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Up and coming Swiss designer Dimitri Bähler
01.18.18

Up and Coming

This Swiss Designer Blends the Rational With the Emotional to Create Some of the Most Beautiful Objects We’ve Seen

"When I started at ECAL at age 18, I actually didn’t know much about design," admits Dimitri Bähler. "As a kid, I was more interested in music, fashion, and illustration, along with biology and chemistry. In fact, I've always combined those two poles of interests: the rational and the emotional." That seems as good a way as any to describe Bähler, a young Swiss designer whose work has always seemed the result of both meticulous planning and wild experimentation. In many of his pieces, a relatively strict basic form is married to a more complex and renegade surface treatment.
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01.05.18

Up and Coming

This Swedish Illustrator’s Soft-Edged Work Might Be the Calming Influence We All Need Right Now

If you're a relatively highly attuned design person — and chances are, if you're here, you are — you might recognize the work of Swedish-born, Barcelona-based designer and illustrator Klas Ernflo (and not just because it often reminds us of another perennial SU fave, Geoff McFetridge). Ernflo's done work for Apartamento, Domus, Frame, IKEA, Mother London, Oyyo, and more, in addition to keeping up his own studio with drawings, paintings, and sculpture. But it's his latest project that we find the most fascinating.
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11.28.17

Up and Coming

An Up-and-Coming Brazilian Designer On Lightness, Gravity, and the Future

“Before studying product design, I almost graduated with a business degree,” says Guilherme Wentz, the São Paulo–based designer who, in 2016, partnered with entrepreneur Rafael Gehrke to form WENTZ, a new line of furnishings, lighting, and accessories. “But at the time, I was not happy with the job and life I had. I realized I wanted to live in a simpler and maybe more disruptive way.” Since then, the up-and-coming Brazilian designer has become a serious talent to watch, what with his spare, nature-infused creations blurring the boundary between old and new.
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11.08.17

Up and Coming

Meet the Up and Coming Finnish Illustrator Behind the Sight Unseen Suitcase Print

Earlier this year, when we began to think about who might design the pattern that would adorn the interior of the Arlo Skye x Sight Unseen suitcase, we first established a few parameters: We wanted the suitcase to be more sophisticated than playful, but to still embody the warm, colorful, graphic sensibility that we tend to favor. We needed the print to repeat, but we wanted the pattern to have the illusion of being more random. And we hoped that we might be able to shine a light on a lesser-known, up-and-coming talent.
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Bauhaus-inspired housewares by Orphan Work
11.08.17

Up and Coming

Brutalist- and Bauhaus-Inspired Housewares and Lighting From the Duo Behind Material Lust

Christian Swafford and Lauren Larson, the creative couple behind Material Lust, introduced their sister brand Orphan Work humbly enough, with a soft launch last year that had us wondering what, exactly, the brand even was. But since its debut, the label has evolved beyond its origins as “an exploration of orphaned material” and developed into a full-fledged brand: lighting, accessories, and what they call “monuments for your tabletop,” inspired at turns by Bauhaus and Brutalism, but mainly by the Vienna Secession.
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09.19.17

Up and Coming

An Emerging Melbourne Artist on Still Lifes, Surrealism, and More

One look at Sean Meilak’s Instagram, and you’ll see why the Melbourne artist has suddenly become our new talent to watch Down Under. Meilak has a way of incorporating and transfiguring familiar visual references and echoes — from antiquity to Surrealism to the Memphis group — into works that quietly hint at something less obvious or known.
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09.05.17

Up and Coming

A Debut Collection Influenced By Poetry, Philosophy, and “Total Garbage”

We've always been curious about solo designers who choose to use a studio name, but we got as good a reason as any recently by Brecht Gander, the designer behind a brand-new, Queens-based studio called Birnam Wood, whose first collection we're debuting here today. A philosophy major and the son of two poets, Gander's studio name is a reference to Macbeth. But its lack of specificity also acknowledges the people who work alongside Gander in his shop — as he says, "I write the songs, but it takes a group to play the music."
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07.27.17

Up and Coming

Gradients and Bands of Gold: Jonny Niesche’s Mesmerizing New Paintings

For the Sydney-based, Australian-born artist Jonny Niesche, one of the more transformative moments of his career occurred while studying abroad at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. During a crit, a mentor likened Niesche's work to a Tumblr, meaning that he hadn’t yet established enough parameters or guidelines for his practice — or, in other words, the things that might make his work stand out as his. “As long as you think about the principles of your work, then it can be your work no matter what material or form it comes in,” he was told.
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