Dutch design team Tejo Remy and Rene Veenhuizen mount first U.S. 'solo' show

On the floor at Industry, that "brain" rug (called "Accidental Carpet") is plenty lush underfoot, but its messages, including the idea that it might need to be soft to keep falling epileptics from breaking their skulls, somehow unnerve us. Generally speaking, high design doesn't evoke offal and illness, extravagance and waste, or used blankets that you're more likely to imagine on the back of a homeless person than on the floor of a condo.

People often use words like "whimsical," "comic" or "witty" to describe the works of Remy and Veenhuizen, but the laughter they provoke is usually nervous, more like a response to Lenny Bruce than to Mickey Mouse. "For us, it's dead serious," Veenhuizen says, smiling. "It's not humor for humor's sake," says Remy, more soberly. "Good humor is very intellectual."

Almost all of us still associate design with "comfort" -- if not physical, then at least intellectual or aesthetic. Even if a Bauhaus armchair in chrome and leather may not be easy on the bottom, it is easy on the eyes and has such a get-able gestalt that we can learn to be at ease with it. Even most avant-garde designers have come up with new models for comfort and ease -- turning away from Victorian velvet-on-oak, for instance, to embrace Bauhaus, then Danish modern. What few designers have done is work to abolish comfort itself as a design principle, in favor of objects that disconcert. That's the Remy and Veenhuizen model.

The cost of innovation

Such high artistic goals come at a cost. Innovation tends to trump the strategizing and compromise it takes to go from prototype to mass production.

Only 17 rugs have been made, Remy explains. Each is different, assembled by hand by workers laboring together for a week under the designers' close supervision.

You can still order one of Remy's drawer-piles from the Dutch distributor Droog, which sponsored some of his early work and has become much better known than Remy himself. But you may have a long wait: Remy is still the one who finds and chooses all the secondhand drawers for each unique piece, then ships them off to a fine carpenter in the Hague who custom-builds a casing to match the dimensions of each drawer.

That's why it costs $35,600 to get such a dresser from Droog. Industry is selling the brain rugs for $14,000. This is a lot by design standards, but rock bottom for a museum-ready work of art.

"It's a pity that things become so expensive if you don't mass-produce," Veenhuizen says. Of course, there's always the option that someone could borrow the duo's "method" for making a piece, rather than buying one. They know of admirers who have done that. "If they improve it, that's a good thing," Veenhuizen says. The pair would object only if someone started selling them to others.

The "underlying message" of all their work, Veenhuizen says, "is that people should do more in their environment."

Remy cites Robinson Crusoe as their anti-Ikea hero and model: "Everything around you can be used in a different way, to create your homemade paradise."

Hands On,

showcasing recent work by Atelier Remy & Veenhuizen, runs though May 8 at Industry Gallery, 1358 Florida Ave. NE, Suite 200, open Wednesday to Saturday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Call 202-399-1730 or visit http://www.industrygallerydc.com.