William Jess Laird

Why take a chair or table so seriously" Serban Ionescu?s furniture doesn?t necessarily make the most practical sense, but he wants you to love it anyway. ?I think these things become almost like pets,? says the designer of his work. Take the Ihop table, which is made of shamrock-green powder-coated steel with cutouts in the center that look like a face. A red mouth riveted on makes it almost look like the logo of a certain pancake chain of the same name. You get the sense that it?s a creature that could crawl toward you.

Courtesy R & Company

Ihop table, by Serban Ionescu, 2020. $3,500 from R & Company.

A table you can?t really put much on top of might seem strange, but for Ionescu that?s the point: He wants you to enjoy his furniture but on an imaginative, not purely functional level. It?s also why the seating he makes ? like the baby-blue Lacaria bench, which is more reminiscent of a mangled John Chamberlain sculpture than a plush perch ? is deliberately uncomfortable. ?I don?t want you to sit in them; I want you to look at them,? he says. The table and the bench are both featured in an online exhibition at the Tribeca gallery R & Company. Named ?Failed Seriousness: Lapo Binazzi and Serban Ionescu,? the show is a window into his world of design that?s whimsical, campy, and a little bit deranged.
Ionescu, 34, was born in Romania and his family moved to Queens when he was still a child. He studied arc...