A new shop for objects, a Biarritz-ish holiday house, and more

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The Duo Behind the New Copenhagen Shop Aarticles Are As Object-Obsessed As We Are

Aarticles’s first pop-up in Copenhagen, top, along with two of the products you can shop on its website, by Yeodong Yun (cup) and Agnieszka Owsiany (candleholder). Photos: Fred Aartun

It’s hard to believe that it’s been three years since we released our book, How to Live With Objects, and five years since we were holed up, during the height of the pandemic, actually writing it. But we still feel just as strongly about its ideas — and its objects — now as we did then, which is why it warms our hearts so much whenever we find kindred spirits out there like Kasia Sznajder and Fred Aartun. Our latest object-obsessed dopplegangers, the Copenhagen-based pair — she a strategist and event producer for the likes of Reform and 3daysofdesign, he head of creative at Frama — have just launched Aarticles, an online (and sometimes pop-up) gallery featuring a meticulously curated selection of curiosities both contemporary and vintage.

Their first collection includes a lamp by jeweler J. Hannah, vases by Shane Gabier, and pieces by lesser-known names like Agnieszka Owsiany, Yeodong Yun, and Louie Isaaman-Jones, plus anonymous objects like a found eel fork and foot sculpture. Started “from the belief that objects carry stories,” the duo write, Aarticles asks “how the objects we live with might shape the way we see.” Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

Katja Pargger Unites Her Material-Driven Furniture Designs into One Line

The T Set, Melodie Crown chair, and Skin Series Querelle from Katja Pargger’s new Items collection. Photos: Mathilde Hiley

While it is not the most curious object in the catalogue — that honor would go to an enigmatic latex robe suspended from a metal rail, limited edition of 3 — Katja Pargger’s Edge lamp, from her debut furniture collection Items, is described in terms that certainly struck me as unusual. The piece is made from a so-called “fabric sock suspension” topped by a mulberry-bark fiber shade — its base essentially wrapped in some sort of scrunched-up, mottled textile that’s secured with little white strings.

The Edge lamp exemplifies the French-Austrian architect’s approach to the entire line, which is to create sleek pieces, each with a decorative twist, that are made from a smorgasbord of sustainable natural materials like plywood, leather remnants, goatskin parchment, inox, curly lambskin, and upcycled silver. The twists include a series of notches along the tops of her boxy wood lounge chairs, draped leather seat cushion on an edgy curule stool, and an epic tea set with a triangular tray and a tiny ball atop its handle. Some of the works you might recognize from the feature we did on Pargger’s Villa N at the start of this year, but the release of Items codifies all the custom pieces she’s been making recently into one very attractive line, available directly through her studio.

France’s Villa Ortensa Makes a Case for the Design-Forward Holiday Rental

The living room and backyard of the new 4-bedroom rental Villa Ortensa, in Hossegor, France. Photos: Clemence Louise Bial

The days of the sterile holiday-house rental are officially over — take it from folks like Robert McKinley, the design-driven rental platform Boutique, and now, the French creative agency Mews, whose new 4-bedroom Villa Ortensa in southern France is the latest to offer a high-brow alternative to generic Ikea-slash-Wayfair properties. While I can’t really advocate for turning private homes into short-term rentals, if you’re going to do it, this is certainly the way: Mario Bellini sofas, shell sconces by Axel Chay, floor lamps by Jean Touret, Gio Ponti faucets in the bathrooms. Plus unexpected pops of color like a baby-blue custom dining table, originally designed for another Mews project, the beach club La Bouillabaisse in Saint-Tropez.

Just note that if you’re a design lover who’s a fan of, or has been curious about, the ultra-popular Biarritz area, you’re most definitely not alone — Ortensa, situated just 40 minutes north in the town of Hossegor, is already booked up for most of next August and September.

At Dutch Design Week, 31 Designers Examined How the Unseen Shapes What We Perceive

31 designers from 13 different countries came together for The Boundaries of Sight at Dutch Design Week last month. Photos: namseungrok

Dutch Design Week has, to some degree, fallen off our radar these days — at least compared to how important it felt back in 2009, when we had just launched Sight Unseen and discovered Formafantasma there while touring Design Academy Eindhoven. But we do still see nice projects coming out of the fair from time to time, this one spotted in our Instagram feed last week: a group show called The Boundaries of Sight, put on at the Van Abbehuis arts center and featuring 31 designers (including Tim Teven, Audrey Large, Mark Malecki, and Odd Matter) hailing from 13 different countries. “The works,” write the trio of curators, “present conditions of partial visibility, allowing what is hidden or absent to shape the viewer’s engagement. What is shown is not simply the object itself, but the question of what is concealed and to what extent it is revealed.”

As usual in group shows, some pieces are more immediately relevant to the theme than others, like a pink freestanding curtain and a tall monolith with a cutout for a single book by Teo Rhe. A blue chair made from foam insulation panels, by Nicolas Zanoni, doesn’t really obscure any lines of sight, but is an interesting chair nonetheless. I tend to judge these exhibitions less by these arbitrary briefs, anyway, and more by the strength of the participants and their contributions. I also just like to celebrate designers supporting each other. Long live the group show.

BMDO Drops a Strange But Sophisticated Second Collection

Selections from BMDO’s second collection, The World’s Smallest Horse, as exhibited at Oigall Projects in Melbourne last month.

With their second collection, recently exhibited at Oigall Projects, the Melbourne/Los Angeles duo BMDO are a studio after my own heart. I am a person who deeply appreciates weirdness and eccentricity but only when they’re done right, and in furniture design, they’re often done very wrong, resulting in work that feels either too try-hard or too slight — a lame one-liner. Gaetano Pesce turned that shit up to 11 (see his Gli Amici or, my favorite, Notturno A New York sofas, among many others) but it always felt purposeful and sincere; BMDO’s latest assemblage of pieces only has a whiff of oddness, but in the most sophisticated way.

There’s a simple oak dining table with artfully misaligned metal attachment plates, an updated version of their boxy metal chair with unkempt orange shag-carpet upholstery, a wall hanging and mirror enameled with a cool/uncool star motif, and a headboard that’s just a chonk of wood with a tapestry nailed to it. Every tweak is subtle, and every piece remains beautiful and well made. “It leans into the chaos yet resolves into a strangely unified experience,” the designers say. “Less sanitized, more stained and sticky.”

Editor’s List

Clockwise, from top left:

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I love Marine Serre‘s signature crescent moon pattern, but most of her clothes are too form-fitting for me, so I was excited to see she’d partnered with the French porcelain brand Gien to apply the motif to deadstock plates and teacups. If I can’t wear it I might as well serve it, and the pieces are cute in their own right (although the mug shapes are maybe a little too trad for me).

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Spartan Shop compares the work of Connecticut ceramicist Tara Vaughan Thornton to Georgia O’Keeffe and Valentine Schlegel, but it also reminds me of a more delicate version of Aldo Bakker’s functional sculpture. I love how completely different her soft, monochrome forms look from every angle.

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Now that the cost of literally everything is so eye-popping, it’s nice to see a really great DIY furniture kit released that isn’t Enzo Mari. These wall mirrors are designed by Julie Richoz, but you can make them at home out of easily sourced materials by downloading this free blueprint — it’s the second in a series of DIY kits developed by A Vibe Called Tech and WeTransfer / WePresent (the first was by Andu Masebo).

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I don’t know why I’m putting this here considering it’s already sold out and I still want to snag one, but oh well; I’m totally obsessed with this elongated-collar shirt from the Frankie Shop — see my spiel about tasteful weirdness above! Also the model is sitting on a Z stool designed in the ’70s by François Arnal, which makes this even more aspirational.

News

Top, Avroko’s newly re-programmed Host on Howard space in Manhattan; bottom, Somerset House’s new showroom in Long Island City. Photos: Tereza Valner, Clement Pascal

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Host on Howard — interiors firm AvroKo’s event space and lighting showroom — was all green last year when it hosted our New York Design Week exhibition. Now the designers have repainted and re-furnished the entire thing, going with a burnt umber scheme, abstract paintings by AvroKo partner William Harris, lots of found objects, and the debut of a new lighting collection designed by the firm in collaboration with the California brand SkLO.

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The high-end vintage furniture purveyor Somerset House — whose co-proprietor, Alan Eckstein, also does staging and interiors — just made the move from a loft in Long Island City to a much bigger, 10,000 square-foot loft in Long Island City. The new space is inside the Metropolitan Building, originally an electrical parts factory that was refurbished by interior designer Eleanor Ambos in 1980 (an era nodded to in the showroom’s copious use of glass blocks, a new interior scheme designed with 941 Studios). Even if you can’t afford the wares, it’s worth a visit for the inspiration.

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Opening this Friday in New York, at Adler Beatty gallery in association with Galeria Mascota, is a solo show of sculptures by Mexico City–based Brian Thoreen, whose design career we helped launch back in 2015 at our showcase at the Collective fair. If you haven’t noticed, he’s been working more in the art realm in recent years, and this show features both wall works in glue-puckered paper as well as solid bronze “paperweights” in the shape of giant eggs and spikes. We’ll see you at the opening Friday night!

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Fairly sure I’m not alone when I say I hate dish racks; most of them are either not very functional or not very nice to look at. A regretful necessity. But Permanent Collection just released a great one, and while it’s an indulgence at $400, it could be worth it for something you have to look at every day. It’s made from red oak hardwood by a longtime farmer/supplier for Chez Panisse, who also happens to be a woodworker, and it’s the same one Alice Waters uses in her own kitchen.