This 1960s Guide to Ikebana is the Resource We Need Right Now

I found The Art of Arranging Flowers, a comprehensive 1960s guide to the Japanese art of ikebana, in Stockholm at the beginning of last year. Too heavy to carry home, I tracked it down from a seller in Indiana and promptly bought it, thinking it would be a nice visual touchstone and a cool thing to display on my coffee table. Little did I know that a year later, I'd be wondering if the book could serve as an actual resource for those currently stuck in their homes, flailing about for ways to express their creativity.
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Our 3 Favorite Projects from the Pandemic-Shuttered Melbourne Design Week 2020

Just as Melbourne Design Week was set to open its largest edition ever a week and a half ago, with over 200 events ready to launch around the city, it was largely shut down by the COVID-19 crisis, one of the increasing design-world casualties the virus has claimed this year. We spotted a few great projects in our inboxes and on Instagram, though, so we're highlighting our three favorites here.
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Week of March 16, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: We continue to bring you the best of what we can see from the safety of our homes, including a chic alternative to terrazzo, a small-space focused furniture collection from Beirut, and a Vincent Van Duysen–designed Portuguese vacation compound (above) that looks pretty appealing right about now.
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19 Designers Share How the Pandemic Is Affecting Their Business — And How They’re Staying Positive

With the creative community facing canceled fairs and projects, lost clients, production delays, and countless other difficulties, we decided to reach out to designers, art directors, gallerists, and other practitioners to find out what they're experiencing, professionally and personally, and what positive thoughts and advice they'd offer other creatives to ensure that everyone can continue to thrive once this crisis ends.
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Wright’s Upcoming Glass Auction is a Good Way to Stay Inspired From Your Couch

Among the other, more pressing, concerns this virus has wrought — Will production partners close? Will businesses go under? How the heck do you keep your kids out of the frame on a video conference call? — there is the more simple concern of how to stay inspired and engaged when there are no studio or site visits, no travel, no visiting with friends or other makers, and even a walk in nature has new rules. One of our most reliable sources of inspiration, though, has always been auction catalogs, and Wright has a doozy of one coming up in early April.
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Week of March 9, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: In the wake of worldwide lockdowns, we have exhibitions no one can visit, a restaurant that's had to delay its opening, and a showroom that's opened just as everyone is obligated to stay home. In other words, we'll be doing our best to continue to support these places online, and to bring you the best of what we can see from the safety of our homes.
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Furniture Inspired by an Architectural Jewel of the Mediterranean

This month, a special exhibition at Gagosian’s Davies Street gallery in London will see the space arranged to resemble Casa Malaparte’s main room, a stone-floored space with ocean vistas that features in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film, Contempt. Tommaso Rositani Suckert, Malaparte’s youngest descendant, has produced editions of three of the most iconic furniture pieces from Casa Malaparte for the exhibition: a table, a bench, and a console, all manufactured in Italy and comprised of solid walnut, pine, Carrara marble, and stone.
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The 21 Best Things We Saw at the 2020 Collectible Design Fair

Collectible has evolved to be one our favorite design fairs, what with its mix of established galleries and emerging designers, its long arm of experimentation, and its emphasis on *great* sceneography. Our favorite booth this year was obviously our own, a pink oasis framed by layered, tonal, sculptural mirrors by Ben & Aja Blanc. Called Chasing Beauty, Ben & Aja's collection explores the very nature of reflection; at the fair, mirrors on opposite walls reflecting each other added yet a another meta layer of interpretation.
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Design, and Its Attendant Signs of Domestic Life, Ruled at the Spring Art Fairs

Design, and its attendant signs of domestic life, played an even more outsized role than normal at last week's art shows in New York. At many galleries, it seemed that the booth furniture might drown out the works themselves, as with the ombré pieces on view at Peres Projects, or the erstwhile neon pink RO/LU benches at Parker Gallery. The best booth of the week by far, though, was by the London-based gallery Lyndsey Ingram, who handed over its design and curation to Georgie Hopton. Hopton in turn tapped her husband Gary Hume to share the joint booth, then kitted it out like a real home, complete with ruffled baseboards anchoring each color-blocked wall.
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