This Dutch Designer is Giving Concrete a Serious Makeover

At this point, we've seen pretty much every formerly humdrum thing in the universe get a design-forward makeover, from watering cans to luggage. But Dutch designer Iwan Pol wasn't happy to simply renovate a product category — he wanted to recast an entire architectural material. "Concrete can take any shape or form, so why not aim for a softer look and feel?" he says.
More
Dutch Design Week 2017 - Hardcore Exhibition

At Dutch Design Week, 17 Designers Turning Everyday Materials into Sculptural Furniture

It’s Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, and we'll be publishing a round-up of our favorites first thing next week. But for the second year in a row, one of the best exhibitions on view came from the young trend-forecasting and design firm Core Studio, who last year curated the colorful exhibition Popcore. This year, the theme was HARDCORE, and the curators asked participating designers to create works exploring "a counter-digital movement."
More

Amazing 80s Interiors, and the Furniture That Was Made for Them, Now On View at Volume

Anyone paying attention probably gets that for us, the Memphis train left the station awhile ago — we were heralding the return of Sottsass in 2007, and our interests have long since shifted. But that doesn't mean we're opposed to every attempt to bring back the '80s, not in the least. Case in point: We highly recommend seeing the current show on view at Volume Gallery in Chicago, which celebrates the '80s interiors of the Chicago architecture firm Krueck + Sexton with the launch of limited-edition reissues of three of their most iconic chair designs from that time.
More

In a New Exhibition, Six Ceramicists Try Their Hand At Furniture

For Lawson-Fenning in Los Angeles, Bari Ziperstein, Michele Quan, Jonathan Cross, Heather Rosenman, Victoria Morris, and Beth Katz (the artist behind Mt. Washington Pottery) have each created a series of ceramic tables, including stacked, saturated totems by BZippy, Brutalist slabs by Jonathan Cross, and Eastern iconography by MQuan. In other words, each piece is a recognizable extension of the artist's current body of work, but unique in its point of view.
More

Brook & Lyn, Los Angeles Furniture Designers

The precision-machined brass bars lining the base of Mimi Jung and Brian Hurewitz’s Pepto-pink sofa? They’re a doggie jail. At least they were, conceptually speaking, intended to be; the couple lives with three dogs in Los Angeles’s Mt. Washington neighborhood, and Truffle, the most diminutive of the bunch, necessitated the arrangement. “If you give her six inches of space underneath anything, she’ll steal things from around the house and drag them in there,” says Jung. “I wanted to make a couch that had prison bars for her, so she couldn’t get in.” Granted Jung started out sketching metal poles and wound up creating a system of stunning, diagonally canted fins that subtly shift in appearance depending on one’s vantage point, but the sofa overall was — like much of Brook & Lyn’s work — designed to serve very specific, very personal needs. Since they moved from Brooklyn to L.A. a year and a half ago, Jung and Hurewitz have been populating the studio's portfolio with pieces they’ve created for themselves, and their new home.
More

Week of October 16, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: A suburban city hall gets custom furniture (just outside Paris, naturellement), The Primary Essentials opens in Manhattan, and we get a peek inside an upstate New York farmhouse with decidedly downtown design credentials.
More

Inside Berlin’s Most Instagrammable Installation

Like some kind of latter-day Helio Oiticica, the French artist Jean-Pascal Flavien has constructed a life-sized house, surrounded by sand, within the exhibition space at Esther Schipper gallery in Berlin. But while Oiticica's work was dependent upon interaction, it's unclear how immersive Flavien's installation is really supposed to be.
More

16 Statement Sofas to Consider Blowing Your Budget On

When it comes to decorating, most people tend to follow the same, tried-and-true, low-risk method: Buy a nice but ultimately unremarkable sofa and bring personality into the room via colorful or patterned throw pillows, statement-y rugs, a killer gallery wall, or dramatic lighting. But today, we're wondering if it might be worth it to consider throwing away that number one rule of decorating and making the sofa the focal point of your whole room.
More

These 3D Interior Images Have Us Drooling Over a Tile Catalog

In the old days, this would have been one hell of an expensive photoshoot: Sourcing design icons-in-the-making from people like Lex Pott, Faye Toogood, and Sabine Marcelis; building out a set; and then painting, styling, and photographing the whole thing. But perhaps this will be known as the year when the rendered, three-dimensional image became almost more exciting — and decidedly cheaper — than the real thing, thereby making it almost de rigueur for brands to invest in these kinds of digital set-ups, no matter the product.
More

Week of October 9, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Three designer coffee shops we're dying to visit, a show of little-known furniture made by Rei Kawakubo for her Comme des Garçons stores, and a group exhibition in Madrid that features the seriously stunning wall hanging above.
More

Albers-Inspired Tableware in Glass and Acrylic, On View in New York

If you happened to have stopped by Canal Street Market during New York Design Week last spring, you might have noticed a series of objects and furniture pieces united in their fascination with materiality: low tables made from planes of marble slotted into translucent acrylic tops, copper mirrors backed by slices of aerated concrete, and curved side tables made from various colors of stone. These objects were the first inkling of a full collection that's debuting next week at Matter by Objects of Common Interest.
More

A Hip New Furniture Brand Launches in Paris

If we could describe the new French furniture brand Youth Éditions in one word, it would probably be vibey. It's got a hip logo, a website punctuated with photos of classical sculptures, an Instagram full of perfectly calibrated inspiration images, and poetically mysterious catalog text that feels like it could have been penned by a copywriter for Millennial-focused car commercials. And yet it all works, in a this-is-not-your-grandmother's-furniture-line sort of way.
More