Jeroen Verhoeven + Demakersvan

Expected to sell for up to US$60,000 at the Sotheby's December 15 auction of "Important 20th Century Design" pieces in New York, Jeroen Verhoeven's Cinderella table is a creative gem among thousands of attempts by young industrial designers to fuse historical inspiration and modern technology.

While most furniture designers today are using computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing (CAD-CAM) to create perfected cookie-cutter pieces, Verhoeven and his group Demakersvan ("Themakersof," composed of twin brother Joep Verhoeven and Design Academy schoolmate Judith de Graauw) use CAD-CAM to construct beautiful, complex designs that convey the feel of old-school craftmanship even as they push the limits of the technology to generate bold, new forms.

Based on the aesthetic of 17th and 18th century Dutch furniture, the seemingly freeform Cinderella table is composed of 57 individual slices (a total of 741 layers) of birch plywood, designed, manufactured, and assembled via CAD-CAM and then finished by hand. Other Cinderella tables in the series (of 20) have already been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

Despite their success in the art world, Verhoeven and company have said that they do not wish for their work to be locked away in museums forever. They are currently working on having many of their pieces, such as their popular How to Plant a Fence (designed with the aid of Dutch bobbin-lace artisans), manufactured more inexpensively in India so as to make their work accessible to the general public.