This Chicago Showroom is an Under-the-Radar Gem for Sourcing High-End Vintage Furniture Finds

The collection of furniture, objects, and art at Beth Berke’s Chicago vintage furniture emporium South Loop Loft is both wonderfully eclectic and satisfyingly cohesive. While Berke is often drawn to iconic classics by recognizable names, she’s developed a keen eye for the unusual, too, which in a way reflects her curious path to the design world. Berke began as an aid worker in Afghanistan and then a social worker in Chicago, helping women and children in crisis; $30,000 sofas were not exactly top of mind. But a stint in San Francisco “on a social worker's budget,” she says, led her to estate sales and Craigslist, as well as a burgeoning passion for vintage furniture.
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This Australian Designer Scoured Paris’s Flea Markets for Her New Vintage Capsule Collection

With their newly launched CLO Capsule, Australian interior design atelier and boutique CLO Studios makes a strong case for visiting Parisian flea markets. It helps if you have a shipping container to fill, which they did, collecting secondhand, vintage, and antique European design treasures over the course of a year to bring back to Australia. Founder and creative director Chloe Tozer has always traveled to find inspiration and on her journeys has struck up friendships with suppliers from Morocco to Beijing. But Paris was always a destination for the company to attend design fairs and exhibitions until a visit in 2022, when Tozer was intrigued by the local flea markets and what she might find among the stalls. She went with no intention to buy…at first. “Once I arrived, I thought, “How can I not?!”
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Meet the 1980s-Era Designer Whose Chair Went Semi-Viral During the Pandemic

The impulse to reassess design from the late '70s and '80s — and to place it in a current context — has clearly been in the air, most notably at last year’s Return to Downtown group show from Superhouse and Magen H Gallery and at the more recent Blurring the Timeline show, also at Superhouse. Standout pieces from both exhibitions included chairs by a designer whose name you might not be familiar with: Howard Meister, part of the core group of designer-artists at Art et Industrie, a now-legendary New York gallery that opened in 1977 and closed in the late '90s. Here, we caught up with Meister from his home in Western Massachusetts. In a roving, entertaining interview, he shared with us how he got his largely accidental start and went from being “a dope in a suit” to an artist, his belief in the importance of craft and his desire not to be “survived by crap."
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How These Vintage Dealers Restyle Their Jersey City Home on the Regular

When we first encountered Joey Meyers and Mark Baehser, it was online, via their vintage shop Ball & Claw — since renamed Unnecessary Projects — which had taken a place in the sprawling North Brooklyn vintage empire Dobbin St. Co-op. We assumed the two were old-hat dealers. But, as we discovered when we approached them about shooting their Jersey City Victorian home for our book, How to Live With Objects, it turns out they only entered the game a few years ago, out of love but also out of necessity: Meyers had taken to constantly cycling furniture in and out of their home, and they needed an outlet to offload the amazing finds that didn't quite work with their own space.
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London interior designer vintage objects

In a New Gallery Space, Hollie Bowden Shows Off Her Talent for Sourcing Minimal Maximalist Vintage Objects

London-based interior designer Hollie Bowden is a self-described “minimal maximalist.” Think bare walls and airy, earth-toned environments accented and brought together with a touch of dramatic surrealism. She has a way of adding the surprising elements that wind up feeling completely necessary to any given project. After working as a stylist, florist, and set designer, Bowden launched her own studio in 2013 and has spent the past decade conceiving of dreamy domestic and retail spaces. As an extension and natural progression of her studio work, earlier this summer she opened The Gallery, an appointment-only shop located next to her Shoreditch headquarters.
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This 20th-Century Vintage Design Store in London is Giving Peak Postmodern Maximalism

Vintage dealer M.Kardana opened a store on Hackney Road in London earlier this year, a physical space that allows owner Mario Kardana to take joy in the arranging of things. “What I love is curating all of these various pieces that could be 70 years apart and making them work together and complement each other,” he says. “I always make sure to mix styles and eras as this is what I find the most fun and interesting.” Downstairs, on the original wonky wooden floorboards, it’s maximalist and colorful whereas the newer upstairs room is more suited to Postmodern and clean-cut pieces.
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The Vintage Furniture Dealer Whose Aesthetic Runs From Bauhaus to Beetlejuice

Gennaro Leone, who runs the vintage furniture shop Spazio Leone in London, is clearly devoted to the cult of '70s and '80s Italian design. But he’s also drawn to pieces that seem to exist in a dream-zone where Art Deco–meets-Postmodernism and Surrealist motifs, along with a hint of Delia Deetz (that's Catherine O’Hara’s sculptor stepmom in Beetlejuice, for anyone who needs a refresher). In the short time that Leone's been up and running, the dealer has developed an aesthetic that could even be described — as he himself puts it — as “WTF is this? I’m trying to find a balance between crazy shapes and comfortable things.
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The Parisian Design Duo Channelling 1970s French Glamour

The 1970s were, arguably, one of the best eras in French design. It’s a decade that saw then-president George Pompidou commission Pierre Paulin to reimagine the Élysée Palace’s interiors in his unorthodox space-age designs, and the stiff conventions of mid-century modernism finally loosened into an ironically cosmopolitan glamour. So when we came across French design duo Hauvette & Madani’s sumptuous interiors that so perfectly channel that decade’s vibe, we were instant fans.
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This Renovated Warsaw Apartment Masters the Vintage-Contemporary Mix

Is Piotr Paradowski the best interior design studio you've never heard of? We stumbled upon the latest project by the Krakow-based firm on Instagram this week and were surprised to find very little about the studio online besides their own site, which includes several richly-hued, vintage-inspired projects much like the renovated Warsaw apartment we're featuring today.
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This Berlin Restaurant Proves How Much Color Can Define a Space

We're featuring these photos because Lok6 boasts a new interiors concept by the Berlin-based duo Various Objects, but in fact the images show how minimal an intervention is necessary when color is the absolute star of a space. Nearly every photo is suffused with a kind of late-day warmth that arises from the restaurant's foundational materials — brick-red pigmented reinforced concrete, and structural steel that's been powder-coated to match.
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