The New Hennepin Made x Victoria Sass Lighting Collection Wants You to Experience the Full Spectrum of Emotion

When two longstanding Minneapolis creative forces — Jackson Schwartz, head of the lighting company Hennepin Made and Victoria Sass, founder of interior design studio Prospect Refuge — team up to create a new lighting collection, you can expect the results to be thoughtful conversation starters. Not simply in the obvious way of getting your attention and eliciting a reaction, of course — though their Ontologia series does just that, with one-of-a-kind, handblown glass globes in various sculptural permutations composed of cords, metal, and mahogany spheres. But there’s a deeper form of conversation that Sass envisioned for her first foray into lighting design, and that Schwartz made a reality: a sort of ongoing dialogue, a two-way relationship between the people living with these lights and the lights themselves, which really do seem to have distinct personalities and moods.
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Rodolphe Parente’s Apertura Collection Includes a Lamp With Two Adam’s Apples

When Pierre Chareau, Gio Ponti and Carlo Scarpa are listed as a designer’s heroes, chances are their own work is going to be expressively shaped, functionally intriguing, and artistically quite lovely. And, happily, that’s exactly where Paris-based Rodolphe Parente’s new collection of furniture and lighting has landed in Apertura, a range of limited editions that complement the refined residential and retail interiors for which his studio is better known.
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In Common With and Sophie Lou Jacobsen’s Collab Lighting Collection is the Drama We Need Right Now

There’s a wonderful sense of mystery in the new lighting collaboration between Brooklyn-based studio In Common With and French-American glassware designer Sophie Lou Jacobsen. The Flora collection, as its name suggests, draws on the forms and proportions of plant life — but not your average bouquet or potted succulent. More like an unknown but totally intriguing specimen you might encounter growing on the forest floor. The 20 pieces here feature hand-blown, mold-blown, and slumped glass in milky off-white, amber, lavender, soft browns, and reds. Sconces are edged with dark, scalloped details, tables lamps and pendants are mushroom- and bell-shaped; and on a gorgeous chandelier of curving brass arms, delicate shades of draped glass resemble the blossom of an Angel’s Trumpet.
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Week of July 18, 2022

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the first furniture collection from interior designer Robert McKinley, colorful glass candlesticks by Lex Pott, and a Wright auction full of postmodern treasures.
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Axel Chay Channels Man Ray Through His Erotic Bent Metal Designs

“Not a bit phallic, a lot phallic!” laughs French designer Axel Chay when I suggest his lamp slightly resembles a penis. Based on a 1920s sculpture by Surrealist artist Man Ray, the playful pink design — which I later found out is actually called Phallus — and a sconce shaped like a nipple are the most blatantly erotic and humorous of Chay’s designs. Others more subtly exude sensuality through their curves or elements entangled with one another, but are finished in bright greens, yellows, and blues so could also be interpreted in a completely different way. 
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The Best of the 2022 Salone Del Mobile — Part I

After a rocky two years, life is inching closer to normal these days, and one could use the design-world fair schedule as a barometer: After outright cancellation in April of 2020, the annual Salone del Mobile in Milan managed to squeak through a mini-show in September, only to come back with full force last week just in time for its 60th anniversary. More than 2,000 exhibitors showed at the fairgrounds this year — which we're recapping today — and we walked away from all the huge Italian dinners, garden parties, and launch presentations feeling like our sanity had finally been restored.
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In Common With ceramic lights

In Common With and Danny Kaplan Expand Their Earthy Ceramic Lighting Range

When In Common With debuted in 2018, the Brooklyn studio made their mark (no pun intended) by pairing sleek, machined lamp bases with ceramic shades that had been obviously, laboriously made by hand — pinch marks, bumps, and all. The studio soon found ways to make the shades faster and more efficient — and expanded their offerings to include glass and metal — but in a continued collaboration with ceramicist and fellow Brooklynite, Danny Kaplan, they have been able to recapture that earlier, earthier quality.
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A New Lighting Brand, With Deep Roots in New Orleans and France, Putting a Modern Spin on Traditional Techniques

Swadoh — an anagram of shadow that founder Valerie Legras devised after reading the Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki’s “In Praise of Shadows” — works exclusively with small artisans who do intricate and often time-consuming hand work at their workshops in France. That, and the idea that each artist should be working in a wonderfully unique way with their chosen material, is the strict guiding principle behind Swadoh.
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Here Are a Few of Our Favorite Things From This Year’s Salón Cosa in CDMX

For its third edition, the burgeoning Salón COSA, Mexico’s biannual “gathering of contemporary objects,” returned to its roots in CDMX after a stint in Guadalajara last fall. On a relatively intimate scale — 22 participating artists and designers showed recent and unpublished works — Salón COSA occupied the dance floor of an old cantina nestled among the cafés, nightclubs, and shops of Calle de Motolinia, one of the oldest streets in the city. With the walls and furniture of the bar-turned-exhibition-space cloaked in a fresh coat of cerulean blue, this year’s curation reflected Salón COSA’s nocturnal setting.
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Week of February 14, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: never-produced 1970s furniture by Gabriella Crespi reissued by Gubi, a sprawling solo show of works by Simone Bodmer-Turner, and a new wallpaper series (pictured) whose bold geometries have a painterly feel.
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At Barber Osgerby’s Galerie Kreo Exhibition, An Exploration of the Artisanal and the Industrial

Though the London-based studio Barber Osgerby first started working with Galerie Kreo more than half a decade ago, with their monolithic, shinto shrine–inspired Hakone collection of tables, last month marked their debut as a solo exhibitor. In a show called Signal, on view until April 16, the London duo finally gets to show off their impeccable color sense, which has always seemed a natural fit with Galerie Kreo's aesthetic.
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