Design History: A Timeline of the Most Iconic Dining Objects of All Time

If we’re being totally honest, our idea to create a timeline of iconic dining objects for the second-ever issue of MOLD — the bi-annual journal about the future of food, which we were invited to guest-edit by our friend and colleague Linyee Yuan — didn’t initially spring from any grand pedagogic ambition to illustrate the history of design through the lens of one of humankind’s most universal rituals. It came, rather, from a chance, late-night encounter with a particularly nostalgic bit of pop culture: the Beetlejuice dinner-party scene.
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10 Designers on Their Favorite Dining Chairs

When you love design as much as we do, it can be hard to choose your favorite, well, anything. If asked to choose our favorite dining chair of all time, for example, would we pick a luxurious Milo Baughman? Or something more classic like Breuer's Cesca chair? That's exactly the question we posed to 10 designers around the world in our role as guest editors of the second-ever issue of MOLD Magazine.
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Studiopepe Just Made Us Fall in Love With Italian Design All Over Again

As much as Italian design sometimes feels like an oppressive shadow from under which every other design movement will eternally struggle to emerge, we can't deny that it's also an eternal wellspring of inspiration — as a budding adult we loved its plastics, in our mid- to late-20s it was Memphis, and these days we find ourselves coveting pretty much everything Cini Boeri ever made. Last week we happened across a perfect reminder of this, in the form of a 2016 AD Germany shoot styled by Studiopepe and celebrating the best of Italian design, both then and now.
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Inside the Home and Shop of Oslo’s Most Stylish Couple

To glimpse inside the home of the owners of the best design shop in Oslo is an exercise in great envy. (After all, the couple’s instantly recognizable style is so attuned to color we now pretty much want everything to be green and pink.) Alessandro D’Orazio and Jannicke Kråkvik — interior designers, stylists, and owners of Kollekted By, the aforementioned Norwegian design mecca — spent a year thinking about the look of their newly renovated fin-de-siècle apartment in Oslo.
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Soft Baroque in PIN-UP No.19

Up until recently, there were only a few chairs, mostly vintage, that I'd consistently dreamed of decorating an entire room around: Vico Magistretti's green Selene stacking chairs for Artemide come to mind, as does the sheepskin coziness of Hans Wegner's Flag Halyard chair for PP Mobler. But in Milan last spring, I found a new contender: Soft Baroque's Enzo Mari–inspired, infinitely changeable New Surface Strategies armchair, available only in electric blue.
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The Houses of Prickly Mountain, from Collective Quarterly 2

Collective Quarterly is a niche journal that deep-dives into a different locale with each issue. In Vermont, the journal pointed its camera lenses at a region known as the Mad River Valley, spotlighting the craftspeople and personalities based in the area, from puppeteers to knife-makers to the brilliantly quirky architects whose profile we're excerpting today.
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The Spectrum Issue of Gather Journal

Since its launch in 2012, each issue of the biannual food journal Gather has been organized around a theme, but this summer's is by far our favorite. We're excerpting a story from “Spectrum,” an entire issue devoted to color.
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Anders Ruhwald in PIN-UP No. 18

In the lull between Milan and the frenzy of New York design week, it's easy to become a bit myopic about what's going on elsewhere in the design world. But we'd be remiss if we didn't point out an exhibition happening right now with one of most fascinating concepts we've ever come across: At Chicago's Volume Gallery last week, the Detroit ceramicist Anders Ruhwald opened "The Charred Room," an exhibition that explores "the aftermath of a fire – objects as they should be, recognizable to an extent in shape and position in relation to one another – but charred. Slumped, melted and morphed the objects lose their direct references that create comfort, leaving the viewer with renderings of domestic detritus vaguely familiar." We had the pleasure of speaking with Ruhwald about the lead-up and the process behind that exhibition earlier this year, on assignment for PIN-UP, and with the magazine's permission, we're excerpting that story here today.
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Color Palette, From PIN–UP #17

When PIN–UP editor Felix Burrichter asked me to put together a product-driven color story for the magazine's new fall issue, which just came out last week, I said yes without hesitation — then secretly panicked later. It turns out that defining yourself by a single hue can be strangely intimidating. After thinking about it for ages, I resolved not to think at all, resorting to an idea that's been kicking around Sight Unseen's Pinterest feed for months now: electric blue, reimagined for the magazine as the more whimsical-sounding "peacock." I rounded up 14 of our favorite examples, which PIN–UP contributor Fausto Fantinuoli turned into the gorgeous illustration pictured above, along with the selections of Ambra Medda (dolphin), Tauba Auerbach (vermillion), and Paloma Powers (blush). Burrichter was kind enough to let us share the full story, which you can view after the jump.
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Oeuffice Milanes collection Piero Portaluppi

Oeuffice’s Milanes Collection, from PIN-UP No. 16

Now that Seattle Week on Sight Unseen is over, we're turning our attention to another northwestern capital — Milan, Italy, home of the Salone del Mobile, where Jill and I are on serious scouting duty this week. Before we begin posting our annual eyewitness dispatches from the fair, though, we wanted to start our coverage with a small paean to our temporary digs: an article I contributed to the forthcoming Milan-themed spring/summer issue of PIN–UP magazine, which features the work of one of our favorite local design firms (Oeuffice) photographed inside the foundation of one of our favorite local architects (Piero Portoluppi). Click through to learn more about Oeuffice's Milanes collection of tabletop items and the impetus behind these gorgeous images, plus how you can snag the PIN–UP No. 16 when it goes on sale next month.
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Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Lost Interview with Ettore Sottsass, From Surface Magazine

It's no secret that we're devotees of the work of the late Italian design legend Ettore Sottsass, but to the extent that everyone we know has been caught up lately in the more superficial elements of his influence — the post-modernist colors, patterns, and geometries — we jumped at the chance to share with you this reminder of his intellectual legacy: one of several previously unpublished interviews with Sottsass conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2001. It was given to us as a little holiday present by Surface magazine's new editor Spencer Bailey, who oversaw its inclusion in the Dec/Jan Art Issue, which was co-edited by ForYourArt founder Bettina Korek and is the fourth since Surface was redesigned and reimagined this past July. Says Bailey: "Last fall, I was talking with Serpentine Gallery co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist over dinner in London about his unpublished interviews with artists and designers. He mentioned that he has several with Ettore Sottsass, so I asked him to send them to me. This one in particular blew me away. Hans Ulrich is a master interviewer, and Sottsass is, well, Sottsass. When I was putting together Surface's first annual Art Issue, I just knew I had to publish it." Sight Unseen is the only place on the web you can read the entire edited interview as it ran in the magazine — check it out after the jump, including images added by us, and don't forget to subscribe to Surface when you're done!
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