Week of May 22, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: The newest, coziest addition to Bower's Melt collection, new housewares from a beloved shoe brand, and the first furniture line from one of our favorite London interior designers.
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Ben Willett Joins the Sight Unseen Collection With Warm Wood Furniture That Channels 1970s and 80s Europe

You could say that moving into furniture design was something of a pandemic project for Ben Willett. At the start of the shutdown, he and his wife, chef and cookbook author Molly Baz, were on vacation in California and decided to stay there, eventually making a permanent move from a 700-square-foot New York City apartment to a house on the far east side of Los Angeles. With space came the need to fill it, along with a new West Coast perspective; the result is a collection still in the works but previewed in the images here, with pieces like the WS-Shorty credenza, a beauty in Douglas fir that debuted last night at our Sight Unseen Collection show in New York.
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Danny Kaplan Wants His New Furniture Collection, Made From Clay and Oak, to Appear Built By Nature

Danny Kaplan is a ceramicist, but he’s also a bit of a wizard, conjuring pieces that somehow manage to feel earthy and ancient — as if they’ve always existed — yet also exceedingly current and fresh. “A lot of my forms were born from looking at Etruscan ceramics and thinking about midcentury ones as well,” says the New York–based designer. “I love the idea of blending these things in an organic way where it feels like my pieces are almost built by nature,” their geometry and angles always slightly relaxed or imperfect. This especially applies to his latest collection, Brick, which is launching as part of our Sight Unseen Collection today, both online and in NYC through May 25 at Voltz Clarke Gallery on the Lower East Side.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.” 
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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