Meet the Belgian Designer Pushing the Limits of Stained Glass

The Stained Glass Lights collection from Belgian designer Maarten de Ceulaer — in which illuminated sheets or cylinders of handmade, mouth-blown glass essentially become three-dimensional abstract paintings — is a beautiful balance of control and chaos. While the colors are deliberately chosen and it’s possible to guide the fabrication process to some extent, there’s no way to wholly calibrate the outcome with this material; each piece is a bit of an experiment.
More

The Outdoor Collections Making Us Long For Warmer Weather

It’s almost time, in most of the northern hemisphere at least, to spend as much of the day outside as possible. (This is, we understand, both a statement of fact and a piece of wish fulfillment.) And while we have typically struggled to find effortlessly great outdoor furniture, the new outdoor dining and lounging collections from Danish design company Skagerak — which joined another Danish furniture mainstay, Fritz Hansen, to officially become Skagerak by Fritz Hansen last year — is a serious contender. Their new Pelagus series, named after the Greek word for sea, evokes a deeply relaxing, maritime atmosphere. But with their clean Scandinavian lines and unfussy simplicity, these tables, chairs, and sunbeds could fit in just about anywhere.
More

Meet the 1980s-Era Designer Whose Chair Went Semi-Viral During the Pandemic

The impulse to reassess design from the late '70s and '80s — and to place it in a current context — has clearly been in the air, most notably at last year’s Return to Downtown group show from Superhouse and Magen H Gallery and at the more recent Blurring the Timeline show, also at Superhouse. Standout pieces from both exhibitions included chairs by a designer whose name you might not be familiar with: Howard Meister, part of the core group of designer-artists at Art et Industrie, a now-legendary New York gallery that opened in 1977 and closed in the late '90s. Here, we caught up with Meister from his home in Western Massachusetts. In a roving, entertaining interview, he shared with us how he got his largely accidental start and went from being “a dope in a suit” to an artist, his belief in the importance of craft and his desire not to be “survived by crap."
More

Week of April 3, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Eny Lee Parker's collab with Lulu & Georgia, a new incubator program at Colony starring two RISD grads, and a new chair, arrived Stateside, that reminds us of Britpop and the house style of the UK’s “Big Brother.” 
More

This Intensely Color-Blocked London Victorian Will Make You Rethink the Possibilities of an Historic Home

When Studio Rhonda was asked to redesign a Victorian terrace house in North London for a friend, “the brief was to go crazy, a celebration of life moving forward,” notes Rhonda Drakeford, director of the studio. With a trusting client, Drakeford completely pulled it off while pushing the limits of what you can do with color. Thick stripes and blocks of saturated primary colors harmonize with earthier tones of terracotta and chalks — over 30 shades of paint, in all. Drakeford kept the period details of the residence but glossed over them, in some cases literally: ignoring moldings and architraves, the dictates of corners and where walls meet ceilings. Instead, she used color and geometric shapes to delineate the space.
More

Week of March 20, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: layered neutrals in a classic Haussmann apartment in Paris, an all-female design exhibition in New York, and the best Wright design auction we've seen in years.
More

The Moody Textures — and Glass Blocks — of This California Restaurant Set the Vibe

Los Angeles-based designer and 2023 American Design Hot List-er Jialun Xiong has a strong background in interiors, architecture, and furniture design, all of which is on full display at her latest project, the new City of Industry restaurant 19 Town. Xiong went for “lavish restraint” in this 4,200-square-foot space, divided into dining and lounge areas that are each subtly well-defined yet work together as a whole.
More

These Mysterious Glass Assemblages, On View at Marta, Were Inspired By Modernist Buildings and Corporate Architecture

Over the years, Jonah Takagi has worked with all kinds of materials, but it's glass that has preoccupied him throughout five summer residencies in the south of France, at the International Glass and Visual Arts Research Center, or CIRVA, in Marseilles. For Takagi, the experience yielded not only an unexpected love for Marseilles but also an ever-evolving series of mesmerizing angular vessels that reference, in their shape and in their texture, the Brutalist architecture of Kenzo Tange or Le Corbusier. His latest selection, a series of dusky, painterly assemblages, is on view through April 22 at Marta gallery in Los Angeles in a solo show called "Brut Vessels."
More

The New Hennepin Made x Victoria Sass Lighting Collection Wants You to Experience the Full Spectrum of Emotion

When two longstanding Minneapolis creative forces — Jackson Schwartz, head of the lighting company Hennepin Made and Victoria Sass, founder of interior design studio Prospect Refuge — team up to create a new lighting collection, you can expect the results to be thoughtful conversation starters. Not simply in the obvious way of getting your attention and eliciting a reaction, of course — though their Ontologia series does just that, with one-of-a-kind, handblown glass globes in various sculptural permutations composed of cords, metal, and mahogany spheres. But there’s a deeper form of conversation that Sass envisioned for her first foray into lighting design, and that Schwartz made a reality: a sort of ongoing dialogue, a two-way relationship between the people living with these lights and the lights themselves, which really do seem to have distinct personalities and moods.
More

London’s Daytrip Studio on Mining for References and Why “Pinterest is a Dangerous Place”

The London-based interiors firm Daytrip Studio can do soothing, pared back minimalism; they can do more maximalist drama. Still, whatever it is, it all derives from the same place: a fixation on materials and a layered attention to sensory details. They bring together elements of texture, light, depth, proportion, and color palette and the overall effect is one of deceptive simplicity: the whole looks effortless and inevitable, yet every part is thoroughly researched and considered.
More

Week of February 13, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the hits from Zona Maco, an exhibition that's meant to recall an imaginary speakeasy by the sea, and our favorite new candy-like glass goblets, by the Franco-Russian designer Alissa Volchkova.
More

The Istanbul-Based Animate Objects Makes Statement Objects, With a Surrealist Touch

We often talk about objects that have a life of their own, that shape the space around them and affect the atmosphere and tone of a room. The limited-edition décor and collectible furniture from Animate Objects – an apt name – not only seem to live and breathe, like characters in a story, but they emote, they perform. Zeynep Satik, an Istanbul-based designer, launched Animate Objects a few months ago, with the idea of creating “theatrical environments.” Think statement pieces, with a Surrealist touch, that are as functional as they are distinctive and playfully attention-getting.
More