Week of December 11, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Two outstanding installations in LA — a gingerbread replica of Flamingo Estate in collaboration with Mytheresa, and a public viewing of the famed 1987 amusement park Luna Luna with installations by the likes of Keith Haring and Salvador Dalí — plus the High Tech incense burner of our dreams.
More

Frederik Fialin on His New Tubular Metal Collection: “We All Like to be Comfortable, But Other Things Are Often More Important to Me”

Danish designer Frederik Fialin understands the idea that you have to know the rules before you can break them. He’s certain something is working not only when it’s functional and beautiful, but when it makes him laugh. It’s a way of taking the work seriously, without taking yourself too seriously, and it may have something to do with how Fialin got started, with a classic cabinetry apprenticeship. “I didn’t particularly enjoy it at the time, but now I see why everything has to be done in a certain way. I consider this, now, to be possibly the greatest foundation of my professional life that I could ever have asked for — especially because I can use, remix, and warp this never-ending chase for perfection that dominates the environment. There’s reason in the madness.”
More

Week of November 13, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an array of chic, ready-to-install mantels, an exhibition inspired by a classic work of American literature, and a sock utopia opens in Brooklyn.
More

Sarah Ellison Just Made Some of Her Most Iconic Designs Outdoor-Ready (It’s Summer in Australia, At Least)

Australian designer Sarah Ellison has a way of blending contrasting qualities into a beautifully integrated whole: refined yet comfy, chunky yet shapely, lowkey yet high polish, distinctive yet versatile. It’s a totally engaging vibe, one that seems made for lounging on a patio by a pool. It only makes sense that the studio would bring it outside, sustaining the warm, earthy neutrals they’re known for while translating some of their signature indoor pieces into weather-ready versions.
More

A New Exhibition of Black Designers Explores the Role Aesthetics Play in Social, Economic, and Racial Justice Efforts

In 2017, Little Wing Lee of Brooklyn’s Studio & Projects founded Black Folks in Design, an international network for Black design across disciplines: interiors, architecture, fashion, graphic design, and more. BFiD was ostensibly founded in order to foster community but Lee's aims also go way beyond that, based on the idea that design and aesthetics aren’t simply a luxury but part of everyday life — that our environments shape us — and therefore play a role in social, economic, and racial justice efforts. Last year, Lee curated Spotlight I, an inaugural showcase of Black designers at the Ace Hotel in Brooklyn. Now the collective’s Spotlight II is up at the Verso gallery in Tribeca, with pieces that reflect and incorporate traditions – cultural, familial, stylistic – while also looking forward.
More

EJR Barnes On Cast Glass, Instagram, “Freaky Stuff,” and His Excellent New Show at Emma Scully Gallery

Elliot Barnes’s work is full of historical references and subtle echoes that are at once familiar but hard to pin down. It’s not so much an expression of nostalgia as it is a longing for a time and place that never actually existed. In his work, Barnes messes with temporality, giving shape to things that feel anachronistic or out of time — and that are both sophisticated and a little mischievous. In his first solo show, A Room on East 79th Street at the Emma Scully Gallery in New York, the self-taught designer has created a dreamscape in the form of a living room.
More

Week of October 9, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Two new design-led bakeries — aka Modernist paeans to carbs — an expansive ceramic furniture exhibition by Cody Hoyt, and a new, modular furniture collection inspired by the book Soviet Bus Stops of Georgia.
More

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.
More

Each Rug in the Latest Collection from Cc-Tapis Looks Like a Portal to Somewhere Else

Made of hand-knotted Himalayan wool at the cc-tapis atelier in Nepal, the Memento collection by Yabu Pushelberg features a trio of undyed, tone-on-tone variations in off-kilter geometries. There are arches that could be doorways; squares, trapezoids, and circles that could be windows; portals to somewhere else. Or not. These designs are not so much figurative as suggestive. Like a fleeting memory that takes you out of the present but can’t exactly put you in the past.
More

15 Projects We Loved From September’s Design Fairs in London and Paris

It could be the time of year that gives the London Design Festival and Maison & Objet in Paris a kind of in-between feel. Summer still lingers in places, and a moody, autumnal atmosphere takes over in others — although this could also be attributed to the essential nature of each city's design scene as well. As usual, there was plenty to see, though we also wondered if there was some amount of holding out for what may end up the true statement moment of the fall design calendar: October's inaugural edition of Design Miami/Paris. What struck us this year (from afar, sigh) wasn’t so much a few noticeable trends as an emphasis on collaboration — aesthetics may be fragmented, but our connection to each other is stronger than ever.
More

Need a Cheat Sheet to the Current Norwegian Design Scene? Take Notes

For this year’s Unika Auction, the third iteration of the contemporary Norwegian design showcase, FOLD Oslo invited 30 designers, from up-and-comers to established Norwegian names, to create new pieces. (Unika means unique in Norwegian). "Choosing designers to be part of this Unika exhibition was challenging, but also very exciting, as the Norwegian design scene has exploded with talented designers, craftspeople, and artists in recent years,” says FOLD member Anna Maria Øfstedal Eng. There are a wealth of materials here, which both represent and spring from longstanding Norwegian craft traditions in textiles, woodworking, glass, and aluminum. What connects it all for Øfstedal Eng, aside from geographic provenance, is a shared approach: a combination of preservation and innovation that leads to enduring work.
More