A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an Ibiza boutique that mimics the sea, a Belgian artist’s house-museum covered in velvet, and a two-person sculpture show nestled in the mossy landscape of Manitoba, Russel Wright’s home an hour north of NYC.

Interiors

The Polonio, a clothing brand that started a few years ago in coastal Cadaqués, recently opened a new store in Ibiza, enlisting architect Raúl Sánchez to envision a highly textured spot that conjures both the sea and a kind of nightlife glamour. That deep blue long-pile carpet practically undulates, like water, while the clothing rack areas have been coated with sprayed mortar, giving them a rough, rocky finish. Even the fitting rooms, finished in a turquoise stucco, are like grottos. Above, a grided metallic ceiling — the sky — reflects the blue floor as well as the colors of the clothing, a direct homage to the elegant spatial solutions of Adolf Loos’ art deco American Bar in Vienna.

For the new Akila Eyewear flagship in Silver Lake, Los Angeles architecture/design firm 22RE, along with the eyewear brand’s in-house team, drew inspiration from a ryokan, a kind of traditional Japanese inn. Translucent materials, grids, and a curved soffit all evoke shoji sliding doors, while also nodding to the design of Akila’s first retail outpost in New York. Natural materials like Douglas fir were sourced from the Pacific coast, while the stylish use of light-filtering glass blocks adds something of a local touch – obviously, they exist everywhere but for us they specifically conjure postmodern LA design.

Exhibitions

To celebrate and coincide with the opening of its new space in London, the Cadogan Gallery is presenting its largest group show ever, with new work by 21 international artists. The gallery, which also has a location in Milan, is known for championing abstract, contemporary pieces from painting and sculpture to textiles. The show’s excellent roster includes Elise Ansel, Kim Bartelt, Lorenzo Brinati, Lawrence Calver, Gabriele Cappelli, Andreas Diaz Andersson, Edoardo Dionea Cicconi, Ramón Enrich, Richard Hearns, Terrell James, Mimi Jung, Tycjan Knut, Laurence Leenaert, Sam Lock, Nuria Maria, Theo Pinto, Emanuel Seitz, Deborah Tarr, Leonardo Anker Vandal, Maximilian Verhas, and Richard Zinon. Opening October 3, on view through February 8, 2025.

At the C. Gallery in Melbourne, Australian interior and furniture designer Max Copolov currently has a dozen works on display with his exhibition Venice. Copolov’s first show with the gallery, Venice features nine wooden tables, whose intricate marquetry depicts everyday scenes of life in the Italian city, along with three flat-pack table lamps made of hand-finished aluminum and woven metal mesh. The intersecting lines and angularity in Copolov’s pieces visually reference the Wiener Werkstätte ­– as does Copolov’s keen attention to material, craft, and worksmanship in an industrial, mechanized context, celebrating the past without being bound to it. On view through September 24.

The Horta Museum in the Belgium – the family home and workshop of architect Viktor Horta, built right at the turn of the 19th century in Art Nouveau style – recently invited five artists to decorate the walls of Horta’s house using velvet. (Horta saw textiles as a foundation of spatial design.) In Smooth as Velvet, Louisa Carmona takes the kitchen, exploring revelation and concealment in a domestic setting; sisters Flore & Pauline Fockedey tease out the lines between private and public in the breakfast room; a puppet theater in the boudoir, from Elise Peroi, raises questions around theatricality; while Marc Van Hoe wrestles with history and legacy, referencing sixteenth century paintings, in the family room. The Belgian weaving mill Van Neder and French velvet cutters Florence and Martine Moulis brought the artists’ visions to life.  Up through the end of June.

In the hands of Martín Soto Climént, the industrial process of silkscreening, built on repetition and uniformity, produces unexpected, gorgeous results. For his latest show, Heart of Heaven / Blushing Paintings at the Andréhn-Schiptjenko gallery in Stockholm, the Mexican artist folded foam into sculptural shapes which he then photographed and transferred to a silkscreen print, mounted on panels. As the title suggests, these paintings, as Soto Climént calls them, almost seem to blush – that rosy, involuntary physical response to emotion – creating an intimate yet vaporous relationship with the viewer. Two complementary tones in these works echo sunrise and sunset, and how dualities like night and day exist together in a kind of “oneness” and movement. On view through September 28.

Manitoga is the former home of industrial designer Russel Wright, who acquired an abandoned quarry and, with his wife Mary, turned it into a 75-acre woodland garden about an hour north of New York City. It’s a perfect setting for the stunning outdoor, two-person sculpture exhibition The Moss Room, with works by Alma Allen and Bosco Sodi. Curated by Kate Orne, founder of Upstate Diary, and co-organized by the Kasmin gallery, these pieces, like Allen’s swooping bronze Not Yet Titled and Sodi‘s untitled totemic golden stack, shimmer in place, contemplative and mysterious. Up through November 18.

Discoveries

The Hour Collection of lighting and functional objects, the latest from designer Bec Snelling of New Zealand’s Snelling Studio (previously known as Douglas and Bec), is a meditation on nature, time, and circularity. On daily walks in the forest near her home, Snelling looked to local flora for design inspiration for the first installment of the Hour. The Phila table lamp takes its symmetrically repetitive and harmonious shape from the silver fern (Alsophila tricolor). The kauri tree (Agathis australis) inspired the silhouette of the Agathis floor lamp, available in oiled kauri wood or a lighter ash finish. The Rho wall lights, in a single or double sconce version, take their name and form from the Nikau palm (Rhopalostylis sapida), whose single blooms are female while its male flowers are paired. A body of lathe-turned wood and hand-finished metal is topped with hand-dyed raw silk diffusers. The Briar mirror series – with floor, vanity, and wall iterations – is named for Snelling’s late mother, incorporating yet delicately scaling down the feminine forms of the Agathis and Phila lamps.

Pretziada Studio in Sardinia is dedicated to promoting the island’s craft and artisanry, and one of their latest projects, the 1946 Cabinet Collection, celebrates Sardinian-born sculptor Costantino Nivola ­– in particular, his post-war encounter in the US with Le Corbusier. A minimalist inner cabinet is hidden by a façade of curving exaggerated doors, whose bronze handles were produced using a sand-casting method that became central to Nivola’s large, architectural sculptural panels in the 1950’s. To make the cabinets – a standing version and a wall module – Pretziada enlisted Pierpaolo Mandis, a third-generation woodworker and chair maker and La Nuova Fucina, a family-run metalworking workshop, both based in Sardinia. Mandis also fabricated Pretziada’s Bobboi bed collection. Bobboi is the Sardinian word for “sweet” and each bed was inspired by a Sardinian dessert: the Bobboi Wavy echoes the snake-shaped cookies called “tiliccas,” while the Ziggurat mirrors the zigzag cut of sweet ravioli.

Ready to Hang’s new Petal wall mirror combines subtle floral curves and cut-ins, layering glass over acetate – a material most of us probably associate with sunglass frames. That almost subconscious connection to warmth and light is a way of bringing the outside in. Available in a beigey, terrazzo-like Oyster or a tortoiseshell Havana shade.