03.18.23

Saturday Selects

Week of March 13, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: essential spring attire from Marimekko, a tonal terracotta Asian diner in Byron Bay, and a lamp that looks like a stack of giant Malteasers.

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03.16.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

These Mysterious Glass Assemblages, On View at Marta, Were Inspired By Modernist Buildings and Corporate Architecture

Over the years, Jonah Takagi has worked with all kinds of materials, but it's glass that has preoccupied him throughout five summer residencies in the south of France, at the International Glass and Visual Arts Research Center, or CIRVA, in Marseilles. For Takagi, the experience yielded not only an unexpected love for Marseilles but also an ever-evolving series of mesmerizing angular vessels that reference, in their shape and in their texture, the Brutalist architecture of Kenzo Tange or Le Corbusier. His latest selection, a series of dusky, painterly assemblages, is on view through April 22 at Marta gallery in Los Angeles in a solo show called "Brut Vessels."

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03.15.23

Sighted

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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03.14.23

Fair Report

A Barbie Pink Living Room, A Patchwork Metal Cabinet: Everything We Loved From the 2023 Collectible Fair in Brussels

Consistently one of our favorite fairs on the design circuit, the sixth edition of Collectible opened last week in a new venue in Brussels, and even from afar we were struck by the fair's continued push towards experimentation. In a new section called Dialogue, galleries were invited to show works from the '80s and '90s in conversation with more contemporary pieces (probably our favorite exhibition trope, tbh); another new section, called Architect <=> Designer, showcased only work by architects and interior designers, while a third, called New Garde, featured the best recently launched galleries and collectives.

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01.04.22

Up and Coming

In Mexico City, An Up-and-Coming Design Studio Inspired by Institutional Aesthetics

The objects and furniture made by the Mexico City–based design studio Panorammma are difficult to pin in one particular box. Their concepts pivot from material focus — such as in their Neolithic Thinker chair, an upturned U-shaped seat made of volcanic tezontle stone — to abstract ideas, like the Sisyphean Table, a glass-topped Vignelli-esque cocktail table inspired by the concept of the absurd. But the thread that connects all of these approaches is a steady preoccupation with narrative and memory.

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03.11.23

Saturday Selects

Week of March 6, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a show of more than 50 lamps by up-and-coming artists and designers in Brooklyn, the "most Instagrammable" restaurant interior in Tbilisi, and a home in Australia that makes the case for green-on-green-on-green (above).

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03.08.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

Nadia Yaron Embraced Chaos — In the Form of Chainsaws — To Create This Tranquil Exhibition

In a new show at Francis Gallery in Los Angeles, Nadia Yaron presents the body of work that emerged from a burgeoning love affair with her natural surroundings in Hudson, New York. “I work mostly outside from spring to autumn and am immersed in nature,” she shares. “This show is a tribute, a way to say thank you to these elements for their beauty and wisdom and all the joy they bring to our lives.” From her studio, a repurposed 19th century barn, Yaron used chainsaws and grinders to produce a series of sculptures of striking tranquility. It is not a peaceful exchange of energy. But, she says, “out of the chaos comes some quiet.”

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03.07.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

The Latest Iconic Italian Sofa Reissue, Bellini’s 1972 Le Mura, Has Arrived in the US

First came the return of conversation pits. Then came the resurgence of that other '70s-era seating mainstay — the ultra-comfortable, oft-squishy, sometimes-modular sofa, conceived by an array of (mostly) Italian designers, and built for conversation, intimacy, and that ephemeral but much sought-after quality of "conviviality." The trend only picked up steam during the pandemic, spurred by our collective desire to entertain at home. Now, alongside a slew of other sofa reissues throughout the industry, comes a Mario Bellini masterpiece back onto the market: The Le Mura sofa, first released in 1972 and reissued last year by Tacchini, will get its U.S. debut this week at the New York design gallery M2L, in a special presentation on view though March 27.

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03.04.23

Saturday Selects

Week of February 27, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a Los Feliz house done up in a who's who of contemporary design, new art-inspired textiles from Areaware, and a Louis Poulsen lighting reissue that's close to our hearts.

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03.03.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

In a New Milan Exhibition, These Elemental Materials are Anything But Basic

Wood and metal — often used interchangeably for the same purposes, known as symbols of strength, both are innately rigid, while also malleable and capable of being crafted into almost any shape imaginable. As part of the recent Makers 1 exhibition in Milan, these two materials, which dominate the construction and furniture industries, were investigated in their many weird and wonderful guises by no less than 28 designers.

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03.01.23

Invitation

The DALL-E Invitational: We Asked Designers to Create Rooms, Objects, and Other Weird Experiments Using Image-Generating AI

With the sudden explosion into mainstream culture of AI tools like ChatGPT and the image-generation program DALL-E, the past few months have seen lots of speculation and big talk about what AI means for the future: Will machines take over the world? Will they take over the design industry? How scared should we be? These are questions that require serious consideration, but at the same time, we could hardly be blamed for simply being curious about what these tools can do, DALL-E in particular. DALL-E allows you to generate an endless stream of fictitious images based on whatever prompt you plug in, and it's insanely addictive; a few months back I went down a rabbit hole asking it to design rooms, to mash-up the work of famous designers and artists, or to create imaginary products from scratch; it was fun, so I invited a dozen designers to join me. You can see both my creations and theirs after the jump.

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02.28.23

Interiors

London’s Daytrip Studio on Mining for References and Why “Pinterest is a Dangerous Place”

The London-based interiors firm Daytrip Studio can do soothing, pared back minimalism; they can do more maximalist drama. Still, whatever it is, it all derives from the same place: a fixation on materials and a layered attention to sensory details. They bring together elements of texture, light, depth, proportion, and color palette and the overall effect is one of deceptive simplicity: the whole looks effortless and inevitable, yet every part is thoroughly researched and considered.

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