The Melbourne Design Studio Creating “Soft-Spoken” Objects

How many new things should we actually be making? This is the question that plagues so many designers now as the issues facing our planet continue to worsen. “I find the design industry very troubling in a lot of ways, and I do feel the tension of creating new pieces in a world of excess, with the majority of furniture and lighting ending up in landfill. It’s really hard to reconcile sometimes,” says Kate Stokes, co-founder for Melbourne studio Coco Flip.
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This Interior Design Studio Firmly Rejects “Instagram Moments,” But Its Spaces Are Still Super Photogenic

Despite a wane in the curated "Instagram aesthetic," hotels and restaurants still often must rely on vignettes that guests will be inclined to photograph, post, and tag as part of their organic — and free — marketing strategies. But for New York-based Islyn Studio, the aim is to lift these guests out of their digitally oriented lives entirely, and — even if for a brief spell — focus on the sensorial value of the space they’re in. “We reject trends and ‘Instagram moments’ in favor of timelessness,” says founder Ashley Wilkins. “Our hope is that our audience is so immersed in the moment, they forget to look at their phones.” 
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So Long, Synthetics — This Sustainable Furniture Collection is Bound by Natural Tree Sap

Harnessing tree sap to bind wood is a technique that dates back more than 45,000 years — a fact that fascinated Catskills-based studio Earth to People enough to revive the age-old process, using nature's glue to assemble furniture pieces crafted from reclaimed cedar and aluminum. Founders Jordan and Brittany Weller are “driven by a love of ancient stewardship and the handmade,” and for the past two years, they've dedicated their practice to reviving historic furniture-making traditions — taking things back to basics to create more sustainable, but still beautiful, seating and lighting.
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This Designer’s Interior Design Secret? Make It a Little Bit Weird

During a career spanning almost two decades, Julia King has worked for several of the interior design world’s heavy hitters — from Kelly Wearstler to Michael Smith to Charles DeLisle — and absorbed a little of each of their dramatically disparate design styles along the way. Now, after setting up her own business, Studio Roene, this aesthetic mash-up is delightfully evident in her first wave completed projects, which borrow a little of their resident’s personalities, and blend King’s eye for color and compositions of vintage and contemporary furniture. “I always try to think: ‘How can we make it a little bit weird?’” King says. “It doesn't have to be in your face, but let's just add one thing in each room that gives it a bit of funkiness.”
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A Wonderfully Cohesive Debut From Tobias Berg, Sight Unseen’s Best in Show Winner at Greenhouse, the Stockholm Showcase for Emerging Design

At the Stockholm Furniture Fair earlier this winter, we found the thing we're always searching for at these things: a designer whose work is so sophisticated and ready for the market that they're bound to be in the conversation for years to come. (A booth full of bangers, if you will.) And so our Best in Show at Greenhouse award this year went to Tobias Berg, a Norwegian designer with one of the most assured debuts we've seen in years.
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Each Project By This International Interiors Studio is More Than “Nice” — It’s a Self-Contained Jewel

Whoever said “nice guys finish last” clearly never met designers Sacha Leong and Simone McEwan. Since they started their London-based studio, Nice Projects, five years ago, the duo has completed a string of hospitality interiors that each has a distinctly expressive identity rooted in context, a strong focus on natural materials and local craft, and a touch of magic that has helped the dining spots soar in popularity. 
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This Parisian Designer’s Furniture Looks Like it Was Left Out in the Rain

Following a storm, there’s a moment when surfaces are left covered with beautiful, randomly dispersed droplets that glisten until they evaporate. In his new series — appropriately titled After the Rain —Parisian designer Quentin Vuong has been able to recreate this effect with startling accuracy across a series of blackened oak furniture pieces, upon which he painstakingly hand-applies black epoxy resin. Currently on show at Galerie Gastou, the series is the latest example of Vuong’s delicate approach to imbuing his works with intriguing details that require significant time and focus to achieve. 
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This Self-Taught Designer’s Dark Wood Furniture is Imbued with Spirituality

It wasn’t until the pandemic that South American designer Rafael Triboli found his calling. Triboli grew up in Porto Alegre, in the south of Brazil, and studied communications at a university there. He later moved to São Paulo and worked as an art director and scenography designer. But during lockdown, which forced him back home for a period, he looked inward and delved into his own artistic practice: signing up for free courses; discovering influences in artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, and Eileen Gray; and, eventually, experimenting in a friend’s wood shop. With the time and opportunity to research, learn, and experiment in the world of art and design, the Brazilian creative quickly learned that his favorite woods to work with are the darker, harder varieties — such as mahogany, imbuia, and ipe — that are native to Brazil. He uses these to produce simple seats, benches, daybeds, dressers, trunks and tables that wouldn’t look out of place in a friary – albeit a very stylish one.
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A Teal and Tobacco Study, a Pistachio Bedroom — David Lucido’s Sophisticated Sense of Color Makes Him One of our Favorite Interior Designers to Watch

David Lucido has a gift for combining proportion, shape, and color in ways that are sophisticated and refined but not at all stuffy. His interiors, whether residential, commercial, or in hospitality, are never overdone but also never boring; they’re just right. It’s a challenge he makes look easy, but effortlessness almost always requires a lot of effort. Lucido, who currently splits his time between Palm Beach and New York City, pulls it off by balancing a strong work ethic and meticulous attention to detail with a lack of personal pretension. “I’m not a very serious person,” he says. “It’s not surgery, so why not be a little more expressive with things?"
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Jorge Kilzi Wants You to Make Friends With His Furniture

Many designers talk about imbuing their work with character, whether that means giving them anthropomorphic features, unusual shapes, or textures that reveal the hand of their maker. But Jorge Kilzi takes this concept a step further: His furniture and lighting designs really do resemble animate beings. It’s not that Kilzi’s designs are overtly human; it’s that the forms he’s achieved somehow conjure movement, emotional expression, and personal connection all at once, as though they could have been alive and talking while you were out of the room, then froze just before you entered — a kind of domestic Toy Story.
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The Green Goblin, Norwegian Black Metal, SpongeBob: Up-and-Coming Designer Clay Brown’s References Run the Gamut

Clay Brown’s work is shot through with an imaginative sense of play that is, quite simply, fun — but that’s not all it is. Somehow his pieces come off as minimal and spare yet highly referential and evocative, like his resin Island lamps, which call to mind cake domes; the Formica and birch I’m Ready cabinet, which could be a “mini-bar or maybe a wardrobe for a toddler;” and the jagged yet precise aluminum 1234567 bookcase, which is sharp but not at all forbidding. His Stave cabinet, part of the Sight Unseen collection, rises to a steep peak in darkly moody colors but it’s also… friendly. With its oxblood Thumbprint pull by Sam Stewart — with whom Brown has worked on several projects — it’s like a classic wooden toy scaled up to human proportions.
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