Wood is good was the underlying theme at Interior Design Show West (IDSWEST), held March 19 to 22 at the Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre. And if recycled wood was good, wood in its original, rugged form was even better.

Show director Jason Heard summed up the event as "a lot more custom design this year and a lot more originality". You could say that again, beginning with Emily Carr Institute students who switched on some novel lighting ideas. Andrew Wong’s Book Lights were rectangles roughly the size of War and Peace in paperback tied up parcel-style with what looked like freeform elastic bands, in bold colour combos like purple on black. Claudia Patricia Fernandez morphed a bunch of Transformers into a metre-tall lamp on a three-legged-stool base and sprayed it all white to divert attention toward shape and away from original purpose.

Displays of beds and desks that disappear into walls provided a nod to the smaller spaces we may have to learn to live in for environmental and financial reasons. So did Modern-Shed, a Seattle company that makes prefabricated buildings for back yards. Designed to stand on a concrete pier foundation and ranging from a six-by-eight-foot "basic" shed to a 10-by-12-foot studio complete with deck, they’re fast gaining popularity with space-strapped work-at-homes, said company rep Christine Palmer.

Recognizing that 2010 will put all aspects of Vancouver in the global eye, IDSWEST created the REST Public Seating Design Competition, which challenged 14 architects and designers to dream up innovative and handsome places for visitors to take a break. A standout example was Phil Wong’s sinuous Little Canyon Bench, made of 15 layers of cultivated, compressed sorghum board; curved on top, sides, and internally like a miniature Grand Canyon; and with colour striations reminiscent of rock strata. Other eye-catchers that would add fizz to public spaces were Omer Arbel’s elegant bench, cast from concrete little more than a centimetre thick; Zachary Fluker’s gorgeous B.C. Bench, a centrally twisted but otherwise deceptively simple plank of wood; and Judson Beaumont of Straight Line Design’s Canned Seat, a visual pun with a grey top that peels back to reveal black quilted seating.

Wherever you looked, materials did the talking. Live Edge Design took a colossal vertical slab cut from a downed maple tree, left its edges rough, and used it as a tabletop, filling a long knothole on its surface with rounded river pebbles. Rooted in a simple maple base, trios of espresso-coloured square columns supported the table at either end. Another slice of maple made the company’s spectacular Green Dreams headboard, which, with its integral side tables, was like something out of the dwelling place of a very urbane hobbit. Letting the beauty of driftwood speak for itself, Coast EcoTimber, also a company that repurposes found wood, turned a drowned tree root upside down, mounted it on a matte black-metal base, and hung handbags on it. (I’d bet that more than one show visitor walked away with an idea for a do-it-yourself project.)

Evidence of the widely varying styles that can be created with natural materials could be found at the display put on by ODI Gallery (883 Hamilton Street), which showcases a number of local "green" designers. Co-owner Grant Wyllychuk pointed out Brent Comber’s sturdy red-cedar lampshade with cutout Xs on its sides and top, its rusticity tamed by, again, a matte black-metal base; and Wyllychuk’s own entertainment centre, its clean, modern lines custom-built from the highly sustainable material-of-the-moment, bamboo.

Traditional design in a new medium was on show at the Peking Lounge (83 East Pender Street) booth, where a Chinese cabinet was classic in dimensions and traditional "peg" closure, everything except its material: mirror-bright stainless steel. One from a line of contempo-Asian furniture, it’s not a piece to own if you share a home with a sticky-fingered
toddler. Another example of ancient and modern worlds meeting with eye-opening results was a pair of shiny-black 1950s Shanghai chairs that store owners Daniel Poulin and Michael Bennett have given interchangeable seats in firecracker scarlet and bright-yellow patent.

If there was an overall aesthetic to the furniture at IDSWEST, it was uncluttered and pared down. Silhouette and material took precedence over fussy detail and trim, as in Upholstery Arts’ luscious, russet-coloured sofa designed to seat four, or even more, and the company’s grouping of curvaceous pieces that were midway between large chair and small sofa.

Cool new technology was also there to be oohed and aahed over, including an in-home automatic hand dryer for the germphobic. The sexiest device on show was a prototype Sony OLED (organic light-emitting diode) TV borrowed by Yana Imaginative Audio & Video Solutions in West Vancouver. With a screen only three millimetres thick—or, rather, thin—it will be on the market this summer, sticker price around $2,500. If you’re thinking that all you need now is a hunk of tree to stand it on, know that someone has already thought of that. Coast EcoTimber’s booth included an LED screen mounted on a vertical slab of salvaged timber.