A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the best launches from Melbourne Design Week, another super-sleek USM collab — this time in pink! — plus a special edition Gaetano Pesce vase debuting at the Philip Johnson Glass House.

Melbourne Design Week

To celebrate Melbourne Design Week, Fiona Lynch Office opened no less than three exhibitions. “Low-Key” showcased nine local designers and artists as part of Work Shop by Fiona Lynch Office, which began in 2019 as a platform for emerging, experimental design and art objects. The “Low-Key” show (above) explored process and materiality, and how curiosity informs design, featuring a low table by Jordan Fleming, a quartzite chair from Felix Jerome Grech, lamps by Marlo Lyda, a mirror by Annie Paxton, a tapestry by Ella Saddington, a chair and leather table from Simone Tops, and pieces by Olivia Bossy, Claudia Lau, and Lynch herself.

Through her studio, Cordon Salon, Ella Saddington also presented her Garniture collection of lighting and furnishings at Melbourne’s Oigall Projects. This stunning series is a result of studying and recontextualizing the shaping, forming, and joining techniques of late Western European plate armor. “It was important not to romanticize or imitate, but to distill: to isolate structural gestures such as the frilled edge of a table or the quiet logic of plate-to-plate joining, and allow those elements to speak on their own terms,” says Saddington. These pieces are made to order in Melbourne, in stainless steel with mirror-polished and satin finishes, and a limited patent leather series.

For their part, Oigall Projects also presented Design House Vol. 2 Girls, Girls, Girls, a show highlighting female designers. Says the gallery: “We wanted to engage playfully with the idea of women in the domestic space, a kind of tongue in cheek encounter with gendered space.” Works included ceramic pieces by Alex & Trahanas, a stately yet soft chair from Adriana Hanna, Studio Tali Roth’s Magen modular sofa, a sort of moveable conversation pit, architectural book “daises” from Studio Discourse, exquisitely detailed drawings of interiors by Antonia Ellis, and sculptural lighting by Rosanna Ceravolo & Jordan Fleming, Sarah I’Anson Design Office, Helen Claire Davies, Marsha Golemac, and Linda Valentic.

Melbourne’s Fomu Studio exhibited their latest collection of sculptural lighting, Layette, in which a floor lamp, table lamp, and pendant become an exploration of translucency and layering, using fiberglass panels, aluminum, and thoughtful hardware. Fomu’s Gabrielle Beswick and Andrew Beveridge also showed their Frame II chair and stool in raw aluminum at the clothing brand/store Friends with Frank.

At Melbourne’s C. Gallery, Oko Olo – the partnership of designers Juliet Ramsay and Genevieve Hromas – had their second solo show with the gallery. The use of natural materials is vital to the duo and Process: Conversations with Objects delved into the making of Oko Olo’s seemingly casual yet highly considered Plank lamp and table along with their Weighted Lamp.

Events

The annual Summer Party at the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut — taking place next weekend on June 14th — supports the preservation of Philip Johnson’s iconic Modernist home and the cultural events the Glass House continues to program, like the Barbara Kasten exhibition taking place on the grounds. Among the festivities this year, a special focus on Gaetano Pesce will mark the debut of a limited-edition resin vase, Edizioni del Pesce, Big Surprise 2, produced in collaboration with Meritalia. The vase draws inspiration from Pesce’s Feltri armchair, a couple of which live in the Glass House. Available in two colorways, the vase can be purchased on-site.

Discoveries

When Chloé Nègre, of the eponymous design studio in Paris, returned from a trip to the town of Grand-Bassam in Côte d’Ivoire, she was inspired to recapture the texture of her visit, how the sun-dazed warmth and sun-bleached colors contrasted with the coolness of the shade. She translated her experience into the À la Tombée du Jour collection (meaning “at dusk”), produced by Laclaux, the studio’s manufacturing arm. These 11 new pieces debuted in April, and include the honey-stained sandblasted Louisa table, featuring a marquetry of lemon, birch and olive wood, the After Club sofa, upholstered in a paprika-colored Manuel Canovas fabric, the Baba swivel armchair, in another Manuel Canovas fabric with ebony and cream motifs, and the Moonlight coffee table, in rattan with a smoked mirror top that opens up.

Known for their gorgeous sculptural jewelry, LA-based J.Hannah is launching a second capsule collection with New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Subjects of Adornment pieces are inspired by portraits in the museum’s collection, zooming in on small details and embellishments and giving them three-dimensional form, bringing historical silhouettes into the present. Rings and necklaces draw on Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes, from 1530; Ingres’ nineteenth-century painting of the Princesse de Broglie, Hans Memling’s fifteenth century portrait of Maria Portinari, and the Portrait of a Woman of the Slosgin Family of Cologne by Barthel Bruyn the Younger, 1557.

Husband and wife duo Loney Abrams and Johnny Stanish of Wretched Flowers are experts in balancing a certain darkly romantic mood with a light-as-air delicate refinement, transforming chainmail into a kind of brocade. Their latest Tapestry IV, a chainmail tapestry beaded with white jade gemstones, has a new metal finish, Blackened Brass. They’ve also completed new custom chainmail table and floor lamps, made of stainless steel chainmail, recycled glass beads, and brass, drawing pattern inspiration from nineteenth century French cotton textiles and old books on crochet. New versions of their Crown of Thorns frame are comprised of 264 interlocking pieces of laser-cut steel in the style of tramp art, a woodworking technique popular during the Depression.

At NYC x Design, Herman Miller launched the New Mexico collection, in partnership with the Georgie O’Keeffe Museum. The collection features two limited-run pieces that speak to the friendship between O’Keeffe, Alexander and Susan Girard, and Charles and Ray Eames. O’Keeffe first saw an upholstered Eames Wire Chair Low Base in the Girards’ Sante Fe living room and loved it so much that Eames gave her a prototype of an upholstered fiberglass chair on a low wire base. What O’Keeffe called the “smallest, best chair,” is what inspired this special iteration of the Eames Wire Chair Low Base upholstered in Girard Toostripe in Ochre Dark/Sienna on a white wire frame and base. Along with the chair comes the Girard Snake Table. Girard experimented with this design in the ’50s, but this is the first time Herman Miller has produced the table, which features a steel top in a white enamel finish printed with a black Girard Snake on a splayed-leg aluminum base.

Another NYC Design Week pleasure: Flowers and Chairs: Dominik Tarabanski & Friends at  WSA. The show featured a selection of Tarabanski’s poignant flower photographs from his series Roses for Mother.  From 2018 to early 2020, while working as a fashion photographer, Tarabanski would form floral compositions from the leftovers of shoots, combining the blooms with synthetic materials and turning them all into anthropomorphic, emotion-filled models. He continued this process with plants given to him by friends. WSA placed Tarabanski’s photos in the company of custom benches created by Minjae Kim, in conversation with Tarabanski’s Roses for Mother work, along with a chair and ottoman by Mr. Liz Hopkins and Umberto Bellardi Ricci’s Trono series.

For their new Manhattan showroom, unveiled during New York Design Week, Vitra renovated a 6,200 square foot, third-floor loft space in Chinatown, leaning into the natural light created by a wall of windows that opens on to an expansive view of the Manhattan Bridge. While Vitra’s headquarters are in Germany, this space provides a new home for Vitra and Artek (founded by Alvar Aalto in 1935 and acquired by Vitra in 2013) teams in the US. Working with architect Serge Drouin (Jean Prouvé’s grandson), Vitra installed floating curtain rails suspended from the ceiling that allow the space to be divided or left totally open, a long terrazzo bar for congregating, with a backdrop of blue tiles repurposed from old Aalto projects, and adopted a color scheme that pairs neutrals with warm reds and deep blues. Iconic Jean Prouvé and Artek pieces (like the Stool 60) fill the space, as does work by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, Edward Barber & Jay Osgerby, and as part of an initial presentation, the Anagram Sofa by Panter & Tourron.

London’s Buchanan Studio partnered with Swiss modular furniture brand USM, launching a debut collaboration, Tesselate, last month. Based on the USM Haller system, the eleven new pieces — the Stool, the Bench, the Coffee Table, the Bar Trolley, the Side Cart, the Cube Side Table, the Kiss Side Table, the Tray, the Desk, the Credenza, and the Bookcase —  are “inspired by the principles of tessellation; exploring repetition, symmetry and adaptability,” says studio creative director Angus Buchanan. The collection incorporates a checkerboard pattern — a go-to for the studio, and comes in USM Ruby Red, Pure White and Graphite Black, as well as BS Pink, a special edition color. Cushions for the stool and bench are available in Buchanan Studio’s Teddy, Studio Stripe, and Ticking Rose fabrics, and you can choose a marble top option for the Kiss Side Table, Desk and Bar Trolley in Black Horse, Norwegian Rose and Calacatta Viola.