Craft Turns Heads at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair

Mr. Mau, 25, a founder of Studio Dunn, a two-year-old furniture company in Providence, R.I., was part of an army of youthful exhibitors who were rocking on the heels of their pointy-toed leather shoes or fuzzy polka-dot sneakers as they introduced updated versions of such hoary designs as Shaker chairs and gentlemen’s valets.

Studio Dunn’s Corliss chair, for instance, was a supple handmade fusion of cast-aluminum back and maple seat and legs that paid tribute to George Henry Corliss, the inventor who improved the steam engine.

“All of our new pieces are named after game-changers in industrial design and transportation design,” Mr. Mau said.

At Richard Watson’s booth, one looked in vain for the wrinkly codger who produced an 18th-century-style highboy and accompanying stool. But it turned out that Richard Watson wasn’t elderly. In fact, Richard Watson isn’t a person at all, but a New England furniture brand that bears the surnames of its female founders, Brooke Richard, 34, and Laura Watson, 33.

“My initial inspiration was preciousness,” Ms. Richard said, indicating the $18,000 highboy’s white bronze pulls, hammered by a jeweler, and the contrasting walnut fronts and maple sides intended to give each drawer, when removed, the appearance of a keepsake box.

For as long as factories have efficiently spat out objects, craft has been an antidote to the chilly uniformity of mass production. Fragrant knotty furniture of one variety or another has always appeared at this fair, along with the occasional woven tapestry and thrown pot. This year, however, craft, with its quirks and nicks, threatened to overshadow the sleek machined goods that are a calling card of the 23-year-old event.

Wafting through the convention center and satellite design exhibitions around town was nostalgia for preindustrial and early industrial technology. Members of the British group Designers in Residence, which presented the exhibition “Tools for Everyday Life,” were typical in their adoration of gleaming brass rivets, which they embedded into lamps, and the gauges and shims used at machine shops, which they turned into building blocks.

Where were the cheeky midcentury motifs of recent years? The bathroom hardware company Lefroy Brooks’s Belle Aire tub faucet, with fins like a 1950s automobile, looked as out of place as a poodle skirt on Louisa May Alcott.

Vintage charm is one thing, but craft really seized attention this year by turning itself into theater.

At Wanted Design, an exhibition in Chelsea that ran concurrently with the fair, the furniture company Bernhardt Design sponsored a blue-jean-making demonstration. Employees of Raleigh Denim stitched on antique sewing machines that had been transported to New York from their workshop in North Carolina. The buttonhole machine, which dated to 1940, had leather belts and produced the sound of a machine gun, appropriate for a tool made during World War II, pointed out one of the company’s founders, Victor Lytvinenko.

At the Standard hotel at Cooper Square, one of several sites that made up the pop-up NoHo Design District, James Carroll, a woodworker with the Dublin company Makers & Brothers, sat in front of a plate-glass window, hewing chunks of Catskills ash to make three-legged stools.

And back at the convention center, Hellman-Chang dramatized the struggle between human and hand tool by setting up a workbench, where the furniture company’s publicist was spotted trying to sculpture a table leg with an implement intended for shaping wheel spokes. “It’s pretty safe,” Eric Chang, a founder of Hellman-Chang, assured an onlooker. “I’m more worried about the wood.”