An Up-And-Coming Dutch Duo On Why They Don’t Identify As “Designers”

In 2008, when Daphna Isaacs Burggraaf and Laurens Manders began collaborating, they kept their studios separate. It wasn’t until four years later that they officially founded their company, compounding ideas and names — the latter of which was deemed a challenge until the Internet threw up the solution. “We were looking to find out if images of our products had been published, and we found an image of our lamps with the name ‘Daphna Laurens’ written above it.” Upon reading this, they realized that it was exactly what they’d been looking for — an anonymous name that symbolized their way of working together; a new ego that has allowed them to playfully carve out a space for themselves as form-flexing experimenters.
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Look Inside the Practice of Four Up-And-Coming Ceramicists

What we found at RCA's annual Work in Progress exhibition, in the Ceramics & Glass program, was a study in experimentation: clay that had been manipulated into terrazzo-like slabs, perforated bricks, stringy lumps, punched-in blobs, donut-like lamps, and meticulous geometrics, and almost nothing that looked like it had been turned on a traditional potter's wheel.
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In This Dutch Designer’s Hands, Even a Door Handle Becomes a Piece of Sculpture

So pretty. So minimal. That, in a nutshell, is the work of Dutch product designer Jeroen van de Gruiter. A recent graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven, van de Gruiter’s work plays with the tension between what a thing appears to be and how we choose to let it function in the world. His objects are as much about themselves as anything else: the way they take up space, shifting and fluctuating, contrasting and offsetting — other objects as well as their surroundings. They are concept made manifest; latent potential given concrete form.
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These Colorful Vases Are the Latest Sign that Acrylic Is on the Rise

Remember when we named the California Light and Space art movement one of the top trends to watch in 2017? Well, the evidence just keeps mounting. Seoul design trio Hattern say their new series of two-tone acrylic vases were inspired by the way Impressionist painters tried to capture the effects of changing light quality on nature, but we can't help but see elements of Vasa, Helen Pashgian, and Peter Alexander's work. Is acrylic the new marble?
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This Moscow-Based Studio is the Only Place Not Under Russian Influence

When you think of Moscow and its corresponding decor schemes, Scandinavian minimalism isn't the first thing that comes to mind. But take a look at the interiors in this post — with their exposed-bulb lamps, gridded pillowcases, herringbone floors, moody palettes, and splashes of pink, they'd be right at home in a Stockholm flat. In fact, they're the work of Crosby Studios, the Moscow- and New York–based furniture and interiors studio that debuted its first collection with us at last year's Sight Unseen OFFSITE.
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Australian art director and stylist Natalie Turnbull

Why This Melbourne Creative Switched from Sculpture to Styling

A love of materiality and working with objects is what initially drove Natalie Turnbull to sculpture. But it was a break from the art scene that finally set the Melbourne-based stylist and art director on her own path. In 2012, when Turnbull moved to New York to intern with both Confetti System and Fredericks and Mae, she realized that these designers had created a career path for themselves that didn’t exist before they started — and that she, too, could do the same.
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Five New Ceramics Collections We’re Feeling Right Now

Sometimes we get the feeling that we have altogether enough stuff. But then the period between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve happens, and we realize that we somehow don't have all the requisite items for serving food, displaying flowers, or generally decking out our dinner table in a manner befitting a design editor. So this round-up couldn't have come at a better time: Meet five new ceramicists creating work that's sculptural but functional, minimal but avant-garde, and generally chic as hell.
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This Studio’s First Collection Is Inspired By Drinking and Fast Cars

You'd think that the new graphics and furniture studio Hey, Porter were based in Monte Carlo or St. Tropez based on the descriptions they've given their first designs: chairs inspired by the "1st running of the 24-Hour Le Mans Automobile Race in France," bar carts named after a "cunning craft cocktail ace from 19th-century London." Alas, their backstory is not quite as dramatic as their influences would suggest — but we're still intrigued.
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Emerging Norwegian designers Domaas Hogh

An Emerging Norwegian Design Duo, Inspired by the Scandinavian Winter

While others may bemoan this season’s ever-wintery temperatures, young Norwegian design studio Domaas/Høgh look to the colder skies as an excuse to imbue their work with a bit of coziness. “This might sound like a cliché, but seasonal change is not something that passes us by without notice,” note the duo, when asked what’s been inspiring them of late. In truth, that awareness seems to be instinctive to Norwegian designers as a whole.
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Two Former Architects on Finding Common Ground (In the Middle of Manhattan)

Some of Pelle's work belies their background in architecture — their Klemens mirror, for instance, stretches a thin mesh fabric over a structure that looks like scaffolding. More often than not, their work is organic and even whimsical, with their two best-known projects being a chandelier that daisy-chains bubble-like glass globes and their Soap Stones, for which they hand-carve dyed and fragranced glycerin soap into a gemlike shape. But all of their work speaks to the idea of finding common ground despite their differences.
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Strauss Bourque-Lafrance

Strauss Bourque-Lafrance and the Deconstructed Domestic Space

Strauss Bourque-LaFrance’s work reflects a holistic approach to materials informed by the social function and status of objects as well as our relationship to them; the roles they play in our lives as symbols, signs, and totems. In Bourque-Lafrance's world, objects and paintings often get mixed up together with sculpture and interior design; his approach may be best summed up by his gallerist, Rachel Uffner, who calls it: “painting-in-the-expanded-field, painting-as-collage, painting-as-performance, and painting-as-sculpture.”
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A Parisian Creative Studio With An Epic Client List (We’re Looking At You, Rihanna)

In some ways, the five-year-old Parisian creative agency Bonsoir Paris has everything a modern-day entrepreneurial venture could want — creatively fulfilling commissioned work from cool, high-profile clients (everyone from COS to Rihanna) as well as the time and space to pursue their own work on the side. The studio has a lab that encourages its workers into "boundaryless exploration," as managing director Ben Sandler puts it.
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