07.30.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

The Designers on Our Radar After This Year’s Design Parade in Hyères and Toulon

As we hurtle towards the September make-up version of Salone del Mobile — which will mark the first major in-person design fair since COVID began, advisedly or not — we first wanted to turn our attention to the return of one of our favorite smaller fairs, the annual Design Parade in Hyères and Toulon from Villa Noailles in the south of France. As always, we're smitten with the competition format for these two festivals, which seems to unearth amazingly talented designers we've never heard of.
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07.24.20

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Independent Design Label Launches in the South of France

The tiny town of Hyères in the South of France is only 50 square miles, but has long had an outsized presence on the contemporary design map as the home of the arts foundation Villa Noailles and its annual Design Parade festival. The festival was canceled this year due to the pandemic — more on that next week! — but two young Parisians have managed to fill in the gap with an exhibition called Été Super, which is serving as the launch of their independent design brand 13Desserts and its permanent showroom in a former Hyères skate shop.
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Design Parade Toulon
07.15.19

Excerpt: Exhibition

At Design Parade 2019, a Contemporary Homage to the Ancient Roman Triclinium

For the fourth year in a row, the French design festival Design Parade was divided into two distinct parts: a design competition and exhibition taking place at the Villa Noailles in Hyères, and an interior design competition and installation in the neighboring town of Toulon. Tomorrow we'll be posting a full roundup of the projects that were on view across both halves of the show, but today we're focusing on one of our favorites, an entry in the Toulon competition designed by the Brussels duo Sandro Della Noce and Caroline Wolewinski.
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06.26.18

Interiors

Five Rooms, Five Ways: From ’80s Brushstrokes to Meditative Minimalism

Hundreds of design lovers will find themselves in Provence this week on the occasion of the Villa Noailles Design Parade. But one of the coolest things can actually be found a scenic, 90-minute drive from Hyères in the small town of Grasse. There, in a 300-year-old farmhouse owned by design patron Silvia Fiorucci-Roman, is the 5Rooms project at Moulin Des Ribes, for which five design studios were each asked to create a bedroom with ensuite bathroom, with every detail inspired by the colors, crafts, and traditions of the surrounding region.
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07.12.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

Design Parade, a Festival in the French Countryside, is the Anti–Design Fair

Each spring, as we're challenged to survive the Milan fair, New York Design Week, and Design Miami-Basel in rapid succession, life really does start to feel like one big, annoying, never-ending design parade. And yet funny enough, the festival of that same name, which takes place in early July at the Villa Noailles in Hyères, often feels like the antidote — a charming anti-design-fair in the French countryside where creativity, not commerce, is the only thing on the agenda.
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06.30.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

Ceramic Experiments by a Swiss Designer, On View in the South of France

First on our list of talents to scout at this year's Design Parade at Villa Noailles: Swiss designer Dimitri Bähler, who we featured earlier this year for the beautiful limestone bench he showed with Nov Gallery in Milan. Bähler showed at Noailles a few years ago when his current project was in its infancy: Now called Volumes, Patterns, Textures & Colors, the collection, on view in the gymnasium at Villa Noailles, features a series of ceramic volumes that have been imprinted with various three-dimensional patterns by way of a textured latex foil.
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08.16.24

Fair Report

This French Riviera Design Showcase Delivers On Emerging Talent

For those lucky enough to be sunning themselves in the south of France right now, there are two sister design shows worth peeling away from the beach for. Split across a pair of historic and impressive — yet totally different — venues in the neighboring Riviera towns of Hyères and Toulon, the annual Design Parade festival and competition brings together established and emerging designers as part of two season-spanning exhibitions. Design Parade has long been a particularly great opportunity to spy up-and-coming French talent, and there's more than enough to get us excited in this year’s edition.
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01.20.24

Saturday Selects

Week of January 15, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a Paris apartment with a stellar stainless-steel kitchen (again!), a hotel with rooms by 14 different designers, aluminum furniture cast from waste polystyrene, and a few early highlights from Maison & Objet and IMM Cologne.
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08.15.22

Fair Report

A Favorite French Design Festival Returns With a Crop of Fresh Talent

If you assumed earlier this year, based on a barrage of dreamy, sun-drenched Instagram posts, that all your favorite French designers — India Mahdavi, Pierre Yovanovitch, Dorothée Meilichzon  — seemed to be vacationing in the same idyllic beach town in the French Riviera, you would be almost correct. Actually, they were attending the 16th edition of Design Parade, the French design festival that has become a go-to for spotting new trends and discovering the next wave of buzzy young designers.
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07.17.21

Saturday Selects

Week of July 12, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a rainbow-colored housewares store in Berlin, the latest extruded-plastic works by James Shaw, a group show of vases by 19 ceramicists, and a highlight from this year's Design Parade in France (above).
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09.09.20

Excerpt: Exhibition

With Design Parade Postponed Until 2021, the Cities of Hyères and Toulon Took Their Exhibitions (Mostly) Outside

Like most international art and design festivals this year, the annual Design Parade — which typically takes place across two cities in the south of France and is on record as one of our favorites — was forced to postpone its summer edition until 2021. Somehow, though, these restrictions don't seem to have reduced the activity in Hyères and Toulon by much.
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