For West Elm’s Design Challenge, We Show You How to Personalize Your Living Room With Objects, Sight Unseen-Style

When West Elm approached us last fall to participate in their ongoing Design Challenge series — in which subjects start with a blank canvas and create a room entirely from scratch — we immediately said yes. After all, what better way to show people how to live with objects than to demonstrate it ourselves? The project would bring to life some of the big ideas from our recently published book, and it would give us the opportunity to flex our design muscles, which we don't always get the chance to do. The result is a four-minute video that delves into our philosophy of objects, and how they can bring a major dose of personality to any interior.
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The book is a wall-to-wall guide to finding your personal style and incorporating those meaningful works of art and design into your home.

Out Today, Our Book Shows You How to Create a More Meaningful Home By Collecting Objects You Love

Two and a half years in the making, our first book, How to Live With Objects, is finally out and in bookstores — and, hopefully, in your home, if you pre-ordered! — today. We could not be more excited for people to finally see and touch and read this book — we very much wanted it to feel like an object in and of itself, since we're usually talking to you from behind a screen, and it's such a pleasure to hold the book in your hand and flip through it. So exactly what is the book about? Read on to find out.
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Week of November 7, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Sophie Lou Jacobsen's new glass menorah, a terrazzo-inspired lounge chair, a '60-inspired floral furniture collab, and Alex Tieghi-Walker's new New York gallery.
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“If Books Could Talk, What Furniture Would They Ask You to Make For Them?”

The design world sprang almost alarmingly fast back into action this week in Milan, but before that, one of the quieter — and cuter — exhibitions to appear on our radar was by the peripatetic Norwegian design collective Pyton. Together with the artist-run publishing project Heavy Books, Pyton's founders Tron Meyer, Henrik Ødegaard and Richard Øiestad created a small collection of new works to show at Galleri Golsa in Oslo. For the exhibition, Christian Tunge, the artist behind Heavy Books, gave several limited editions from his publishing house to the designers and asked: “If books could talk, what furniture would they ask you to make for them?”
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This Exhibition Shows How Cranbrook Helped Pioneer the Cross-Disciplinary, Craft-Based, Experimental Design and Art of Today

Most people know the highlights of the Cranbrook Academy of Art’s storied 90-year history, from its campus by Eliel Saarinen to its role as a breeding ground for the stars of mid-century modernism. But in June, the school launched the results of a four-year deep-dive into its own history — in the form of a sprawling exhibition and a 600-page book, both called With Eyes Opened — that offer a much more nuanced view of Cranbrook’s game-changing influence. We spoke with curator Andrew Blauvelt about 6 artworks and objects by varied practitioners that were part of that narrative.
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An Iconic Children’s Book is the Inspiration Behind This Incredibly Joyous Exhibition

A friend of mine and I have often joked about how Goodnight Moon, the classic 1947 children's book written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd, would make an excellent moodboard for a gloriously maximalist interior design project: The incredible color blocking! The striped drapes! The scalloped picture frames! The animal hide rug! And while we still would love to see those benchmarks turned into something truly livable, a new exhibition has done the next best thing.
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A Roberto Burle Marx book, and Other Graphic Design Picks for March

In a new column, each month The Brand Identity will share with our readers a selection of the most interesting studios, packaging designs, and branding and identity projects featured recently on their site. This month: A book on the work of iconic landscape artist Roberto Burle Marx, the design of a favorite Spotify playlist series, an identity for an experimental Australian tea house, and more.
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Ken Miller’s New Book Pictures Photography Anew

A new volume by editor and curator Ken Miller celebrates photography not for the referential images it can capture, but for the possibilities of the medium in and of itself. Titled PICTURES, the book celebrates non-representational photography, and it’s a formal announcement of sorts that photographs, as an art form, have come into a category all their own and not just in service of documentation, representation, or narrative.
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Peek Into The Private Library Of Instagram’s Coolest Book Dealer

Press SF is interested in a refined but never rarefied melange of burgeoning artist’s movements and localized design, the kitschy and the iconoclastic, sourced from library sales and small secondhand bookstores with “a lot of different buyers and a lot of different viewpoints.”
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Guest Editor Fiorella Valdesolo on Mushrooms and the Interconnectedness of All Things

Today, meet Fiorella Valdesolo, a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, and consultant who is probably best known for her role as co-founder and editor-in-chief of the food magazine Gather Journal (whose erstwhile print issues we still hoard). All of the stories we’ll be posting between now and Friday have been either written or chosen by Fiorella; they center around the interconnectedness of all things — and, in a way, why we need each other now more than ever.
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Three Recipes for Virtuous Comfort Food, From a Fave Restaurant of New York Creatives

Right now we're all cooking at home, and all we want is virtuous comfort food — exactly the kind of food that the New York restaurant Dimes is known for. Today we're sharing three recipes from its new book, Dimes Times, all of them warm and soothing, relatively easy to make, and freezer-friendly, too. It's no sitting-at-a-Matisse-inspired-table-sipping-wheatgrass-margaritas, but it's the perfect thing for a pandemic that has deprived us of such.
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An Artist Responds to the Work of Victor Vasarely, Father of the Op-Art Movement

An internationally exhibited conceptual artist working in photography, sculpture, and installation, Oran Hoffmann was invited to the Fondation Vasarely in Aix-en-Provence in 2017, where he sifted through boxes of Vasarely’s tiles, parallelograms, serigraphs, and other ephemera used to inspire and lay the groundwork for the unusual architecture of the foundation and the optically boggling sculptures and spaces within. Hoffmann’s new book is the culmination of a year of research and working with Vasarely’s archives.
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