Design Parade, a Festival in the French Countryside, is the Anti–Design Fair

Each spring, as we're challenged to survive the Milan fair, New York Design Week, and Design Miami-Basel in rapid succession, life really does start to feel like one big, annoying, never-ending design parade. And yet funny enough, the festival of that same name, which takes place in early July at the Villa Noailles in Hyères, often feels like the antidote — a charming anti-design-fair in the French countryside where creativity, not commerce, is the only thing on the agenda.
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These Ceramics in a Former French Salon Are the Exact Amount of ’80s Nostalgia We Need Right Now

When Italian designer Valentina Cameranesi and curator Matylda Krzykowski first saw the former hairdresser's shop in Toulon, France — where the interior design portion of the annual Design Parade festival is held this year — its windows were plastered with the word "Féminin." Perhaps it was fate, because the word is an apt reference to Cameranesi’s work, which is on view in the former salon in her first solo exhibition until September 24.
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Week of July 3, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: velvet-clad walls at the Vienna Secession, 3-D artworks having a moment, and, for good measure, Scandinavian paper porn.
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See Sabine Marcelis’s Real-Life Version of Mondrian’s Most Famous Painting

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the launch of Theo Van Doesburg's seminal magazine, De Stijl, in 1917, and Rotterdam-based designer Sabine Marcelis recently helped carve out a space at the Cannes Film Festival to honor the art and design movement that adopted its name. For the festival's Dutch Pavilion, Marcelis brought to life Mondrian's famed 1935 painting "Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow" by building a 3-D framework of black lines inset with gradient glass panels, then punctuating it with primary colored versions of her signature Voie Lights and Candy Cubes.
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Nine New Mirrors We Love, On View at a Swiss Gallery

For the Lausanne gallery MOBILAB — which also does triple duty as part laboratory, part shop —the latest theme of works is “Face / Surface,” which entails a wild exploration of mirrors by nine designers, craftsmen, and artists. The varying concepts of reflection range from hanging balloon-like chandeliers by glassmaker and artist Matteo Gonet to quasi-circular, blue-hued shapes inspired by lunar cycles from Swiss designer Adrien Rovero.
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Week of June 26, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: furniture inspired by Judd and Noguchi, a peek into Portland's seriously impressive retail scene, and a new collaboration between a Dutch textile designer and a happy housewares store, above.
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Six Talents to Watch from RCA’s 2017 Graduate Show

Despite continued uncertainty about the effect Brexit might have on applications from students abroad, this year’s Royal College of Art graduate show was a celebration of global design talent, showcasing some of the best emerging talents from the EU and beyond. Here are six of our favorites.
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This Heath Ceramics Alum Just Made the Chicest Salt Lamp We’ve Ever Seen

A little more than a decade ago, when Christina Zamora was just an art-school grad living in the Bay Area, she landed a job that would go on to inform her life and her practice in immeasurable ways: She became a designer for Heath Ceramics, the midcentury California pottery brand whose early-2000s revival coincided with Zamora's tenure there. "I was surrounded by her way of thinking and working every single day. This experience had a profound impact on how I approach design." That becomes clear from the moment you encounter the first product made by Zamora's year-old, Oakland-based studio, Brave Matter.
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Ana Kras Natalie Weinberger

Ana Kras and Natalie Weinberger’s Powerhouse Collab at Picture Room

On view through August 20th at Brooklyn’s Picture Room, Family pairs pencil drawings by artist and designer Ana Kraš with stacked stoneware sculptures — each comprised of a set of functional vessels wheel-thrown by Brooklyn ceramicist Natalie Weinberger — in an exploration of emotional interplay between inanimate objects. “We started calling each set a family,” Weinberger says, “because we’re working with separate figures that share an emotional attachment.”
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Buy These Curated Arrangements from Daniela Jacobs, Queen of the Still Life

Daniela Jacobs sees the world through the lens of the still life — something that's instantly obvious with a scroll through her Instagram page, where her beautifully shaped and textured ceramics are placed in and among the best props and treasures. So when her latest collection of shoppable still lifes, called ARC Accents, came about, it had evolved over years of accumulation and a love for secondhand items. “I didn't want to start a secondhand shop, but rather a curated collection of pieces, both found and of my own design.”
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