11.14.21

Saturday Selects

Week of November 8, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: two blockbuster exhibitions in Athens by Philippe Malouin and Sigve Knutson, the first Boy Smells store in LA, and the shelving unit of our dreams (above) by Barbora Žilinskaité.
More
11.11.21

Shopping

Yes, Watches and Clocks Are Still a Thing — Here Are 50 of Our Favorite Designs, Sourced on eBay

By all reasonable logic, watches and clocks should have gone the way of the fax machine, or the VCR. Yet luxury watch sales are at an all-time high, and designers continue to release new wall and table clocks as if the past 20 years never happened. We love coming across amazing watches and clocks when we're shopping, especially for vintage, so we decided to devote a post to cataloguing our favorite examples, sourced from one of our favorite shopping platforms, eBay — which happens to be ground zero for watch lovers.
More
11.10.21

Up and Coming

This Belgian Designer’s Color-Blocked Kitchens Channel the De Stijl Movement

“My first study was the preservation of paintings,” Dries Otten tells us over the phone from his home in Antwerp, Belgium. “But I decided it was too boring — your job is only appreciated when it's invisible!” Since hanging up his white gloves, though, Otten’s work has been impossible to ignore — bright, color-blocked interiors and furniture that set him apart from the neutral-obsessed minimalists that dominate contemporary Belgian design.
More
11.09.21

Q+A

Meet the Swedish Brand Championing “Bold Minimalism” With Rugs That Are Stylish, but Subtle

When Liza Laserow-Berglund, her husband Fabian Berglund, and his brother Felix Berglund decided to start a business together, the biggest thing they had in common was Sweden, and their desire to share some part of their native country’s vibe with the rest of the world. When they realized that rugs played a huge part in every Swede’s life, they founded Nordic Knots, a rug brand aimed at spreading the Scandinavian design gospel. Their goal? A highly curated brand offering mid-range rugs with a distinct point of view — but not one loud enough to overwhelm a room.
More
11.07.21

Saturday Selects

Week of November 1, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a new online ceramics marketplace, a Texas-based studio working in wood, and a Barcelona apartment with a seriously enviable copper-and-green bathroom situation.
More
06.27.19

Sighted

The Los Angeles Design Scene Has Officially Hit Its Stride

From a giant Block Shop mural to the now annual Hem Fest to Sarah Ellison's launch at Hawkins New York to Intro/LA — whose showcase we're featuring here today — the LA Design Festival and its surrounding events looked like a crazy amount of fun, as we well as a serious display of how far the LA design scene has come in terms of both community and cohesion.
More
11.04.21

Travel

How Two Sisters Turned Their Childhood Home in Mallorca Into an Artist’s Residency and Coveted Airbnb

Claudia del Olmo and her older sister Isabella got to grow up in a richly decorated villa in Mallorca, playing in the garden and watching their mother host countless parties and dinners. "It was always really magical," she says. So much so that as adults, the sisters wanted to recreate that magic, first channeling their own gift for hosting into a dinner series in London, and ultimately reclaiming their childhood home for themselves, transforming it into an events space, artist's residency, and Airbnb property called Casa Balandra.
More
11.03.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

Jonathan Muecke’s New Works Are a Familiar Enigma

Jonathan Muecke doesn't seem particularly interested in siting his work on the spectrum between design, art, and architecture, so we won't do it for him either. But the interesting thing about his new works for Volume Gallery is that they're described in the exhibition materials as "unknowable" but also "open to ongoing interpretation" — which, in some paradoxical way, makes them more knowable?
More
11.02.21

Sighted

A Tacchini Reissue Proves Tobia Scarpa’s Very First Chair Is Still One of His Best

As a designer, you may have been taught to always explore beyond your initial hunch — that, not unlike the "bad pancake" theory of dating, your first idea will never be your best. And yet history offers a wealth of exceptions to that rule, including Tobia Scarpa's iconic 1959 Pigreco chair, the first furniture piece he ever designed that, having recently been reissued by Tacchini, endures to this day.
More
10.30.21

Saturday Selects

Week of October 25, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a vacation home in Greece made from repurposed Styrofoam, a furniture series in colorful onyx, and the prettiest hand-blown borosilicate bong.
More
10.28.21

Q+A

Lighting Designer Lukas Peet on Balancing the Sculptural and the Saleable

Lukas Peet's first commercially successful lighting design — and the one that brought him to our attention way back in 2011 — looked like diamond wedding band that had been stretched into a three-foot-long oval tube. An arch of shiny gold at the top, flowing into a glowing strip of LEDs nestled inside the contoured glass, his Rudi light was inspired by his father, a jeweler. That light's success was enough to convince Peet that lighting might be the most interesting path for him to follow in design, and with his fellow Vancouver-based creatives, Caine Heintzman and Matt Davis, Peet co-founded the commercial and residential lighting manufacturer and studio ANDlight.
More
Nick Pourfard furniture
10.26.21

Up and Coming

Nick Pourfard, the Guitar-Maker Turned Furniture Designer On the Rise

Skateboarding gave Nick Pourfard his foundation in design. Building ramps and obstacles for his friends provided an early education in how to put materials together effectively, and old skateboard decks are what he’s used to construct the body of the guitars he’s been producing since 2014. Recently, this San Diego–based luthier (maker of stringed instruments) has moved into furnishings, bringing his meticulous skills and try-it-and-see approach with him.
More