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For a Summer, the Athens-Based Gallery Antiqua is Trading White Walls for the Deep Blue Sea

The Athens-based 20th-century furniture gallery Antiqua is popping up on the Greek island of Antiparos for the summer in a show called “By the Sea.” Photos: Giorgos Sfakianakis

One regrettable limitation of having a permanent gallery space is that, regardless of how much exhibition design you can pull off, or how many bizarre interventions ensue, each show still retains the DNA of its enclosure. An Alex Da Corte show at Karma Gallery — even with red carpeting, pink walls, and an upside-down inflatable cat — still feels like a typical Karma Gallery show; heavy curtains or a Do Ho Suh–esque house can’t fool you into thinking you’re not at Jacqueline Sullivan’s. (Perhaps the most successful transformation of a known space I’ve ever seen was Felix Burrichter’s Charlap Hyman & Herrero–designed BLOW-UP exhibition for Friedman Benda, but that’s another story for another day about how 2019 was my favorite year in design.) This is why it’s so exciting when a shop or gallery decides to decamp entirely to a new space, whether for the long haul or even for a few months. There’s a pleasant friction that develops from seeing the same pieces in a new envelope.

The Athens-based 20th-century furniture gallery Antiqua is taking full advantage of that friction this summer as they pop up on the island of Antiparos, in a space called Maison Bardot, a cultural center not far from the beach. Maison Bardot’s aesthetic is typically Cycladic — lime and clay surfaces, pigmented terracotta floors, diffused light — so much so that it temporarily scrambled my brain to see pieces like this blue-legged Sottsass bookcase or a laminated wood Mendini chair inside it. I wondered if they were some new folly of contemporary design. Once your eye adjusts, you may, as I did, start wondering how these pieces might be transformed when placed inside yet another interior: your own living room.

The American Midcentury Workplace is Alive and Well at This Bar in Turin, Italy

Fabio Fantolino’s design for the new Lève Office Bar in Turin reference 1960s office culture with its drop ceiling, chrome-framed chairs, wood paneling, and more. Photos: Luca Argenton

In Turin, a watering hole that goes by the name of Lève Office Bar has opened, designed by Fabio Fantolino, and the fun lies in seeing just how far they can take the workplace references without descending into full pastiche. There are full-on nods to the American open-plan office, including bouclé-covered partitions meant to resemble cubicles and a drop ceiling that here is made from smoke-colored, disco-ready reflective glass. There’s also wood paneling, what appears to be a linoleum floor in a slimy chartreuse green, glass blocks, and cantilevered Thonet chairs that recall another Turin interior we once covered by Fantolino. But the elevated materials and color palette keep this bar firmly in hospitality territory — red lacquer, chrome, leather, and resin among them — as do the FF&E choices, like the vintage pendants or a series of aluminum sconces and suspension lights by Lambert & Fils. In this way, its references to the Mad Men–era office culture are able to go beyond mere citation, as the designer says, becoming an integral part of the design.

A Short History of the Salt and Pepper Shaker, Courtesy of Yowie

Silver-plated swan salt and pepper shakers by Philadelphia-based artist Carl Durkow (left); ceramic shakers by Sean Gerstley (right). Photos: Bre Furlong

The 3rd annual Yowie Salt & Pepper Shaker show was up for only a few short days in Philadelphia last month, but if you read this newsletter with any regularity, you know we absolutely cannot resist the opportunity to write about a single-object show. Among the objects we’ve covered — ashtrays, paperweights, nightlights — salt and pepper shakers may be our favorite because of the opportunity to produce a slightly mismatched pair. In the Yowie show, jeweler Allison Grabenhorst made two sterling silver shakers set with different sets of semi-precious stones; Elissa Defranceschi sculpted two tiny horses, one in porcelain and the other in black earthenware clay; Sean Gerstley applied his mosaic-tile technique to clay; and Carl Durkow made the most Jill Singer–coded silver swan shakers of all time. What I particularly loved about this exhibition is that Shannon Maldonado of Yowie provided a short history of the shakers on Instagram chock full of fun facts: “Before the shaker, salt was pure theater,” she writes. “In Italian Renaissance courts, the trinciante — a professional meat carver — would slice meat mid-air, letting each piece fall gracefully onto the diner’s plate, then dip his knife in salt and scrape it directly onto the plate.” What in the Salt Bae? She also revealed that there’s a museum of salt and pepper shakers in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, with more than 20,000 examples — Sight Unseen field trip anyone?

In Chicago, a New Canyon Coffee Pop-Up Feels in Conversation with the City’s Legacy of Design

The new Canyon Coffee pop-up inside Design Within Reach’s Fulton Market flagship in Chicago offers different vignettes in which to enjoy your morning cup, including an office, a lounge, and a freestanding island.

As coffee brands go, there are few that seem as authentically tethered to the world of design as Canyon Coffee, founded in 2016 by Ally Walsh and Casey Wojtalewicz. Their first LA outpost, inspired by a trip to Georgia O’Keeffe’s home in Abiquiu, New Mexico, featured stools by Shin Okuda of Waka Waka and ceramic mugs by Peter Shire. In New York, a shop opened last fall in Prospect Heights peppered with furniture by Kelby Singhaus of Mambo Jambo (an American Design Hot Lister!), sconces by Thomas Yang, and spiral hooks by Clarissa Guzman of Platform Studio. There’s even a special Canyon Coffee blend made in collaboration with the JB Blunk Estate, its beans hailing from Santa Rosa, California, near the late artist’s estate.

So it makes sense that the brand’s first pop-up in Chicago would take its design bona fides seriously. A location debuted earlier this month inside Design Within Reach’s Fulton Market flagship, and it extends beyond a mere café into vignettes for lounging, working, and listening to music: a full 360 hospitality experience that feels like it’s in conversation with Chicago’s modernist legacy and also illustrates how the designed environment can enhance everyday rituals. An “office” of sorts includes a rug by David Chipperfield, a collection of seating and lights by BassamFellows, and a Wrensilva record console; a music collection was curated for the space by Secretly Group + Numero Group and features Illinois-born and based musicians from Gia Margaret to Miles Davis. As a part of the new partnership, DWR will also now serve Canyon Coffee in stores nationwide, meaning I’ll be shopping there a whole lot more.

Editor’s List

CLOCKWISE, FROM TOP LEFT:

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A friend of mine loves to make fun of me for using my iPhone as a lipstick mirror; in high school, I used a Clinique makeup compact that always shook powder loose in my backpack. So yes, perhaps I’m ready to level up with the new Clasp Compact from Ready to Hang, which launched earlier this month. It’s made from a satin-finish zinc alloy and has a signature ball closure that snaps together like an evening bag. Chic!

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Friend of SU Mackenzie Wagoner had a great piece on The T List last week about how textured lamps are the new paper lanterns. She followed it up with an even more in-depth round-up on Instagram where she alerted us to this sweet cast aluminum and blown-glass lamp made by her college roommate, Claire Torok, who designs under the name Clab. One to watch!

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I published my big Copenhagen round-up this week, and one thing I didn’t have room for were these new ceramic vases based on the forms of Belgian water towers; designed by Bernard Dubois, they were produced by Bitossi for PIN-UP HOME. Longtime Sight Unseen stans might remember that a version of these vases originally debuted in wood at our Offsite design fair in 2016. It’s always nice to see a piece come back around with a new lease on life!

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A nice submission in our inboxes this week from Forge Objects, a Poland-based practice founded by a goldsmith and an industrial designer. In their recent experiments in silver, they’ve made a hand fan, a brooch, a mirrored box, and the stone-set perfume bottle shown here.

News

The Jade Cabinet and Serpent Sconce by Jeremy Anderson, on view with Gallery Fumi at Galerie56 in New York (left); Martino Gamper’s 100 Chairs in 100 Days (right). Photos: Ethan Harrington and Filippo Pincolini

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It feels like a lifetime ago (late May) that I went to the opening for Jeremy Anderson’s solo show with Gallery Fumi, presented at Galerie56 as part of Fumi’s three-month residency in New York. Anderson’s pieces are incredibly intricate — those brass frames are cast in small pieces that are then puzzle-pieced together, and he develops his ceramic glazes in-house — but perhaps my favorite piece was the simplest: a metallic-glazed sconce whose swagged, serpent-like body is the very definition of pizzazz. Through July 3.

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Perhaps it’s a measure of how long you’ve been in the design world if you remember Martino Gamper’s seminal project 100 Chairs in 100 Days happening in real time. I am one of those oldheads; I was two years into my design career when Gamper began collecting discarded chairs and transforming them via grafting and recombination. In doing so he challenged the very idea of authorship and also created a framework that would be duplicated ad nauseum by other designers. What I didn’t know about the project is that Nilufar’s Nina Yashar, in 2009, acquired the collection of 100 chairs in full to prevent it from ever being sold off piecemeal. Later this year, a major museum will announce its acquisition of the project but before then, on June 30th, the chairs will be gathered together one last time at Nilufar’s warehouse in Milan, where Gamper will make one last “100th chair” on-site.

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Two major launches this week for those who love a patterned textile: Dusen Dusen launched a womenswear capsule collection that includes shift dresses and wrap skirts, for all your late-90s cosplay needs. And Block Shop launched a collab with the Hancock Shaker Village for which the sister-run brand reimagined motifs from the Shaker Gift Drawing Archives as hand block prints and corresponding table linens. This bright pink tablecloth — which takes its leaf pattern from an 1851 print — is a favorite.

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The Malin — aka the co-working space where you’ll find me when I’m not WFB (working from bed) — just opened its seventh New York location in Brooklyn Heights, right by the iconic Gage & Tollner. Who wants to have a work date followed by a happy hour drink at the tiki bar above the steakhouse!?