design gift guide 2016

The Best Gifts for Design Lovers Under $50

For as long as we've been publishing holiday gift guides — and this is our fourth annual one! — we've been dividing them up by editor, which eventually became predictable even to us. Want something monochrome? Go to Monica's gift guide. In the mood for something colorful? Jill's got you covered. Need something ever-so-slightly less girly? Our junior editors are invariably men. This year, we decided to do our readers a service, and lay things out according to the cold hard cash you'll have to put down.
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Herman Miller’s New York Flagship is a Design Store for the Way We Live Now

Five years in the making, the new Herman Miller flagship opened on Park Avenue South in New York just before Thanksgiving, at the same address where George Nelson once had his offices. The new store nods towards Herman Miller's storied place in American design but more often than not, it also looks forward, both re-contextualizing vintage items and archival Herman Miller pieces in a fresh, more modern context and incorporating some of our current favorite independent designers and brands,
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design miami 2016 preview

The 40 Best New Works You’ll See at Design Miami This Week

When we think of Design Miami, which opens tomorrow, the idea of the fair as a place to scout exciting new work by an elite cadre of emerging designers isn't necessarily the first thing that comes to mind. Lush, immersive installations and epically cool lounges, yes; vintage gems by French designers like Prouvé, Royère, Perriand, and Pergay, of course. But the past couple of years have featured a notable swing towards a younger, more experimental crowd.
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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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Of-The-Moment Ceramics — And Mushrooms? — At a New Brooklyn Pop-Up

Since it opened in the summer of 2012, Frank Traynor’s Perfect Nothing Catalog — an ice shack–turned-shop that its owner transplanted from upstate New York to Brooklyn — has already relocated twice: from its original home in a Greenpoint garden to the backyard of a gallery in Bushwick, and, very briefly this summer, to a subway platform in Williamsburg. That particular pitstop, set up outside a more permanent subway retail outlet called The Newsstand, was a show called Behind Flamingo Plaza. “It was named after my high-school hangout, an all thrift-store strip mall in Miami — a very formative space for my aesthetic and a vibe I wanted to honor,” explains Traynor.
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Week of November 14, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week we're putting the focus on some of the coolest women in design and art: an exhibition of hard-edged abstract paintings by the late Californian Helen Lundeberg, a sleek black lacquered furniture collection by up-and-comer Ania Jaworska, and the best vase in the archive of the late Finnish glass artist Helena Tynell.
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Australia Meets Asia in Daniel Emma’s Newest Collection

With the launch of their new Bling Bling Dynasty collection today, by way of an exhibition at Hugo Mitchell Gallery in Adelaide, the Australian design duo Daniel Emma have fully embraced their Asian influences for the first time, saying that it's the first of many projects in which they hope to explore their "time spent in between cultures."
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A Master of the Instagram Still-Life in Her (Perfectly Styled) Natural Habitat

Since the launch of her ceramic accessories line ARC Objects in 2014, the interaction of space and ideas through the black box of process has been a framework for Daniela Jacobs, whose work you might be familiar with from the thoughtfully rendered still-lifes that populate her Instagram. Which would be appropriate, considering how crucial a part Instagram has played in catapulting Jacobs to fame.
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A Creative Director Brings His Fashion-World Cred to Candles

We fell in love with Overose, a new Parisian candle and perfume house founded by Matthieu Belhandouz, the moment we saw the photos in this post. Belhandouz studied fashion design at La Cambre and had a brief stint at Stella McCartney, both of which could explain his keen eye for visuals and his acute understanding of the importance of branding.
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A New Exhibition Celebrates the Ambiguity of Objects

For a new show at New York's Chamber Gallery, curated by Matylda Krzykowski, contributions from American Nick Van Woert, Swiss designers Robert and Trix Haussmann, Polish talent Oskar Zieta, and Vienna-based design studio mischer’traxler, among others, each pay homage to Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage, “Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?” — the inspiration behind the show and its moniker (“Just What Is It”).
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Here’s One Thing We Can All Do Today to Help Enact Change

With Design for Progress, we’ve created a fundraiser to benefit the groups and issues we believe might be in need of the most support after this election. To anyone feeling powerless, marginalized, scared, or angry today, this is one small thing we can all do to help.
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