If artists, musicians and furniture designers Simon and Nikolai Haas feel they don’t have a sufficient number of adjectives before their collective name, they can surely pick up a few this week at Design Miami/Basel. The Haas brothers’ latest range of furnishings – launched in Basel by New York contemporary-design gallery R 20th Century – comes with a list of descriptives a mile long, and when viewed at once it casts a whole new light on the craftsmen.

The new collection of reptilian brass tables and feral fur seating has a brutish quality that both attracts and repels. The brass coffee tables and stools employ the designers’ groundbreaking hexagon-tile surface to unusual amorphous effect, creating a shape that appears to physically skulk. Combined with Plexiglas to form the ‘Unique’ lamp and shade, the hexagonal tiles take on a phallic quality that will shock and delight in equal measure – even among the cosmopolitan crowds at Basel.