Farrah Sit’s Work — Including Her Best-Selling Serpentine Sconce — Feels Both Effortlessly Current and Like a Prehistoric Artifact

Equilibrium and harmony: They’re difficult to achieve in life and maybe only slightly easier in design. But the search for balance, especially a desire for balance with nature, has lately been driving New York designer Farrah Sit — in a stylistic sense, but also in the way she produces the lighting and furniture for her eponymous line. Sit makes pieces that embody substantial and even existential concerns but wear their heaviness lightly; they’d look really great in your living room but they’re also meant to do more than that. “Part of what we’re trying to do as designers,” she says, “is create awareness between you and your environment.” Her aesthetic has largely hewn to neutral colors and natural materials and a dedication to elegant, mysterious forms ­— like Sit's best-selling Serpentine sconce, which debuted as part of Sight Unseen Offsite in 2020 and is now part of the Sight Unseen Collection. A ceramic wall sconce, Serpentine seems both effortlessly current and like an unearthed artifact — a relatively simple form that wordlessly conveys a whole world of feeling.
More

A New Design Hotel in Porto for Everyone Going to Portugal Right Now

Situated on the Douro river, The Rebello hotel in Porto features 103 rooms, a full-service restaurant, two bars, and a luxurious yet unfussy spa. But it’s the design, of course, that we’re most taken with. Outside, local architecture firm Metrourbe transformed a disused, 19th-century factory for kitchen utensils into four thoroughly modernized yet character-rich buildings, two of which were newly constructed to connect the original stone structures. Inside, Spanish designer and founder of Lisbon’s Quiet Studios Daniela Francheschini has woven together four central elements that reference Porto: water, wine, wood, and industry.
More

Objects & Ideas Are Making Sculptural, Relational Objects in the Canadian Wilderness

Since we last checked in with Di Tao and Bob Dodd of Toronto’s Objects & Ideas, their furniture designs have moved increasingly towards functional sculpture. “We’ve always thought that every piece we make needs to have a strong character and a strong expression — that has never changed. But the way we express our ideas has evolved,” says Tao. The latest pieces are visually alluring objects that have a use, of course: The enveloping Beaver Tail chair offers a seat, the curving Ascend floor lamp provides illumination. But these works also — and just as importantly — are relational, changing the space that they, and you, occupy.
More

Each Piece in Kim Mupangilai’s Debut Furniture Collection is a Meditation on Cross-Cultural Identity

Each of the pieces in Kim Mupangilaï’s debut furniture collection, on view in a solo exhibition called HUE/I/AM – HUE/AM/I through August 20 at Superhouse Vitrine, is comprised of numerous, sometimes unexpected aspects that all cohere. Without being heavy-handed, and as the name of the show implies, the collection embodies the ways we might understand and conceive of our own identities.
More

Week of July 17, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a Finnish candy–inspired handbag from Marimekko, a secret garden–inspired glassware collection by Sophie Lou Jacobsen, and a Paris apartment whose palette was inspired by a Tracey Emin painting.
More

Bowen Liu Was Up to the Challenge of Making Furniture in Cast Glass

Without being towering, there’s a heft and monumentality to the cast glass Helle collection by New York designer Bowen Liu. The presence of these pieces is anchoring, a solidity that’s offset by their translucency. Made by glass workers in Brooklyn, the collection includes bookends, a coffee table, floor lamp, mirror, and side table, which debuted at New York Design Week in May. While the mirror and lamp feature white oak details, the coffee and side tables and bookends are made entirely of glass. If you don’t see a lot of cast glass furniture at scale, it's because it demands expertise, skill, and time to produce. But Liu was up for the challenge.
More

Week of June 19, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: 12 designers reinterpret the classic piggy bank, Martino Gamper floods a New York gallery with 700 hooks and vases, and a South African designer interprets 1920s glamour through the lens of a classic TV period drama (above).
More

A Controversial Seinfeld Character Inspired One of Ethan Cook’s New Paintings

The depth of color in Ethan Cook’s work is entrancing: It draws you in and then proceeds to work its spell, stirring up meaning and feeling. Cook is known for his abstract “woven paintings” in which color isn’t applied at all but is part of the canvas itself. He uses a four-harness loom to hand weave fabric, which is then stitched together and stretched on bars. But recently, Cook has been exploring additional materials and techniques, evident in his latest exhibition Entities, at the Brussels location of Nino Mier.
More

Sarah Burns’s Collection for Marta is Dreamy But Humble — In Other Words, a Little Midwestern

As a designer, New York–based Sarah Burns has a remarkable fluidity when it comes to scale. She can go small and intricate, like the jewelry she creates as co-owner of the Chinatown shop Old Jewelry. But she’s also adept at working with larger, place-defining forms, as with the furniture collection in her first solo show, Prairie’s Edge, now running at Marta in LA through June 10.
More

Caroline Chao Uses Glass, Mirror, Lucite, and Light Itself to Create Optical Illusions in Her Furniture Debut

The nature of furniture is participatory — chairs invite us to sit, tables to gather round — but this holds especially true for the work of New York–based designer Caroline Chao. Her pieces engage our powers of interaction and perception — perhaps because in addition to the glass and Lucite she uses, light itself is a kind of material for her. We recently spoke with her about interiors vs furniture, how to re-contextualize ordinary materials, and her work towards changing the concept of a “good view.”
More