04.23.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

An All-Female Welding Team Built Studio Kuhlmann’s Gorgeous, Stainless Steel Ode to Lucid Dreaming

Lucid Dreams, the new solo show from German designer and welder Hannah Kuhlmann, is an ode to unconscious depths, afternoon naps, and theta state reverie. On view at St Vincents gallery in Antwerp through mid-May, these pieces evoke an atmosphere somewhere between illusion and reality, following a kind of dream logic where the unexpected is encountered and absorbed. Lucid dreaming, after all, is when you realize you’re dreaming in your dream. “I wanted to capture the essence of those moments of heightened awareness within our subconscious,” Kuhlmann says. “The title Lucid Dreams speaks to the surreal experience of being both asleep and awake, where the mind wanders freely and perceptions shift.”
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11.19.24

Sighted

With New Lights and a Serene New Showroom in Downtown Manhattan, Danny Kaplan is Cementing His Studio as a Major Creative Force

Danny Kaplan's Facet series is made of slab-built forms in first-time materials for the studio: perforated brass with a patina finish, stainless steel, or white painted steel (though the studio has stayed true to its ceramic roots, hand-sculpting clay models at the start of the production process). Hard, defined edges and angles paradoxically create a mellow mood, an atmosphere that’s serene and soothing. You could say the same thing about the studio’s new 4,000 square foot showroom, located in a pre-war cast iron warehouse building in NoHo; it's a meditative, calming exhalation that both resets and reinvigorates you.
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11.01.24

Shopping

Exploring Pewter — a Once Fusty, Now Weirdly Cool Material — Via 22 Vintage and New Pieces You Can Bring Into Your Home

When I was in Stockholm earlier this fall for Svenskt Tenn's 100th anniversary exhibition, I thought about pewter — which is a primary part of the Swedish design store's lore and product catalog — a lot. We talk about metal often on this site, but unlike brass, which can be a turn-off in the wrong context, there's almost no silvery toned metal that I'd ever tire of. Aluminum, stainless steel, chrome — all eternally perfect. (Okay, let us not speak of brushed nickel.) But there's something uniquely appealing about pewter, despite its somewhat fusty early connotations as part of a kind of American Revolution cosplay kit. I started to wonder whether we were on the verge of a renaissance with this ancient material.
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05.11.24

Saturday Selects

Week of May 6, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: pale green and stainless steel is the new butter yellow and stainless steel; an exhibition devoted to the vicissitudes of wood; and new rugs from everyone's favorite LA sister-run brand, Block Shop. 
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05.08.24

Interiors

In San Sabino, New York Gets the Buttery Yellow Restaurant Interior It Needs

After butter yellow's long and winding ascent to the top, finally we get a restaurant interior with that hue as the star. And it was well worth the wait — San Sabino is the next-door sibling to Don Angie, the still-too-hot-for-a-reservation restaurant in the West Village also designed by GRT Architects. But where that space has extremely chic elevated trattoria vibes, San Sabino has elements that read almost like a diner, at least during the daylight hours. There are the round, leather-topped bar stools; the stainless steel accents like a ceiling "crown" and metal-trimmed booth seating; and oh, that laminate.
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10.05.23

Travel

Beata Heuman Made Her Name Designing Colorfully Maximalist Interiors. Now She’s Bringing That Same Aesthetic to a Chic Parisian Hotel.

The Swedish-born, London-based designer Beata Heuman is known for bringing character and charm to her interiors. And she does just that with her first hotel project: Hôtel de la Boétie, which opened in September, the sixth Parisian space from design-forward French hotel group Touriste. For this collaboration, Heuman and her studio worked with the 19th-century architecture of the building — located in rue de la Boétie in the eighth arrondissement, not too far from the Champs-Élysées — and incorporated existing elements such as the marble entrance, elevator, and staircase of the 40-room property. Keeping the design relatively simple, using a limited palette, natural woods, and stainless steel and brass, Heuman has created the kind of heightened atmosphere you can have in spaces that are meant to be traveled through and not necessarily lived in all the time. “We can treat it a bit like a stage set, which is not the approach I would take when it comes to someone’s home,” says Heuman.
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05.01.23

Sighted

Sarah Ellison Gives Bauhaus a Feminine Spin With Her Tubular Chromeo Chair

Are tubular metal chairs back? Almost a century since Marcel Breuer started churning out seating designs formed from sculptural lines of curved stainless steel, like the B5, Wassily, and Cesca models, Australian designer Sarah Ellison has paid homage to these Bauhaus icons with the launch of her Chromeo lounge chair. A more contemporary and feminine spin on the intentionally simple style, with its curvy silhouette and bolstered cushioning, the design offers a fresh approach to the movement’s ethos of combining art, craftsmanship, and mass production.
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12.14.22

Q+A

Sophie Lou Jacobsen Gets Emotional About Objects

For Brooklyn-based designer Sophie Lou Jacobsen, objects have a life of their own. “I firmly believe that objects have their own energy, and that what they bring to your environment and daily experience is almost spiritual,” she says. “I’m not religious by any means, but I do believe in the interconnectedness of our world, and that there should be this sort of mutual relationship between us and our things — one of respect, care, and thoughtfulness. I think in my mind I live in a very Beauty and the Beast-like world!” It's not just in her mind, though — we can easily see the likes of Mrs. Potts interacting with Jacobsen’s curving, almost animate vases, intricate stainless steel candleholders, and draping glass lamps.
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12.15.18

Saturday Selects

Week of December 10, 2018

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: An amazing gingko-leaf chair from the past, and a new stainless steel chair (above) from the future. Plus, four on-trend interiors and a surreal immersive exhibition in Paris.
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08.09.16

Sighted

Five New Styling Pieces From a Favorite Brooklyn Housewares Brand

We once described the small-goods Brooklyn brand Areaware as straddling the line between Jeff Koons and Dieter Rams — which in practice meant that for every gold-foiled pig or pug-printed pillow, there was a hydroformed stainless steel flask, or a bottle opener with a built-in magnet. Their new fall collection falls along that same continuum, with carefully considered items that telegraph a sense of fun through either a color palette or an extremely clever concept.
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03.25.13

Sighted

Tom Dixon’s New Mass Coat and Book Stands

Tom Dixon has long been considered a master of metal (thanks, famously, to an early motorcycle accident requiring extensive bike repairs for which he learned, then fell in love with, welding). So we weren't the least bit surprised when we received a press release this morning revealing the London designer's newest wares — set to be released in two weeks at the Milan Furniture Fair — that contained a veritable smorgasbord of copper, cast-iron, brass, and shiny stainless steel, with a small contingent of nickel-plated aluminum tables that pair the faceting of a cut gem with the roughed-up surface of a silver ingot. There was one thing that really stood out for us, though: two minimalist brass sculptures, each an imposing 6.5 feet tall, one for holding books and the other for hanging coats. They're so different from anything we've seen Dixon show lately that they almost beg the question as to what new wunderkind he's brought on staff, but either way, they're a win. Someone with good taste, a huge budget, and high ceilings is about to make us very jealous.
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