“With my carafes, I was also referencing normal plastic containers, but finding a way to elevate them into a piece of art.”

09.13.10

Up and Coming

Victoria Wilmotte, Furniture Designer

As the youngest child of a Parisian architect — with three older brothers working in the same field — Victoria Wilmotte had one thing going for her when she started studying furniture design at London's RCA four years ago. But she also had a few handicaps: she was only 20 years old, she had just been rejected from Paris's ENSCI school, and her professor at RCA, Jurgen Bey, couldn't comprehend her strange working methods. Obsessed with materials and surfaces, she wanted to spend all her time in the workshop, skipping the thinking and brainstorming part and going directly to prototyping. "Jurgen Bey was really into concepts," says Wilmotte, now 24. "He was more about a table telling stories, but I only wanted to talk technically. He basically said, 'I don’t understand you. But continue.'"

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Crested Comb-Back Chair, above “Applying a seat to a frame feels superfluous somehow. I wanted to keep the same principles, but pare down the lines a bit.”

06.23.10

Up and Coming

Tim Liles, Furniture Designer

It used to be that if you left your big-city corporate job, moved your family to a small town in New Hampshire, did some soul-searching behind the wheel of a camper van, and opted to spend your days doing what you really loved from the basement of your house, you were most likely a 55-year-old man having a mid-life crisis. Twenty-seven-year-old RISD grad Tim Liles — who followed that exact trajectory after quitting a footwear-design job at Converse last fall — understands this perfectly well: "My girlfriend is a couple years younger and her friends don’t get it, they all live in Chicago and think we're just confused," he says, speaking to me from week five of the couple's two-month cross-country vision quest. "But in traveling around the country, I’ve met a lot of people my age who have quit a salaried job in search of something simpler."

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Patternity’s Shift table, another collaboration with Grace’s father, launched at last month’s Clerkenwell Design Week. “People tend to misunderstand marquetry, and they think the panels are painted,” says Winteringham. “But actually they’re dyed beforehand. You can pick them out from a catalog that’s kind of like a Pantone swatchbook, with different color and grain options. The underside of the Shift table is made from sycamore and the panels are dyed cedar.”

06.07.10

Up and Coming

Patternity, furniture and textile designers

For Anna Murray and Grace Winteringham, pattern is everywhere — in the flaking paint of street bollards and the crisscrossing beams of scaffolding, in the fashion photography of Mel Bles and the banded stiletto heels of Parisian shoemaker Walter Steiger. Together, Murray and Winteringham run Patternity, a studio and online resource for pattern imagery where each photo is curated, sourced, or taken by the designers themselves. Spend some time on the site, and their obsessions become clear: One week it’s rocks and strata; another it’s the vivid African textiles that line the stalls of the Ridley Road street market that runs daily in Dalston, the East London neighborhood both women call home.

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Inspiration behind your Simple Machine(s) series: The inspiration for the Simple Machine(s) series came from the threaded end of a wooden broom handle. It's so honest and unassuming, and I love how the fastener and the handle are one and the same. The Simple Machine(s) series riffs on that idea by using the threads as fastener and ornament.

04.30.10

Up and Coming

Jonah Takagi, furniture designer

Jonah Takagi claims he has ADD, and he may be right. Since graduating from RISD in 2002, the Japanese-born, New England–bred, Washington D.C.–based designer has worked as a cabinetmaker, a full-time musician, a set builder for National Geographic docudramas, and a producer for an indie-rock kids’ show called Pancake Mountain. In the weeks leading up to this story, we talked about skinned cats, prosthetic kidneys, and smoking pot out of an art-school professor’s peg leg. But Takagi’s work is anything but schizophrenic.

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Inspiration behind your Hex Series: “I’ve been obsessed with crystals and polygonal structures since growing crystals in a can with a blue vitriol solution and making hexaflexagons as a child. Although the geometry that was taught at school seemed boring to me.”

04.07.10

Up and Coming

Kostya Sasquatch, graphic designer and artist

The 28-year-old graphic designer Kostya Sasquatch makes thick, vector-like graphics on a PC, all cartoon colors and geometric shapes, odd logotypes that create iconographies for systems that seem to exist only in the designer’s mind. (He has a whole series called Donut Control.) They’re the kind of designs that could be from anywhere, but they might not have looked anything like they do if Sasquatch wasn’t from Moscow.

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What inspired your Bonbon lamps? "While working on another lamp, the craftsman made me a lampshade which had bad dimensions. I was looking at that piece thinking how can I use it? I didn't want to throw it away, so I decided to knit some strings over it. Then I made different shapes and knitted over them, and now they're called Bonbons because they remind me of silk bonbons."

04.05.10

Up and Coming

Ana Kras, Designer and Photographer

You only need to know a few things about Belgrade to understand where Ana Kraš comes from: It's been invaded countless times throughout history, even by the Nazis, after which it was then ravaged by Tito, Milošević, the Kosovo War, and the associated NATO bombings. When it finally emerged from its troubles in 1999, its government and economy were in shambles; the average salary in Belgrade is still less than 400 euros per month. To have become a designer in this context is exceedingly difficult — Kraš's design school had no workshop, materials, or experienced professors, and almost none of her compatriots can afford to spend money on furniture — and yet you won't find a trace of that struggle in the talented 26-year-old's work. At least not by looking at it.

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Looks from Choi's graduate collection, which was picked up for a two-week selling exhibition in the basement of Dover Street Market. "Jade Jagger came in one day and bought two pieces," Choi says. "She actually offered me a job, but I already had a contract."

03.19.10

Up and Coming

Eudon Choi, fashion designer

Since graduating from London’s Royal College of Art in 2006 with a master’s degree in womenswear, Eudon Choi has had his graduate collection picked up by the fanatically worshipped Dover Street Market, been a senior designer for Savannah and Sienna Miller's label Twenty8Twelve, and been called a “fabulous individual” by our favorite throwback men’s fashion mag Fantastic Man. All of which makes his decision to move to London in 2003 — after having already completed a master’s in menswear at Yonsei University in his hometown of Seoul — seem like a pretty good move. “London, and womenswear in particular, just felt like a place where I could be more experimental,” says Choi.

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Rodrigo Almeida's new collection — built by hand in his São Paulo studio — includes the Concreta chair shown here. It's made from wood and rope, with sparkly plastic cushions. Color is a huge element of Almeida's work. "When I walk in Brazil, the greens are so strong, sky is so blue — it’s different," he says. "I lived for a few years in the U.S., and while the flowers are more beautiful, the green is more like gray. So you get a spot of color, but not blocks of color like in Brazil. These are the kinds of things you internalize as a designer."

03.03.10

Up and Coming

Rodrigo Almeida, Furniture Designer

To any reader who went to design school and is, years later, still making student loan payments month after month, you might want to close your eyes for this one: Rodrigo Almeida — the 34-year-old Brazilian furniture designer who's pals with the Campana brothers, has been featured in Wallpaper, and has made pieces for top galleries like Contrasts and FAT — didn't go to university, not even as an undergrad. What you're looking at here is raw talent, and a career that began when Almeida simply picked up the Brazilian magazine Arc Design six years ago and thought, "I want to do that."

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Inspiration behind your photography: Beauty and photographers better than me, who trigger constant renewal and prevent stagnation. Photo (c) Kimm Whiskie

02.19.10

Up and Coming

Kimm Whiskie, photographer

There’s something charmingly mysterious about the 24-year-old Lithuanian photographer Kimm Whiskie. The name alone sounds like an alias (turns out the second half actually is — Whiskie did time in a rock-and-roll band) and its gender is ambiguous (an embarrassed email straightens this out). A request for an interview is politely downgraded to a Skype chat; when a portrait arrives, it’s a grainy Lomo shot of the photographer lying face down on the pavement.

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Inspiration behind your Drag series: Sensations. One of the things I try to do through my designs is express sensations. My product-development process actually involves a lot of weird miming and sound-making; I sometimes have to hide to be able to finish a project because I feel a bit ridiculous. It's basically about representing the piece through movements and sounds. Some designers draw or model their projects, I mime mine. It might be because I'm French, I live in the Netherlands, and the studio language is English — it's getting too difficult to express things with words in that context.

01.13.10

Up and Coming

Julien Carretero, Product Designer

Julien Carretero's work invites metaphor the way cheese fries beg to be eaten — make a bench that's perfectly shaped in front and slowly morphs into chaos in back, and suddenly it could be about anything: humans' ultimate lack of control over the universe, politics, the pressure to succeed, mullets. For the Paris-born, Eindhoven-based designer, though, it's mostly just about one thing.

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Diaz's Ink Calendar, originally conceived for an exhibition around the theme “Gradually,” curated by his former RCA tutor Martino Gamper. “A huge amount of research went into this project,” says Diaz. “I think I went through 60 different paper stocks and inks to make it work the way I needed it to. But I had less than 30 days to make it, so I couldn’t test it for a whole month!”

12.07.09

Up and Coming

Oscar Diaz, Product Designer

The scientific process behind many of life’s workaday phenomena is something called capillary action, which is the molecular attraction that makes liquid flow through a porous medium, for those in need of a high-school refresher. It’s what makes tears flow through your lachrymal ducts, what gives micro-fiber its super-absorbent properties, and why groundwater naturally spreads into areas of dry soil. It’s also what powers the Ink Calendar by Oscar Diaz.

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11.03.09

Up and Coming

Annie Lenon, Jewelry Designer

“I grew up going to pow-wows and stuff” isn’t the first thing you expect Annie Lenon to say as she’s puttering around the garden apartment and studio she shares with her boyfriend in a brownstone in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene. But then you recall that the 25-year-old jewelry-maker and Pratt grad hails from Bozeman, a city of 27,000 located in the southwestern corner of Montana — a state that with its prairies and badlands and Indian reservations seems downright exotic to most New Yorkers — and you realize she’s working from an entirely different reference point.

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