02.09.16

Interiors

A Brooklyn Home by the Duo Behind New York’s Coolest Design Shop

Coming Soon is the design shop most cities only wish they had. The downtown New York boutique, founded by former art gallerists Fabiana Faria and Helena Barquet, opened in 2013 in an area that's since become a nexus of cool, thanks to neighbors like Dimes, Project no 8, Mission Chinese, and Fung Tu. The plant-filled shop hosts occasional exhibitions and carries a pitch-perfect mix of vintage finds and design's most-wanted giftables, and it does so in a space that's constantly changing but somehow always exactly what you need. What we didn't know when we first met Barquet and Faria is that the two have an ad-hoc, not-quite-professional interior design business on the side.

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02.08.16

Interiors

A Designer’s Barcelona Home, Where Color is King

In the most recent issue of Apartamento, alongside really excellent pieces including an interview with Matt Connors, a photographic essay of Donald Judd's collections, and a paper still-life series, we found this gem: Casa Horta, a 1920s single-family Barcelona house now occupied by the young designer Guillermo Santomà, who used vibrant shades of green, pink, and blue paint to delineate space as well as provide a gorgeously saturated, incredibly dramatic backdrop.

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02.06.16

Saturday Selects

Week of February 1, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week is all about shapes: geometric tables and artworks, a shelf adorned with a wooden squiggle that looks like a break in the space-time continuum, a series of angular Brutalist teapots, and the epic Vignelli-esque, Toogood-esque Moser tray pictured above.

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02.04.16

Up and Coming

Pedro Paulo Venzon Is the Hip New Face of Brazilian Design

History looms large over Brazilian design — how to compete with tropical modernism? Sergio Rodrigues? Lina Bo Bardi? Everyone's got it pegged, which is why the work of Pedro Paulo Venzon is so exciting: He's the first young up-and-coming Brazilian designer we've seen who's totally nailing the delicate balance between paying homage to the legacy of his forebears, and developing an aesthetic that's new, cool, and relevant to the international contemporary scene.

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02.03.16

Current Obsession

Lava Rock — So Hot Right Now

The Guadalajara-based studio Peca made coasters out of it. Formafantasma paired it with more refined materials like brass and glass. Aleks Pollner and Adrien Rovero are obsessed with it. Now, the latest designer to be inspired by plucking basalt from the earth and fashioning it into something, well, fashionable is Laura Bilde, a furniture and interior design student from Denmark who sent us this seriously on-trend lighting series this week.

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02.08.13

Up and Coming

Ya Wen Chou, Textile and Product Designer

Ahh, design school — where navel-gazing and the pretentions of identity art are not only tolerated, but encouraged (on days when the lesson plan doesn't focus on sustainability or people with disabilities, of course). It's easy for lesser talents to get sucked too far into these themes and end up with over-baked work that either borders on kitsch or is completely irrelevant to the wider world, but when done right, the results can be both beautiful and culturally illuminating — as in the case of Ya Wen Chou, who used her time in the RCA's textile department to dig into the traditions of her grandmother and her home country of Taiwan. "My grandmother’s house was always full of handicrafts made by Taiwanese artisans," she told the Arts Thread blog last year, explaining a main source of her inspiration. And her Precious Objects project — which first caught our eye on Pinterest — explores her culture's traditional reverence for nature's role in everyday life, which does feel rather universal, having a lot in common with everything from Icelandic elf mythology to Native American spirituality. Read more about Chou's point of view in our interview after the jump.

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02.02.16

Fair Report

Our Top 10 Finds From Maison & Objet

In the spring edition of the fair, we found refreshing colorways (so long neon and pastels!) and sophisticated sensibilities. If you didn’t get chance to visit the French capital, never fear: Behold our guide to the best furniture finds and more from the week.

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02.01.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

Experimental Objects from a New Generation of Design Stars

Considering this is our fifth year covering the Ornsbergsauktionen, a design auction produced annually by some of our favorite Swedish talents in conjunction with Stockholm Design Week, we began to wonder what it is about this particular event that we love so much. For us, it basically hits all the sweet spots — it focuses on the small-scale production of experimental objects, it commissions work only from contemporary designers with unusual or inventive practices, and it photographs really, really well.

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01.30.16

Saturday Selects

Week of January 25, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Everything old is new again: midcentury-inspired lamps (like the gorgeous one by Toronto's Lightmaker Studio, above), Memphis-inspired tea trolleys, and an ancient Japanese tray garden re-imagined as a post-industrial panorama.

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01.29.16

Sighted

Be the First to Snag New Jewelry by Moving Mountains

Today is a happy day for anyone obsessed with the furniture of Moving Mountains's Syrette Lew — she's just debuted a new jewelry line that's infinitely more accessible, and we made sure we were the very first ones to carry it, in the Sight Unseen Shop. Not only is almost everything in the collection under $250, it shares the same inspirations as her ultra-popular Palmyra lamp.

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01.27.16

Studio Visit

Chiyome’s Japanese-Inspired, Minimalist Handbags

It’s easy to look at the work of designer Anna Moss and draw associations with a familiar sort of functional Japanese minimalism: her line of handbags, CHIYOME, is named for her Japanese great-grandmother. Yet for Moss, the starting point is plainly straightforward: “I strive for simplicity and that can take many forms,” she explains. What interests her is not minimalism for the sake of it, but rather a focus on the bag as vessel; it’s a study less in stripping back and more in adding intentionality.

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01.26.16

Up and Coming

Isabel + Helen’s Constructivist-Inspired Kinetic Sculptures

What happens when restrictive graphic forms are expanded into three-dimensional objects? The kinetic sculptures produced by London-based duo Isabel Gibson and Helen Chesner seem to be one modern-day answer. In their projects, references to historical art and architecture movements are offset by an unabashedly free creative approach that escapes all formal restrictions. Even the final pieces are difficult to categorize: Are they sculptures, products, or props?

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01.25.16

Sighted

The Jewelry Line Every Design Lover Should Be Wearing Now

Plenty of jewelry lines are inspired by architecture, but rarely does one transcend a mere aesthetic exercise into the realm of the truly, truly chic. AGMES, the brand new line by New York designer Morgan Solomon, is a pretty exciting exception — not only does Solomon name-check the likes of Cini Boeri and Bertrand Goldman when talking about her inspirations, but her pieces have such a strong, sculptural presence that you could picture passing them on to your children someday.

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