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07.13.23

Sight Unseen Collection

Only a Year Out From Graduating RISD, Alexis & Ginger Already Have Two Collections Under Their Belt

Was it fate that brought Alexis Tingey and Ginger Gordon together? The designers’ studio benches happened to be positioned next to each other during their furniture design Master's program at RISD, and after two years of sharing ideas and inspirations, the pair decided to officially join forces and set up a business together after graduating in 2022. A year later, Alexis & Ginger have moved to Brooklyn, launched two collections — one as part of our Sight Unseen Collection — and already have plans for so much more.
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07.11.23

Up and Coming

Bowen Liu Was Up to the Challenge of Making Furniture in Cast Glass

Without being towering, there’s a heft and monumentality to the cast glass Helle collection by New York designer Bowen Liu. The presence of these pieces is anchoring, a solidity that’s offset by their translucency. Made by glass workers in Brooklyn, the collection includes bookends, a coffee table, floor lamp, mirror, and side table, which debuted at New York Design Week in May. While the mirror and lamp feature white oak details, the coffee and side tables and bookends are made entirely of glass. If you don’t see a lot of cast glass furniture at scale, it's because it demands expertise, skill, and time to produce. But Liu was up for the challenge.
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06.20.23

Sighted

This Spiky, Globular Blown-Glass Lighting Benefits Marginalized Communities

When your cute, blown-glass cups, vessels, plates, and ornaments start to catch the eye of designers like Kelly Wearstler, there’s really only one thing to do: Go bigger. So that’s exactly what Grace Whiteside of the New York design brand Sticky recently did, creating a collection of larger pieces using the same glass-blowing techniques that have defined the studio's signature sculptural style, and opting to turn the pieces into a range of lighting designs that are just as whimsical as Sticky's selection of smaller works.
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12.14.22

Q+A

Sophie Lou Jacobsen Gets Emotional About Objects

For Brooklyn-based designer Sophie Lou Jacobsen, objects have a life of their own. “I firmly believe that objects have their own energy, and that what they bring to your environment and daily experience is almost spiritual,” she says. “I’m not religious by any means, but I do believe in the interconnectedness of our world, and that there should be this sort of mutual relationship between us and our things — one of respect, care, and thoughtfulness. I think in my mind I live in a very Beauty and the Beast-like world!” It's not just in her mind, though — we can easily see the likes of Mrs. Potts interacting with Jacobsen’s curving, almost animate vases, intricate stainless steel candleholders, and draping glass lamps.
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12.01.22

How to Live With Objects

A 1920s Brooklyn Brownstone Offers the Perfect Backdrop for Kim Mupangilai’s Collection of Vintage Handmade Objects

Born and raised in Belgium, Kim Mupangilaï is a Belgian-Congolese interior architect, furniture designer, and graphic designer who lives with her boyfriend in a 1920s brownstone in Brooklyn. Its original period details offer the perfect backdrop for her extensive collection of vintage handmade objects, which she also sells through her side project, the online shop En la Mésá.
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10.06.22

Sighted

Bower’s New Mirrors Are Based on the Elements of a Home — But They’re Really a Portal to Someplace Else

Mirrors have always conjured thoughts, both lofty and literal, about reflection and perception, consciousness and subjectivity, surface and depth. Any mirror, when you look long enough, will provoke this. But the latest ones from Bower do even more: They’re transformative objects that turn space into something else. Over the last couple of months, the Brooklyn-based design studio, led by Danny Giannella, Tammer Hijazi, and Jeffrey Renz, has launched six individual mirrors that all nod to familiar architectural elements you think you know well — doorways, bookshelves, windows, arches — but become unexpected, making you do a double take.
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08.01.22

Q+A

This Brooklyn Designer is Trying to Create a Zero-Waste Studio

Coming from an art background, Nathaniel Wojtalik had no interest in creating furniture that was purely functional and offered no meaning behind it. But through Cultivation Objects, the Brooklyn studio he founded during the pandemic, Wojtalik has been able to find a way to craft intentional narratives by virtue of concept and technique to end up with designs that are beautiful and intriguing, yet still maintain a utilitarian quality.
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05.19.22

Giveaway

Enter to Win a Night at Ace Hotel Brooklyn, Whose Rooms Were Inspired by Corbu’s Cabanon

In the 9 or so months since it opened, Ace Hotel Brooklyn has emerged as one of the borough's most enjoyable hubs. Inside a 13-story concrete-and-glass building custom-designed by Roman and Williams, it boasts a restaurant with a striking mosaic installation, a consistently-packed Brutalist bar, a lobby that plays host to exhibitions like this month's furniture showcase from Black Folks in Design, and a light-filled interior courtyard that offers gentle respite from the bustle outside its doors. The property is a social lynchpin for downtown Brooklyn, even amongst locals like us. We're offering you the chance to experience it for yourself, with a giveaway for one free night at Ace Hotel Brooklyn. Click through to enter!
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06.30.21

Interiors

You’ll Want to Move In to the Hovey Sisters Latest Styling Project — And That’s Kind of the Point

If you're not one of the 12.5K people who follow sisters and expert home stagers and stylists Hollister and Porter Hovey on Instagram, what are you waiting for? We've long been fans of the Hoveys style, which mixes big-box basics (like a double-cushioned white West Elm sofa that pops up in many of their projects) with vintage Italian and French midcentury pieces picked up at auction and accessories that were, at least pre-pandemic, often brought home from the sisters' travels to places like Mexico City, Los Angeles, and Madrid.
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11.05.20

Q+A

In Bower’s New Perception-Bending Collection, Mirrors and Materials Appear to Melt Uncannily

To mark the release of their largest-ever collection of furniture and mirrors — whose wood, marble, and upholstered surfaces appear to melt over their frames — the New York studio Bower collaborated with 3-D renderer Alexis Christodolou on a series of images that capture the pieces in an escapist indoor/outdoor fantasy world. We caught up with the trio about that project and more.
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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.
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10.13.20

Q+A

James Evans’s Photorealistic Paintings Are a Meditation on Impermanence

The suffocated images of artist James Evans’ “Constraint Equation” series are a photorealistic depiction of what appears to be houseplants wrapped up in sheets of humid plastic that obscure and abstract them. Created during a period in quarantine, they are a fitting expression of the limitations and discomfort most of us have experienced this year. Evans, who grew up in Colorado and now splits his time between New York and Mexico City, is a prodigious new force in the art world.
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