Week of October 7, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, and more from the past seven days. This week: a new entrant into the vintage velvet couch Hall of Fame, a designer killing it with kids' room decor, and an exhibition featuring a who's who of Canadian designers.
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A Spanish Architect’s Wildly Colorful Renovation, Inspired By Disco and Nightclubs

Mario Montesinos Marco is just one year out of architecture school, but this marks already the second time we've featured his interiors, and this one's a doozy: For the renovation of a friend's apartment in Valencia's Ruzafa neighborhood, the Spanish architect designed most of the furniture and lighting according to the same principle that drove his art school thesis — "disco space."
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This Dutch Artist’s Warped Archival Photos Are the Break From Reality We Need Right Now

When I first discovered the Dutch artist Koen Hauser, and his Skulptura series in particular, I viewed his work as an escape — moments of disrupted reality, primarily in the form of warps and swirls edited into photos of artworks and artifacts taken from old books and museum archives. And I liked it not only because it was weird and disorienting, but because I had rarely seen that kind of technique deployed to such beautiful effect. Yet there's actually more going on in Hauser's images.
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Kim Bartelt’s Pastel Paper “Paintings” Are the Bedrock of Her Berlin Home

When Kim Bartelt was an art student at Parsons, and then a young set designer in New York, she would often collect the colored tissue paper that comes with clothing purchases from small boutiques, or wrapped around samples when calling in pieces for a photoshoot. The papers sat for years around her apartment in a giant Paul Smith bag — first in New York, then back home in Berlin — before eventually becoming the abstract "painting" that would become the basis for a body of work she's been creating for more than half a decade.
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Why Not Let a Room Divider Be the Biggest Statement in Your Home?

Over the years, room dividers have been used as privacy screens and dressing rooms, as freestanding walls to divide loftlike apartments, as backdrops for a tea ceremonies, and so much more. But what if we just decided that room dividers didn't need to be anything but themselves? That seems to be the thinking behind the latest crop — that the divider is more akin to an artwork than a functional piece of furniture, and, as such, can be used as a giant canvas on which to explore experimental ideas about materiality, form, optical illusions, and more.
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In Copenhagen, The Flower Shop As Art Installation

Considering that floral art is the new medium of choice, it was only a matter of time before floral shops became art installations themselves. The new Tableau store in Copenhagen, founded by Danish florist Julius Værnes Iversen, was designed by Copenhagen-based architect David Thulstrup to resemble something more like a gallery, with six architectural podiums made for displaying single arrangements like art.
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Week of September 30, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, and more from the past seven days. This week: a Jacquemus-designed restaurant in Paris, a Hans Arp show in Hong Kong, and a new Ace Hotel in Kyoto (above) that's been years in the making.
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Is It Weird That We Want All the Furniture From a South Korean Optometry Store?

You know a store interior is good when you want to take all of the furnishings that aren't for sale home with you. Max Lamb's rugs for Acne come to mind, as do the oxblood leather ottomans at Rachel Comey's Charles de Lisle–designed NYC flagship. You can now add to that list Projekt Produkt, a South Korean optometry store designed by the Korean-born, Mälmo, Sweden–based designer Kunsik Choi.
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Week of September 23, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, and more from the past seven days. This week, a series of opalescent flower photos, Nathalie du Pasquier's ode to the brick, and an architectural puzzle destined for holiday wishlist ubiquity.
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Ian Felton’s Kosa Collection — Inspired by Pre-Colombian Cultures — is This Season’s Must-See Debut

Ian Felton's debut collection was supposed to arrive in New York in June, just in time for a showcase at Michael Bargo's Chinatown gallery. But, as luck would have it, the pieces — in transit from an atelier just outside of Mexico City — got stuck in customs and the collection, called Kosa, debuted only last week. In some ways, however, the new launch date seems appropriate: Felton's collection — all thick bolsters, chunky forms, and autumnal hues — was inspired by Pre-Colombian cultures and ideas around creation and rebirth — a very fall-like theme — not to mention how cozy it might be to snuggle up in the rounded corner of his alpaca-covered lounge chair.
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Three Designers Turned Their Hotel Rooms Into Studios for A Weekend Residency — Here are the Results

With the help of the design-forward travel app HotelTonight — which allows designers to choose from a curated selection of hotels that might drive creative inspiration — we issued a challenge to three designers: Spend a weekend in a city you've never been to, bringing with you only the tools you can fit into a carry-on, and use your hotel room as a mobile studio in which to create a design object inspired by your travels.
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