Week of February 17, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an ironically-named (and perfectly executed) wine bar-cum-bookshop, an Upper East Side duplex with downtown credentials, and the third, tousled-'70s version of Casa Perfect LA (above).
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Meet The RISD Grad Pushing Pastel Pulp To The Forefront of Sustainable Design

Twenty-two-year-old Mike Ruiz-Serra grew up in Westchester, a great vantage point from which to peer in on New York’s constantly evolving design scene. And for his first collection as an industrial design graduate from RISD, he cites barely-older-than-him contemporaries like Zach Martin and Thomas Barger as people whose work helped him to understand the full potential of his favored medium: paper pulp.
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Cape Town Ceramicist Jade Paton’s Quirky Hand-Formed Vessels

Ceramic artist Jade Paton’s parents own a well-known florist in Cape Town where she’s spent many hours working, twisting bouquets, and building installations. It’s fitting then that she now uses her hands to make vessels that look particularly wonderful when filled with flowers. But don’t be mistaken — her ceramic pieces are equally inspired by her background in sculpture during her studies in fine art and would hold their own in a white cube. “I believe that the boundaries between art and design are more blurred than ever before,” she says. “I like that my pieces feel both functional and sculptural.”
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Week of February 10, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a design show in an empty mansion in Mexico City, a retrospective of immersive artworks by Lucio Fontana in L.A., and a new series of mirrors and screens by Bower (above).
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Inspired by Crop Circles, Grain’s Lands Rug is Early American Settler Chic

To create their textile pieces, the Seattle-based studio Grain used to travel all the way to Guatemala, working with artisans in the country where founders James and Chelsea Minola first met and fell in love. But over the past few years, the designers have begun sourcing producers a bit closer to home: Their Lands Rug, a custom version of which debuted at The Primary Essentials in Manhattan last week, is woven by a 30-year-old textile mill near their alma mater, RISD.
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Our Favorite Launches From Stockholm Design Week 2020

Some of our favorite launches from Stockholm Design Week include a duo of dream sofas — one soft and pillowy, one firm yet cozy — a lamp made from cast iron, a group of student furniture made from limestone, a curated apartment that beautifully mixed art and design, and a lamp from 1953 with — you guessed it — a ball base, in production for the first time ever.
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Muuto’s Ultra-Chubby Kink Vase and Tableau’s Art Florals Are a Match Made in Heaven

When American-born, Rotterdam-based designer Rachel Griffin of Earnest Studio launched her ceramic Kink Vase during New York Design Week two years ago, it became something of an instant icon. This, of course, was just as the appetite for so-called "chubby design" was reaching its frenzied peak, and the Kink, with its double-mouthed, binoculars-on-a-marshmallow-bender form was perfect fodder. Lucky for us, the vase was recently picked up by Muuto, where it will sell for just $200 and still be available in that cozy sky blue.
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2020 interior design trends

2020’s Biggest Design Trends Are All About Our Desire to Escape

We know that putting out a trend forecasting story in February is a bit like still saying "happy new year" to people, but hear us out: We've been thinking a LOT about where this latest trend cycle came from. And last week, when Yellowtrace wondered aloud why everything suddenly looks like the inside of a cave, it hit us — everything we've been noticing lately, particularly in interiors, has been focused around the idea of escape
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Week of February 5, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: hits from Zonamaco's art and design fairs, a pink concrete wonderland by David Adjaye in LA, and an entrée into beauty by one of the world's biggest fashion brands.
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Get Ready To Fall In Love With Caudex Studio, Brooklyn’s Haute Couturier Of Ceramics

Caudex Studio is something of a secret, if anything with a website and an Instagram account could be considered as such these days. Launched late last year by fledgling ceramicist Éloïse Larochelle (who cut her teeth in fashion design in Givenchy's atelier and—in case those cross-disciplinary bonafides don't suffice—had the brand's logo designed by a friend at M/M Paris), Caudex planters are one-of-a-kind, wheel-thrown and made in two pieces—a drainage-friendly top set on a glaze-lined base that collects water, "for optimal plant health."
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Sorry, Hygge Hive — Mattias Sellden Just Took Nordic Design Out Of Its Comfort Zone

For Swede Mattias Sellden, the first step towards making a name for himself was, for better or worse, admitting that he wanted to. “For me, even showing what I do was a hurdle. I still don’t have a website and I started my Instagram only in August of last year — three months after my graduate exhibition.” Sellden chalks this reticence up to the Nordic code of conduct known as Janteloven, which he describes as “the very Swedish notion not be a show-off.”
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Goblets Are Your New Kitchen Must-Have

In February of 2018, we were Google-searching glassware for another story when we stumbled upon a series of objects from the '50s that awoke in us an obsession for thick-stemmed wine glasses that we never knew we had: Kaj Franck's series of colorful goblets. Two years later, our obsession has only grown, and we think they're the thing to have on your table now.
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