Wood Designs With Classic Carvings
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A stain finished mantel with AFE’s Modern Classic corbels in Wood-Mode Fine Custom
Cabinetry’s Mountain Retreat (photo courtesy Wood-Mode, Kreamer, PA) contrasts with
Wood-Mode Cottage Green Essex and Kensington cabinets.Top: AFE Modern Classic
rosette.  

Art for Everyday manufactures decorative wood components for sale to a client base of more than 1,500 kitchen and interior designers and architectural firms, as well as high-end cabinetry companies. Producing 950 stock decorative wood components for its catalogs, the company both hand carves and machines custom decorative wood embellishments, marketed as “mix-and-match” components. Its exhibit at AWFS Fair this month (Booth 2329) is a return engagement for Toronto-based Art for Everyday, which showed its Modern Classic Collection of decorative mouldings, columns, corbels, rosettes, posts, appliqués and capitals at AWFS Fair in 2009. The 2011 AWFS Fair comes after May Interzum in Germany, where Art for Everyday’s FSC-certified North American hardwood items were well received.

“The response from the design community was overwhelming right from the start,” says Vince Curci, sales and marketing manager. “We wanted designers to think about woodcarvings in a different way and get them to understand how each piece in the collection could work together.”

The striking hand-carved designs, embodied in Art for Everyday’s Modern Classic line, take wood components beyond the commodity level. This collection of over 200 originally designed woodcarvings, a post-Modern amalgam with Arts & Crafts, Neoclassic and Deco influences, has earned Art for Everyday caché and awards. Their uniqueness (see rosette insert) protects them from unauthorized mass production copycats — where precision and proportion are not easily emulated.

Curci says that during the downturn, the Modern Classic designs got them attention, while sales of its bread and butter lines of over 750 wood embellishments, sold on a mix-and-match concept, kept them afloat. Manoo Mahmoodi, president and founder, moved the company into a 50,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art plant in 2007.

 
Wood-Mode Fine Custom Cabinetry, a Kreamer, PA, manufacturer and distributor of high-end kitchen cabinetry, featured Art for Everyday’s Modern Classic corbels, mouldings and pilasters in the interior of its Rocky Mountain retreat design.

“This collection is so creative,” says John Troxell, director of design from Wood-Mode, “We’ve been able to assemble the elements in completely different ways each time for new designs. We’re very impressed with the way the collection comes together to provide us with distinctive treatments and unique elements.”

In April, Art For Everyday added metallized versions of its wood carvings in partnership with Make it Metal, a St. Catherines, Ontario, licensee of the LuminOre cold-spray metallizing technology, adding brass, bronze, copper, iron, zinc and nickel silver finishes for its wood carved components.

The new LuminOre metallizing method for treating wood makes it appear and feel like metal, while retaining the lightweight, malleable qualities of wood. The cold metal spray technology delivers a substantial 95 percent metal constituent surface coating to the wood.

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