A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Judd-esque wall units, a new gorgeously appointed showroom for textile company Zak + Fox, and some hits from Zona Maco (with more to come this week!)

Discoveries

The hard surfaces and strength of architectural elements like bricks, tiles, and mortar get translated into soft pile and woven textile in the new Archiscape collection from Belgian carpet company BOMAT. Archiscape features seven different rugs, each named for an architecture or design legend — Lina Bo Bardi, Gabriella Carillo, Frank Lloyd Wright, Anni Albers, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Josef Chochol, and Kengo Kuma – rendered in a rich yet subdued palette of shades like “Burnt Brick,” “Mossed Concrete,” “Castle Wall,” and “Porcelain Tile.”

From Marta Jurado Chagnaud and Louis Chagnaud comes Bisa, a Franco-Spanish studio based in Madrid. Bisa aims to be a showcase for sculptural furniture, collaborating with artists and designers to produce limited editions slowly and conscientiously. Current works, to be shown at Atelier Lardeur in Paris, include a teak armchair by Garance Vallée and Franck Pellegrino, Vallée’s hand-woven rattan shelving unit, ceramic works by Moisés Tibau, and Marta Jurado Chagnaud’s own series of six light sculptures with brass hooks.

A beam of light in lamp form, Rotterdam-based Forever Studio’s cast resin lighting sculpture extends from floor to ceiling, as if stretching the space it lives in. Made of translucent tubes in custom shades, the pillars create a third color when adjusted to overlap.

Artist Laurie Maun, based in the UK, is particularly interested in the space and moment in which colors meet and interact. In her latest collection of prints – entitled “Lifelong” and all originally oil and acrylic works on paper – those colors are muted but deep, evoking the natural world in a gently and gorgeously abstracted form. Available to purchase on her website.

With echoes of Donald Judd’s rectangular wall-based works, the new KGT Wall Unit makes the simple shapes super practical. Designed by Studio CP-RV (working between London and Marseille) in collaboration with Lisbon’s UTIL, this minimalist shelving system comes as a single, a trio, or six vertical powder-coated aluminum drawers, or a three-drawer horizontal option. Choose among seven colors, from neutral to bold. Drawers can also be removed and used as storage boxes.

Interiors

New York textile house Zak + Fox officially opened its new showroom this week on Park Avenue. The 6,000-square-foot space includes a custom rug gallery (a new product line for Zak + Fox) and plenty of room to focus on fabrics and wallpaper. Substantial, look-like-they’ve-always-been-there oak displays for the textiles were designed by Zak + Fox’s creative director and founder, Zak Profera. And a mix of vintage furniture and antiques places you in a historic but ambiguous era — it feels traditional but refreshed.

In Paris, architect Arnaud Behzadi blends warmth and structure in Brazilian chef Raphael Rego’s new double restaurant Oka Fogo, starting with the exterior wood façade on a classic Hausmann building. Inside is a welcoming a mix of wood and marble, imported chairs from Brazilian designer Sergio Rodrigues, a palette of browns, beiges, and mossy green, and a contrast of forms: squiggles, curves, cylinders, and straight edges. Large frescos by Florence Bamberger complete the mood – the ceiling of Oka nods to the flora and fauna of Brazil while the wall of Fogo reimagines Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe, mixing Brazilian and French influences.

Exhibitions

Last year, Mexico City’s Studio 84 created an installation for Zona Maco in Luis Barragan’s Casa Gilardi. This year, in keeping with that format, they hosted a show of pieces from cc-tapis and Nilufar in the former home and studio of modernist architect Pedro Ramirez Vazquez. On display among the architect’s own personal effects and contemporary Open Edition works from Nilufar, the three cc-tapis collections of hand-knotted rugs include the new Naïf collection by Lebanese designers David/Nicolas, along with their Plasterworks collection, and the Guadalupe collection by English designer Bethan Laura Wood, inspired by the stained-glass windows in Ramirez Vazquez’s New Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Also during Mexico City Art week, as part of the Unique Design x Group Fair, UNNO, the first digital design gallery of contemporary Latin American work, presented Hacer, para no ser by  artist and designer C.S. Nuñez. The show’s title, meaning “Do, so as not to be,” is meant to reflect the human condition, and as the sculptures and paintings raise ontological questions, they do so beautifully. For Nunez, objects are inextricably attached to time and history, making design no less than a reflection of existence.

Double Entendre, a group show up last month at Toronto’s Project107, featured emerging designers from Montreal and Toronto, exploring how the unintentional and the unexpected aren’t necessarily design flaws, but might actually be features, challenging the notions of “good” design. Like Etienne Vernier’s Fold vases (bottom), made from coiled and sculpted ribbons that loosen into distinct forms.

You know what they say about one person’s trash. Vietnamese artist and photography Duong Gia Hieu is a firm believer in that adage, as evidenced by the work that came out of his time at Haioku AIR (Haioku Artist in Residency) in Kobe, Japan late last year. At Haioku Air, abandoned buildings and houses owned by Nishimura-Gumi, an architectural group formed by Shuji Nishimura, are used as artist studios. Over the course of two weeks, Hieu gave new function and life to disused materials in the form of stools, chairs (not just any chair but “The Most Comfortable Chair in the World,” as he calls them), a DJ booth, a bench, and a lamp. A commentary on disposability and waste, sure, but also a feat of bricolage.