A Decade In, 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen is a Must-Visit on the Design Fair Circuit

There's an increasing sense in the design world that 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen is a must-stop on the design fair circuit — some have argued even moreso than Milan. And while we didn't make it over this year, we could see from our inboxes that there was no shortage of wonderful things to see at the 11th edition this past June. The annual festival featured more than 400 exhibitors, bringing together emerging, experimental voices and established global giants, sprayed across the city, each stop just a bike ride — or sometimes a boat ride — away. While Danish and Scandinavian talent was on full view, a roster of international designers also had a strong presence. The theme this year — Dare to Dream — brought forth new interpretations of classic forms and inventive uses of unusual materials. Here were some of the highlights for us.
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Week of July 1, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: We're taking a deep dive into the first ever LA Design Weekend, plus a stellar new London hotel draped in Bode tapestries, a gloriously tangible furniture collection by a digital artist, and a summery group show at Tiwa Gallery in New York that takes its cues from the mossy ancient forests of Wales.
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Danny Kaplan’s Earthy Ceramics Meet Lesser Miracle’s Warm Woods in a Pitch-Perfect New Collab

What began as a one-off turned not only into a furniture collection but also a friendship when New Yorkers Danny Kaplan of Danny Kaplan Studio and Vince Patti of Lesser Miracle started collaborating last year. In early 2023, Kaplan, known for his ceramics-forward furniture and lighting, asked artist and designer Patti to help construct a bed for his own home. What resulted is the Paravent, both massive and graceful, featuring a brass-hinged floating oak headboard and base, accented with geometric, jewel-like tile detailing. As the two worked on the piece, says Kaplan, “it became clear that our combined vision and skills could produce something more substantial, merging my ceramics practice with Vince’s woodworking expertise.” And so, the Delf collection was born.
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How Do You Conceive Design That is “Correct” for Our Time? A New Exhibition Proposes Work by 10 Designers Answering the Call

Since opening in 2020, the Max Radford Gallery in London has consistently been showcasing some of the best contemporary and experimental collectible design from up-and-comers. With the Now 4 Then exhibition, ten of these designers are debuting new work at the recently opened 2000-square-foot gallery space from design store Aram. For this collaborative show, Radford was inspired by something Zeev Aram, the founder of Aram, once said regarding his enterprise, which is currently celebrating its 60th anniversary: "I decided that I will try my best to bring to the public designs which are contemporary and correct for the time.”
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Material Intrigue and Rich Details Unite These Three Standout Collections From New York’s Design Festivities

Over-the-top and outrageous has a place in our hearts, but we need to be in the mood for it. What always seems to hit right is design that combines a certain restraint with sumptuous details: material richness, attention to composition, elegance of form. Three of the best collections we saw at New York Design Week — from Sunfish, Nicholas Obeid, and Gregory Beson — do just that: Not too much, but still refreshing and surprising; a little asymmetry, an unusual but just-right choice, or a wow-inducing flourish.
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Week of May 20, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a vintage resale shop in Melbourne featuring some of our favorite Australian talents, a rug collection inspired by folklore and cinema, and the long-anticipated reopening of Philip Johnson's Brick House.
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Bronze, Silk, Pine, Cherry: A Year Without a Kiln Forced Simone Bodmer-Turner to Reconsider Her Materials Palette

What does an artist do when they don’t have access to the tools their work requires? The ceramicist Simone Bodmer-Turner — celebrated for her abstract stoneware vessels and sculptures in shades of soft white or matte black — beautifully answers that question this month at Manhattan’s Emma Scully Gallery with her show of furniture and functional objects, A Year Without a Kiln.
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This Entryway at the Kips Bay Show House Takes Wall-to-Wall Carpeting to New Heights

As a participant in this year’s Kips Bay Decorator Show House, New York–based designer Bennett Leifer wanted to do something that would push design boundaries, he says: “not necessarily in a way that would be loud or provocative but that would be intellectually exciting.” Soon after learning he’d be part of this year’s iteration, Leifer happened to have dinner with the team from Edward Fields Carpet Maker (who you'll remember we worked with on our Norway x New York exhibition!). He’s worked closely with the custom luxury rug brand for years and has long admired “their heritage and their vision” – the company’s storied work has been featured in many iconic settings, including Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House in Palm Springs and the famous sunken living room of the Miller House by architect Eero Saarinen and interior designer Alexander Girard. That conversation provided the creative spark for Reframed Foyer, Leifer’s contribution to the Show House.
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F Taylor Colantonio’s Solo Show in Venice Makes You Feel Like You’re in an Underwater Grotto

To enter F Taylor Colantonio’s show Frutti di Mare (literally, fruit of the sea) is to be submerged in an otherworldly environment, a kind of aquatic grotto where things are fluid and surreal. Glowing forms that have a rippling effect, as if underwater; vessels that feel like remnants of an ancient civilization or like they landed here long ago from outer space. It’s Colantonio’s solo debut with the roving gallery Object & Thing, in partnership with D.H. Office.
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An Interview With Formafantasma, Whose Queer-Coded, Modernism-Inspired Solo Show Was the Best Thing We Saw at This Year’s Milan Fair

In the whirlwind of this year’s Salone, Formafantasma’s perfect solo show, La Casa Dentro — presented on the quiet second floor of the Fondazione ICA Milano — made us stop and catch our breath. La Casa Dentro (meaning The Home Within) is as much a collection of furniture and lighting as it is a meditation on design, memory, the familiar, and the uncanny. It conjures a dream state where the clinical feel of a medical office gives way to the comforts of an old family home (if your grandparents were the kind with an eye for stylish detail). Bent tubular metal forms are combined with embroideries and embellishments painted on wood, floral patterns, and silky decorative fabric. It's work that takes certain signifiers of the past and reanimates them in a new moment. Attempting to “queer the codes of Modernist design,” as the designers put it, the collection is as conceptually charged as it is materially stunning, and its theoretical considerations can’t be unraveled from personal and emotional ones.
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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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