A Landscape of Architectural Ceramics at Patrick Parrish Gallery

Since we first spoke to him four years ago, ceramicist Ian McDonald's pieces have gotten more architectural, more functional, and more singular — his first solo show at Patrick Parrish Gallery in New York opened yesterday, and it's full of ceramic vessels made in parts and arranged within the parameters of powder-coated trays. We spoke with him about refining the old, experimenting with the new, and the satisfaction he’s found in exploring a form that resonates.
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Anthony Sperduti Hamptons home tour

Anthony Sperduti’s Art-Filled Hamptons Hideaway

Partners & Spade's Noho storefront closed in 2014, as the brand grew up, evolved, and moved into swankier digs on Lafayette Street. But I was happy to see its spirit alive and well when I walked into Anthony Sperduti's Sag Harbor cottage for the first in an editorial series we're doing with SONOS on the homes of some of New York's most interesting — and influential — creatives. Sperduti's weekend Hamptons house, tucked away in a quiet corner on the Sag Harbor Bay, is our favorite kind of home — the perfect mix of vintage and contemporary art and objects, each with a fascinating story behind its acquisition.
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A Wallpaper That Lets You Cover Your Walls With Kaleidoscopic Spraypaint

When the New York design showroom Colony presented new work by its roster of emerging talents during design week this past May, the furniture wasn't the only highlight — several of the space's carefully styled object vignettes were backdropped by rainbows of hyper-color ombre splatter-paint that we zeroed in on immediately, assuming they were an artful site-specific flourish applied by someone who knew their way around a spray can. Not so: They were actually panels of large-scale, non-repeating wallpaper by Brooklyn's Flat Vernacular, in a new pattern called The Heavens.
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Week of June 27, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a weirdly synchronous amount of folded metal, a colorful alternative to all those brass bottle openers, and a new way to experience an exhibition on the other side of the world.
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Emily Mullin still-life sculptures

Still-Life Sculptures That Blur the Line Between Photography and Art

In its guise as a flower shop, Saffron Brooklyn had already hosted its share of exhibitions over the years, everything from photography by Youngna Park to ceramics by Katy Krantz. So it makes sense that the sister-owned shop would eventually open a gallery of its own: Sunday Takeout, a tiny spot in Fort Greene next door to Saffron, opened in April of this year. On view now, their second-ever exhibition on view now — by Brooklyn-based Emily Mullin (who goes by the studio name Vachina) — in fact bridges both of those mediums, photography and ceramics. Her show spotlights a series of wall-based, still-life sculptures featuring glazed ceramic vessels on painted sheet metal.
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Ceramic Experiments by a Swiss Designer, On View in the South of France

First on our list of talents to scout at this year's Design Parade at Villa Noailles: Swiss designer Dimitri Bähler, who we featured earlier this year for the beautiful limestone bench he showed with Nov Gallery in Milan. Bähler showed at Noailles a few years ago when his current project was in its infancy: Now called Volumes, Patterns, Textures & Colors, the collection, on view in the gymnasium at Villa Noailles, features a series of ceramic volumes that have been imprinted with various three-dimensional patterns by way of a textured latex foil.
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19 Surprisingly Cool Bathroom Interiors

People often refer to the bathroom as the "most overlooked room in the house," but you certainly wouldn't know it judging from our most popular Pinterest board, Interiors: Much to our surprise, some of our most viral Pins ever have been super-designy WCs, from the iridescent-paneled Tom Dixon creation above to an all-pink confection featured recently in our story about Guillermo Santomà's Casa Horta. We pulled 19 of our favorite examples, after the jump.
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RCA emerging designers 2016

Six Talents to Watch from RCA’s 2016 Graduate Show

Martino Gamper, Tomás Alonso, Raw-Edges, Soft Baroque — these are just a few of the designers who came from abroad to study at London's Royal College of Art and ended up making a home in the UK. So it's no wonder a dampened mood filled the air at this year's graduate showcase, in the wake of the EU Referendum, with an underlying anxiety of how the political sphere might affect the influx — and future prospects — of applying students. Still, the show was as fruitful as ever at uncovering this year's next big thing designers — click through for six of our favorites!
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A Finnish Textile Designer Who Tossed Out All the Rules of Textile Design

Reeta Ek is one of those fine artists who studied design for practicality's sake, as a way to ensure she'd actually be able to get a job upon graduation. Yet when it came time for her to start her thesis, she gave herself one last taste of freedom, opting to throw out all of textile design's typical rules and restraints and just create whatever pleased her.
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Week of June 20, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: new love for an old Cini Boeri chair, one of the best oversized planters we've seen, and a great show of rare originals by Pierre Paulin on view in New York City, pictured above.
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When Is a Hairy Mirror Not Just a Hairy Mirror? Talking Materiality and Minimalism with Ben & Aja Blanc

Wood, bronze, marble, and minerals are some of the raw, elemental materials Providence-based design duo Ben and Aja Blanc use to craft their minimal objects for the home. The couple, who graduated from RISD and were the unexpected darlings of last year's Sight Unseen OFFSITE, have only been collaborating for a little more than a year and a half. But their fledgling partnership has already yielded more than a few instant classics.
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