A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: A conceptual fashion space hidden in a Tashkent street market, joyful ceramic candleholders shaped like sardines and bananas, and a new collection of lamps inspired by the Triadic Ballet.

Interiors

I recently wandered into the Cubitts store in Soho and found my dream sunglasses — I have a tiny face, and the brand makes every frame in S, M, and L — so my antennae perked up when I saw a submission from Oskar Kohnen, who recently completed the interior for the brand’s second New York store, in the West Village. Paying homage to the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who once lived in the building, Kohnen designed the store to have an airy “stage” area in front and a darker “backstage” behind, with a theater-style vanity and brown walls. Says the brand: “The space is lit by a 1980s vintage pendant by Mario Botta and a 1960s Kaiser Leuchten table lamp by Klaus Hempel, chosen for their allusions to theatre flashlights and photographic reflector screens.”

AvroKO, the stalwart New York–founded interiors firm known for its hospitality design, has branched out to create its own take on the genre with Host on Howard, a showroom and events space where the designers can host gatherings as well as show off their own hospitality-grade furniture and lighting. That includes a series of whimsical service trolleys — for “ice cream, dessert, bar, and dim sum offerings” — as well as found objects they’ve restored or reimagined. They plan to reset the space every year with a new concept, the inaugural one being The Paradisa: “channeling the utopian allegory of Eden’s walled garden, illustrating the foundations of hospitality as an abundant gift.” Being that one of my absolute favorite boutique clothing lines at the moment is J. Kim, I had to share the unusual space it opened recently in the Chorshu Bazaar in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The brand and its founder, Jenia Kim, are based in Uzbekistan, and the central concept of the line is that it combines contemporary design with Uzbek traditional craft and elements of traditional Korean dress (Kim’s heritage is Koryo-saram, the ethnic Koreans of far-east Russia). The space is a design laboratory, shop, and object showroom that merges Kim’s influences, all in a 2,000-year-old street market that she’s always come to for inspiration.

Discoveries

For Dancer — their new collection of lamps — the Australian furniture brand Coco Flip collaborated with ceramicist Belinda Wiltshire on a table lamp and two wall lights in her signature brown clay with painted iron-oxide stripes. The designers say the series was inspired by Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet, which also featured lots of stripes and conical, lampshade-like skirts. During a trip to Kyoto a few years back, the French studio Garnier & Linker — who have long worked with French artisans using traditional craft methods — became entranced with Kitayama cedar, which is cultivated in the region. They brought some back to France at the time for their Kitayama furniture collection, and recently launched a new series called Kami that wraps some of the same forms (along with some new ones) in Japanese urushi lacquer. The collection, say the designers, is an attempt to “enrich their exchanges with Japanese craftsmanship, following in the footsteps of rich past collaborations, such as Jean Dunand’s apprenticeship with lacquerer Seizo Sugawara, or the crossed collections between France and Japan that Charlotte Perriand imagined from the 1940s onward.” Really into this playful new series of ceramic candleholders by Fernando Aciar of Fefostudio in New York. At first glance they just look like brightly colored abstract shapes, but then you start to see the basic outlines of sardines, bananas, corn, and cucumbers — just a little moment of delight for your decor. They’re currently available through the Brooklyn shop Take Me With You. Photos: Paolo Verzani I don’t usually pay attention to tiles because they tend to all look the same to me, but this new release from London-based Otto Tiles was an exception for a few reasons: First, I just like the tiles, especially these Bauhaus-esque marble face tiles, and second because the Italian villa they shot their campaign in is so goddamn beautiful. Third, they get bonus points for propping the shoot with this bench from our friends at Oculus London, holy moly.

Exhibitions

Glad we got to see the current exhibition at LA’s Neutra-designed VDL House, Confluence, before this week’s tragic events. It features optical artworks by Lachlan Turczan and abstract sculptures/fountains by Lily Clark, installed in and around the house’s iconic reflecting pools and fountains. “Clark’s delicate droplets trace water’s movement, while Turczan’s optical sculptures bend light through water, creating moments where art, architecture, and nature converge.” The show was meant to be open through January 18, but we aren’t sure of the House’s schedule pending ongoing developments in LA. Last month, to celebrate the launch of the seventh issue of the art and design journal Bricks from the Kiln, its founders partnered with the London gallery Fels to produce an exhibition called Hidden Noise Idiom, featuring works from a roster that’s like a who’s who of vanguard designers: Andu Masebo, Grace Prince, LS Gomma, Olivia Bossy, Tino Seubert, EJR Barnes, Carsten in der Elst, and more. “All embody practices that produce objects and furniture whose pursuit towards paradox and tactile ingenuity rejects, recycles, or recomposes the conventions of interior space,” write the curators. The show closed just before Christmas, but you can still pick up a copy of the journal issue here. The reign of single-object design exhibitions has still not ended! This one took place last month in Monterrey, Mexico, and focused on salt and pepper shakers/vessels from a smorgasbord of Mexico-based designers. Alexis Del Toro and Jorge Diego Etienne curated the works, which were ultimately auctioned to benefit the Museo Marco, which hosted the show. You can see all 62 contributions on the exhibition’s website which is fun; our favorites included, from top, pieces by Emilio Flores, Fabien Cappello, and Aldo Álvarez Tostado. For her second solo exhibition — and her first in Brazil — Buenos Aires–born designer Deon Rubi has created a suite of furniture that is quite literal in its references to love: hearts, cupids, arrows, and a piece called “Desire, Much Desire.” But Rubi tempers the theme in her choice of polished aluminum as her primary material: “How daring, some may say, to approach the concept of love — a sappy theme by definition — with chromatic austerity, a hint of mechanical rigor, and a lack of material paroxysm.” It’s love, but without the fragility and vulnerability, exploring the contrast between softness and coldness.