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06.23.26

The Weekly

I Expected to Love My First 3Days of Design in Copenhagen. But I Could Never Have Anticipated What Would Make It So Great.

If you can believe it, this was my first year attending 3DaysofDesign in Copenhagen, and I went to the fair, now in its 10th year, armed with absurdly high expectations. I knew that just existing in Copenhagen in early June — using Lime bikes to cycle around, drinking natural wine, eating smørrebrød — would set a good baseline for fun. But after my experience at Salone, which I wrote about here, I felt increasingly desperate for Copenhagen to mean something. I told people I was going because, as a chronicler of design fair culture, I felt compelled to see one that had become such a word-of-mouth success. But on a personal level, it’s like I needed Copenhagen to prove to me that design fairs were still worth attending. As hesitant as I am to say this — lest everyone frantically start planning their show next year in Denmark, which is simply not the right move for everyone — Copenhagen actually exceeded my expectations.
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01.30.25

At Home With

Inside the Home and Showroom of Oculus’s Alfie di Trolio, London’s Coolest New Vintage Design Dealer

“If you asked a child to sketch what their fantasy chair or bed looked like, they might draw something that looks like an Oculus product,” says Alfie di Trolio, who deals vintage furniture and objects under the name Oculus and works as a set designer in London. It’s a pretty perfect description of the pieces he seeks out for selling — handmade, imperfect, a little wonky and weird. “They’re functional pieces but there’s something super decorative and super silly; often the scale is a bit more exaggerated than it needs to be,” he adds. Guided mostly by intuition, di Trolio gravitates toward metal work, specifically wrought iron, which allows for “these overblown, extravagant forms.” Weighty wooden pieces are hardly out of the question, though, like “chunky old cabinets where you feel like someone’s chopped down a tree and carved inside.” So, what makes for an Oculus object? There’s a feeling of excitement di Trolio gets, a tumbling curiosity around how the object came to be. “It’s like, I can’t imagine who made you! What were they doing? Were they in therapy?"
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