04.13.22

Sighted

Fiona Lynch’s New Furniture Collection References Everything from Rudolf Schindler to the Ace Hotel Aesthetic

Melbourne-based interior designer Fiona Lynch's first furniture collection was spun out of her own interior design for the new Ace Hotel Sydney, which opens later next month. Before coming up with her ideas for the hotel’s rooftop restaurant spaces, Lynch traveled to New York City and Los Angeles as a kind of “study tour” of American design, visiting and drawing inspiration from the Schindler house, Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock, and the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in New York.

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04.12.22

Q+A

Aaron Poritz’s Henry Moore–Inspired Sculptural Wood Furniture is Next Level

Aaron Poritz's latest furniture collection — Big Woods, currently on show at Cristina Grajales Gallery in New York City — is both a fond look back at his childhood spent in the forests of Massachusetts, and an evolution of years spent working with, learning about, and appreciating the material for its visual, tactile, and workable qualities. His odyssey began in Nicaragua in 2012, where a chance encounter with an exporter of hurricane-felled trees resulted in the creation of his first range of wooden furniture. Focused on joinery techniques and traditional Danish shapes, and informed by his background in architecture, however, the designer’s initial work is miles apart the Henry Moore-influenced soft curves, organic shapes, and bulbous protrusions of the sculptural designs he’s currently exhibiting. 

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04.11.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Show Highlights the Appealingly Messy Side of Contemporary Ceramics

Closing in Barcelona this week is an exhibition that celebrates some of the bigger trends in contemporary ceramics these days — namely bright, drippy glazes; lumpy, organic forms; and raw, tactile, fissured surfaces. Presented by Side Gallery, “Exposed Material” is an overview of work by four artists who span several generations and hail from places ranging from America to Auckland, New Zealand.

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04.09.22

Saturday Selects

Week of April 4, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, dinner party hosting as an extreme sport, exquisite new vessels by Shio Kusaka, and an excellent new exhibition exclusively focused on female and nonbinary woodworkers. 

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04.07.22

Q+A

This Housewares Brand Thinks the Future of Design Lies in Uniting 3D Printing With Contemporary Talents — and Traditional Artisans

In recent years, 3D printing technology has finally started to come into its own, making the dream of an on-demand manufacturing industry — one that yields products people might actually want — feel closer at hand than ever. That's the realization that inspired cousins Ismail and Adnane Tazi, who founded the Parisian housewares brand Trame in early 2020, to rethink their entire approach to production just two years later, culminating in the launch of their new Alhambra.gcode collection.

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06.25.19

Interiors

Oscar Piccolo’s London Home Is a Perfect Reflection of His Creative Approach

The first time we saw photos of Sicilian-born, London-based designer Oscar Piccolo's home, featured on The Modern House, we had to chuckle — it's not every day you find a guy whose name means "small" in his native Italian living in a cozy one-room flat in London. But the second time we saw it featured, on Architectural Digest's Clever site last week, where our very own writer Zoe Sessums described how Piccolo has thoughtfully transformed the space over the past three years, we began to notice all the ways in which his home suits him perfectly in more than just name.

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04.06.22

Up and Coming

Introducing Manon Steyaert, the French Artist Making Plastics Look Pretty

By now, you might be aware that latex is having a bit of a moment in the fashion world. But have you ever seen sheets of the stuff applied to — or, more specifically, becoming — the canvas? We hadn't, or at least we hadn't seen instances where it was not only used but was in fact the main event, which is precisely why we found the work of Paris-born, UK-based artist Manon Steyaert so interesting.

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04.05.22

Sighted

Theoreme Editions’ New Collection Features Mirror, Metallics, and a Hint of Mint

Named after a 1968 movie by Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Paris-based brand Theoreme Editions describes its curatorial approach as embodying the same “fetish for form” and penchant for storytelling through art as Pasolini's radical film did. After presenting their debut collection of furniture, which we spotted during Milan Design Week in 2019 as well as at the 2020 Collectible Design Fair, founders David Giroire and Jérôme Bazzocchi invited 10 new French designers to collaborate with artisans across Europe. Intended as a continuity of the first, Collection 02 keeps a sculptural and poetic thread running through a range of numbered and limited editions.

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04.02.22

Saturday Selects

Week of March 28, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a new limited-edition program by Hem brings three of our favorite Swedish talents into the fold, a megastar mass-market designer creates marbleized housewares, and the checkerboard trend takes on an oh-so-British archetype — the toast rack. 

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04.01.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

In His First Gallery Show, Ryan Preciado Combines His Love of Wood, the 80s, and High-Gloss Finishes

L.A. designer Ryan Preciado traffics heavily in nostalgia, particularly for his own Cali upbringing: "When I was a kid, my grandpa would give me five bucks to buff and polish his cars; I bet that’s why I’m attracted to the glossy finish," he told us back in 2019. He also cited his grandmother's garden chairs, and his uncle's car-show habit, as formative design influences. All of those influences were on display in his first gallery show, A Cliff to Climb, at Canada gallery in New York earlier this month — including via a new, ultra-polished green cabinet that he created at his friend’s autobody shop. 

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03.30.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

Nathalie du Pasquier is So Much More Than the Poster Girl for Memphis Design

When a return to Memphis became the defining design trend back in 2014, a few of the movement's original members flew to the forefront of discourse once again, among them Peter Shire, Ettore Sottsass, and Nathalie du Pasquier, whose exuberant patterning became a kind of shorthand for cool around that time. (If you came home from Milan in 2014 without an NDP Wrong for Hay tote bag, were you even there?) But while Du Pasquier became pigeon-holed for that kind of blocky, frazzled look (remember when she designed for American Apparel?!), she's always been so much more than that, and the full fruits of her output as an artist are on view this month at an exhibition called "Speed Limit" at Anton Kern Gallery in New York.

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03.28.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

These Fashion Designers Made Their Name Reinventing the Uniform. Now They’ve Turned Their Eye to Furniture

One of the more poignant collections to come out of lockdown was on view earlier this month at Nilufar Depot in Milan. Called "Scarpette and Carolino," the exhibition — conceived by the Danish-Italian duo OLDER, aka Letizia Caramia and Morten Thuesen — featured two pieces of design dreamed up during a period of pandemic isolation spent at Caramia’s father’s studio in Pietrasanta, on the seaside edge of Tuscany. “As lockdown isolation is a lonely affair, our idea was to create a small series of friends to bring us company and warmth," say the founders.

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03.26.22

Saturday Selects

Week of March 21, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a proliferation of interesting work out of Melbourne Design Week, a new co-working space is Brussels whose furniture looks like the above, and a quirky, corky mirror.

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