Sign up and become a VIP member to make sure you are the first to find out about sales, promotions and new items. Springvale Home Maker Centre This stunning lounge chair makes a big visual statement and at the same time offers loads of comfort. Once you're seated, you wont want to move! Some people even use it as a canvas for some amazing art! Free Shipping to Capital Cities, excluding Perth and DarwinLivingHomewaresDiningHotBuysWall ArtCandles & FragrancesSofas & SofabedsCare Products Sign up to our newsletter Welcome to OZ Design Furniture Originally trading as the Great Australian Design Company, we opened our first store in Auburn, Sydney in 1979. Australian owned & operated the business has since grown to 28 stores along the Eastern Seaboard of NSW/ACT/VICTORIA and QLD with an enviable reputation as one of the leading aspirational furniture and homewares brands. With a specialty in fabric and leather sofas, dining tables, entertainment units, occasional tables, console tables, buffets, shelving, storage as well as accessories which include cushions, decorative vases, lamps, mirrors, prints and rugs, we are the Living and Dining room experts.
INDOOR OUTDOOR FURNITURE ADELAIDE | QUALITY CONTEMPORARY OR CLASSIC DESIGNER FURNITURE ADELAIDE SHIPPING AUSTRALIA WIDE | Solid Timber Dining Room Furniture Made in Australia | Premium German Outdoor Living Furniture | Italian Leather Fabric Sofa Lounges |Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth | Dining Tables and Chairs | Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth | Australia Wide Deliveries - TASTE FURNITURE | INDOOR OUTDOOR FURNITURE ADELAIDE Sale Ends 28th Feb.DINING CHAIRS\ STOOLS | BUFFETS \ TV UNITS | Australia's first legal officer George Brandis has howled loud and long for the blood of punk torrenters, rumpus room crims, drawn-curtain reprobates, who've dared infringe this Commonwealth's hallowed Copyright Act by downloading bootleg music and movies.Fine, in and of itself – that's only fair and right. But explain to me this, then: why is the theft of animate composition a heinous misdeed worthy of outlaw and prosecution yet the naked plagiary of inanimate composition is not?
How is it a gross moral and commercial trangression to download a film or an album from a file sharer, denying the filmmaker or songwriter rightful compensation for their work, yet the purchase of a blatant rip-off of a designer's original chair or table or lamp is a misdeed we sanction? The answer, I suppose, is because that's the law – but as we well know, the law is an ass.After all, why is the Attorney-General so exercised by pirated content draining Hollywood studios of revenue yet the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and the Cabinet are so sanguine about obscenely profitable companies up the coast in Cupertino and Mountain View evading company tax in Australia? Yet again, the American diplomatic machine demands everything and gives nothing. Milan Direct's Dean Ramler is a major "replica" furniture seller. I am fascinated by industrial design. I've been to the Milan Furniture Fair, Salone del Mobile, and to Fritz Hansen's factory in Allerød, outside Copenhagen, and to Herman Miller's HQ in Zeeland, Michigan.
I've interviewed Antonio Citterio and Patricia Urquiola and Tom Dixon. So this has been a bugbear of mine for a long time. Each day I wince as I walk past a pair of fake Le Corbusier LC2 chairs (1928) in the lobby of my apartment building (1951). Ironically, the Swiss-Frenchman evangelised "democratic" design for the improvement of mass living conditions, which gave France its wretched cités (public housing projects) but also the moneyed classes some stunning (and undemocratically-priced) pieces of furniture.But it was when I sighted a recent Aldi catalogue (don't ask) advertising a rip-off of Charles and Ray Eames' classic Lounge and Ottoman for an absurd $349 (for both), that I resolved to get this off my liver – an organ strained enough as it is.Matt Blatt got the "replica" furniture market started here, but it's now genuinely rife: Milan Direct, Nick Scali, Freedom and even Harvey Norman. And now even Aldi and Bunnings. Fair dinkum, Charlotte Perriand must be rolling in her grave.
You can't take a chapter of Lie Down in Darkness and put it in your own novel. You can't sample the catchiest part of Tusk and not pay for it. You don't get your teeth done by one dentist, but pay another. Attorney-General George Brandis has faced calls to resign after Labor accused him of misleading Parliament. You can't build a Holden, paint it in a colour they don't offer, then badge it as a Golden. It's called intellectual property for a damned good reason. It's not imitation as flattery – that's insulting. Nobody says that of burglary or car-jacking, and anyway, flattery doesn't pay the bills.Europe has banned the sale of fakes (for 75 years after the original's design), and the UK this year followed suit. But of course they're all made in China – a nation with no respect for IP (just ask Google, or the Pentagon) let alone physical property.Before China's explosive economic rise, Japan was the West's go-to for cheap, or fake, crap. But happily, Japan has since become synonymous with an aesthetic culture up there with France, Italy, Germany and Switzerland.Proponents of ripped-off furniture argue that good design should be accessible to the masses.
But there's a clear difference between accessible style and stolen style. Which is why a developed economy prohibits High Street shops from selling fake Louis Vuitton luggage. Leave that to Thailand and Indonesia. Otherwise, what other possessions should people have a right to that they can't afford? Bang & Olufsen TVs? Arne Jacobsen's Egg Chair and Footstool, designed 1958. Estimate $5,000-$7,000 (more in leather). There is plenty of good, affordable and original furniture available today – and regulating against fakes would only ensure there is more still, to satisfy that transferred demand. It might be Eames and Philippe Starck and Hans Wegner who're copied, but it's the young designers whose work the fake market devalues."Replicas", as is their Orwellian descriptor (it's like referring to "rape" as "sex"), also devalue the classics, so in fact do not make good design accessible. They do precisely the opposite.Take Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's 1929 Barcelona chair. But given the proliferation of fakes in corporate lobbies, and bogan homes, it's now untouchable for anyone serious about architecture, art or design.
Which is a travesty.Our market is flooded with product – like Eames by Aldi – that breaks and scratches and falls apart and, basically, looks like shit. Thus in the mind of the next generation of consumers, what was once a classic feat of creativity and craftsmanship is now a piece of shit. in Allerød, I met the master who treats and stretches and stitches the leather over the moulds of Arne Jacobsen's 1958 Egg Chair.He and his colleagues are bona fide artisans, and that's why one costs around $16,500. Compared to $1,900 for a fake, made in a Chinese factory with substandard materials by unskilled, indentured peasants paid $2 an hour.The issue is not about the end-user, it's about the creator. Our law should never permit one person to profit from the intellect, experience, knowledge, sensibility, education and imagination of another, without paying them royalties. Full-stop.Senator Brandis, please act. Do what the Russians do to fake iPhones and US Customs does to fake Rolexes: don't sell fake Eames on High Street, steamroll it into the bitumen.