A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: super-colorful rugs and blankets that are surprisingly affordable, an 80-pound, solid-brass bookcase that’s anything but, a peek inside Totokaelo’s Seattle offices, and a covetable pair of Bauhausian chairs (above).

Discoveries

These very Bauhausian chairs are pretty much the best thing we’ve seen on the blogs in the past week. They’re by the Israeli duo Bakery Studio, and they’re made from bent steel tubes with a plywood seat. So graphic, so good.Portland-based graphic designer Conrad Crespin recently sent us a link to his Memphis Throw series of blankets and scarves — pretty apropos considering all the Memphis references we got in the press for our Sight Unseen OFFSITE show. The interesting twist is that the pieces, including the $150 (!) Sottsass Blanket above, are all made by Pure Country Weavers in North Carolina.We love this new clock by BCXSY, which looks like a decorative sculpture at first but whose shell-like shape rotates, allowing its receding outer edge to mark time on a linear scale. Click here to see it in action.Another unusual typology is this object, which works like a large folding fan but functions as a modular, on-the-go privacy screen. Called Léon, it’s by the Swiss designer and ECAL student Paul Tubiana, and it recently won one of this year’s Prix Émile Hermès awards. View the rest of the winners here.The Cooper-Hewitt shop recently unveiled one of hopefully many forthcoming exclusive commissions: The new hand-honed marble Annex tables by Joe Doucet, which are held together solely by gravity. The legs slot into the tops to form the gorgeously subtle Xs you see above. (Photo by Kendall Mills)We only found out recently that the Brooklyn product designer Alissia Melka-Teichroew has been doing quite a bit of art direction lately — she recently collaborated with Lisa Klappe on a playfully styled spring catalog for Kikkerland, an image from which is pictured above. Prop stylists are the new DJs, folks! Another collaboration we love, which launched in-store at Creatures of Comfort last week, is a jewelry collection designed by Piéce A Conviction‘s Ghislain Ryckebusch in partnership with Mary Ping of Slow and Steady Wins the Race. You can read more about the joint series on T Magazine’s blog. Equally shiny is this stunning — if staggeringly expensive — freestanding bookshelf by London’s Minimalux. Each unit is made from 33 interlocking bars of solid brass, costs the equivalent of $11,500, and weighs 80 pounds, but we’d pay the FedEx bill without a moment’s hesitation if we had that kind of cash lying around.

Links

Anton Alvarez’s big solo show at Sweden’s Gustavsbergs museum opened earlier this week, in which he’ll be running his thread-wrapping machine on-site for weeks, creating the largest pieces he’s ever attempted to make. Disegno visited his studio earlier this year while he was prepping for the show — click here to see the images and interview that originally ran in the magazine.Not too long ago, we hosted Seattle Week on Sight Unseen, and one of the most-read stories from that series was an At Home With shot by photographer Michael Muller in the apartment of Jill Wenger, owner of the cult boutique Totokaelo. At the same time as he shot that story, Muller also photographed Totokaelo’s offices for Remodelista, who finally published the resulting story earlier this month.

Exhibitions

Ending this Sunday in New York’s Nolita neighborhood is the exhibition Norwegian Icons, which features hundreds of furniture and tabletop objects designed in Norway from 1940 to 1975. Definitely make time to see it if you’re in the city this weekend.The annual American Design show at Triode Gallery in Paris ended earlier this week, sadly, but the gallery created this handy downloadable catalog in case you want to see how domestic designs are being promoted on the other side of the pond. The show is a collaboration with Roll & Hill and MatterMade, and this year included works by Anna Karlin, Fort Standard, Jonathan Nesci, and more.We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: We wish there was some domestic equivalent to the American Hardwood Export Council, which supports incredible projects in London like a recent show with Okay Studio as part of Clerkenwell Design Week. We spotted the results of the project on Dezeen this week, including the Apex tables by Hunting & Narud pictured above — if there’s any organization in the States that wants to work with us to support a similar initiative as part of Sight Unseen OFFSITE next year, we’re all ears!
On through the end of August at London’s Design Museum is a retrospective of the designs and methodologies of Pentagram partner Daniel Weil, whose 1981 Bag Radio, pictured above, particularly caught our eye; it’s considered to be his seminal work. Only 10,000 were made, of which most were sold in Japan. We found some information about it on this website: “Daniel Weil’s Radio in a Bag subverts our preconceptions of the appearance of audio equipment, which, by the 1970s, was dominated by hard-edged black and chrome boxes, visual indicators of high technology. The flexible and transparent bag features the radio’s scattered components as the object’s decoration, while also demystifying the mechanism and allowing for easy maintenance.”

Instagrams

The theme of this week’s Instagram roundup: New things made by our friends! Pictured above is a piece by Elyse Graham, an L.A. artist who recently began making vases in the style of her trademark Geodes. Here’s what she told us about the project back in the fall: “The exterior of the vases are made from hydrocal plaster, hand-roto-cast inside balloons — it’s a hilariously jiggly process. The interiors are created by pouring layers of alternating translucent and opaque urethane resin, so they have a similar ‘geological’ look as the geodes, but with an added fluidity.”
This Instagram basically had us peeing in our pants — it’s a shot of a new, exclusive manufactured rug series by New Friends for Anthropologie, several of which are already for sale on the retailer’s site. It’s the moment us not-so-wealthy folks have all been waiting for.We didn’t realize that Makers & Brothers were stocking these adorable geometric egg cups by Saturday Workshop until we saw it pop up on their Instagram feed. Perfect inspiration for the epic brunch we’re about to indulge in. Happy weekend!