06.29.17

Up and Coming

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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06.28.17

Up and Coming

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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06.12.17

Up and Coming

Sarah Kelk, the Melbourne Painter to Know Right Now

An unplanned break from painting in the early 2000s saw Melbourne, Australia–based artist Sarah Kelk living in Scotland, running an art gallery, and focusing on the practice of other artists. It wasn’t until she returned to Melbourne in 2011 that she once again found the energy she needed to approach her practice with a fresh perspective.

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06.06.17

Up and Coming

This Chicago Architect Wants Furniture To Boss You Around

Since receiving a second degree from the storied Cranbrook Academy of Art — alumni of which include Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, and Florence Knoll — Ania Jaworska has been living in Chicago, working as a professor and developing a practice and a body of work that spans art, design, and architecture, more often than not finding her surest footing at the point where all three intersect.

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04.14.17

Up and Coming

This Dutch-Based Studio Was the Best Thing We Saw at Salone Satellite

The Dutch-based studio Truly Truly finds a comfortable niche oscillating between product design and experience, creating artful and engaging moments for the viewer that fall between familiarity and curiosity. Their latest work, presented at last week’s Salone Satellite, features projects that combine technical ingenuity with new aesthetics — their morphing Touch glass lights are cast using a dynamic mold that allows for more expressive surface qualities, while the Wove chair plays on the graphic interplay of two differently colored bent-wire frames. And of course we were instantly magnetized by the Daze table – folded, aluminum volumes with subtle corner slits, which allow flashes of hazy, powder-coated color to burst through.

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04.14.17

Up and Coming

A Studio Aiming to Bring More Curves and Coziness to Finnish Design

In the U.S., we look at the rich, enduring design history of Scandinavian countries like Finland and feel nothing but blind envy. But those who have grown up amidst it often have a more nuanced view, like Anni Pitkäjärvi and Hanna-Kaarina Heikkilä of the emerging Helsinki outfit Studio Finna: "The Finnish design world is very much masculine," they say. "The key aspect is functionality. The design language is edgy and square. The colors used are black, white, and grey." They're trying to take a different tack.

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03.30.17

Up and Coming

These Uruguay-Born, Los Angeles–Based Women are Poised for Furniture Stardom

Four years ago, Emiliana Gonzalez and Jessie Young moved to Los Angeles from their hometown of Montevideo. Back in Uruguay, they'd known each other only peripherally, but as creatives in a new city, they were drawn to one another. Gonzalez had trained as an industrial designer, while Young was a conceptual artist and a new mother who didn't have the energy to navigate a new art scene. After designing a few houses together, they moved on to products — first geometric walnut planters, then furniture — and founded Estudio Persona.

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03.15.17

Up and Coming

Meet the Couple That’s Reinventing Bathroom Style

Call it what you will — wash room, water closet, commode, loo — the bathroom is nothing if not the unsung hero of many a home and apartment. It is a place of quiet refuge for space-deprived urbanites and, if Pinterest is any indication, an actual spa if you live outside New York City. No one knows this better than Lisa and Michael Fine, the founders of Quiet Town (she, a stylist, he, a photographer). They've taken their complementary skill sets and combined them to make a covetable line of bath essentials including shower curtains, rugs, and wall hooks that pleasingly upend convention while marrying (often geometric) form to function.

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03.09.17

Up and Coming

An Up-And-Coming Dutch Duo On Why They Don’t Identify As “Designers”

In 2008, when Daphna Isaacs Burggraaf and Laurens Manders began collaborating, they kept their studios separate. It wasn’t until four years later that they officially founded their company, compounding ideas and names — the latter of which was deemed a challenge until the Internet threw up the solution. “We were looking to find out if images of our products had been published, and we found an image of our lamps with the name ‘Daphna Laurens’ written above it.” Upon reading this, they realized that it was exactly what they’d been looking for — an anonymous name that symbolized their way of working together; a new ego that has allowed them to playfully carve out a space for themselves as form-flexing experimenters.

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02.02.17

Up and Coming

Look Inside the Practice of Four Up-And-Coming Ceramicists

What we found at RCA's annual Work in Progress exhibition, in the Ceramics & Glass program, was a study in experimentation: clay that had been manipulated into terrazzo-like slabs, perforated bricks, stringy lumps, punched-in blobs, donut-like lamps, and meticulous geometrics, and almost nothing that looked like it had been turned on a traditional potter's wheel.

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01.30.17

Up and Coming

In This Dutch Designer’s Hands, Even a Door Handle Becomes a Piece of Sculpture

So pretty. So minimal. That, in a nutshell, is the work of Dutch product designer Jeroen van de Gruiter. A recent graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven, van de Gruiter’s work plays with the tension between what a thing appears to be and how we choose to let it function in the world. His objects are as much about themselves as anything else: the way they take up space, shifting and fluctuating, contrasting and offsetting — other objects as well as their surroundings. They are concept made manifest; latent potential given concrete form.

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01.20.17

Up and Coming

This Moscow-Based Studio is the Only Place Not Under Russian Influence

When you think of Moscow and its corresponding decor schemes, Scandinavian minimalism isn't the first thing that comes to mind. But take a look at the interiors in this post — with their exposed-bulb lamps, gridded pillowcases, herringbone floors, moody palettes, and splashes of pink, they'd be right at home in a Stockholm flat. In fact, they're the work of Crosby Studios, the Moscow- and New York–based furniture and interiors studio that debuted its first collection with us at last year's Sight Unseen OFFSITE.

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