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06.12.21

Saturday Selects

Week of June 7, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: two truly excellent uses of glass blocks in interiors, a reissue of Tobia Scarpa's first-ever product design, a foot-shaped glass vase we're obsessing over, and a sinuous new table by Erik Olovsson, above.
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06.11.21

Sighted

Want to Travel the World Living in Airbnbs for a Year? Here’s Your Chance!

For many of us, our careers no longer require us to be chained to cities like New York and San Francisco. That means we can live out all kinds of unconventional fantasies, like buying a house in Maine, or going nomadic and changing locales with every Zoom meeting. It's in the spirit of the latter that Airbnb has launched an insanely good opportunity for those of us with the travel bug: Live Anywhere, a campaign in which 12 people will get to spend 10 months living for free in various Airbnbs, pretty much anywhere they choose. Keep reading to find out how to apply!
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06.10.21

Q+A

Dirk van der Kooij On Creating a Truly Circular Design Process — And On Using Your Old Nirvana CDs to Make Furniture

To ensure true circularity, Van der Kooij and his team of carpenters, welders, colorists, and finishers make use of proprietary technology including house-developed presses, robots, and extruders to transform waste materials such as discarded CDs, leather sofas, kitchen appliances, chocolate molds, and diseased wood into singular pieces made to stand the test of time and trends.
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06.09.21

Graphic Design

A ’70s-Inspired Sunscreen, and Other Graphic Design Picks for June

Each month The Brand Identity shares with our readers a selection of the most interesting studios, packaging designs, and branding and identity projects featured recently on their site. This month: An identity for a Black- and women-owned L.A. bookstore, a quirky custom typeface for a London underwear brand, and colorful, '70s-inspired packaging for a sunscreen brand (above).
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06.08.21

Sighted

The Designer Making Chairs From Discarded Puffy Coats

If you're like me — and by that I mean you spent a very cold, COVID-filled winter socializing outside — you might be ready to never see a padded puffy coat again. But I was thoroughly charmed by the work of South Korean designer Jinyeong Yeon, who uses padded goose down jackets, which remained unsold by fashion brands and manufacturers, as upholstery for his series of puffy chairs.
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06.07.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

Step Inside Object & Thing, An Intimate Art Exhibit at the 1955 Home Gerald Luss Built for Himself

The new Object & Thing exhibition, created in collaboration with Blum & Poe and Mendes Wood DM at the Gerald Luss House in Ossining, New York, opened on May 7. Since then, I've basically treated it like the design equivalent of the Mare of Easttown finale, trying to shield myself from spoilers on social media until I could visit in person last Friday. And yet, when I got there, I realized that this was a relatively pointless task: No image can replicate the feeling of stillness that comes from being inside a house that's as well-considered as the Luss House, and no Instagram tour can capture all the details that make this particular collaboration so satisfying.
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06.06.21

Saturday Selects

Week of May 31, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an Israeli furniture showroom with a Barragán-inspired look, a French housewares company with a stellar line-up, and — stay with us here — a very sexy new slidable door system.
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06.01.21

Up and Coming

A New Lighting Collection Inspired By the 1960s Modernism of Fire Island Pines

“Growing up, I always love stained glass,” recalls Peter B. Staples, discussing the early design experiments that would eventually lead to the launch of his lighting brand Blue Green Works. “I grew up in a Craftsman-style home, and one summer, my dad and I found the plans for the original stained glass lanterns. We taught ourselves how to fix and recreate them. I was probably 12 at the time and that experience really stayed with me.” But while the exercise was clearly formative, Staples would have to take a circuitous path through the New York design scene before returning to lighting. Having previously worked at The Future Perfect and Apparatus, Blue Green Works marks the first time Staples has designed a collection himself — which you would never guess just by looking at it.
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05.28.21

Fair Report

8 Must-See Projects From This Year’s Venice Design Biennial

After a year of visiting virtual exhibitions, it’s a joy to finally start venturing out IRL again. Where I am here in Italy, things really began to pick up speed last week with the opening of the Venice Biennale, which always brings with it a slew of contemporaneous projects — one of which being the Venice Design Biennial, now in its third year. Curated by Venice Art Factory’s Luca Berta and Francesca Giubilei, this year’s theme was "Design as a Self Portrait" and featured work that spoke, loosely, to the notion of self-representation in design.
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