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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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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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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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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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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Prediction: You’re Gonna Want Each One of These Abstract, Geometric Danish Rugs

Röd Studio specializes in rugs made with non-traditional materials, experimental forms, and a more conceptual idea of storytelling behind each composition. Their Assemblage collection, which employs materials like horse and goat hair to create a more three-dimensional work, was inspired by the visual identity of Marrakech, while their Face It pieces explore both the humanity and abstraction of masks.
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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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Note Design Studio office interior

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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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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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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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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In This Mexican Ceramicist’s Pottery, Traditional Clay Gets a Refined and Contextual Upgrade

Eugenia Díaz Peon, a Mexican ceramicist who prefers to go by the nickname of Uxi, discovered her calling not very long ago. As co-founder of the Yucatán-based brand Région, she began traveling in recent years to remote locations outside of her home base in Mérida, to learn from the traditional craftspeople who typically work far outside the city. There, she was particularly drawn to a clay known as “el barro de Ticul," or the mud of Ticul. Rough, dirty, and filled with impurities, the clay is like a terracotta, but with a more luminous color and texture.
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Week of January 18, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a color-blocked bungalow on the beach, a Norwegian furniture collection that marries ancient traditions and digital technologies, and a new series of "walkable art" from one of our favorite rug companies (above).
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