10.24.23

Fair Report

Move Over, Milan: This Naples-Based Fair Is Providing Young Designers a Prominent Platform

Milan’s Salone del Mobile might be the largest and best-known design event in Italy, but it’s by no means the be-all and end-all of the country’s creative scene. Case in point: EDIT Napoli, which held its fifth edition over three days at the beginning of October. Curated by Emilia Petruccelli and Domitilla Dardi, the design fair took place within the recently renovated cloisters, atriums and frescoed rooms of the Archivio di Stato di Napoli, the city’s historic State Archives building. There were several gems from emerging European talents, who have a better chance to shine at a smaller, more intimate fair like this one. Here are our picks from Naples.

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10.23.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Exhibition of Black Designers Explores the Role Aesthetics Play in Social, Economic, and Racial Justice Efforts

In 2017, Little Wing Lee of Brooklyn’s Studio & Projects founded Black Folks in Design, an international network for Black design across disciplines: interiors, architecture, fashion, graphic design, and more. BFiD was ostensibly founded in order to foster community but Lee's aims also go way beyond that, based on the idea that design and aesthetics aren’t simply a luxury but part of everyday life — that our environments shape us — and therefore play a role in social, economic, and racial justice efforts. Last year, Lee curated Spotlight I, an inaugural showcase of Black designers at the Ace Hotel in Brooklyn. Now the collective’s Spotlight II is up at the Verso gallery in Tribeca, with pieces that reflect and incorporate traditions – cultural, familial, stylistic – while also looking forward.

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10.22.23

Saturday Selects

Week of October 16, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a bucolic design exhibition hosted on a farm in Germany, mesmerizing wood and aluminum furniture, a new furniture collection featuring four buzzy New York designers, and chairs upholstered with a patchwork of reclaimed hospital sheets. 

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10.19.23

Interiors

The Latest Interior We’re Coveting is… a Film Production Office?

We've been thinking a lot lately about the flattening of visual culture and what gets lost when everything looks the same. In design, this is most prevalent in furniture and small goods like ceramics, but we have begun to notice a crushing sameness in interiors as well, with each new office or co-working space aspiring to look like the ground floor of a Brooklyn brownstone or a Parisian flat. Which is why we thought it might be useful to analyze the latest project by New York–based studio Civilian, which, despite featuring many pieces that I'd like to have in my own home, somehow avoids these pitfalls and still firmly reads "office." The space is a multifunctional home base for a documentary production company called Sandbox Films, and what we actually love about this project is how it walks right up to the line between public and private space without crossing it. Let's go over the building blocks.

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10.17.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

EJR Barnes On Cast Glass, Instagram, “Freaky Stuff,” and His Excellent New Show at Emma Scully Gallery

Elliot Barnes’s work is full of historical references and subtle echoes that are at once familiar but hard to pin down. It’s not so much an expression of nostalgia as it is a longing for a time and place that never actually existed. In his work, Barnes messes with temporality, giving shape to things that feel anachronistic or out of time — and that are both sophisticated and a little mischievous. In his first solo show, A Room on East 79th Street at the Emma Scully Gallery in New York, the self-taught designer has created a dreamscape in the form of a living room.

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10.03.22

Shopping

Add Color to Your Space With Our New Collection of Gallery-Level — Yet Accessible — Art

In our forthcoming book, we talk a lot about how easy and rewarding it is to build a collection of great objects that add texture and personality to your interior. What's always been so much harder is building a collection of great art. That's why we were so excited to discover the David Zwirner–backed online art marketplace Platform last November, which lets anyone purchase high-end works by respected artists for relatively accessible prices, and with just the click of a button. A year later, we've partnered with the site to create our own collection of Sight Unseen–approved artworks that will instantly make your space more colorful and more visually interesting — most of which are under $5k.

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10.16.23

Interiors

A Fictional Graphic Designer Was the Muse for This São Paulo Exhibition

“Who lives in this house?” you might be wondering after seeing these images of a stainless-steel Mario Botta sofa sitting upon a high-pile wool rug, or two steel-wrapped, camel-colored Kazuhide Takahama chairs. Its occupant would certainly be lauded for having great taste — if only they existed IRL. The space was actually designed for a fictional character, by a trio of Brazilian creative forces who teamed up to produce an exhibition that celebrates the country’s architecture, design, and art of the mid-20th century, and uses its modernist flavors to inform new works that are also on show.

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10.14.23

Saturday Selects

Week of October 9, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Two new design-led bakeries — aka Modernist paeans to carbs — an expansive ceramic furniture exhibition by Cody Hoyt, and a new, modular furniture collection inspired by the book Soviet Bus Stops of Georgia.

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10.12.23

Shopping

Where Are All the Cool, Designer-Made Beds? Here Are 48 Options to Kickstart Your Search

It's easy to understand why beds aren't a typology that's attempted by most designers; there are pain points at nearly every step in the process. Beds are hard to ship, they're hard to store, and they're limited in their form. Plus, beds are expensive, big-ticket items that only get purchased once in a blue moon. Luckily, we're sensing a shift in the cosmos. Earlier this year, we were introduced to the Copenhagen-based brand ReFramed, whose colorful, easy-to-ship frame is made from 82% post-consumer recycled aluminum and comes with the option to purchase matching headboards and bedside tables; they'll start shipping to the US later this year. And one of our favorite emerging designers, Ben Willett, says he has at least four bed designs in the works. Until then, whether you're spec'ing for a project or buying for your own home, here are 52 options to kickstart your search.

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10.10.23

Up and Coming

This Graphic Designer–Turned–Cabinetmaker’s Dyed-Wood Furniture is, Well, To Die For

Paris-based designer Jonathan Cohen has been working in wood for only a couple of years. Initially trained as a graphic designer, his eye for flat compositions naturally transferred into the three-dimensional world of furniture, with his creations quickly catching the eye of top architects and designers and local galleries. “When you have knowledge of good proportion, shape, and balance, you can design a letter or furniture,” Cohen says. “For me, it’s almost the same.” What lends the designer's work a certain je ne sais quoi, however, is the unique dye treatment he uses, applied in various techniques to bring out the grain and texture of the wood — forming patterns reminiscent of those created by Memphis artist Nathalie du Pasquier. 

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10.07.23

Saturday Selects

Week of September 24, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a wavy wooden console, an exhibition showcasing modernly made Baroque-style furnishings. and the recently reopened Bottega Veneta Paris flagship store.

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10.05.23

Travel

Beata Heuman Made Her Name Designing Colorfully Maximalist Interiors. Now She’s Bringing That Same Aesthetic to a Chic Parisian Hotel.

The Swedish-born, London-based designer Beata Heuman is known for bringing character and charm to her interiors. And she does just that with her first hotel project: Hôtel de la Boétie, which opened in September, the sixth Parisian space from design-forward French hotel group Touriste. For this collaboration, Heuman and her studio worked with the 19th-century architecture of the building — located in rue de la Boétie in the eighth arrondissement, not too far from the Champs-Élysées — and incorporated existing elements such as the marble entrance, elevator, and staircase of the 40-room property. Keeping the design relatively simple, using a limited palette, natural woods, and stainless steel and brass, Heuman has created the kind of heightened atmosphere you can have in spaces that are meant to be traveled through and not necessarily lived in all the time. “We can treat it a bit like a stage set, which is not the approach I would take when it comes to someone’s home,” says Heuman.

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10.04.23

Sighted

Each Rug in the Latest Collection from Cc-Tapis Looks Like a Portal to Somewhere Else

Made of hand-knotted Himalayan wool at the cc-tapis atelier in Nepal, the Memento collection by Yabu Pushelberg features a trio of undyed, tone-on-tone variations in off-kilter geometries. There are arches that could be doorways; squares, trapezoids, and circles that could be windows; portals to somewhere else. Or not. These designs are not so much figurative as suggestive. Like a fleeting memory that takes you out of the present but can’t exactly put you in the past.

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