Week of May 23, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a recap of this year's excellent but small Frieze New York, a designer whose cherry-wood pieces recall Matisse as a woodworker, and an exhibition that captures Alvar Aalto's earliest life and works.
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In a New Exhibition, a Designer in Conversation With His Artist Mother

The intimacy and complexity of family bonds are a boundless source of artistic inspiration, but New York–based designer Minjae Kim and his mother, the South Korean artist MyoungAe Lee, have taken it a step further with their a collaborative show now up at Matter Projects. When their respective work in placed conversation, the result is both intriguing and poignant.
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In Wang & Söderstrom’s First Shop Interior, Color Reigns and 3D-Printed Blobs Act as “Jewelry” For the Space

A central player in the explosive rise of Denmark’s boutique fashion scene, Stine Goya's clothes have become more directional in recent seasons, as has its visual identity. Creative duo Wang & Söderström were recently brought on to help translate that new energy into the label’s physical spaces, with two stores whose color-blocked interiors and 3D printed accents echo the brand's palette — and add a dose of serious fun.
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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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25 Projects We Loved at This Weekend’s 2022 Collectible Design Fair in Brussels

This past weekend marked the fifth edition of the Brussels design fair Collectible, and while our schedules failed to align with an IRL visit, we did our best to round up our favorite participants from afar, everything from old favorites like Maarten de Ceulaer's stained glass lamp series — which got a few new additions this month — to exciting new discoveries like Sarah Becchio and Paolo Borghino of Errante Architetture, who debuted a series of hardware-free MDF coffee tables. Browse our finds after the jump!
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Week of May 16, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: perforated rugs, a truly absurdist exhibition featuring these excellent glass-blown googly eyes, and an apartment that looks like the set of a sci-fi soap opera.
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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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Enter to Win a Night at Ace Hotel Brooklyn, Whose Rooms Were Inspired by Corbu’s Cabanon

In the 9 or so months since it opened, Ace Hotel Brooklyn has emerged as one of the borough's most enjoyable hubs. Inside a 13-story concrete-and-glass building custom-designed by Roman and Williams, it boasts a restaurant with a striking mosaic installation, a consistently-packed Brutalist bar, a lobby that plays host to exhibitions like this month's furniture showcase from Black Folks in Design, and a light-filled interior courtyard that offers gentle respite from the bustle outside its doors. The property is a social lynchpin for downtown Brooklyn, even amongst locals like us. We're offering you the chance to experience it for yourself, with a giveaway for one free night at Ace Hotel Brooklyn. Click through to enter!
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In Common With ceramic lights

In Common With and Danny Kaplan Expand Their Earthy Ceramic Lighting Range

When In Common With debuted in 2018, the Brooklyn studio made their mark (no pun intended) by pairing sleek, machined lamp bases with ceramic shades that had been obviously, laboriously made by hand — pinch marks, bumps, and all. The studio soon found ways to make the shades faster and more efficient — and expanded their offerings to include glass and metal — but in a continued collaboration with ceramicist and fellow Brooklynite, Danny Kaplan, they have been able to recapture that earlier, earthier quality.
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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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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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Sight Unseen Furniture Collection Bestcase

Cool Chromes and Candy-Colored Resin: Introducing the First Sight Unseen Furniture Collection, Created in Collaboration With Bestcase

As an editorial platform and sometimes-IRL design show, Sight Unseen has been showcasing furniture and accessories by talented designers for almost thirteen years. But it wasn't until nearly a decade in, when our old friend Charles Constantine went to co-found a metal manufacturing facility called Bestcase, that we began to wonder — wait, shouldn't we also be making furniture ourselves? After figuring out the possibilities and constraints of designing with metal, creating a '70s-inspired mood board with references to how we wanted the collection to feel — at once icy and warm, vintage-inspired, yet of the moment — and reaching out to a handful of designers who could absolutely nail this look, the resulting six-piece collection launches today, both on Sight Unseen's 1stDibs storefront and through Bestcase’s distributor network.
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