02.26.23

Saturday Selects

Week of February 20, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: megalithic sculptures carved from storm-felled trees, lamps inspired by summer siestas, latex skirt sculptures, and a series of delicately decorated ceramics that are unexpectedly influenced by Soviet propaganda. 
More
02.22.23

Fair Report

All the Best Art — and Design — We Saw at the 2023 Frieze Week in Los Angeles

Los Angeles is certainly not the most social town — compared to New York, where design and art events happen nightly and, as a professional, you could pretty much get by never paying for a glass of wine, LA's calendar can't really compete. Which is why things feel so much more exciting when Frieze comes to town each February, and suddenly your calendar fills up and you're running into interesting people left and right, multiple times a day. For those of us who crave creative stimulation, it's a boon, the time of year when galleries, stores, and makers sync up to showcase new works and new ideas. See (almost) everything we saw after the jump.
More
02.18.23

Saturday Selects

Week of February 13, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the hits from Zona Maco, an exhibition that's meant to recall an imaginary speakeasy by the sea, and our favorite new candy-like glass goblets, by the Franco-Russian designer Alissa Volchkova.
More
02.16.23

Fair Report

The Best of Stockholm Design Week 2023, Part II: The Fair and Around Town

Some of the things I loved at this year's fair included the Frama installation inside Konstnarsbaren, a 1930s-era bar with murals lining the wall that I dubbed "the Swedish Bemelmans;" a visit to Hem's new studio, decked out in four of my favorite colors, cobalt, highlighter yellow, powder blue, and pink; a packed-house fried-chicken party at Note Design Studio; a curving emerald green chair made from 3-D printed recycled fishing nets by a collective called the Interesting Times Gang; a beautiful seating system for Offecct by the late designer Pauline Deltour; a presentation by Beckmans College of Design that paired students with Sweden's leading furniture companies; and Alvsjo Gard, the new platform for experimental design that we wrote about yesterday. Check out the rest of our favorites after the jump!
More
02.15.23

Fair Report

The Best of Stockholm Design Week 2023, Part I: Alvsjo Gard

After a three-year COVID hiatus, Stockholm Design Week returned in full force last week. And while we'll be covering the fair and its happenings around town tomorrow, today we're putting the spotlight on a new exhibition that also happened to be our favorite. Called Älvsjö Gärd, it was a showcase of experimental, research-driven, and collectible design, set across 13 rooms in one of the oldest manors in Stockholm — basically Sight Unseen catnip.
More
02.10.22

Up and Coming

The Former Gucci Model Turned Textile Designer Making Waves in London

British designer Tom Atton Moore creates tactile rugs inspired by painterly abstraction. On view through February 20 at BC in Los Angeles, Moore's new collection was inspired by the patterns he observed in the swirling chemicals on the surface of a countryside pond during the pandemic lockdown. We recently chatted with the former high-fashion model and illustration graduate to gain insight into his material world and self-taught design process, which began with the purchase of a tufting gun from eBay and watching how-to videos on YouTube. 
More
02.14.23

Sighted

A Color-Blocked Exhibition By the Swedish Queen of Color

The theme of this year's FORMEX fair was "Color Vibes," and who better to expound on that than Tekla Severin, the Swedish designer who has built both her career and her wardrobe on an extraordinary sensitivity to color. In a 2,500-square-foot space at the entrance to the fair, Severin curated 200 products from 400 different exhibitors; Severin's genius lies in the fact that it doesn't read like a curation of product at all but rather like a perfect piece of set design or a real-life interior.
More
02.07.23

Up and Coming

The Istanbul-Based Animate Objects Makes Statement Objects, With a Surrealist Touch

We often talk about objects that have a life of their own, that shape the space around them and affect the atmosphere and tone of a room. The limited-edition décor and collectible furniture from Animate Objects – an apt name – not only seem to live and breathe, like characters in a story, but they emote, they perform. Zeynep Satik, an Istanbul-based designer, launched Animate Objects a few months ago, with the idea of creating “theatrical environments.” Think statement pieces, with a Surrealist touch, that are as functional as they are distinctive and playfully attention-getting.
More
02.06.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

Alekos Fassianos’ Hellenic Designs Offer a Fanciful Take on Ancient Greece 

The simplicity of Greek classical and folk art was an eternal muse for the late artist Alekos Fassianos. Best known for his paintings, which blend ancient iconography and contemporary scenes in vibrant swashes of blue, red, and gold, his overtly Hellenic influences and signature palette also gave birth to a wide range of furniture designs. Carwan Gallery in Athens is presenting the first retrospective of these pieces, following the artist's death last year, and they’re just as transportive and delightful as his 2D works.
More
02.04.23

Saturday Selects

Week of January 30, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, Technicolor 3D-printed ceramics, a Frank Lloyd Wright reissue we’d work overtime for, and a furniture collection that defies gravity.
More
Studiopepe rugs Muuto
02.02.23

Sighted

Studiopepe’s New Rugs for Muuto Were Inspired by 1960s-Style Land Art

Muuto is such a staple of the Scandinavian design set that it’s hard to believe the Danish company is only now releasing its first tufted rug collection. A new collaboration with Milan-based duo Studiopepe is exactly what we’d hoped for from both. Using the “tension" between Scandinavian and Italian design as a starting point, studio founders Arianna Lelli Mami and Chiara Di Pinto combined common features of both: high-quality materials, graphic shapes, and simple yet impactful gestures, which in this instance meant filleting one of the rug’s four corners.
More
02.01.23

How to Live With Objects

How These Vintage Dealers Restyle Their Jersey City Home on the Regular

When we first encountered Joey Meyers and Mark Baehser, it was online, via their vintage shop Ball & Claw — since renamed Unnecessary Projects — which had taken a place in the sprawling North Brooklyn vintage empire Dobbin St. Co-op. We assumed the two were old-hat dealers. But, as we discovered when we approached them about shooting their Jersey City Victorian home for our book, How to Live With Objects, it turns out they only entered the game a few years ago, out of love but also out of necessity: Meyers had taken to constantly cycling furniture in and out of their home, and they needed an outlet to offload the amazing finds that didn't quite work with their own space.
More
01.30.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

In a Philippe Starck Retrospective, The Designer’s Early Work Reads As Both Vintage and Prescient

Before Philippe Starck became a mega-famous household name, producing everything from countertop juicers to opulent hotel lobbies and Bond-villain yachts, the French designer conceived of Postmodern furniture that feels distinctly of its time yet continues to fascinate and compel us. Starck’s work from the late '70s and '80s is now getting its first retrospective at the Ketabi Bourdet gallery in Paris. In a way, it’s the next step in the ongoing re-evaluation of designs from that era and a continuation of the conversation the gallery opened up last year with an exhibition of the visionary Italian designer Paolo Pallucco.  
More