Week of January 11, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: House-hunting in Sao Paulo, previewing this month's design fairs (including the Eileen Gray-Victoria Wilmotte match made in heaven above!), meeting the Martha Stewart of Bushwick, and crushing hard on the offerings at new LA design store Consort.
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accessible design objects Good Thing

The Design Brand That Wants to Be America’s Answer to Hay

When the New York–based housewares brand Good Thing relaunched its website this morning with new branding, a new design, and colorful new imagery by Seattle art director Charlie Schuck, it wasn't so much an attempt to simply update its visuals as it was to recast its entire mission statement: to be America's answer to all the popular Scandi brands offering super-accessible design.
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EQ3 emerging Canadian Designers

A New Collection By a Dream Team of Canadian Designers

When we introduced you last month to Thom Fougere, creative director of the Canadian furniture brand EQ3, we had no idea this was coming down the pike: At next week's Toronto Interior Design Show, the brand will launch Assembly, a capsule furniture and accessories collection featuring designs by 10 of Canada's most exciting emerging designers, including Fougere himself, MSDS (who we featured last year) and Sight Unseen OFFSITE alum Zoë Mowat (whose beautiful geometric dressing table can be seen above).
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Nacho Alegre Ricardo Bofill architecture porn

Nacho Alegre Just Dropped Some Serious Ricardo Bofill Architecture Porn

The Spanish photographer and Apartamento co-founder recently begun documenting his travels for Vogue.com, and the burgeoning series depicts architectural icons so beautifully that you won't mind if they come along with a bit of vacation envy. Today we're excerpting shots from his travelogue on a colorful 1973 housing complex in Alicante by Ricardo Bofill, the Spanish architect best-known for his eclectic style and for taking up residence in a crumbling 19th-century cement factory.
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Field Experiments

From June to September 2013, Benjamin Harrison Bryant (New York), Paul Marcus Fuog (Melbourne) and Karim Charlebois-Zariffa (Montreal) set up a studio in Lodtunduh, a farming community on the outskirts of Ubud in Bali, where they generated a trove of conceptual works through daily experimentation. They collaborated with local stonemasons, woodcarvers, batik-makers, kite designers, and painters, all while "absorbing the sights and sounds of everyday Balinese life and documenting commonplace objects, agricultural implements, traditional dress, and makeshift items from the local culture," they write on the project's website. The result is a collection of more than 100 handmade objects meant to "challenge the traditional notion of the souvenir." At Sight Unseen OFFSITE, the collective will present these Field Experiments for the first time, including sketches, photographs, and personal stories from the makers.
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Leave It To a Swedish Designer to Reinvent the White Box

You wouldn’t be alone if your first thought, upon seeing pictures of Daniel Heckscher’s Stockholm apartment, was: How can I reconfigure my life in order to live in a place just like this? For us, this was followed by a second, slightly more reasonable thought: We should repaint. It may come as no surprise to learn that Heckscher is an interior architect at Note Design Studio, the Swedish team that’s gained a reputation for perfect color palettes, well-proportioned products, and stunning spaces.
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South American design

Week of January 4, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a pastel cafe interior that made us swoon, two new affordable prints from two of our favorite illustrators, and the debut of a young Argentinian furniture studio whose work, pictured above, is helping reignite our interest in the South American design scene.
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The Beautifully Bizarre Franken-Candles of Dutch Artist Helmut Smits

Helmut Smits is a Rotterdam-based artist who works in the vein of designers like Dominic Wilcox or Sebastian Errazuriz — his portfolio is bursting at the seams with quick, clever creative experiments, the product of a hyperactive mind with a healthy sense of humor. Some of the projects are silly, some are conceptual, and others are just plain visually lovely, like a series featuring candles of all shapes and sizes melted together into color-blocked totems.
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Tureens, Totems, & Tables: What’s Next for Workaday Handmade

When we think of ceramicists at work, we often conjure romantic visions of noble artisans wearing clay-streaked aprons and strenuously channeling their artistic magic behind a potter’s wheel. Which is mostly true, to a point, and yet — what happens once that noble artisan also has to figure out how to run a thriving, growing business? To find out, we visited the Brooklyn studio of the hugely successful Forrest Lewinger (aka Workaday Handmade) with photographer Paul Barbera.
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Affordable Art Prints by Alma Charry

New Affordable Art Prints by Parisian Illustrator Alma Charry

Ever since we pulled together our first styling gig late last summer, we've been obsessed with the most niggling aspect of the whole process, which was where we could find pretty but affordable art (and amazing patterned rugs, but that's another day and another post). So we were happy to get news this week that one of our favorite illustrators — the young Parisian graphic artist Alma Charry, who we featured around this time last year — has not one but two new outlets from which to purchase her work.
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Hunting & Narud Studio Visit

Hunting & Narud Are Rewriting the Rules of Scandinavian Design

Originally from Norway, Amy Hunting and Oscar Narud both completed design education abroad — Hunting at the prestigious Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (KADK) in Copenhagen and Narud at the RCA in London — but the design heritage of their home country remains an important theme in their work. "There's obviously this romanticized cliché of Scandinavian style but a lot of young designers are now trying to push back," says Narud when we talk about their aspiration to reinterpret the stereotypical notions of a Nordic aesthetic. "Scandinavian design is redefining itself with our generation. We all struggle with the weight of the heritage, but there's a lot of stuff happening now."
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