03.31.14

At Home With

Jill Wenger, Owner of Totokaelo

For most of us, stores are merely the fleeting destinations wherein we acquire our possessions, while homes are the more permanent spaces where we keep and lovingly display them. But for Jill Wenger, it’s the other way around: Ever since she moved to Seattle in 2001 and founded the cult boutique Totokaelo at just 26 years old, her store has been her material and spiritual base, while her living situation has remained mercurial. “I love change and generally don’t stay in any apartment or home longer than a year,” says the Texas native. Even as we interviewed her for this piece — which contains the first-ever published photos of one of her domestic interiors — she already had one foot out the door. Despite initially falling in love last May with her current apartment for its location — in Capitol Hill, three minutes away from Totokaelo — as well as its original hardwood floors and leaded-glass doors, Wenger is in the midst of searching for something new.

03.26.14

Eye Candy

Brooklyn Artist Esther Ruiz On Her “Miniature Landscapes From a Distant Future”

Brooklyn artist Esther Ruiz refers to her sculptures as "settings," "little parties," and "miniature landscapes from a distant future," but whatever you call them, they're meant to act as colorful, abstracted symbols of imaginary places she's conjured in her mind, and the objects that reside within them. Ruiz, who was born in Houston and graduated from the art program at Rhodes College in Memphis in 2011, showed the series in her first New York solo show this past October, at the Bushwick artist's space Wayfarers. According to her artist's statement, she's inspired "mostly by space operas, pop culture, geometry and the setting sun."

03.24.14

Up and Coming

Tim Colmant, Illustrator

For everyone who's ever bought, coveted, or loved the famous laminates of the Memphis design group — or is semi-ashamedly stalking the new Nathalie Du Pasquier collection at American Apparel — it is nearly impossible not to fall for the work of the young Belgian illustrator Tim Colmant. We succumbed the moment we discovered his cheerful illustrations a little over a year ago, and went on to recommend him to Jonah Takagi, furniture designer and co-founder of the housewares brand Field, when he curated an exhibition for our Noho Design District event last year. A few weeks ago, we found out that our little matchmaking scheme had evolved even further, into a collaboration between Colmant and Takagi's insanely talented girlfriend Mary Timony, whose new band Ex Hex has hired him to wrap its merch in his signature Microsoft Paint–inspired designs. We figured it was time to check in and see what else Colmant has been up to in the year since we first featured him.

03.22.14

Saturday Selects

Week of March 17, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: The world's most beautiful bike lock, an iPad cover inspired by New York and a table (above) inspired by Milan, and an epic terrazzo floor discovered in a local institution.

03.19.14

Excerpt: Exhibition

Renate Müller at R & Company

Renate Müller is 68 years old and has been designing children's toys for half a century, some of which she created for her family's toy factory in Sonneberg, Germany, in the '60s and '70s, and the rest of which she still makes by hand in her nearby studio, as part of the personal line she began in 1978. The materials she uses for that line have stayed exactly the same ever since (jute, wood, leather), as has her process and her policy of working alone, save for the occasional hand lent by her daughter. Many of her animal typologies have remained perennial, too. Yet when it came time to create 26 new pieces for her second solo show at New York design gallery R & Company, which opened yesterday, Müller decided to bust out a pretty major — and amusing — twist: Surrealist creatures with two heads, or no heads, that only someone with a very vivid, childlike sense of imagination could possibly dream up.

03.18.14

What They Bought

Sam Baron on Fabrica’s Extra-Ordinary Gallery Collection

When we found out that Fabrica, the Italian design studio and research center, had just launched its striking new Extra-Ordinary Gallery collection in its online shop earlier this month, the pieces were so intriguing and beautiful that we thought we'd struck editorial gold — turns out we weren't the only ones! The collection has been all over the design blogs in the past two weeks, and deservedly so. Yet we couldn't pass up the chance to share it with our readers anyway, so we got in touch with our old friend Sam Baron, creative director of Fabrica's design department, and asked him for some special insight into the collection, which he curated. The result is a fun little personal diary, featuring five of the line's standouts as they relate to Baron's daily routine.

03.13.14

Eye Candy

Totokaelo Art—Objects’s Spring Campaigns

The cult Seattle boutique Totokaelo already carries clothing and objects so beautiful that each new season wreaks havoc on the wallets of aesthetes around the country. The only way the store could possibly improve on that game? By shooting those new collections in scenarios designed to make said aesthetes even crazier. To promote its spring Art—Object catalog, the store's creative director Ashley Helvey masterminded two such campaigns: a photo shoot shot by Robin Stein and styled by Margaret Macmillan Jones in the technicolor plaza of Seattle's King County Correctional Center (designed in the '80s by Martha Schwartz and Benson Shaw), and a video, also in collaboration with Stein, that features Cameron Mesirow of Glasser along with music from her latest album, Interiors.

03.11.14

Q+A

Fort Standard’s Gregory Buntain on his Tombstone Chairs

From an outside perspective, the Brooklyn furniture-design studio Fort Standard exudes the aura of a successful business with a clear DNA. Yet that wasn't always the case: When co-founders Ian Collings and Greg Buntain first joined forces in 2011, after graduating together from Pratt, they had no idea what direction to take — they simply dove headlong into the making process. “We had one goal: to do our own thing,” Buntain said in a recent interview. Their stock may have risen since then, but behind the scenes, the pair still make an effort to keep things loose; to maintain a sense of discovery in their shared practice, they both do separate solo work on the side, little personal experiments and objects they create for their own homes. Occasionally these prototypes are developed into Fort Standard products, but most of the time they go unseen, as was the case for Buntain's marble Tombstone chairs before we spotted them on Instagram. When we approached the designer to ask him if we could share them with you in the interview after the jump, it turned out he had a home full of personal pieces he'd made but also never shared with the public, which he was kind enough to walk us through in the second half of this story.

03.07.14

Eye Candy

Mel Nguyen’s Desktop Deposits Series

Earlier today we posted a studio visit with the young Minneapolis artist Mel Nguyen, shot by photographer Debbie Carlos. But it only featured a small selection of Nguyen's work, in which each project is typically disassembled and morphed into three more. "If you look at a single project of mine and only associate me with that project, it will be not a complete representation of my practice," Nguyen says. We figured it was worth showing you one more example from her portfolio: her recent clay Desktop Deposits series, made for the Kansas City, Missouri, project Objet Boutique curated by Dean Roper.

03.07.14

Studio Visit

Mel Nguyen, Artist

As an artistically inclined teenager feeling bored and marooned in the suburbs of Minnesota, Mel Nguyen did what any millenial in her situation would do: She turned to the internet for creative stimulation. “Even as a high schooler I was looking at all these graphic design blogs, seeing how the field was changing, and thinking, wow,” she says. As soon as she enrolled as an art student at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, she started her own tumblr, showing off her experiments sliding from 2-D into to 3-D and back again. She managed to build such a following on the site that her work went viral in certain online art and design circles — so much so that it’s hard to believe she’s only 21, and won’t graduate until this spring.

03.06.14

Eye Candy

The Fruit Shop by Hsian Jung

Taiwan-born, London-based Hsian Jung works as a curator and interior stylist, but in his spare time, he recently started a hand-formed ceramics line called The Fruit Shop, through whose website he releases collections inspired by individual fruits and vegetables. "Friends were describing my pottery as reminiscent of sweet melons and pumpkins, an insight that inspired this project," explains Jung. To launch his first series, based around the cantaloupe, he styled a series of photographs using "cheap objects from daily life that have similar color tones as the ceramics but totally different textures," he says.

03.03.14

Q+A

Nicole Patel on Her Textile Wall Panels

When we first met the multi-talented Nicole and Sweetu Patel back in 2004, they were running Brooklyn's Citizen Citizen, a high-concept British design showroom that sold objects like crucifix-shaped brushes by FredriksonStallard. But they gave up the project shortly afterward, and have continued to evolve creatively in the last decade: Nicole went on to focus on her interior design business and form a creative partnership with curator Josee Lepage, while Sweetu went on to work for Cappellini and later founded the men's heritage clothing shop C.H.C.M. It was there that we recently spotted Nicole's latest brilliant endeavor, a series of wall panels that she makes from the likes of Japanese indigo textiles and Belgian linen, meticulously stretched and then embellished with things like handmade rope or tone-on-tone embroidery. Beyond hanging them in her husband's store, she hadn't yet put them out in the world, so we decided to do the honors.