
09.18.21
Saturday Selects
Week of September 13, 2021
A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a high-flying furniture debut by Campbell-Rey, an immersive interior and new rug collection by Cold Picnic, and a poufy Lulu LaFortune sofa inspired by… Britney?
Discoveries
We’re digging the particularly grand furniture debut by London design studio Campbell-Rey, sold through The Invisible Collection. There’s a huge range of pieces here, from a tiger-printed pouf to a sculptural, stone-footed sofa and a curving tortoiseshell standing mirror. In short, the drama has very much been brought.
LA furniture designer Lulu LaFortune’s latest furniture collection, which includes new colors of her stained-glass lamps, is very fun. Describing how the gridded, poufy sofas and ottoman came to be made, LaFortune explained that they have modernized traditional quilting techniques, which, apparently, “increases the puff.” (Aspiring sofa designers take note: increasing the puff should always be the end goal.) Business of Home reports that the sofa’s powdery blue color was inspired by Britney Spears’s legendary denim dress at the 2001 American Music Awards, but we didn’t do the reporting necessary to confirm or deny.
Brooklyn-based home accessories brand Areaware has teamed up with High Gloss’s Natalie Herrera on a charming new collection of ceramic vessels, which include pastel-colored Confetti cups and a gorgeous pleated water pitcher. Styled pics by Emily Simms.
There are few objects in recent memory that have gained the ubiquity of Big-Game’s Bold chair for Moustache, so it will be interesting to see whether their latest collection also ends up being absolutely everywhere. Named the Silent Chair, and produced for Valerie Objects, it was designed for the “need [of] quiet objects,” meaning that the chair’s structure has been reduced to a minimum and all joinery remains invisible, while the form nods to “an archetypical church chair.”
I hadn’t really considered that I had been missing decorative wall hooks in my life, but after seeing Schneid Studio’s Fossil Hook collection I’m not sure how I can live without them.
We like the idea behind Bower’s new Column Mirror, which they describe as an “interpretation of the classical architectural form.” It kind of reminds me of an inverted version of the infamous faceted mirror staircase at the Chanel atelier in Paris, which would allow the designer to surreptitiously watch the reactions of guests attending her runway shows. Rendering by Victor Roussel
We totally fell in love with Jamie Wolfond and Adrianus Kundert’s Basket Club project during lockdown last year, so it’s fun to see that more designers are playing around with that particular form. Kuo Duo’s ‘Reel Basket’ project is a cool take on the trend. Using flexible foam sticks, the pair weave the basket shape and then coat the structure with resin for stability, followed by a coat of acrylic for color. They describe the baskets’ wavy silhouettes as “ if time had stopped and we captured a moment of shaking and flowing.”
Australian rug brand Pampa’s latest collection, Eclipse, is an extremely pretty take on what they describe as “universal symbols of the sun and moon.” According to co-founder Victoria Aguirre, it was inspired by Bauhaus-style compositions, the urban color palettes of Buenos Aires, and the celestial murals found at Arizona’s Arcosanti.
Long-time favorites Cold Picnic have a new collection out and we are predictably obsessed (with the rugs and with the immersive patterned environment they created in their own home!). They’ve strayed slightly from the colorful abstractions we’ve come to love and into more repetition. The new rugs kind of look like mid-century hotel room carpets in the best way possible. Photos by Clement Pascal
Interiors
We were recently sent this San Francisco interiors project by Studio Ahead, which also appeared on Clever. The nightstand game in this house is strong — in the guest bedroom is a teal ceramic one by BZippy, and in the primary bedroom is the colorblocked one by Sohyun Yun that we sell in our 1stDibs shop!
We absolutely love this Bed-Stuy townhouse by design studio Civilian, which was introduced to us by designer Sam Stewart, whose Stroopwafel-inspired coffee table anchors two burgundy Gae Aulenti for Knoll sofas in the living room. The Emily Mullin installation and the cherry red hood in the kitchen are also to die for. Photos by Brian Ferry.
Exhibitions
During Paris Design Week, two of our favorites came together for a show we wish we could have seen in person. Amelie Maison, the gallery that brought you Garance Vallée and the Ladies Room Collective, hosted a retrospective exhibition for 15 years of Studiopepe, the Milanese duo of Arianna Lelli Mami and Chiara Di Pinto known for their pseudo-mystical installations and gorgeous styling.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make it over to Venice for their yearly Glass Week celebrations, but some of the shows that launched during the festivities were hard to ignore. One of my favorites was this series of hand-blown glass assemblages by French artist Silvia Finiels, which feel kind of Memphis-y but, she says, were inspired by the playfulness of Matisse’s cutout series.
Links
The Venn diagram of Sight Unseen readers and Gaetano Pesce stans is likely pretty damn close to a full circle at this point, so please enjoy this profile of the master himself, “The Pope of Gloop,” published recently on Curbed.