Nathalie du Pasquier is So Much More Than the Poster Girl for Memphis Design

When a return to Memphis became the defining design trend back in 2014, a few of the movement's original members flew to the forefront of discourse once again, among them Peter Shire, Ettore Sottsass, and Nathalie du Pasquier, whose exuberant patterning became a kind of shorthand for cool around that time. (If you came home from Milan in 2014 without an NDP Wrong for Hay tote bag, were you even there?) But while Du Pasquier became pigeon-holed for that kind of blocky, frazzled look (remember when she designed for American Apparel?!), she's always been so much more than that, and the full fruits of her output as an artist are on view this month at an exhibition called "Speed Limit" at Anton Kern Gallery in New York.
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These Fashion Designers Made Their Name Reinventing the Uniform. Now They’ve Turned Their Eye to Furniture

One of the more poignant collections to come out of lockdown was on view earlier this month at Nilufar Depot in Milan. Called "Scarpette and Carolino," the exhibition — conceived by the Danish-Italian duo OLDER, aka Letizia Caramia and Morten Thuesen — featured two pieces of design dreamed up during a period of pandemic isolation spent at Caramia’s father’s studio in Pietrasanta, on the seaside edge of Tuscany. “As lockdown isolation is a lonely affair, our idea was to create a small series of friends to bring us company and warmth," say the founders.
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Week of March 21, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a proliferation of interesting work out of Melbourne Design Week, a new co-working space is Brussels whose furniture looks like the above, and a quirky, corky mirror.
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“Why Design Matters” is Only the Tip of the Iceberg in This Expansive Book of Interviews by Debbie Millman

If you've ever thought about starting a podcast — a design podcast, sure, but really one on any topic at all — you probably have Debbie Millman to thank for that. Millman, who started the phenomenally popular Design Matters way back in 2005, was one of the first people working in the medium — and, as I was reminded when flipping through her new book Why Design Matters, which brings together more than 50 conversations from the show's past, remains one of the best. We're excerpting one of our favorite interviews from the book, with the filmmaker, graphic designer and artist Mike Mills, here today. 
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Week of March 14, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Gossamer x Studio Proba make psychedelic rugs to sink into, Irish favorites Orior scale down with their limited-edition line of small homewares, and a Flamin’ Hot Cheetos–inspired furniture collection, made from waste polystyrene, is on show in Australia.  
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Win a $2,000 Huggy Chair from Sarah Ellison, Whose Furniture Is Now Available in the US

When the Australian designer Sarah Ellison released her Huggy chair two years ago, it blew up. There was only one problem: If you weren't a big-name designer with a bottomless budget, it just wasn't that easy to get one. But that all changed this winter, when Ellison partnered with Design Within Reach to make her work readily available in the US; together, they're offering one lucky Sight Unseen reader the chance to win a $2,295 Huggy chair in a choice of upholsteries. Click through to enter!
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Paolo Pallucco 1980s archive furniture

A Retrospective of 1980s Furniture Visionary Paolo Pallucco Opens in Paris

If you’ve been following the trend cycle of archive and vintage furniture over the past few years, you'll have noticed by now that the 1980s are back in a big way. We’ve recently covered a few — like Czech Modernist Bořek Šípek and Italian artist-designer Pucci de Rossi — but it seems like every month there's a new figure that's resurfaced and reevaluated in the present day. The latest is designer and manufacturer Paolo Pallucco, whose brief stint at the helm of his eponymous brand produced some of the most radical furniture of the decade — and who is now the subject of a new exhibition in Paris at Ketabi Projects.
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Isern Serra Six N. Five interior

Barcelona’s Go-To Interior Designer for Turning Your Office Into an Oasis

This is the story that answers the question: What if you had to go back to the office, but your office looked just like a house? While that wouldn't solve most of the problems that bedevil workplace culture and WFH advocates, maybe it would help? The offices we're featuring today were both designed by the up-and-coming Barcelona-based interior designer Isern Serra — one for the creative studio Six N. Five, and the other the headquarters for ad agency Fuego Camina Conmigo.
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Daniel O'Toole Modern Times

Daniel O’Toole’s New Gradient Works Provoke a Distortion of the Senses

"Can an image feel as though it has a sound frequency embedded in it?" That is the question animating Australian artist Daniel O'Toole's latest exhibition at Modern Times, which closed this week in Melbourne. Called Cascade Rumble, and inspired by O'Toole's own experience with synesthesia, the exhibition features works that are intended to fully engulf the viewer and to "hum a frequency of sound that resonates in the mind."
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Week of February 28, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Virginia Sin releases the bathroom accessories of our dreams, Linde Freya Tangelder designs a $15,000 bathtub, and Hauvette & Madani complete a very modern renovation of a landmark 1926 apartment in Paris (pictured).
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Here Are a Few of Our Favorite Things From This Year’s Salón Cosa in CDMX

For its third edition, the burgeoning Salón COSA, Mexico’s biannual “gathering of contemporary objects,” returned to its roots in CDMX after a stint in Guadalajara last fall. On a relatively intimate scale — 22 participating artists and designers showed recent and unpublished works — Salón COSA occupied the dance floor of an old cantina nestled among the cafés, nightclubs, and shops of Calle de Motolinia, one of the oldest streets in the city. With the walls and furniture of the bar-turned-exhibition-space cloaked in a fresh coat of cerulean blue, this year’s curation reflected Salón COSA’s nocturnal setting.
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