Having infiltrated deepest Brooklyn with its low-priced homegoods and cafeteria meatballs, Swedish retail juggernaut IKEA is taking its show on the road, with the help of...Illeana Douglas? That's the word from our techie sibling blog, MobileContentToday. According to MCT, Douglas (who utterly charmed us with her Factory Girl turn as Diana Vreeland) will be starring in IKEA's new scripted web series entitled "Easy to Assemble." The first of the videos, which will be viewable on mobile phones as well as online, is slated to debut in September and will showcase IKEA's fall products. Be sure to tune in for celebrity cameos and valuable insight into how to pronounce the name of your dishes ("LJUVLIG" doesn't exactly roll of the tongue).

In response to a New York Times article written by Alice Rawsthorn in March about the downfall of the American furniture design industry, our friends over at I.D. were kind enough to send along word of Aric Chen's piece for the magazine, getting together not just Rawsthorn, but a whole slew of prominent designers working in the US to get to the bottom of her statements. What transpires is just a fantastic conversation between the group, with some on the defensive about the industry here and others admitting that there certainly are some sad truths to what Rawsthorn has said. So if ever you wanted to read some of a "state of the union" about current furniture design, consider this your gold mine. Here's a bit from Rawsthorn's opening statement, sort of summarizing what she'd meant to say in her NY Times piece:

My New York Times column sprang from many conversations with friends in the U.S. design scene over the years. What interested me as a non-American was that so much U.S. design is flourishing. Look at graphics, new media, games, typography - America sports world-class designers in all of those disciplines, as well as Apple as an exemplar of corporate design management, and One Laptop Per Child as a stellar example of humanitarian design. Why wasn't the U.S. achieving the same high standards in furniture?

Well, if Porsche Design and Zaha Hadid can have a line of perfumes, then we figure it's okay for anyone to pretty much do as they please. Turns out, and we had no idea about any of it until we randomly caught mention of it at the Dallas Morning News, that starchitect, author, and head of Yale's architecture program, Robert A.M. Stern, has a line of miscellaneous home furnishings. According to his retail site, you can pretty much furnish your house with stuff he's made, from carpeting to furniture to wallpaper. It all looks pretty nice, very classic, fairly hip, yet kind of old-fashion. All the better: we see no mention anywhere on the site that Stern will demand you return his products if your architecture is in any way absurd.

Early this morning, as Gotham fizzed with Spitzermania, we got a call from one of our Favorite Publicists, who today found herself milling about the set of the Today show. "Quick, turn on NBC," she managed to simultaneously bark and whisper. "Eric Villency just got here, and he has an Emeco chair!"

We dashed for the nearest television just in time to see a black-clad Villency (president and CEO of Maurice Villency) standing among shiny homegoods. In an attempt to convey how viewers could get a piece of the trend for metallics (and blissfully unaware that some of the metallics didn't read as such on screen), Villency confidently raced from sequined pillows to shimmery tiles ("if wallpaper's dating, this is getting married") to his "favorite tip": giving your vintage furniture a foil-like finish by taking it to the local auto body shop. But as predicted, his best moment came in the few seconds he was given to extol Emeco's Navy chair, an icon in recycled aluminum. Primed for soundbites, Villency summed up the chair and its storied origins: "It's tough, it's lightweight, it's ready for war."

We've talked about UNstudio in the past and how much we like them. They just gave us another excuse in this post over at dezeen, about their "The World's Largest Table for All Cultures," which was being exhibited last week at the IMM Cologne furniture fair. It's just a really, really, really long table, with a lot of really incredible detail and in pieces, so it can be moved around a bit and assembled more easily. Because this writer is shopping for a new house right now, it's going to be added to the list that we'll need a dining room large enough to fit this thing in, because if they decide to start selling them, we want it. Here's some of the many details on the table from dezeen:

These aspects are translated and incorporated integrally into the world's longest kitchen table, which offers a place for different types of activities from intimate and secluded to formal meetings for bigger groups.

The table has a length of 55m and a width of 2.6m. It is designed on a modular basis, offering the possibility to use the table in different configurations, and making it shorter or longer. The modular system serves as a generic framework for adding new elements, altogether generating 'THE WORLD'S LONGEST TABLE FOR ALL CULTURES'.

Design junkies currently attending the Sundance Film Festival have a movie that's made specifically for their style-stashing nature, The Guitar, a film that premiered over the weekend:

"One morning, "mouse-burger" Melody "Mel" Wilder (Saffron Burrows) is diagnosed with a terminal illness, fired from her thankless job and abandoned by her boyfriend. With nothing left to lose, given two months to live, she spends her entire life's savings renting an empty palatial loft in the Village. Thinking she'll never have to pay the piper, she lives off her credit cards, fills the loft with the fanciest products..."

That's a still from the movie above, one of many tables in this 6,000 square-foot loft seen overflowing with the entire contents of the latest Design Within Reach catalog.

An article in last week's New York Times describes the purchases even better: "one-of-a-kind rugs from Carini Lang; chandeliers that sell for $2,500 a pop; and, finally, the creatively fulfilling guitar of the title. It's kind of a shopaholic's version of "The Bucket List," with Jonathan Adler designing the Bucket." Writer Joyce Wadler visits the home of director Amy Redford (yes, that Redford) to discuss the possession of well-crafted objects and how they could provide comfort to the terminally ill, something we're sure no one reading this blog could possibly argue with.

Yesterday we told you about the products that earned acclaim from Muji in the company's international design competition, among them "Kakujio," salt formed into pre-measured cubes. Designed by De Meyboom Lab of the Netherlands, the product was among judge Jasper Morrison's favorites. The designer praised the salt cubes as a "great idea," and we're wondering if he recognized their similarity to one of his own creations: the Oblong sofa he designed in 2004 for Cappellini, composed of--you guessed it--modular white cubes.

Sure, we hear of monsters, paintings, skulls, purchases, heck, even internet variety shows being produced by creatives every day for a certain period of time. But chairs? Via ReadyMade's blog we learn of Martino Gamper's 100 Chairs in 100 Days, an exhibition in London which is now available as a book, 100 Chairs in 100 Days and its 100 Ways.

Gamper began his project by scavenging discarded, dilapidated and donated chairs, then hunkered down for the 100 days and built a new chair every day by assembling some quite-random configurations of the chair fragments. Some look like freakish creations left over from the set of Beetlejuice, but all are simply beautiful. We're partial to 'Paste and Cut' and 'Cut and Paste' models, mashups of hacked-up Jasper Morrison Air Chairs.

Your life will never be the same once you've cast your eyes upon the infamous Sleeping Pig by George Chang for Auto, featured as a best-seller in "Best Sellers and Bombs, and What Stores Are Betting On" in yesterday's NY Times House & Home.

Flip through the slideshow to see picks from stores across the country--it's very interesting to see what made it and what didn't, especially when it comes to brand-name designers: They're betting on Tord Boontje's new table for Moroso, but two Hella Jongerius pieces bombed (like the poor Hella Hippo), as did glassware by Karim Rashid, while John Derian's decoupage projects fared well with skeletons but not with playing cards.

Remember the other day when we posted that interview with Tom Dixon about his collaboration with Artek? Well, we find that the mighty Ms. Rawsthorn, she of the International Herald Tribune, was thinking the same thing in her latest piece for the paper. Though she gets into the Dixon pairing for the Dover Street Market festival, her focus is primarily on Artek itself, the famous design firm. She gives you the whole rundown, including the history of the place and what's made it stick around for so long. Here's some:

That longevity has made Artek a Finnish institution, and [founder Alvar Aalto] a national treasure. He designed many of Finland's most important 20th-century buildings, and was the only person, except the president, for whom Finnair delayed its flights. Aalto so enjoyed his grand entrances that if he arrived at Helsinki Airport on time, he'd ask his chauffeur to drive around for a while. He died in 1976, but most Finns still grow up sitting on his furniture.