Wednesday, May 4, 2005

Designed to last

Innovators create eco-friendly options for home modeling

By EILS LOTOZO
Knight Ridder Newspapers

A display of felt hats in a manufacturer’s window caught Jaime Salm’s eye one day as he walked down Philadelphia’s 12th Street.

“It was a bright, sunny day, and in the light the felt was translucent,” says Salm. “And the shapes were so sensuous. I thought, ‘I have to do something with these.’”

Salm, the 26-year-old design force behind the Philadelphia company Mio Culture, turned that moment of inspiration into the Capsule Light, a pendant lamp with a two-tone molded wool felt shade and compact fluorescent bulb.

“Aha” encounters with a raw material happen regularly to Salm. He transformed the rugged cardboard that goes into egg cartons into Mio Culture’s “V2” 3-D wallpaper tiles. And a stack of discarded paper and cardboard inspired a product now in development, the “Bale” chair, a laminated plywood seat designed to strap over a base of old phone books and other items meant for the recycling bin.

But what truly drives Salm’s ideas, and forms the central mission of the firm he and his older brother, Isaac, launched in 2003, is what he calls “eco-intelligent” sustainable design. Mio Culture products don’t just attend to function and aesthetics, but address a whole checklist of issues that include an emphasis on recycled or renewable materials, limited product packaging, a concern for how objects will be disposed of when they outlive their usefulness, and the human impact on local economies.

“Sustainable design … takes into account all of our actions in regard to the environment, and to the people in that environment,” Jaime Salm says. “This is a movement that is gaining speed and momentum. It’s not just a crunchy, granola-bar thing. This is where things are going.”

The Salms, who grew up in Medellin, Colombia, and share a home in Society Hill, run Mio Culture out of a big-windowed third-floor studio in a former industrial building north of Chinatown.

The company is still very much in the start-up mode. The brothers not only do all the design and marketing work, they handle the shipping, too, including orders from their Web site, mioculture.com. They used to spend many a night and weekend assembling their Capsule Lights. (They now pay the New York manufacturer of the lamps’ lighting component to handle that task.)

For the fledgling firm, recognition has come quickly. At the New York International Gift Fair in January, a market for retail buyers, Mio won a “best collection” award for its line. Among the products: a powder-coated aluminum stool called Stoop Social Seating that looks like an upside down bowl; the Shroom lamp, whose molded felt shade gives it the appearance of a fairy-tale toadstool; and the Grid wall pocket, made from die-cut and stitched recycled felt.

But it is their very first product, the V2 wallpaper tiles, that remains the biggest attention-getter for Mio (“mine” in Spanish).

Last fall, Neiman Marcus used V2 as a backdrop for window displays in stores across the country. The paper tiles, which manage to look simultaneously retro and futuristic and whose curvy bas-relief forms can be configured into different designs, have been added to the permanent collection at the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York.

“There is really a market for it,” says Isaac Salm, 27, a former financial analyst for Kimberly-Clark Corp. who left the corporate world to run the business side of Mio. Architect Rem Koolhaas’ firm has contacted them about using V2, he says, and Mio has heard from designers and architects in Spain, Greece and India.

“I stumbled upon it in a magazine, and I knew I would use it as soon as I found the right space,” says interior designer John Bruce, who is featured on the TLC home-makeover show “While You Were Out.”

Bruce got his chance with V2 last year, when he redid a loft apartment in Atlanta for the program. He covered a wall with the tiles, painted them white, and positioned a colored light to rake the surface.

“The effects were stunning,” Bruce says. “This product is fantastic. It’s light, made from recycled material, is easy to paint and install, and it’s super-affordable.”

In the works is a new V2 design that will be fire-retardant and come in colors. But getting the V2 to market in the first place was a long haul for Mio, one that points to the challenges of sustainable design.

Persuading the Philadelphia hat manufacturer whose goods Salm spied in the window to apply his felt-molding techniques to lamp shades was easy. Persuading a steel-plant operator to alter his ways was more of a challenge.

The Salms found a firm that could stamp out steel patterns for a new design they’re calling the Bendant lamp — its flower-petal-like metal arms can be bent in various ways — but there was a catch: no imported steel, whose shipping increases pollution.

Says Isaac Salm: “Ninety percent of manufacturers don’t care where materials are coming from, and we are just one client. We had to try to get this guy to understand that for our product to be considered sustainable, it had to be made only from domestic steel.”

They succeeded. And the Salms, who are branching out into corporate consulting on sustainability, view that victory as equally important as an uptick in sales for Mio’s products.

“It is possible to start moving on the path of sustainability in all sorts of ways,” Jaime Salm says. “Fundamental change can happen, but you have to take the small steps.”

Mio Culture’s products are available at the company’s Web site, www.mioculture.com.

Available at Target.com are “V2” 3-D wallpaper tiles, which cost $27.99 a box, and the “Grid” wall pocket, which costs $59.99.