Gray Matters Brooklyn Showroom by Bower

At Gray Matters’s New Bower-Designed Showroom, the Shop Matches the Shoes

Since founding her cult-favorite shoe line Gray Matters in 2015, designer Silvia Avanzi has made sculptural heels her signature — suede-covered cubes, Plexiglas diamonds, hand-painted stones, and lacquered eggs have all offered support for her sandals, pumps, boots, and slingbacks. So it makes sense that when Avanzi went looking for a studio to design her new Brooklyn showroom, she chose Bower, a firm that knows a thing or two about unexpected sculptural details.
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Camille Walala’s First Hotel Offers a Mellower, More Beachy Version of Memphis

Memphis — the riotously colorful design movement that experienced peak resurgence a few years back — is kind of like the mob: Just when you think you're out, it keeps pulling you back in. In this case, the oft-debated aesthetic popped up earlier this month at a new hotel on the east coast of Mauritius, designed by the London-based color and black-and-white stripes evangelist Camille Walala.
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Is This New, Gleaming Bookstore in Hangzhou the Future of Books?

We marvel at pretty much every bookstore brave enough to open in today's retail landscape, but that goes double for the new Harbook shop in Hangzhou, designed by the Shanghai studio of Alberto Caiola. A sprawling 6,500 square-foot playground filled with monumental custom furnishings and rows of thick steel archways, it's almost touching in how it seems to channel the glory days of the early 2000s, when ambitious "concept stores" still flourished and Amazon hadn't yet ruined books for everyone else.
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Luca Guadagnino’s First Interior Design Project is an Ochre Mansion on Lake Como (Because Of Course It Is)

Pretty much every design person we know has been obsessed with the Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino since I Am Love, the Tilda Swinton movie shot primarily on location at the Villa Necchi, a Piero Portaluppi–designed home in the middle of Milan that's something of a design-world touchstone. So it's no surprise that there was a general freakout this weekend when T Magazine published Guadagnino's inaugural experiment in interior design.
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Visit the 200-Year-Old Portuguese Vineyard That Pierre Yovanovich Turned Into a Chic New Hotel

When the French winemaker Philippe Austruy purchased the Quinta da Corte vineyard in 2012, the 200-year-old property was in a state of utter neglect and disrepair. But by this past July, when I drove two hours from Porto to reach its perch in the hills of Portugal's Douro Valley, it had been completely transformed — turned into a luxe country inn by the buzzy French architect Pierre Yovanovich.
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Inside Villa Stenersen, Oslo’s Under-the-Radar Gem of Modernist Architecture

We first came across Villa Stenersen on a trip to Norway in 2016 and immediately fell in love with the corrugated wall, the glass bricks, the bright blue facade, the free-standing columnal fireplace, and, of course, the colors. Our visit there was so magical that when we heard one of our favorite photographers, Tekla Severin, was visiting Oslo, we implored her to photograph the house for us in all its waiting-to-be-refurbished glory.
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Five Rooms, Five Ways: From ’80s Brushstrokes to Meditative Minimalism

Hundreds of design lovers will find themselves in Provence this week on the occasion of the Villa Noailles Design Parade. But one of the coolest things can actually be found a scenic, 90-minute drive from Hyères in the small town of Grasse. There, in a 300-year-old farmhouse owned by design patron Silvia Fiorucci-Roman, is the 5Rooms project at Moulin Des Ribes, for which five design studios were each asked to create a bedroom with ensuite bathroom, with every detail inspired by the colors, crafts, and traditions of the surrounding region.
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