Week of April 24, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: we’re being struck by swimsuit mania, having mixed feelings about the design influence of Soviet sanatoriums, and obsessing over a lo-fi pizzeria in a small Spanish town.
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Fisher Parrish The Paperweight Show

At a New Brooklyn Gallery, The Paperweight is Anything But Obsolete

If there's anyone who knows from paperweights, it's New York gallerists Patrick Parrish and Zoe Fisher. The two began working together when Fisher — who at the time was helming her own fledgling gallery — began working for Parrish at his Tribeca space, which not only sells vintage examples of those sculptural objects but also boasts a well-documented obsession with Carl Aubock (perhaps king of all paperweight-makers). So it makes sense that when Fisher and Parrish finally decided to go into business together, they would choose the paperweight as their first canvas.
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A Down Under Furniture Brand Meets an American Favorite in Soho

Opening today, one of our favorite design duos, Ladies & Gentlemen Studio, will be launching a concept shop in SoHo for the month of May, showcasing the new Australian design brand SP01. Over/Under, as the project is called, presents a leap for L&G beyond objects like lighting, furniture, and jewelry, and into a holistic interiors experience. SP01, making its U.S. debut, looked to L&G for a concept beyond the traditional showroom, a place where guests could relax.
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Bower x West Elm

Bower Made a Collection for West Elm, And It’s Really Good

If you're a frequent reader of this site, you've probably heard us bemoan the lack of cool, but affordable, American furniture more times than you can count. Which is precisely why collaborations like this one — which pairs Bower's signature, mixed-material aesthetic with West Elm's years of accumulated knowledge — are so important.
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Jose Davila

Jose Davila Creates Sculptures From Glass, Stones, and Gravity

Using simple materials like stone and cardboard, Mexican artist Jose Dávila mines art history to create some of the most relevant works today. His oeuvre is defined by a diverse, medium-traversing output, from his precariously balanced sculptural arrangements to his “cutout” series, in which he extracts the focal point of iconic works of art, creating an absence that bestows a three-dimensionality upon the resulting pieces. In all of his art, there is an underlying exploration of how the modernist movement continues to influence the modern mind.
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Ladies & Gentlemen's Brooklyn studio

Playing Around With the Cool Kids of American Design

Inside the experimental playground that is Ladies & Gentlemen's new Brooklyn studio: “All of our work is an evolution of itself,” says Dylan Davis, one-half of the up-and-coming design couple. Shapes on a piece of jewelry might lead to a geometric take on lighting; that, in turn, might inspire the assorted forms suspended on a mobile. However distinct, each piece is unmistakably linked to the next, joined by an understated elegance and what the two refer to as "playful austerity." “We try to embrace that feeling you had as a kid when you got to really explore,” Davis says. “Our goal is to take that spirit of play and figure out how to use it professionally.”
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Week of April 17, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week we must be experiencing spring fever, because we've fixated on a lot of green (a gallery by Antonino Cardillo, an interior by Arquitectura-G, the border of the Vera Panichewskaja mirror above) and a lot of plants (an indoor garden in Paris, and more). Now if only the sun would come out in New York...
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Entryways of Milan

A New Book Celebrating the Secret Beauty of Milan

Having just gotten back from Milan, where the foyer of our Airbnb apartment building looked like this, the subject of a new book from Taschen hits awfully close to home: Called Entryways of Milan, the book takes readers inside the heavy wooden doors that often conceal the city's most beautiful thresholds, or ingressi.
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Fernando Mastrangelo Escape Series

Outfit Your Whole House With These Magical Desert Sand Sculptures

For Escape, a collection that debuted over the course of two weeks in Milan at Rossana Orlandi Gallery and in New York at Maison Gerard, Fernando Mastrangelo takes a leap forward in terms of color and his experimental approach to materials, layering hand-dyed granules — including sand, coffee, powdered glass, and silica — to create an ethereal suite of furniture, inspired by his trips to the American Southwest.
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In This Designer’s Hands, Recycled Leather Becomes Something Undeniably Cool

Continuing with a self-produced material he calls Structural Skin, Madrid-based designer Jorge Penadés has turned his exploration of recycled leather waste into a sleek collection of mirrors and table lamps, on display earlier this month at the Rossana Orlandi gallery in Milan. Penadés gets the leather offcuts for his pieces from Hermès, which means the color palettes become a kind of artistic constraint — and yet, the shredded leather, combined with resin to create a reconstituted material, is undeniably cool, resembling marble or a particularly colorful particleboard.
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Join Us for our 2017 Sight Unseen OFFSITE Show!

Today we're excited to share the details of our fourth annual Sight Unseen OFFSITE show, taking place May 19–22 on the ground floor of 100 Avenue of the Americas in Soho. The 2017 event will be even more focused than in past years on individual presentations: Pared back to just 25 participants, each will have a larger exhibition space in which to show a collection of more elevated work. Sight Unseen’s editors have also chosen a select number of up-and-coming talents for a standalone group exhibition.
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Sally Breer up-and-coming interior designer

At Home With Sally Breer, LA’s Coolest Up-and-Coming Interior Designer

For someone who spends her working hours designing the interiors for many of Hollywood’s “successful young hustlers,” Sally Breer needed her own home to provide a neutral palette and be ideal for “clean head space.” But beige and softness — aka comfort — can still be stunning for a designer like Breer, who describes herself with words like absurd, ballsy, and passionate.
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Week of April 10, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: more good things from Milan (including our picks for MVP), artist- and architect-designed carpets, and a chill-out zone for reading and record-listening (so analog!) in the middle of Manhattan.
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