By PENELOPE GREEN


NEW YORK - The relationship between you and your furniture is not a onenight stand, says Ellen Lupton, curator of contemporary design at the Cooper- Hewitt National Design Museum: Sometimes it lasts a lifetime.

That said, home life is rarely just sunshine and freshly made heirloom beds. It can be dark and complicated.

“People kill each other,” Ms. Lupton said recently. “They have affairs. They steal each other’s money. Domestic life is hard. It’s important to show its dark side. I like to see things that suggest that complexity.”

At the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in mid-May at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, Ms. Lupton was hunting for that complexity - a challenge in a hall where so much floor space was devoted to the white leather offerings of large Italian furniture companies.

She had to wander before spotting her quarry, stopping at the booth of an English design firm, Thelermont Hupton Ltd. In it, there were bright red kitchen knives sunk deep in a wall (and meant to be used as coat hooks, $32), surveillance cameras in primary colors with mirrors instead of lenses ($160), and white teacups that were tipped over and strewn along a shelf ($50 for three).

“Really good design is an object that makes you think about how we behave and our social conventions but still really works,” she said, hanging her shoulder bag on one of the knives and noting that each teacup was designed to sit upright, too, and actually hold tea.

Thelermont Hupton was one of 552 exhibitors - 212 of them first-timers - that came from as far away as Australia and Vietnam to show at the I.C.F.F.

“It’s not a museum, it’s a marketplace,” Ms. Lupton said of the fair. “I go to see what’s happening in the world of commercial progressive design. I like cruising along the edges, seeing the people with just one product. I just find it very democratic in that way.”

Design, she’ll tell you, describes more than the function and aesthetics of an object: It’s critical thinking married to action, a discipline that can inform how you arrange your furniture, manage your time or prepare a PowerPoint presentation. “Design is everywhere,” she said. “It’s not just shopping.”

She likes objects embedded with ideas and stories, and furniture that is multifunctional.

She is also a fan of the kind of alchemy involved “when people take a generic and familiar object and make it new,” she said, running her hands over the forest of dowel sticks that held up a $2,600 bamboo bookshelf designed by Michael Iannone.

At a booth of three Brooklyn furniture designers, she found another example, a clean-lined sofa by Doug Fanning that was made with a shelf for storage under its legs, priced at $8,700. “It’s taking a classic form and adding functionality,” she said.

Ms. Lupton skirted the Italian section, tundra-like exhibition space flecked with glacier-white sofas. What did it all mean? “Freedom from want?” Ms. Lupton suggested. “When you have everything you need you get white leather?”

Around a corner, there was a little knot of people around the ModKat, a $180 kitty litter box in glossy plastic. It looked like a piece of office equipment, a stylish paper shredder perhaps. Ms. Lupton approved of the design process of its makers.

“They’ve studied kitty behavior and worked from there,” she said, referring to the feline propensity for jumping into and out of enclosed spaces. “And it looks like the iPod of litter boxes.”

In her book, “Design your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things,” written with her twin, Julia Lupton, an English professor at the University of California, Irvine, Ms. Lupton shows how design can influence behavior by depicting how most toilet paper holders discourage family members from replacing spent tubes. Consider a simple horizontal bar open on one end, she advises; the double-dowel numbers are seemingly too complicated for the average teenager or spouse.

“Good design is always about the truth,” she said. It can be a weighty truth, like the world is out of whack, or a little one, like no one in my family will replace the toilet paper. And the biggest truth, she suggested, is that real life is just funny.

“I think our things should reflect that. There is a lot of illusion in design, a lot of surface and playing with reality. That’s why I like things that have a sense of humor. They just seem more true to life.”


A coat tree wall sticker from Ferm Living. Below, polyester-filled cotton poufs with knitted wool covers, from the Future Perfect.











Cabinets from Loadbearing, at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair.