06.21.23

Sighted

This Campaign for a Sailboat-Inspired Sofa Transports You to a 100-Year-Old Sailing School in Venice

The Vela, designed for Saba Italia by Zanellato/Bortotto, is an interesting take on the puffy sofa: It's soft and cushy yet somehow still crisp, with arms that taper to a subtle point and striking diagonal tufting seams that gently reign in its voluminousness. That contrast is intentional, reflecting the inspiration for the sofa, which also lent it its name ("sail" in English): "We both love the sea and have always been fascinated by the unfurled sails blown by the wind near the Venice lagoon," says Daniele Bortotto. For its new campaign, Saba sent photographer Mattia Balsamini to photograph it at the Compagnia della Vela, a nautical school founded in 1911 on the island of San Giorgio.

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06.20.23

Sighted

This Spiky, Globular Blown-Glass Lighting Benefits Marginalized Communities

When your cute, blown-glass cups, vessels, plates, and ornaments start to catch the eye of designers like Kelly Wearstler, there’s really only one thing to do: Go bigger. So that’s exactly what Grace Whiteside of the New York design brand Sticky recently did, creating a collection of larger pieces using the same glass-blowing techniques that have defined the studio's signature sculptural style, and opting to turn the pieces into a range of lighting designs that are just as whimsical as Sticky's selection of smaller works.

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06.19.23

How to Live With Objects

“The Willingness For Something to be Imperfect” — Inside the Mexico City Home of Rodman Primack & Rudy Weissenberg

Rodman Primack and Rudy Weissenberg are all over the map, both literally—with houses in Guatemala, Mexico City, and New York—and figuratively, with multiple professional interests that ultimately converge around contemporary design. Primack is a former director of Design Miami and currently runs the textile and interiors studio RP Miller, while Weissenberg, a former television exec, now works in real estate development. Together, the pair founded the design gallery AGO Projects, which is just a short drive from their colorful Mexico City apartment, featured here.

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06.17.23

Saturday Selects

Week of June 12, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: acid-house Victorian-floral bedding by Jonathan Saunders, a fun new striped bench from Spain, and lots of summer travel porn in the form of two restaurants and two hotels in four different sun-soaked locales.

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06.15.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

At the Venice Design Biennial, Popping Up in an Out-of-Season Beach Cabana and a 100-Year-Old Bocce Court

Behind a battered green door on a quiet canal snaking through Venice’s Dorsoduro neighbourhood, far from the shoulder-to-shoulder throngs of tourists that populate the narrow corridors close to Piazza San Marco, is the city’s last bocce court, opened over a century ago. Most days, the area’s elderly residents convene there to throw bowls, gossip, and sip apéritifs (usually a ruby red Select spritz). But for a few weeks this May and June the sports club has given up one of their precious lanes to an entirely novel endeavor, the recently opened Venice Design Biennale.

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01.04.21

Shopping

36 Extremely On-Trend Face Masks For Wearing Every Time You Leave the House

Remember when the term "masking" conjured visions of an electively low-key Friday night spent with your face cloaked in petrified French clays, dripping honey concoctions, or mildly alarming acids? Today, of course, amidst an ever-expanding backdrop of heartbreak, fear, weirdness, and uncertainty, Mask Life has taken on new meaning. But while removing your mask may no longer reveal a newly glowing visage, it's still possible to view wearing a mask as a form of self care. Even better, it's a way to care for others around you.

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06.14.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Controversial Seinfeld Character Inspired One of Ethan Cook’s New Paintings

The depth of color in Ethan Cook’s work is entrancing: It draws you in and then proceeds to work its spell, stirring up meaning and feeling. Cook is known for his abstract “woven paintings” in which color isn’t applied at all but is part of the canvas itself. He uses a four-harness loom to hand weave fabric, which is then stitched together and stretched on bars. But recently, Cook has been exploring additional materials and techniques, evident in his latest exhibition Entities, at the Brussels location of Nino Mier.

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06.10.23

Saturday Selects

Week of June 5, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a set of very austere chairs, a contemporary take on Asian-influenced tableware, and a Barcelona apartment that’s reminiscent of a lemon meringue pie.

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06.09.23

Interiors

Curved Walls — and Color — Are French Architect Pauline Borgia’s Secret to Designing a Small Space

At Pauline Borgia’s childhood home in Corsica, every room was a different color. Growing up in this polychromatic environment, she quickly understood the power of color to create associations and identity, and now applies hues in a highly considered way — to focus a sightline, play with proportion, or create a trompe l’oeil effect — in projects by her Paris-based studio, Atelier Steve.

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06.08.23

How to Live With Objects

Almost Everything in Lisa Mayock and Jeff Halmos’s LA Home is Vintage or Handmade

Next up in our How to Live With Objects house tours: Lisa Mayock and Jeff Halmos, who live in a 1920s-era Spanish-style house in the Glendale neighborhood of Los Angeles. Before moving to LA with their two children, Mayock and Halmos met in New York City, as designers of the somewhat legendary early-aughts cult-favorite fashion brands Vena Cava and Shipley & Halmos. After a brief stint co-running the graphic T-shirt line Monogram, they’ve both branched out into new lines of work — Mayock as an interior designer and Halmos in commercial real estate development. We visited them on a brilliantly sunny day in the summer of 2021, and although you'll have to wait for the Instagram-only behind the scenes content to peep their incredible backyard and pool, take a tour through some of their favorite vintage and handmade treasures after the jump. 

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06.07.23

Fair Report

10 Projects We Loved from the 2023 Melbourne Design Week

If anyone here is in the business of bringing journalists to Australia for Melbourne Design Week, please allow this to be us throwing our official hat in the ring. Because there's no other design fair right now that's both so exciting and yet that we feel so removed from, having never even set foot on the continent. The 10 projects we're featuring here today absolutely crackle with energy and are sensitive about material reuse in a way we hope to see replicated from here on out in other design fairs; we'd love nothing more than to have seen them in person. But we'll settle for this: choosing the best of the best, and sending them our digital love.

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06.06.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

Inspired by a Children’s Poem, Giopato & Coombes’ Milan Exhibition Took Visitors on a Journey Through Memory

The children’s poem Il Cosario describes finding forgotten small items collected in pockets and looking at them with fresh eyes. Italian-British design duo Giopato & Coombes initially bought this poem for their son, but they kept a copy at their workstation because they found it so inspiring. When the time came, they used the process outlined in the poem's verses to guide 18 Pockets, an exhibition during the recent Milan Design Week that presented reimagined pieces from the pair’s back catalog and ideas that had yet to be realized, combined in multiple ways to help tell the designers’ personal stories. A journey through their own memories, you could say.

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06.05.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

Sarah Burns’s Collection for Marta is Dreamy But Humble — In Other Words, a Little Midwestern

As a designer, New York–based Sarah Burns has a remarkable fluidity when it comes to scale. She can go small and intricate, like the jewelry she creates as co-owner of the Chinatown shop Old Jewelry. But she’s also adept at working with larger, place-defining forms, as with the furniture collection in her first solo show, Prairie’s Edge, now running at Marta in LA through June 10.

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