Land of Nod amazing affordable rugs
01.21.16

Shopping

Our New Secret Source for Amazing — and Affordable — Rugs

A few years ago, we were asked by one of the glossy magazines to name our go-to source for amazing, affordable rugs. At the time, we cited Rugs USA as the place to buy insanely cheap, reasonable facsimiles of ultra-trendy floor coverings — think Beni Ourains or overdyed Turkish kilims that look great in photographs, but won't exactly be passed down as heirlooms. But lately we've found ourselves scouring another extremely unlikely source for textile gems.
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Material Lust American furniture designers
01.20.16

Studio Visit

Exploring Furniture’s Dark Side with Material Lust

Just a year and a half old, Material Lust was born of a desire to fill glaring gaps in the world of home design: lighting that isn’t overpowered by its surroundings, for example, or a rug that does double duty as sculpture. Now four collections in, the studio's work is singular, striking, always made with extreme care and attention. It’s also often and unreasonably stereotyped.
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Thea Djordjadze
01.19.16

Up and Coming

Thea Djordjadze Is Your New Favorite Artist

The Georgian–born, Berlin-based sculptor has a way of combining references to modernist architecture with a palette of diverse, process-oriented materials like plaster, foam, and linoleum that's total catnip to those of us in the design world.
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01.16.16

Saturday Selects

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
01.15.16

Sighted

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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07.16.14

Studio Visit

Otaat / Myers Collective

If the best reason to know the rules is to be smarter about breaking them, then consider the year-old collaboration between designers Albert Chu and Jennifer Myers not so much a violent upheaval but an exercise in playfully tweaking the system. Chu and Myers met while studying at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design — an institution they say reinforced their respect for constraints — and each worked in architecture and launched an accessories line before combining their shared pedagogy into a series of leather and brass pouches. “I think working within, and rebelling against, a set of parameters is actually the ultimate in design fun,” Myers says. Chu agrees: “We love working with fundamentals and trying to introduce a slight deviation,” says the designer of Otaat, which stands for “one thing at a time.” “Harvard was about being restrained in the conceptual and design intervention, that sometimes the most effective and thorough result could arise from a minimal, subtle act.”
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EQ3 emerging Canadian Designers
01.14.16

Sighted

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
01.12.16

Sighted

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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01.11.16

At Home With

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
01.09.16

Saturday Selects

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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01.08.16

Sighted

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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01.07.16

Studio Visit

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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