For this year’s Unika Auction, the third iteration of the contemporary Norwegian design showcase, FOLD Oslo invited 30 designers, from up-and-comers to established Norwegian names, to create new pieces. (Unika means unique in Norwegian). "Choosing designers to be part of this Unika exhibition was challenging, but also very exciting, as the Norwegian design scene has exploded with talented designers, craftspeople, and artists in recent years,” says FOLD member Anna Maria Øfstedal Eng. There are a wealth of materials here, which both represent and spring from longstanding Norwegian craft traditions in textiles, woodworking, glass, and aluminum. What connects it all for Øfstedal Eng, aside from geographic provenance, is a shared approach: a combination of preservation and innovation that leads to enduring work.

On view through October 1, French curator Anne-Laure Lestage has imagined a Surrealist-inspired exhibition called House of Dreamers at Villa Empain, a storied Art Deco jewel of a building in Brussels. The group show offers visitors the chance to wander through the rooms of a home furnished with imaginative objects that fall somewhere between art and design, making a case for mixing the surreal with the decorative. Here, a tablescape boasts a flamboyant salad sculpture centerpiece; there, a wooden stool is covered in spiral snail shells. In another room, ferns grow from a planter shaped like a medieval castle. 

Behind a battered green door on a quiet canal snaking through Venice’s Dorsoduro neighbourhood, far from the shoulder-to-shoulder throngs of tourists that populate the narrow corridors close to Piazza San Marco, is the city’s last bocce court, opened over a century ago. Most days, the area’s elderly residents convene there to throw bowls, gossip, and sip apéritifs (usually a ruby red Select spritz). But for a few weeks this May and June the sports club has given up one of their precious lanes to an entirely novel endeavor, the recently opened Venice Design Biennale.

The depth of color in Ethan Cook’s work is entrancing: It draws you in and then proceeds to work its spell, stirring up meaning and feeling. Cook is known for his abstract “woven paintings” in which color isn’t applied at all but is part of the canvas itself. He uses a four-harness loom to hand weave fabric, which is then stitched together and stretched on bars. But recently, Cook has been exploring additional materials and techniques, evident in his latest exhibition Entities, at the Brussels location of Nino Mier.

If you've read our book, you probably know by now that mixing vintage and contemporary pieces is one of the many keys to our heart. So we were excited last month to see that the East London–based gallery and design shop Spazio Leone — who we know primarily as a purveyor of wonderfully Postmodern and classic collectible pieces — was presenting new works by the Eindhoven-based Italian designer Francesco Pace of Tellurico, alongside some of the more delightful objects drawn from Spazio Leone's collection.