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06.16.22

Fair Report

The Best of the 2022 Salone Del Mobile — Part II

For our second Salone del Mobile round-up of 2022, we're taking you on a trip around town. For anyone who has never been to the Milan furniture fair, it's a bit impossible to grasp just how many things there are to see, and reader, we won't be showing you all of it. But please enjoy a sampling of our favorites.
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05.25.22

Fair Report

New York Design Week, We Missed You — Here Are 25 Favorites From the Festival That Was

Well, after two years of fallow Mays due to COVID delays (and a November iteration of NYCxDesign that barely registered), New York Design Week returned with a vengeance this month. Its de facto kick-off was the incredible MASA exhibition, curated by Su Wu, which opened in a former post office in Rockefeller Center and remains a high-water mark for the month. The festivities finally ended last week with a rager of a party at Matter Projects for a dual exhibition with furniture designer Minjae Kim and his mother, the painter Myoungae Lee, which we'll cover more in-depth on the site this week. Here are our favorite projects from the past few weeks.
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05.20.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

Haos’s Steel and Plywood Collection is a Coolly Elevated Take on Minimalism

Haos's Sophie Gelinet and Cedric Gepner recently relocated from Paris to Lisbon, where they've opened a larger studio and workshop where they can make work on-site. But rather than take their practice to the furthest experimental reaches just because they can, they've instead created a pared-down, rigorous framework for their fourth collection, taking cues from traditional Japanese architecture, 20th-century Modernism, and the Dogme 95 movement, which sought to distill filmmaking to its essence by rejecting special effects and gimmicks.
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05.15.22

Saturday Selects

Week of May 9, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: towering pavilions and whimsical creatures by Serban Ionescu, on view at R & Company, a bubbled glass moment, and why terrazzo will never die.
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05.13.22

Q+A

A New Lighting Brand, With Deep Roots in New Orleans and France, Putting a Modern Spin on Traditional Techniques

Swadoh — an anagram of shadow that founder Valerie Legras devised after reading the Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki’s “In Praise of Shadows” — works exclusively with small artisans who do intricate and often time-consuming hand work at their workshops in France. That, and the idea that each artist should be working in a wonderfully unique way with their chosen material, is the strict guiding principle behind Swadoh.
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04.16.22

Saturday Selects

Week of April 16, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a Vienna Secession–inspired editorial, a futuristic department store in Seoul, and a new Italian furniture featuring a who's who of international designers. 
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04.11.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Show Highlights the Appealingly Messy Side of Contemporary Ceramics

Closing in Barcelona this week is an exhibition that celebrates some of the bigger trends in contemporary ceramics these days — namely bright, drippy glazes; lumpy, organic forms; and raw, tactile, fissured surfaces. Presented by Side Gallery, “Exposed Material” is an overview of work by four artists who span several generations and hail from places ranging from America to Auckland, New Zealand.
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03.30.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

Nathalie du Pasquier is So Much More Than the Poster Girl for Memphis Design

When a return to Memphis became the defining design trend back in 2014, a few of the movement's original members flew to the forefront of discourse once again, among them Peter Shire, Ettore Sottsass, and Nathalie du Pasquier, whose exuberant patterning became a kind of shorthand for cool around that time. (If you came home from Milan in 2014 without an NDP Wrong for Hay tote bag, were you even there?) But while Du Pasquier became pigeon-holed for that kind of blocky, frazzled look (remember when she designed for American Apparel?!), she's always been so much more than that, and the full fruits of her output as an artist are on view this month at an exhibition called "Speed Limit" at Anton Kern Gallery in New York.
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03.28.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

These Fashion Designers Made Their Name Reinventing the Uniform. Now They’ve Turned Their Eye to Furniture

One of the more poignant collections to come out of lockdown was on view earlier this month at Nilufar Depot in Milan. Called "Scarpette and Carolino," the exhibition — conceived by the Danish-Italian duo OLDER, aka Letizia Caramia and Morten Thuesen — featured two pieces of design dreamed up during a period of pandemic isolation spent at Caramia’s father’s studio in Pietrasanta, on the seaside edge of Tuscany. “As lockdown isolation is a lonely affair, our idea was to create a small series of friends to bring us company and warmth," say the founders.
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03.21.22

Excerpt: Book

“Why Design Matters” is Only the Tip of the Iceberg in This Expansive Book of Interviews by Debbie Millman

If you've ever thought about starting a podcast — a design podcast, sure, but really one on any topic at all — you probably have Debbie Millman to thank for that. Millman, who started the phenomenally popular Design Matters way back in 2005, was one of the first people working in the medium — and, as I was reminded when flipping through her new book Why Design Matters, which brings together more than 50 conversations from the show's past, remains one of the best. We're excerpting one of our favorite interviews from the book, with the filmmaker, graphic designer and artist Mike Mills, here today. 
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Isern Serra Six N. Five interior
03.08.22

Interiors

Barcelona’s Go-To Interior Designer for Turning Your Office Into an Oasis

This is the story that answers the question: What if you had to go back to the office, but your office looked just like a house? While that wouldn't solve most of the problems that bedevil workplace culture and WFH advocates, maybe it would help? The offices we're featuring today were both designed by the up-and-coming Barcelona-based interior designer Isern Serra — one for the creative studio Six N. Five, and the other the headquarters for ad agency Fuego Camina Conmigo.
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