A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a new exhibition space in Buenos Aires, a soft/hard collision in the USM x Comme Si pop-up, and the chicest utility knife we’ve ever seen. 

Exhibitions

Hard meets soft in a perfect collaboration between Swiss manufacturer USM Modular Furniture and the high-end socks and loungewear brand Comme Si.  The collection includes special editions of Comme Si pieces and custom furniture like the Sock Dresser, Reading Wall, Vanity, Platform for Relaxation, Chaise Lounge, Wardrobe, and Folding Screen – you know we love a good room divider. For the Table Lantern light, Comme Si’s Jenni Lee created semi-sheer panels by combining the label’s Italian linen with USM’s glass, providing a soft glow when illuminated. The collection is on display at USM in New York at 28 Greene Street through the end of May before it travels to other cities.

In Tectonics, the first furniture collection by designer and architect Drew Seskunas of SAW.EARTH, the focus is on joinery; where planes not only meet but collide, converge, and create new forms. Angular and sharp, punctuated by visible hardware and perforations, these pieces also exude a certain warmth. This is indoor-outdoor furniture that is meant to be used by real people, connecting with one another. On view at the Brooklyn boutique NOMIA through the end of the month.

From Chamber Projects and Itmet Studio comes 322A, a new space in Buenos Aires for architecture and designed objects. Under the direction of Maximiliano Ciovich and Juan Garcia Mosqueda, 322A aims to develop products and provide a gathering space for exhibitions and community. Their opening show “Small Architectures” features newly commissioned metal works from Swiss designer Lütjens Padmanabhan and Spain’s MAIO, a daybed from Monadnock in the Netherlands, metal and ceramic pieces from MOS, a table by Sean Canty, a lamp from Something Fantastic, and a wooden stool by Go Hasegawa.

Another new spot is the New York branch of Parisian gallery Amelie, Maison d’Art, which recently opened in a 6,000-square-foot space in Soho. To bring its roster of 100 contemporary artists stateside, the gallery commissioned French-American architectural duo Tess Walraven and Nike Vogrinec, along with Keith Burns, to design a space in a late nineteenth century building that evokes a collector’s home combined with an art studio: curved white walls, cast iron columns, a bronze floor inlay, and a skylit atmosphere work as a warm, inviting backdrop for works like a timber and bronze bench by Linde Freya Tangelder (Destroyers/Builders), a ceramic carpet inlay by Heloise Bariol, sofa by Pierre Augustin Rose, a large, light-filtering sculpture by Gerd Kanz, and an intricately carved double door of French oak panels by Eloi Schultz.

Interiors

A renovation by Estudio Reciente of a Madrid penthouse built in the 1960s is an object lesson in how to keep what works and refresh where needed. To maintain cohesion, the designers worked with the existing green terrazzo floor and ceiling panels while opening up the space and visually connecting various areas with a continuous wall of oak slabs. The kitchen features a mix of stone and industrial stainless steel while the bedroom nods to ’60s psychedelia with the swirling Alpi Sottsass grey veneer on the closets and headboard.

Barcelona-based design studio Isern Serra went minimal and tranquil without skimping on rich detail for the new headquarters for Spanish eyewear brand Gigi Studios. The open and airy workplace references the domestic and takes advantage of the movement of the sun throughout the day to maximize natural light. Custom pieces in soothing shades are paired with classics like Breuer’s Wassily and Cesca chairs, and seating like Driade’s Roly Poly and Boa poufs by Sabine Marcelis.

Discoveries

Rialto, a new design store at Hackney Downs Studios in London is a “retail space that blurs the lines” – come for the beautiful homewares and stay for the conversation and sense of community. Founded by Richard Whitaker and Hannah Smith of Studio Tuesday, the shop also functions as a base for their interior design practice. Concrete floors and a ceiling made of hay provide a textured space for new collections, works by local artists, and exclusive editions. Rialto currently features lighting and tables by Abid Javid (a molecular biologist turned ceramicist!), sculptural objects by Tim Martin and Gunn Ceramics, and vessels by Lydia Hardwick and Talia Nidam Warshawsky.

Observations at Metamorphoses, an online gallery and shop for contemporary collectible design, was curated over the course of two years by Nadine Snijders, founder of the Dutch gallery. The 50 objects that comprise the collection are all somehow concerned with the act of observing – both on the part of the designer, examining materials and sources and being attentive to unexpected results during production, and also on the part of the viewer, perceiving a work once it exists in the world. Observations includes work from Cara/Davide (Italy), Rino Claessens (Netherlands), Seon-hyeok Yoon (Korea), and Lenny Stöpp (Netherlands) as well as pieces from designers that have previously worked with Metamorphoses, like BuroBelén, Aldo Bakker, Destroyers/Builders, and Bloc Studios. Four newly commissioned pieces by Atelier Fig, Hot Wire Extensions, Tessa Silva, and Maria Tyakina round out the collection. Works are on view at Looiersgracht 60 in Amsterdam.

The tableware and home goods from Levant are as evocative as the eastern Mediterranean region that inspires them. Founded in 2023 by Süreya Koprülü, who is half-Turkish, and Naz Muessel, who is half-Iranian, Levant’s collections incorporate and reimagine ancient motifs along with styles of the Ottoman empire. Iznik dishware references the ceramic artistry favored by royal courts, while the Calligraphy collection, produced in Lebanon, is inspired by 10^th century Nishapur earthenware; handthrown red terracotta features abstracted Arabic lettering. The lacy Balik placemat made of Belgian linen is an “ode to fish restaurants… of the Bosporus” and the indigo table linens of the Assos collection are like a deep dive into the sea.

Brooklyn homeware and fashion brand Home in Heven teamed up with iconic Danish lighting brand Louis Poulsen on a series of lamps that marries the classic colored glass inspired by Louis Poulsen’s Pale Rose collection with surreal Home in Heven touches like horns, swirls, and tentacles. The founders of Home in Heven, Breanna Box and Peter Dupont, worked with Elliot Walker of Birmingham’s Blowfish Glass to bring these creations to life.

We write a lot about sculptural objects, but those objects aren’t usually utility knives…until now. Designed by the ever-inventive Chen Chen and Kai Williams for Craighill, the stainless steel Sidewinder knife is a work of motion and precision. Its serpentine curves reference its snake namesake. Compact enough to fit in a pocket but with style to spare, it’s also display-worthy.

“Comforting” and “enticing” are words the French design studio Nouveau Standard had in mind when developing 1976, their first collection of furniture, and those effects are just what they’ve achieved. Jonathan Fleurance and Simon Brandeau, the duo behind Nouveau Standard, were inspired by memories of their grandparents’ interior spaces. And they evoke an older rustic and rural style, making it current while guarding some of its mystery. Nostalgic but also a little out-of-time, the four pieces — a chair, a lounge chair, table, and lamp — reference the past but aren’t bound by it. The collection plays with the volume and proportions of two basic elements — the ball and the cone — and the materiality of darkened oak, lava, and, and a bold ’70s pattern textile.