02.12.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

These Ceramic Lamps, Paired With Delicate Paper and Bamboo Shades, Are About to Be Everywhere

We first stumbled across Bennet Schlesinger's lamps on the Instagram of a friend. Perched atop two handmade ceramic bases were shades made from translucent paper sheets, stretched across a cambered latticework of bamboo strips. They were glowing and fresh and new, and we immediately fell in love. Now, the Southern California–based Schlesinger, who designs under the name Lightsong Exchange, is co-headlining an exhibition of his work at the new Los Angeles gallery Stanley’s.

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02.11.21

Q+A

Anastasia Komar’s New Leather Goods Nod to Everything from Karl Springer to Superstudio

The wavy line is everywhere. It's in the puddle-shaped mirrors that have become ubiquitous on Instagram; it's in the amoeba-shaped tables that have popped up in millennial interiors. Remember the scalloped trim on that Collectible booth last spring? (Related: Remember fairs?) And yet we're still seeing novel applications of a trope that of course dates way beyond even midcentury touchstones like Jean Royère and Karl Springer. The latest is on a series of crossbody bags, totes, and clutches by the Moscow-born, New York–based multi-disciplinarian Anastasia Komar, who designs under the studio name Forms.

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02.10.21

Q+A

Milanese Set Designer Elena Mora Has Perfected the Surreal

If you followed the now-defunct Icon Design Italy in its final few years, you would know exactly who Elena Mora is. The Milanese set designer and interior stylist’s cinematic spreads were always a highlight of the Italian design magazine. Recognizable for her lush use of color and irreverent bordering on surreal scenarios, Mora’s work is always so much more than just a product round-up.

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02.06.21

Saturday Selects

Week of February 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 dream sofa designed in homage to its 1970s forbears, a few Norwegian design icons reinterpreted in fashion, and an Yves Klein Blue house smack in the middle of Brooklyn.

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02.05.21

Interiors

A Los Angeles Natural Wine Store Inspired by French Midcentury Groceries

Earlier last month, a bright, cozy, and colorful new shop opened in Los Angeles's Atwater Village neighborhood. Called Wine & Eggs, the store — which sells natural wine and provisions, and in many ways reminds us of the LA version of Dimes Market — is the brainchild of Monica Navarro, owner of the beloved LA boutique Individual Medley (as well as a gem-focused wine store in the desert). For the interior, Navarro hired designer Adi Goodrich, in her first interiors project in Los Angeles.

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12.12.18

Fair Report

Our 30+ Favorite Finds from Design Miami 2018

For Design Miami, the way to announce itself as different from all other design fairs is to, well, embrace the Miami-ness of it all — whether that means an ultra-saturated backdrop (as with Atelier Courbet this year and Demisch Danant last year), an exhibition devoted exclusively to water fountains (Sabine Marcelis x Fendi), or, as with the Chris Wolston light for The Future Perfect at top of this post, an explosion of hyper-colorful flora and fauna.

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02.04.21

Sighted

While on Lockdown at the Barbican, This Duo Made Brutalist Furniture Out of Moving Boxes and Other Scraps

A Space's new Barbican collection is a series of mirrors, lights, and tables whose name references the famed London housing estate where the studio's founders spent the past year living and making it. Having moved in last May, they conceived the series as an homage to their new surroundings, then sculpted it out of the materials available to them during lockdown, including moving boxes, food containers, and plaster of Paris ordered online.

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02.03.21

Shopping

All the Coasters We Could Find for Protecting Your Tables and Making Your Cocktails Extra Photographable

This story came about, as many stories on this site do, because of something I needed. I recently upgraded to a vintage Borge Mogensen dining table, and while it certainly feels indestructible, I don't particularly want to test out that theory. But when I went looking for coasters to protest its beautiful surface, I was honestly surprised to see how few options there were.

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02.02.21

Graphic Design

Waka Waka Gets a New Identity, and Other Graphic Design Picks for February

In a new column, each month The Brand Identity will share with our readers a selection of the most interesting studios, packaging designs, and branding and identity projects featured recently on their site. This month: New branding for the LA studio Waka Waka, a chic identity for a moving image museum, colorful bottles for a Ukrainian soda line, and more.

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02.01.21

Interiors

Perhaps More People Would Want to Return to the Office If It Looked Like This

There's been copious hand-wringing since the pandemic began about how people have adjusted to working from home, how WFH might actually be preferable to returning to the office, and what it all means. We would venture to guess that more people would be willing to return to their offices if they looked like this, a new London interior by Note Design Studio for The Office Group.

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01.30.21

Saturday Selects

Week of January 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 funny lamp with cartoon hands, a new space for emerging design in Paris, and a collection of furniture by SU favorite EJR Barnes for a collector in London (above).

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01.28.21

Gift Guides

In Quarantine, Some of Our Favorite Products Are Hardly Products At All

Some of the more interesting submissions we've gotten lately have existed outside the boundaries of what we typically think of as a product. Number one amongst these is a series of vases by Dutch designer Willem van Hooff, which were commissioned as holiday gifts for the EDHV design studio and Dutch Invertuals teams in Eindhoven, each vase based on the personal characteristics of its recipient and meant as a way to honor each team member in this difficult year of working remotely.

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01.26.21

Current Obsession

Justin Morin’s Silk Draperies Reference Pop Culture and Natural Phenomena in Equal Measure

Justin Morin’s printed silk installations take many forms — some unfurl dramatically against an expansive gallery wall; others are cinched and pleated like couture; still others are knotted, tied, looped, bunched, gathered, or, simply hang listlessly like a flag. Morin’s specific visual vocabulary, developed over the course of a decade since he created his first printed silk work in 2011, proposes that anything and everything in our information-dense and visually overwrought world can be unraveled and represented in sensual, gradient silk.

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