A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the printed jeans of our dreams from Marimekko, Brutalist-influenced glassware by Solange Knowles, and a menswear store interior that’s unequal parts Halston, Richard Serra, and Teletubbies.

Interiors

How many different metallic surfaces in one interior is too many? The limit does not exist, at least not in this menswear multi-brand retail space in LA’s Arts District. Designed by 22RE (who we featured yesterday!), the Departamento store is sleek, industrial, and minimal, with injections of bold color in the form of green leather-wrapped display cases, a cylindrical red fitting room, and a slice of aubergine-toned carpet infinitely reflected between mirrored walls. Large curved panels divide the main shop floor, beneath the metal-grid ceiling, and blackened wood walls highlight the sheen of the abundant silvery elements. We’re dubbing the result as Halston meets Richard Serra in the underworld, with hints of Teletubbies. Photos by Erik Stackpole Undehn

Enter this apartment inside a late 18th-century building in central Madrid, and find a library from which portals lined with swirly grained veneer lead to all of the other rooms. Designed by Spanish architecture firm Lucas y Hernández-Gil’s offshoot interiors studio, Kresta Design, the residence is physically and aesthetically separated into three distinct areas. Spaces facing the street are white and bright, featuring pale herringbone-patterned flooring that flips orientation along circulation axes. It’s a different story entirely at the back, where the kitchen, dining and utility rooms are enveloped in a mint-pistachio hue, with only wood cabinets and a bright red table exempt. Finally, the bathrooms in the center have Portuguese pink marble basins and step details, paired with blush-toned plaster walls. All rather dreamy. Photos by Jose Hevia

Exhibitions

Supporting a mission to create in Portugal, European design house Project 213A invited Quoï Alexander and Tom R Porter to studio in Macieira de Sarnes to produce a series of works between 2021 and 2024. As a result, Alexander’s folklore-influenced paintings and Porter’s ceramic masks are now on display alongside Project 213A’s artisanal furniture as part of an exhibition at Mili Galeria in Melides, Portugal. The faces and figures in both artists’ works add even more character to the presentation of crafted pieces, which include sculptural wooden chairs, benches and stools. On view through August 20.

With Versailles hosting the equestrian events at the Paris Olympics, now’s the perfect time to launch a mise-en-scène based on the Grand Couvert — a lavish dining ceremony in which the French royal family (when that was still a thing) would eat from gold and silver dishes, surrounded by princesses, duchesses, and courtiers. The Galbut Institute has recreated this for the current age by pairing a monumental dining table and stools by Jonathan Gonzalez of Office GA with a large-scale painting by Jason Galbut, who founded the institute this year to display his body of work. The table has a solid walnut top with a fold in the center and cylindrical champagne-toned metal legs, polished to a golden finish, while similar drum-shaped stools are topped with satin velvet cushions. Galbut’s painting Renovation also features folds, layers and vertical lines, with hints of gold amongst gray and orange stripes. The exhibition in Miami’s Little River neighborhood is on view until September 28.

Discoveries

This collection of works by design studio LS Gomma revolves around the process of molding rubber around metal mesh formwork. Ripples in the mesh and drips of the rubber add texture to the surfaces of block-like seats, in single or double versions, as well as cylindrical shades for floor lamps with spindly metal tripod bases. The dark blue options are particularly alluring.

Our favorite Finnish pattern purveyors have finally expanded into denim! Marimekko has applied its printmaking expertise to the most democratic of garment materials, and launched its Maridenim collection this month after debuting the designs during Copenhagen Fashion Week in February. The prints include Maija Isola’s iconic Unikko pattern, which celebrates its 60th anniversary this year, and the styles are applied across three fits in four shades. Whatsmore, the collection was designed according to The Jeans Redesign guidelines by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which are based on circular economy principles. That means 100% cotton (20% of which is recycled), removable buttons, and no harmful chemicals used for the washes.

Solange Knowles has always had taste with a capital T, and her most recent foray into glassware is no exception. The lightweight set she designed for Saint Heron, available exclusively at MoMA Design Store, takes cues from Brutalist architecture and pairs shades of topaz and onyx in geometric shapes formed using graphite molds. Titled Small Matter: Form Glassware 001, the collection “expresses the brand’s commitment to democratizing through design, while expanding interest in object-making as an art, especially as it relates to Blackness” according to Saint Heron.