05.15.22

Saturday Selects

Week of May 9, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: towering pavilions and whimsical creatures by Serban Ionescu, on view at R & Company, a bubbled glass moment, and why terrazzo will never die.

More

05.13.22

Q+A

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.

More

05.12.22

Sight Unseen Presents

Cool Chromes and Candy-Colored Resin: Introducing the First Sight Unseen Furniture Collection, Created in Collaboration With Bestcase

As an editorial platform and sometimes-IRL design show, Sight Unseen has been showcasing furniture and accessories by talented designers for almost thirteen years. But it wasn't until nearly a decade in, when our old friend Charles Constantine went to co-found a metal manufacturing facility called Bestcase, that we began to wonder — wait, shouldn't we also be making furniture ourselves? After figuring out the possibilities and constraints of designing with metal, creating a '70s-inspired mood board with references to how we wanted the collection to feel — at once icy and warm, vintage-inspired, yet of the moment — and reaching out to a handful of designers who could absolutely nail this look, the resulting six-piece collection launches today, both on Sight Unseen's 1stDibs storefront and through Bestcase’s distributor network.

More

05.11.22

Sighted

Obsessed With Materials? This Italian Brand Is Turning Them Into Wall Art

Most object designers — and object-lovers too, ourselves included — have an unusually heightened appreciation for materials. We can feel moved simply by the surface texture of clay, or by the way a piece of glass reflects light, or by the curious reaction of metal to certain chemicals or industrial processes. That notion is at the heart of Design Editions, a novel new project making its debut at Suite NY that treats materials like paintings, framing them so they can be hung on the wall and admired.

More

07.24.20

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Independent Design Label Launches in the South of France

The tiny town of Hyères in the South of France is only 50 square miles, but has long had an outsized presence on the contemporary design map as the home of the arts foundation Villa Noailles and its annual Design Parade festival. The festival was canceled this year due to the pandemic — more on that next week! — but two young Parisians have managed to fill in the gap with an exhibition called Été Super, which is serving as the launch of their independent design brand 13Desserts and its permanent showroom in a former Hyères skate shop.

More

05.09.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

At a Los Angeles Gallery, Ceramic Fountains and a Living Room Rendered Entirely in Clay

For those of us who’ve gotten to know our homes and domestic spaces a little too well in the last couple of years, House and Garden, a joint installation of new work by Lily Clark and Analuisa Corrigan at Stroll Garden, offers a chance to refresh the familiar. At the LA gallery, Corrigan has rendered a living room of furnishings in clay while Clark has created a garden of working ceramic fountains staged with live plant vignettes by Alice Lam of A.L. BASA. All of it Invites you to pause and give a second thought to what seems ordinary and everyday and then think yet again.

More

05.07.22

Saturday Selects

Week of May 2, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: four more new design talents to close out our two-week series (including Kiki Goti, above), outdoor bathtubs giving us serious dream-life FOMO, and an installation in a 1920s private airport by Nilufar gallery.

More

05.05.22

Up and Coming

Lukas Cober’s Practice Grew From Building Surfboards in his Teens

From a young age, there was never any doubt in Lukas Cober's mind that he would pursue a career in design. “I have always been into crafts, so for me, it was clear at a very early stage that I would be building things with my hands” says the designer, who grew up in Aachen, a small medieval city at the tripoint of Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. But Cober inevitably embarked on his current path by pursuing a somewhat surprising endeavor for such a hopelessly landlocked city. “At one point in my late teens, I got heavily into the art of hand-shaping surfboards,” he recalls, “which sparked my fascination with functional art and gave me a deep understanding about to approach aesthetics."

More

05.04.22

Up and Coming

Rutger de Regt’s Latest Collection is a Creative Take on Children’s Crafts

Rutger De Regt's current project, "Mommy I made an ashtray," on view at Casa Perfect in New York until June, expands on the Dutch designer's research into balloon-sculpting, using ceramic in lieu of pellets to hand-form objects.

More

05.03.22

Up and Coming

Rejo Studio’s Playful Designs Reference Everything From Their Arab Upbringing to Japanese Anime

There’s something almost animate about the furniture and lighting designed by Reem Olyan and Jumana Qassem of REJO studio. You can easily imagine these pieces having conversations with each other when you’re out of the room. Contrasting with this stylistic playfulness, though, is the seriousness of purpose that these Palestinian designers share.

More

05.01.22

Saturday Selects

Week of April 25, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a cookbook borne from the depths of the pandemic, BZIPPY’s technicolor LA headquarters, a ceramicist in Australia blowing our minds with material innovations, and more.

More

04.29.22

Up and Coming

Rasmus Nossbring’s Glass Sculptures Look Like They Were Squeezed Through a Tube of Swedish Caviar

For Swedish glassblower Rasmus Nossbring, it’s the immersive nature of the medium that’s so compelling. "Glass moves like nothing I've ever seen before and to use it demands full attention from your whole body and mind," says the Stockholm-based artist. "It’s like super Zen and an adrenaline rush at the same time. A lot of people describe it as a dance, and I would say that on the best days I feel like I become one with the material."

More