A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the sweetest new English-language bookshop in Lisbon; a pattern-heavy, T Magazine–approved Tivoli farmhouse; and a collection of furniture made from slabs of olive tree roots and finished with olive oil. 

Interiors

When Samuel Miller and Giovanna Centeno, the owners of Good Company — now the largest English language bookstore in Lisbon — approached Studio Pim to design their space, the goal was to create a new, modern space that also felt like it had always been there, as stylish as it was accessible and welcoming, to both locals and ex-pats. Studio Pim’s Perrine Velge essentially started from scratch, with the exception of the existing cream terrazzo floors, yet the interior still has a soulful feel. An octagonal book display and wooden shelves were inspired by storied Lisbon booksellers, Aillaud e Lellos, which closed in 2017 after 86 years in business. In the café area of Good Company, painted tile panels by local artist Henriette Arcelin are set into wood paneling over a two-tiered marble bar, and nearby banquettes are upholstered in Pierre Frey fabric, with Charles Rennie Mackintosh-inspired backs. In the evening, the large spherical pendant light in the entrance — which you can see from all four street corners through the store’s tall windows — invites passersby as the cafe transitions to a wine bar. Photos © Lourenco Teixeira De Abreu

Not sure when we’ll get over the interiors of an 18th-century farmhouse in Tivoli, New York, designed by Adam Charlap Hyman of Charlap Hyman & Herrero and recently featured in T Magazine. Through an ingenious use of pattern and texture, Charlap Hyman infused a space of traditional pine floors and ceiling beams with an off-kilter, slightly uncanny edge: “We thought it would be fun to think of it,” he told T, “as the country home of an architect-professor who comes here from the city and puts modern things in a really rough space.” The study is a dream in blue, brought to life by Paper Hangings wallpaper from Adelphi, a Strips sofa by Cini Boeri for Arflex, a 60s Bacco bar table by Sergio Mazza for Artemide, and an area rug from Patterson Flynn. In the living room, Charlap Hyman wrapped the red brick fireplace in a textile work by New York–based artist Sophie Stone, mixing it with a Jean Prouvé armchair, ’80s floor lamps by Fabio Lombardo for Flos, and a Pillow Sofa by Kassel Editions. A cloud-shaped pendant lamp by Susi & Ueli Berger is suspended above an 80s chrome Ikea bed in an upstairs guestroom, with more wallpaper from Adelphi, while a kaleidoscopic mural, painted by Massachusetts-based artist Lukas Geronimas, spans the whole upper half of the dining room. Photos © Blaine Davis

For the design of Entre Nous, a new wine bar and restaurant in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn’s The House Special Studio were going for the “unpretentious elegance of Old-World European bistros.” Terrazzo floors, a custom copper and cherry wood bar, and bentwood bistro chairs all bring about that effect. But they’ve made it fresh and contemporary, too, mixing in lighting by Soho Home, &Tradition, Verpan, Violaine d’Harcourt, and Frangere (the sconces from Sight Unseen’s collection!) as well as accents like aluminum vases from Office of Tangible Space, Fort Standard candleholders, ceramic vases by Ellen Pong, a metal vase by Kiki Goti (co-founder of The House Special Studio with Vincent Staropoli), a still life textile on the wall by Andrew Pierce Scott, and earthy Zia tiles in the bathroom. Photos © Sean Davidson

Exhibitions

Polish designer Jan Ankiersztajn treats metal almost like a fluid fabric: assembling pieces together and using welding techniques that sometimes look like stitching. For Body of Work, his latest exhibition, Ankiersztajn, based in Poznan, drew inspiration from concept cars and race cars; he stretches an aluminum skin over a tubular frame, for seamless, aerodynamic forms – which feel automotive but also human. At Objekt Gallery in Warsaw, through March.

Uprooted, by Spanish designer Jorge Penadés, presents a project in two phases: deep research followed by design experimentation. Over the course of 10 years, Penadés delved into the hyper-efficient and highly mechanized olive oil industry in Andalusia (his birthplace). He discovered that discarded olive roots are often left behind in the process and challenged himself to work with this unpredictable material; olive wood is dense and tends to bend as it dries, complicating typical construction methods. Penadés work is the antithesis of an extractive process – based on reciprocity and engagement rather than exploitation. He ultimately came up with a collection of sculptural furniture, finished with olive oil, that highlights the irregularity, grain, and beauty of the material. Uprooted, which includes two chairs, a stool, book shelf, wall shelves, a wall lamp, and a coffee table of olive root slabs with a glass top, is on view as part of the Madrid Design Festival at Espacio Gaviota in Madrid through February 22.

While working as a corporate design executive and a professor at Yale in the late ’70s, the now legendary graphic designer and artist Dan Friedman started to transform his non-descript, one-bedroom apartment in a Greenwich Village high-rise into a living “sketchbook.” Every surface — from the walls to the TV — became a canvas, the space a kind of laboratory. Friedman would document this in his 1994 treatise Radical Modernism, writing: “I create elegant mutations, radiating with intense color and complexity, in a world that has deconstructed into a goofy ritualistic playground for daily life.” Superhouse’s new installation of Friedman’s art furniture, Why Shouldn’t I Have Fun All Day?, evokes that atmosphere, using the same Day-Glo paint that Friedman used. Works like 1984’s motorized “Power Screen,” which blends paint, raffia, wooden beads, feathers, and fur, with corporate iconography, mystical symbols, and a stuck-out tongue, chart Friedman’s move away from the corporate world and into the downtown art scene that included Basquiat and Haring, fashion designer Willi Smith, and gallerist Jeffrey Deitch. After a 2023 retrospective of Friedman’s work at the Art Institute of Chicago, this marks the first gallery presentation of his pieces since 1994 — and comes thirty years after Friedman’s death due to AIDS-related complications. Up through March 22. Photos © Matthew Gordon

Merida Studio in Fall River, Massachusetts is dedicated to releasing limited edition works of textile art using natural materials. Their latest series, Yarn Unveiled — photographed here at the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris — comes from their current artist-in-residence, Paris-based Sylvie Johnson. Guided by the subtleties of shadow and light, movement and contrast, Johnson understands yarn not just as a material but as a language with a grammar through which it expresses itself. Even the bright and saturated carpets here have an understated, nuanced appeal. On view through March 14 at Merida Gallery in Manhattan.

Discoveries

With the Cosmic Traces collection from Mexico City’s Sten Studio, you can embrace the ceremonial, woo-woo energy of mineral formations or simply be taken with the playful character of these pieces: a dozen small side tables crafted from stone like lapis lazuli, fluorite, blue calcite, and onyx in unusual varieties: Coca-Cola, pink, and green.