The 40+ Biggest Breakout Talents at Dutch Design Week 2017

When we first covered Dutch Design Week back in 2012, arts funding in the Netherlands had been slashed and the Design Academy Eindhoven had gone through a major directorial shake-up, making us worry that the halcyon days of Dutch design might be nearing an end. Five years later, though, we're happy to report that no such thing has occurred. Have a look at this year's Dutch Design Week mega-roundup to see what we mean.
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A Swedish Design Collective Turning Factory Waste Into Covetable Objects

Who knew a collection of waste — from industries spanning across southern Sweden — could come together in such a beautiful way? Using glass, sheet metal, acrylic, stone, and brick, a design collective called Malmö Upcycling Service has created a collection of household goods and decorative objects, from a circular standing mirror to a series of vases with interchangeable glass parts.
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Hem, Our Go-To Destination for Accessible, Scandinavian-Inspired Design, Just Popped Up in NYC

America has a furniture problem: If you are young, aesthetically minded, and upwardly mobile but not quite rich, where do you buy your furniture? When you're looking for something with more staying power than Urban Outfitters, a greater cool factor than CB2, and less ubiquitous than West Elm, where do you turn? For the last few years, whenever we've been asked that question (which is, to be honest, all the damn time), we've answered: Have you heard of Hem?
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Week of October 23, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Highlights from Design Week Mexico (including these graceful screens by Swiss designer Julie Richoz), a new direction for Pritzker Prize winner Tadao Ando, and a series of modular, millennial-friendly furniture made from metal, MDF, and — major wild card here — resin-infused buckwheat groats.
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This Dutch Designer is Giving Concrete a Serious Makeover

At this point, we've seen pretty much every formerly humdrum thing in the universe get a design-forward makeover, from watering cans to luggage. But Dutch designer Iwan Pol wasn't happy to simply renovate a product category — he wanted to recast an entire architectural material. "Concrete can take any shape or form, so why not aim for a softer look and feel?" he says.
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Dutch Design Week 2017 - Hardcore Exhibition

At Dutch Design Week, 17 Designers Turning Everyday Materials into Sculptural Furniture

It’s Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, and we'll be publishing a round-up of our favorites first thing next week. But for the second year in a row, one of the best exhibitions on view came from the young trend-forecasting and design firm Core Studio, who last year curated the colorful exhibition Popcore. This year, the theme was HARDCORE, and the curators asked participating designers to create works exploring "a counter-digital movement."
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Amazing 80s Interiors, and the Furniture That Was Made for Them, Now On View at Volume

Anyone paying attention probably gets that for us, the Memphis train left the station awhile ago — we were heralding the return of Sottsass in 2007, and our interests have long since shifted. But that doesn't mean we're opposed to every attempt to bring back the '80s, not in the least. Case in point: We highly recommend seeing the current show on view at Volume Gallery in Chicago, which celebrates the '80s interiors of the Chicago architecture firm Krueck + Sexton with the launch of limited-edition reissues of three of their most iconic chair designs from that time.
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In a New Exhibition, Six Ceramicists Try Their Hand At Furniture

For Lawson-Fenning in Los Angeles, Bari Ziperstein, Michele Quan, Jonathan Cross, Heather Rosenman, Victoria Morris, and Beth Katz (the artist behind Mt. Washington Pottery) have each created a series of ceramic tables, including stacked, saturated totems by BZippy, Brutalist slabs by Jonathan Cross, and Eastern iconography by MQuan. In other words, each piece is a recognizable extension of the artist's current body of work, but unique in its point of view.
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Week of October 16, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: A suburban city hall gets custom furniture (just outside Paris, naturellement), The Primary Essentials opens in Manhattan, and we get a peek inside an upstate New York farmhouse with decidedly downtown design credentials.
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Inside Berlin’s Most Instagrammable Installation

Like some kind of latter-day Helio Oiticica, the French artist Jean-Pascal Flavien has constructed a life-sized house, surrounded by sand, within the exhibition space at Esther Schipper gallery in Berlin. But while Oiticica's work was dependent upon interaction, it's unclear how immersive Flavien's installation is really supposed to be.
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16 Statement Sofas to Consider Blowing Your Budget On

When it comes to decorating, most people tend to follow the same, tried-and-true, low-risk method: Buy a nice but ultimately unremarkable sofa and bring personality into the room via colorful or patterned throw pillows, statement-y rugs, a killer gallery wall, or dramatic lighting. But today, we're wondering if it might be worth it to consider throwing away that number one rule of decorating and making the sofa the focal point of your whole room.
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