A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Formafantasma’s first US solo show, a new housewares line that pairs Greek art with Swedish craftsmanship, and two new stores in Brooklyn, one focused on vintage heirlooms and one focused on contemporary Georgian design.

Interiors

This futuristic room is a new sound space that opened last month inside the Triennale museum in Milan, a 3,000 square-foot project dubbed “Voce” whose interiors were designed by AR.CH.IT Luca Cipelletti (inside the museum’s 1933 Giovani Muzio building). Philippe Malouin and Meritalia designed the green seating, and the sound system is top of the line, set up for a new series of programming that will include live concerts, DJ sets, listening sessions, and sound installations. Says the museum’s president, Stefano Boeri: “In a Palazzo that for 90 years has hosted a unique and wide-ranging array of images, artworks, and visual performances, we have decided to create a space for listening.” Tucked into a Provençal village called Marsanne that’s a 2-hour drive north of Marseille, the new French hotel Pantoufle, designed by Laëtitia and Luc Boulant, has been retrofitted into a building in the town square that was built in 1905. There’s a pool and sauna, of course, plus lots of vintage furniture, pottery, and mirrors throughout its common spaces and 17 guest rooms.

Shops

A small space with big style, Tage Gallery opened last month in Bushwick, Brooklyn, during New York design week, helmed by artists and dealers Tyler Rizzuto and Deon Hinton. They plan to devote the gallery both to vintage heirloom craft objects/furnishings as well as artworks — we particularly love this pitcher by Belgian ceramicist Goedele Vanhille, seen in the cabinet above. Being half-Georgian myself (my father was born in Tbilisi), I was very excited to learn of a new store that opened recently in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood devoted entirely to furniture and objects by Georgian-born artists and designers. Called Jamieri, it was founded by interior stylist — and Georgian expat — Keti Chichinadze, and showcases works by the likes of Around the Studio, Tika Shelia, Levan Mindiashvili, Studio Gypsandconcrete, and IDAAF Architects. The photos above aren’t of the store itself (though it’s also quite beautiful, you can see bits of it here), but of a photo shoot Chichinadze did of its greatest hits, shot in the iconic Palace of Rituals building in Tbilisi designed by Viktor Djorbenadze in 1984. The shop in general is a great way to get to know some of Georgia’s more up-and-coming talents, post Rooms Studio, as its creative scene blossoms. Photos: Lasha Gigauri

Discoveries

Obsessed with these new plates from Bi-Rite, designed by founder Cat Snodgrass herself — they’re smoked-glass, but half-dipped in a food-safe beige paint, so they look vintage and contemporary at the same time, minimalist yet with a handmade feel since the dip line isn’t perfectly straight. Just so much more interesting than boring white porcelain. And for $25 each, I can afford to buy a separate set for entertaining in addition to the boring white set I use every day, so I can keep them looking nice without all the wear and tear — win-win for me. Last week we spotlit several projects that were part of this year’s Melbourne Design Week, but the design center Craft Victoria also debuted two exhibitions in May as part of its Conscious Craft project, which showcases projects that have a strong sustainable angle in terms of materials and production methods. Our favorite bit from those shows was a small series of works by Pit Projects, the studio of Anni Hagberg and Michael Gittings, who showed lights and furniture made from found metal and glass, including a shattered bus stop enclosure. The duo used the metal as-is to frame out the pieces, then melted and cast the glass in molds made from wet discarded cardboard they found on the side of the road. The results are pretty transformative. Beloved late Greek artist Alekos Fassianos always made objects, and even had his art on plates in the past that you can now find at auction. But until this month if you wanted accessible versions of his work, your options were mostly limited to posters sold at the museum in Athens dedicated to his work. Now, though, Swedish heritage brand Svenkst Tenn has teamed up with the Fassianos estate to release a series of housewares that feature his art, from $48 napkins to $62 trays to $210 pillows, so that if you love his colorful style, you can add it to your sofa or tabletop for a fraction of the originals. Fun to spot Anton Alvarez’s blobby blue plates in the photo shoot, too (they’re now available to purchase through Svenskt Tenn as well). Photos: Henrik Lundell To create her first collection of furnishings, London interior designer Tabitha Isobel teamed up with Devon-based artist and craftsman Dom Callaghan to collaborate on pieces made from two natural but contrasting materials: London Plane hardwood (sourced from salvage dealer Fallen & Felled), and brushed stainless steel. The lamp is made from steel, the mirrors wood, and the side table a simple pairing of the two.

Exhibitions

For their first exhibition in the US, at Friedman Benda gallery in New York, Milan-based duo Formafantasma fittingly chose to pay homage to three people and entities that were highly influential to American design: the Shaker community, Frank Lloyd Wright, and George Nakashima. To that end, they built the collection of lamps, chairs, and desks around planks of cherry wood, in some cases combined with a nod to historical domesticity in the form of simple, white, draped textile elements. They then brought all these references into the present day with aluminum and LED panels. Besides a slightly more expressive chair with blue upholstery that’s an obvious FLW reference, the pieces are pretty simple and understated, which is what the duo intended — the show is meant to stand in contrast to splashy, experimental design-art launches. Photos: Izzy Leung Across the pond in Antwerp, St. Vincents gallery just also launched a solo exhibition of works in metal and wood, this one a lot more artistic — it’s Dutch designer Nick Valentijn‘s first big show since he graduated last year, and it features both his graduation thesis as well as new works he’s added to the series since. The pieces, which he welds himself, were inspired by time he spent in his grandfather’s metal workshop. Photos: Alexander Popelier Nicole Lawrence‘s solo show at C Gallery in Melbourne sees the designer expanding beyond the materials we’ve long associated her with: bent-metal furniture and tubular metal lights. Despite the show’s name — Heavy Hand — the palette here is softer, with lamps featuring flowing textile shades, a bulbous, satiny wood table, and convex blackened-brass sconces dotted with freshwater pearls. The work, the gallery explains, “expands Nicole Lawrence’s decade-long affection for metal as she experiments with press forming, a jewelry forging technique that shapes metals under immense pressure… Her process doesn’t follow a fixed idea but a willingness to combine innovation with ancient methods.” The exhibition is on view through July 11.