09.10.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

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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09.09.21

Interiors

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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09.07.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

“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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09.03.21

Up and Coming

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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09.02.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

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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02.05.19

Sighted

You Need These New, Color-Blocked Goblets by Helen Levi

There's a ceremonial feel to the latest collection from Brooklyn-based ceramicist Helen Levi. First, there are the goblets — a type of stemware more often associated with medieval banquets or religious rituals, to which Levi gives a resolutely modern look by color-blocking and employing a pristine matte finish. Second are the jugs, which might look as though they'd been excavated from a silty river bed were it not for the delicate palette, ranging from stony buff to rose pink.

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09.01.21

What They Bought

The Vintage Furniture Dealer Whose Aesthetic Runs From Bauhaus to Beetlejuice

Gennaro Leone, who runs the vintage furniture shop Spazio Leone in London, is clearly devoted to the cult of '70s and '80s Italian design. But he’s also drawn to pieces that seem to exist in a dream-zone where Art Deco–meets-Postmodernism and Surrealist motifs, along with a hint of Delia Deetz (that's Catherine O’Hara’s sculptor stepmom in Beetlejuice, for anyone who needs a refresher). In the short time that Leone's been up and running, the dealer has developed an aesthetic that could even be described — as he himself puts it — as “WTF is this? I’m trying to find a balance between crazy shapes and comfortable things.

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08.30.21

Current Obsession

Revisiting the Czech Postmodernist Whose Unusual Chairs Are Suddenly Everywhere

The Czech designer Bořek Šípek was one of the heavyweights of design in the late 1980s and 1990s, creating postmodern furniture and objects that enchanted the international scene. But he failed to become a household name, and his work ultimately fell into oblivion. That, however, is suddenly changing: A new generation of designers, curators, and tastemakers is rediscovering Šípek’s designs and bringing his tribal and highly eclectic aesthetic to the forefront again.

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07.31.21

Saturday Selects

Week of July 26, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week is a bit different because in addition to our usual roll call of '80s-inspired interiors and incredible craft projects, we're featuring our favorite finds from this summer's design school degree shows, including hits from RISD, Beckmans, RCA, and the Kingston School of Art.

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07.30.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

The Designers on Our Radar After This Year’s Design Parade in Hyères and Toulon

As we hurtle towards the September make-up version of Salone del Mobile — which will mark the first major in-person design fair since COVID began, advisedly or not — we first wanted to turn our attention to the return of one of our favorite smaller fairs, the annual Design Parade in Hyères and Toulon from Villa Noailles in the south of France. As always, we're smitten with the competition format for these two festivals, which seems to unearth amazingly talented designers we've never heard of.

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07.29.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

This Exhibition Shows How Cranbrook Helped Pioneer the Cross-Disciplinary, Craft-Based, Experimental Design and Art of Today

Most people know the highlights of the Cranbrook Academy of Art’s storied 90-year history, from its campus by Eliel Saarinen to its role as a breeding ground for the stars of mid-century modernism. But in June, the school launched the results of a four-year deep-dive into its own history — in the form of a sprawling exhibition and a 600-page book, both called With Eyes Opened — that offer a much more nuanced view of Cranbrook’s game-changing influence. We spoke with curator Andrew Blauvelt about 6 artworks and objects by varied practitioners that were part of that narrative.

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07.28.21

Up and Coming

Lewis Kemmenoe’s Debut Collection Features One Very Of-the-Moment Material

“For as long as I remember I loved just making things,” says London-based designer Lewis Kemmenoe. “My parents told me that when I was eight, I begged them to let me go to art school, right there and then.” He may not have matriculated quite as early as he had hoped, but Kemmenoe eventually enrolled in Central Saint Martins to study Fine Art. Eighteen months ago, he began working on his first collection of furniture, a series of chairs, tables, shelving, and lighting in burl veneer, plywood, and timber — either left in its natural state or stained with linseed to highlight the grain.

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07.26.21

Sighted

With Prints Inspired By Art-Store Pen-Test Doodles, These Curtains Are ‘Free and Wild’

Sarah Illenberger has a talent for recontextualizing everyday items in ways that are deceptively simple, yet at the same time so clever that there's an irresistible kind of magic in it. The same is true for her new collaboration with Danish textile purveyor Kvadrat, a series of three vibrant curtain panels created by scanning the little pads of paper people test pens on in stationery stores — the unremarkable made remarkable, through little more than a flash of creative inspiration and a change in scale.

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