Six Norwegian Designers Explore Our New Normal

Organized by design collective Fold Oslo and featuring work by six emerging Norway-based designers, "The Ny Normal" isn’t so much a literal reaction to the pandemic, but rather a nudge towards a more thoughtful, local, and sustainable approach to how we can make and use things going forward.
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Week of September 13, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a high-flying furniture debut by Campbell-Rey, an immersive interior and new rug collection by Cold Picnic, and a poufy Lulu LaFortune sofa inspired by... Britney?
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Three New Collections in Metal That Get Creative With Industrial Parts

We recently noticed a fascination, shared among three up-and-coming designers from two different parts of the globe — Sebastian Kommer, Jinyeong Yeon, and Nice Workshop — with using off-the-shelf metal materials in new, more beautiful ways. The concept itself is nothing new, but it underscores just how much endless versatility can be found in industrial parts and profiles — and how they offer emerging designers access to industrial fabrication without the expensive factory tooling and MOQs.
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A Book on Chromophobia Inspired Estudio Persona’s Most Colorful Collection Yet

Born of an investigation of volumes and building principles and marking Estudio Persona's first foray into color, the pieces in their Connection Collection — such as the Block chair, a low-slung lounge upholstered in rust-colored mohair — are meant to elicit a new perspective on their surroundings. Of course, as soon as the collection was ready to be shipped across the country and shown, the country went on lockdown.
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50 Products We Loved at The 2021 Salone del Mobile

Last week we attended the 2021 Salone del Mobile fair — postponed to September this year because of the pandemic — and we're documenting our favorite finds in two stories, today and tomorrow. Today it's new releases by brands and studios, from a Muller Van Severen carpet to a Teklan kitchen.
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For a Show in the Former Home of a Sculptor, Designers Respond to His Works and Collection

When the British flamenco dancer and sculptor Ron Hitchins died, he left behind a small pink Victorian house in Hackney, London. For their first exhibition, Atelier LK — a newly formed interior design studio helmed by Lisa Jones and Ruby Kean — has taken over the home, leaving intact a curated selection of the artist's work and asking 36 contemporary artists and designers to respond to it.
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Cool Metallics and Skittle Colors Reign in This Sardinian Boutique by Gonzalez Haase

When we think of the Mediterranean island of Sardinia, certain colors come to mind: teal, for the brilliantly blue waters of the coast; terracotta for its lush buildings and native ceramics; and taupey brown for the nuraghi, a series of mysterious Bronze Age stone ruins shaped like beehives that dot the island. Gray, as a hue, definitively doesn't appear anywhere in that palette. And yet when speaking of what inspired their Porto Cervo interior for the fashion boutique Modes, the architects Gonzalez Haase pay homage to the non-color.
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“If Books Could Talk, What Furniture Would They Ask You to Make For Them?”

The design world sprang almost alarmingly fast back into action this week in Milan, but before that, one of the quieter — and cuter — exhibitions to appear on our radar was by the peripatetic Norwegian design collective Pyton. Together with the artist-run publishing project Heavy Books, Pyton's founders Tron Meyer, Henrik Ødegaard and Richard Øiestad created a small collection of new works to show at Galleri Golsa in Oslo. For the exhibition, Christian Tunge, the artist behind Heavy Books, gave several limited editions from his publishing house to the designers and asked: “If books could talk, what furniture would they ask you to make for them?”
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This Seeded Glass Coffee Table is the Star of Courtney Applebaum’s New Furniture Collection

Inspired by an eclectic range of periods and sources — from the ancient world to Art Deco, antiques to high design — interior designer Courtney Applebaum rarely sources contemporary pieces for her interiors. “We really only use vintage. Everything else, we make,” says Applebaum. So, it only made sense for the designer to finally create her first namesake furniture collection: a series of terracotta and raffia sconces, terracotta lamps, and a glass coffee table, with more pieces on the way.
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For His New Collab With Kvadrat, Artist Danh Vo Wrapped an Entire House in a Rediscovered Nanna Ditzel Textile

Kvadrat’s newest fabric release, Sisu, doesn’t look particularly remarkable in photos at first glance. A thick wool woven in 16 different two-color pairings, it closely resembles its cousin, Hallingdal, the best-selling textile designed in the 1960s by Danish icon Nanna Ditzel. But when we learned the full story behind its discovery and development — in collaboration with the artist Danh Vo — it was so interesting we didn’t even know where to begin telling it.
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