11.03.20

Up and Coming

In Lucas Morten’s Hands, Scandinavian Design Becomes Something Much Darker

Swedish designer Lucas Morten’s Klot chair is sculpted from Styrofoam and his Skal vases are formed from stiffened burlap cloth. These improbable materials are the result of his general curiosity about life and his constant search for beauty. “The whole philosophy behind my objects revolves around breaking the Swedish heritage of ‘functionality first’,” he says. “I’m really inspired by the total beauty that can be found beyond practical aspects and interested in what that kind of beauty means to the human being.”
More
10.31.20

Saturday Selects

Week of October 26, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a new Instagram auction destination, a contemporary update on Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and an extremely chic razor, for anyone still interested in grooming at this point in 2020.
More
10.30.20

Excerpt: Exhibition

With Degree Shows Cancelled, A Stockholm Museum Offers Students the Chance to Show Their Work

With the pandemic in mind, the Stockholm-based Möbeldesignmuseum — which was founded in February 2018 by collectors and design world insiders Kersti Sandin and Lars Bülow — decided to create a platform for final year students from Beckmans, HDK-Valand, Konstfack and Malmstens. Called Ex-Works, the exhibition features work by 23 designers from the four schools, and the curated works are uniformly strong.
More
07.16.19

Excerpt: Exhibition

The 2019 Design Parade Festival Is a Total Visual Overload — In the Best Possible Way

If you've ever looked closely at coverage of the annual Design Parade festival in France, we're guessing that like us, your reaction was probably a mixture of bafflement and awe. How do they manage to get so many new objects and new ideas in one (tiny) place, not to mention so many balls-to-the-wall interiors with what appear to be no-expense-spared, move-in-tomorrow production values? Design Parade is practically on the level of the Milan Furniture Fair in terms of the volume of visual inspiration it provides — check out our sprawling overview of 2019's show here.
More
10.27.20

Interiors

This Spanish Studio Just Took the Checker Craze to the Next Level

In Masquespacio's interior for La Sastreria restaurant in Valencia, nearly every square inch of the bar area is covered in a different variation of our biggest trend prediction of the year — checkers — from your standard monochromatic Vans grid to various multicolored takes on the classic harlequin pattern. While it may seem at first like an attempt to become some kind of post-COVID Instagram Influencer pilgrimage, though, the design actually had a completely unrelated objective.
More
10.26.20

Excerpt: Exhibition

In This Banner Year for Outdoor Art, Anders Ruhwald’s IMA Garden Installation is a Standout Favorite

At Newfields, the gardens that surround the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Detroit-based ceramicist Anders Herwald Ruhwald installed an exhibition of 10 large-scale ceramic works. Titled Century Garden, the sculptures — many of which are meant to hold plants — were tucked into the wilder, more overgrown parts of the garden; though the ceramic surfaces appeared almost tie-dyed, mottled as they were with yellows and blues, tangerine oranges and greens, they were camouflaged amongst the flowers and native plants, creating an uncanny effect.
More
10.24.20

Saturday Selects

Week of October 19, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: furniture inspired by robots, our favorites from the 2020 Design Academy Eindhoven graduate shows, and a carpeted chair by Max Lamb that's apropos for COVID life.
More
DIY papier mache quarantine
10.23.20

Sighted

The Texas Jeweler Plucking Sculptures from the Recycling Bin

Early in quarantine, way back in April, you couldn't open Instagram without running into a designer teaching a papier-mâché tutorial. Down in Austin, Texas, Sarah Murphy of the jewelry brand Hey Murphy caught the bug, like many of us did, and began making pieces from what she calls "quarantine trash" as a creative distraction and release while she watched TV and drank wine (relatable). "The point was to not create any more waste, so they are mostly made from the contents of our recycling bin," Murphy says.
More
10.22.20

Up and Coming

This Swiss Designer’s Unfussy Furniture is Inspired By the Sunshine of His New Spanish Home

When Antonius Dreier moved from Switzerland to Madrid just over a year ago, the light and lifestyle in the Spanish city inspired a debut furniture collection from Studio Drei that’s most at home in the spots where the sunshine spills inside. “I think the move has had a great impact on my pieces,” he says. “The culture of this country and its craftwork are very present in my first catalogue.”
More
Simone Bodmer-Turner ceramics
10.20.20

Studio Visit

Simone Bodmer-Turner’s New Brooklyn Studio is Like a Ceramic Sculpture Come to Life

Simone Bodmer-Turner's most recent project, a build-out of her Brooklyn studio, explodes the scale of her ceramic forms. Taking over the doorway and an entire wall adjacent to the former factory’s bright loft windows, she installed a bench, desk, and shelving in textured white gypsum — what she describes as an homage to the Mediterranean-influenced organic architects that have shaped her ceramics practice thus far.
More