11.02.24

Saturday Selects

Week of October 28, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: mirrored prism-like furniture, a spectacular renovated Porto townhouse, and an NYC home goods store and cafe with major redwood tables that we hope will bring back banquet-style dining.

10.24.24

Travel

This Fall, Stay At These Autumnal-Toned Hotels, Each Renovated in Reverence to Its Heyday

Who’s ready to get cozy? Fall travel is about walking through the park with crisp leaves underfoot, wandering the streets dressed chicly in layers, and staying in hotels that encourage snuggling up with a book by the fire. There’s something nostalgic about this season, too, as we look back on the summer that was while digging out our favorite unmothballed sweaters. And what do you know — nostalgia is a common theme across a trio of newly reopened hotels we’re recommending for your next autumnal adventure, each redesigned to evoke its prime.

10.16.24

Sight Unseen Collection

This California Designer’s Steely Minimalism Was Inspired by Japanese Architecture and the Light & Space Movement

It's a common conundrum for creatives: knowing exactly what you want for your own space, but, more often than not, finding it does not exist. California-based designer Orlando Pippig began producing furniture for this very reason, without any formal training, to create a home filled with pieces he actually loved. Eight years later, something of an accidental furniture designer, he’s amassed a collection of striking minimalist designs — several of which we sell through our own Sight Unseen Collection — and he continues to expand his range of “usable sculptures” through experiments with materials, scale, and proportion.

10.15.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

Lukas Cober’s Crinkled-Resin Collection Was Inspired By A Beloved Children’s Book

Confession: I have never read Where the Wild Things Are. But after learning that the children’s book left such a lasting impression on Maastricht designer Lukas Cober — and influenced his most recent collection of resin-fiberglass works — I've added it to the top of my library list. Cober was so enchanted by American author and illustrator Maurice Sendak’s 1963 picture book, which follows a boy’s journey to a jungle inhabited by mischievous monsters, he decided to reconnect with his inner child and tap into a state of curiosity, naïveté, and sheer joy while crafting the body of work that’s currently on view at the Objects With Narratives gallery in Brussels.

10.01.24

Sighted

Hauvette & Madani’s Second Furniture Collection Channels 1930s Art Deco and the Strict Geometries of a Visionary Architect

When the French design duo Hauvette & Madani released their debut furniture collection in 2021, they called it Amuse-Bouche, after the small canapés served prior to a meal. Their newest collection, which launched during Paris's design week last month, has a slightly more esoteric name — following with the dining theme, they called it Entremets, dubbed for the decorative after-dinner or between-course treats popular in French cuisine — but it's a clear and logical evolution from their previous releases. Here, oak, lacquer, and Art Deco accents are the primary ingredients, resulting in a mélange of pieces with a distinctly 1930s feel. This means hard lines, essential geometries, and lots of layered materials, which have been cropping up a lot in new collections recently. Deco is seemingly the design era du jour.

09.25.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

This Norwegian Studio Devised Its Own Machinery to Make These Joyful, Rainbow-Colored Stools

We learned something new today, so perhaps you will, too: The acronym for the colors of the rainbow in Norwegian is ROGGBIF, which Oslo-based Studio Sløyd has used to title its new collection of stools, as multi-colored and joyful as you’d expect from such a moniker. Comprising 24 different playful shapes, each is designed to explore applications of a newly created dyed wood technique, which founders Herman Ødegaard, Mikkel Jøraandstad, and Tim Knutsen — who decided to work together as students during a late-night karaoke session (extremely relatable) — have been developing over the past couple of years. “Rather than starting with a shape or form, we turned our usual process on its head for this project, experimenting our way to a new material,” says the trio.

09.14.24

Saturday Selects

Week of September 9, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an exhibition that delves into grotto life, tapestries that depict architectural deterioration, and a woven rug collection photographed at a folk-influenced farmhouse in Sweden.

09.12.24

Up and Coming

A Speaker That Looks Like a Sculpture, and So Much More, From a New Australian Design Talent

There’s a raw simplicity to Australian designer Tom Fereday’s work that comes from applying simple gestures to great effect. The majority of his pieces are sculpted or constructed from a single material, and have one, carefully considered defining feature. Take his Cor light, a pillar of travertine with fileted corners, from which a curved slice is pared away to reveal a hollow core and a light source that glows from within. Or his Cove Lounge, a chair with a slender metal frame that — rather than wrapping around the backrest — elegantly disappears into the curved panel on one side and reemerges on the other. “I try to add innovation in the pieces from a perspective where we might look, for example, at articulating engineering details with natural materials,” Fereday says. This approach to simplified and sophisticated contemporary form-making is proving to be a hit with design lovers worldwide.

09.04.24

Sighted

Audo, Our Go-To for Cozy Danish Furniture, Just Dropped a Whole Slate of Products Perfect for Small-Space Living

By now, we’ve established that Copenhagen’s 3 Days of Design is a staple on the annual design-fair circuit, particularly as many Danish brands forgo Milan in favor of their own city, where their work can be exhibited both in context and in a more sustainable fashion. For Audo Copenhagen, this summer's 3 Days offered the opportunity to celebrate the brand's Nordic roots — and newly released products — at the revitalized Audo House in the Nordhavn district. Launched in 2019 as a combination monobrand store, restaurant, and residence, Audo House got a glow-up this year in collaboration with Stockholm’s Note Design Studio to showcase updated favorites. But perhaps it's ironic that Audo's refreshed collection launched in summer, as so many of Audo's products are designed for maximum indoor coziness. As such, many of the products this season arrive in new, more petite sizes.

08.16.24

Fair Report

This French Riviera Design Showcase Delivers On Emerging Talent

For those lucky enough to be sunning themselves in the south of France right now, there are two sister design shows worth peeling away from the beach for. Split across a pair of historic and impressive — yet totally different — venues in the neighboring Riviera towns of Hyères and Toulon, the annual Design Parade festival and competition brings together established and emerging designers as part of two season-spanning exhibitions. Design Parade has long been a particularly great opportunity to spy up-and-coming French talent, and there's more than enough to get us excited in this year’s edition.

08.15.24

Sighted

With Its Designer Collective, CB2 is Bringing a Global Design Perspective to the Masses

Big-box furniture stores doing high-profile collabs has long been one of the surest bets for those who yearn for a collection of beautiful things by internationally renowned designers — but who can't necessarily afford the luxury price tags that typically accompany such items. CB2 has long been at the top of our list when it comes to products with a point of view, hand-picking many designers we know and love — from Kara Mann to Luam Melake to Studio Anansi and Farrah Sit — to offer collections at accessible price points, bringing the designers' varied global design perspectives within reach of a much broader audience. Now, CB2 has introduced its 2024 Designer Collective, a showcase of nearly two dozen designers and independent studios, through whom the brand is able to introduce multiple design styles from around the world— giving design fans more options to find pieces that align with their aesthetic and creating a variety in perspectives that enables the range as a whole to feel fresh and current. We spoke to three members of the Designer Collective — interior designer Kara Mann, lighting designer Farrah Sit, and the Barcelona-based Mermelada Estudio — about what this collaboration means to their practice, and how their individual approaches to design each bring something unique to the brand.

08.10.24

Saturday Selects

Week of August 5, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the printed jeans of our dreams from Marimekko, Brutalist-influenced glassware by Solange Knowles, and a menswear store interior that’s unequal parts Halston, Richard Serra, and Teletubbies.