10.12.22

Sighted

Jacqueline Sullivan’s Tribeca Gallery Breathes New Life Into the NYC Design Scene

Gertrude Stein’s experimental text Tender Buttons is more than a hundred years old and yet it still surprises. In the book’s three sections — Objects, Food, and Rooms — Stein evokes an eclectic domestic scene that it is at once cozy and weird, making ordinary things, and language itself, strange, beguiling, and new. It’s what New York gallerist Jacqueline Sullivan is also after in her inaugural exhibition: working to reframe and refresh objects and the ways we live with them.

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10.06.22

Sighted

Bower’s New Mirrors Are Based on the Elements of a Home — But They’re Really a Portal to Someplace Else

Mirrors have always conjured thoughts, both lofty and literal, about reflection and perception, consciousness and subjectivity, surface and depth. Any mirror, when you look long enough, will provoke this. But the latest ones from Bower do even more: They’re transformative objects that turn space into something else. Over the last couple of months, the Brooklyn-based design studio, led by Danny Giannella, Tammer Hijazi, and Jeffrey Renz, has launched six individual mirrors that all nod to familiar architectural elements you think you know well — doorways, bookshelves, windows, arches — but become unexpected, making you do a double take.

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09.22.22

Sighted

How Do You Remix the Most Iconic Furniture of All Time? Give it a Splash of Danish Color

Charles Eames once said that “the details are not the details — they make the product.” So, when Danish design brand HAY had the chance to collaborate with Herman Miller on a refresh of eight classic Eames pieces, we imagine the opportunity was as exciting as it was daunting: How do you take something so iconic and rework the defining nuances in your own style? The Eames Office has rarely let creative liberties be taken with these mid-century designs. But this collaboration, born out of mutual appreciation, features a revitalized color palette and some updated materials that feel utterly contemporary while remaining true to the originals.

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09.16.22

Sighted

In Common With and Sophie Lou Jacobsen’s Collab Lighting Collection is the Drama We Need Right Now

There’s a wonderful sense of mystery in the new lighting collaboration between Brooklyn-based studio In Common With and French-American glassware designer Sophie Lou Jacobsen. The Flora collection, as its name suggests, draws on the forms and proportions of plant life — but not your average bouquet or potted succulent. More like an unknown but totally intriguing specimen you might encounter growing on the forest floor. The 20 pieces here feature hand-blown, mold-blown, and slumped glass in milky off-white, amber, lavender, soft browns, and reds. Sconces are edged with dark, scalloped details, tables lamps and pendants are mushroom- and bell-shaped; and on a gorgeous chandelier of curving brass arms, delicate shades of draped glass resemble the blossom of an Angel’s Trumpet.

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09.10.22

Saturday Selects

Week of September 5, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a posh, velvet-filled, Boston-adjacent restaurant, an exhibition in a handmade home in New Jersey, and a new showroom that shows off its Hamptons location to a T.

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09.09.22

Up and Coming

“Am I Just Making the Trash of the Future?” And Other Philosophical Questions With Designer Drew Abrahamson

“I always want my work to be fun, not taken too seriously, a point of conversation,” says Australian artist and designer Drew Abrahamson. And while it definitely is, it’s thoughtful, too, and even veers, in a light-hearted way, toward the kinds of philosophical questions anyone who puts anything out into the world ought to probably ask themselves: “Am I just making the trash of the future?” Abrahamson’s answer, in his recent series “We Are All Garbage,” is pretty much yes, but concedes that there’s freedom and liberation in the act of creation, especially when it isn’t so tightly tied to the constraints of marketability.

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09.08.22

Up and Coming

This Cross-Cultural Couple is Carving Out a Space for Contemplation — And Furniture Production — in San Miguel de Allende

Part of what motivates designers Giulia Zink and Mat Trumbull of OHLA Studio is a question: “How do we build within the traditions of the past as new challenges loom?” The answer for OHLA, based in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and Los Angeles, is to balance a contemporary aesthetic with a respect for the region’s vernacular design and historic motifs, while turning to local and not-too-far-away artisans and resources to realize their projects.

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08.16.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Traveling Gallery Show in Belgium Offers a Renewed Sense of Discovery

This summer, the galleries Barbé Urbain and Atelier Ecru, located in Ghent, Belgium, have teamed up to present a temporary exhibition of collectible design and contemporary art outside of their dedicated spaces. Named to evoke a sense of discovery, the Magellan show brings together works by a host of artists and designers in the De Beir residence, an iconic early Modernist building designed by Belgian architect Huib Hoste in 1924.

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08.11.22

Sighted

Raf Simons Just Dropped a 16-Piece Shaker-Inspired Accessory Collection for Kvadrat

Over the course of nine years, the ongoing collaboration between Raf Simons and Kvadrat has brought us bold textiles attuned to color, texture, and proportion. Their latest project, the Shaker System, is no exception, while also being a bit of a departure. It’s a storage and accessories collection that fuses a precise simplicity with the comfort and ease of home.

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London interior designer vintage objects

08.03.22

Sighted

In a New Gallery Space, Hollie Bowden Shows Off Her Talent for Sourcing Minimal Maximalist Vintage Objects

London-based interior designer Hollie Bowden is a self-described “minimal maximalist.” Think bare walls and airy, earth-toned environments accented and brought together with a touch of dramatic surrealism. She has a way of adding the surprising elements that wind up feeling completely necessary to any given project. After working as a stylist, florist, and set designer, Bowden launched her own studio in 2013 and has spent the past decade conceiving of dreamy domestic and retail spaces. As an extension and natural progression of her studio work, earlier this summer she opened The Gallery, an appointment-only shop located next to her Shoreditch headquarters.

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07.23.22

Saturday Selects

Week of July 18, 2022

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the first furniture collection from interior designer Robert McKinley, colorful glass candlesticks by Lex Pott, and a Wright auction full of postmodern treasures.

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07.20.22

Sighted

Vaspaar, an Up-and-Coming Digital Design Gallery, Looks at Collecting As an Act of Preservation

For Kaisha Davierwalla and Andrea Grecucci, the Milan-based designers who run the digital gallery Vaspaar, the art of collecting amounts to more than simple acquisition. It’s not merely about possessing a beautiful material object — though Vaspaar offers plenty of those — but an act of preservation. Whether that’s preserving “something from the passing of time, or as a token of memory, a symbolic representation of an era, or the significance of an object and the emotions involved,” they explain, “we look at the act of collecting from both a deeply academic viewpoint and also from how personally we tend to get attached to these pieces.”

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