It’s Not Often That a Designer Strikes Gold With Their First Big Product, But Studio Mignone Nailed It With Their Beloved Tavolo Morbido

When Studio Mignone’s Tavolo Morbido coffee table debuted in 2019, it became something of an instant, and soon much copied, classic. Tavolo Morbido is Italian for soft table, which gets at what Isabella Wood, one half of the Australian design duo, calls the “illusionistic softness” of the piece. But the name is also a little ironic: The original version was made of solid concrete pillars. It’s a relatively simple design, but a generative one that’s led to many iterations. It perfectly embodies a kind of maximal minimalism — clean, straightforward forms that contrast with the exuberance of their materials, colors, and surfaces — which is also what makes it work in so many different style spaces.
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Week of January 29, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: paintings made by a giant squeegee, a perfectly preserved Art Deco hunting lodge outside of Paris, and a Barcelona apartment inspired by the 1992 Olympics.
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The 11 Best Things We Saw at This Year’s 2024 Fog Design+Art Fair in San Francisco

In January I finally attended the Fog Design+Art show for the first time. The design scene in SF seems to be picking up a bit these days, and we've been getting to know its talents — from interior designers like Studio Ahead and Michael Hilal to local furniture and object makers like Kate Greenberg, Caleb Ferris, and Ido Yoshimoto — so I figured it would be a good chance to both network with the locals and see what the out-of-towners were bringing to the fair itself. Here's everything I liked at the show(s).
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How Do You Make a Home Inside a Monument? Ask the Gachots, Who Just Spent Three Years Living in a Paul Rudolph Masterpiece

In 1976, the architect Paul Rudolph bought the 19th-century townhouse at 23 Beekman Place where he’d had an apartment since the early '60s. While keeping the existing building as residences, he constructed his now-landmarked, multi-level penthouse on top of it: a steel and cement work of art that is rigorous and spare in its lines yet dizzying in its scope and form. Inside, beams clad in reflective material support a light-filled space with few walls, delineated by platforms and catwalks and cantilevered, landscaped terraces with spectacular views out over FDR Drive and the East River. For Rudolph, it was a kind of creative laboratory — and it’s also not hard to imagine it as a site for glamorous, louche, late disco-era parties. But how about a family home? Enter designers John and Christine Gachot, of New York’s Gachot, known for the warm modernism they bring to their high-end interiors.
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The Malin Opens a Moody, Textured, Pine-Accented Location in Nashville

Having been a member of the design-forward co-working space The Malin for nearly a year now, we could tell you a lot about their New York locations: how there's often a snack plate on offer (banana bread in the mornings, cookies in the afternoon); how there's always a row of lights running above the shared desks that were designed by two of Sight Unseen's longest-running collaborators; or which location has the best view (Williamsburg FTW). But Nashville, where the Malin recently opened its fourth and largest location — and first outside of New York — is something of an unknown quantity to us, having never before visited. We can't tell you which restaurants nearby have the best take-out, or what the artsy neighborhood it's in — called Wedgewood-Houston, or WeHo for short, because of course it is — is like. But part of what we love about The Malin is how they keep so many aesthetic elements the same, while switching things up just enough to make each outpost feel simultaneously familiar and fun.
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Technology and Craft Meet in Tino Seubert’s New Aluminum and Glass Works

London-based designer Tino Seubert has a way of juxtaposing the industrial and the natural to create a coherent whole — even, or perhaps especially, as these elements clash and contrast. He’s been working in this vein, mixing traditional craftwork with technological sleekness and using unexpected combinations of materials and forms, since 2014, when we first spotted him at London's Royal College of Art, lacquering galvanized steel to brilliant effect. Different iterations have followed, as have pieces like a side table of bent rattan and brushed aluminum and his Corrugation lights, which combine ash veneer and aluminum tubes into rippling yet static sine curves. With Ferric Glass and Cosmos, his two new collections exhibited at in BAM Practice in Berlin this past November, Seubert has pushed these juxtapositions even further.
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An Exhibition of 100 Hooks Has Us Totally Rethinking Our Wall-Mounting Game

The humble coat hook might be the most simple and effective design humans ever invented. It solves the problem so well that it’s often taken for granted (as most genius inventions are) and little attention is paid to its ingenuity, because it just works. Well, humble no more — the hook is celebrated in all its weird and wonderful variations in an exhibition called 100 Hooks presented by the estate of American sculptor JB Blunk. A hundred versions — by names like Jasper Morrison and Ilse Crawford as well as young artists and designers from across the US, UK, Europe, Mexico, and Japan — are all designed, at least nominally, for hanging clothing, towels, bags, hats, art, or whatever else needs storing or displaying. 
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Steal This Tip: Rich Velvet Curtains to Give Your Interior a Boudoir-Like Vibe

When it comes to curtains, the bigger the statement, the better. (See pretty much every photo shoot Sight Unseen has ever done.) Bold and heavy textiles might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but they can undeniably make a space more dramatic, cozy, and welcoming. And at Locke am Platz, a newly opened aparthotel in Zurich, they’re everywhere: ruby red drapes framing the headboards; Modernist-patterned fabric wrapping the guest-room living area walls; warm terracotta textiles encircling the lobby; and honey yellow portières dividing stations in the restaurant. The effect, created by London-based Sella Concept, is one of instant warm fuzziness in every space, encouraging guests who’ve booked two nights — or two weeks — to feel right at home.
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Week of January 15, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a Paris apartment with a stellar stainless-steel kitchen (again!), a hotel with rooms by 14 different designers, aluminum furniture cast from waste polystyrene, and a few early highlights from Maison & Objet and IMM Cologne.
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This Holiday Rental in London is a Treasure Trove of 1970s and ’80s Furniture

Have you ever found the perfect piece of furniture, only to realize that you can’t fit it into your apartment because the pass-throughs are too narrow? For Hollie Bowden, access was particularly problematic during her renovation of a one-bedroom holiday rental apartment in London, which is located on the fifth and sixth floors of a Victorian building in Covent Garden and reached via a narrow and winding staircase. Which items could she bring up safely, without having to first hack them to bits? Luckily, she found a modular leather sofa bed by De Sede, one of many vintage finds from the '70s and '80s that give the sunny yellow space a retro-futurist feel, in a vibe we're calling High-Tech Country Kitchen.
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Born in Philly and Based in London, Andrew Pierce Scott Has a Knack for Turning Discards Into Drama

Metamorphosis is at the heart of what Andrew Pierce Scott does. The London-based American designer has a talent for taking leftovers and discards and turning them into sculptural metal furniture and objects or an evocative textile still-life. In Scott’s hands, recycled sheet steel becomes a lamp with a darkened yet almost iridescent finish; fabric scraps become a plate of oysters and glasses of wine that make you immediately wish for the pleasures of good company and a good meal.
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Week of January 8, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Tim Teven's excellent iridescent furniture, Meaghan Roddy's inspiring textile exhibition at Volume Gallery in Chicago, and did anyone else not know about Greta Garbo's ties to Swedish design?! 
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