicago.

Complex joinery showcases the walnut grain of the hand-carved Loft lounge chair by Shelly Shelly. Chase Wills used radiused corners to soften the angularity of the Linc cocktail table, an open-sided box available in any of the company's 25 standard finishes. The propellers of wind turbines inspired the polished-aluminum base of Revue, Jang won Yoon's table offered with a top of plastic lamimate or maple, cherry, walnut, or anigre veneer. Richard Overcash's leather-upholstered swivel chair, Tour, sits on a base of polished stainless steel. And Jonathan Rowell's seemingly weightless stool, Ascent, has a brushed-nickel frame and a maple seat fitted with a white leather-covered cushion. 828-758-9811; bernhardtdesign.com. circle 415