10 Things We’re Looking Forward To at This Year’s Stockholm Furniture Fair

Stockholm functions in many ways like a mini-Milan, which comes, in part, from being a city with an incredibly high baseline of appreciation for design: There's a predictably excellent emerging design showcase at the fair; there are exhibitions around town in the most wonderful and surprising locations (see this year's new experimental showcase at Älvsjö Gard, a never-before-used 16th-century manor on the fairgrounds); there are exciting launches from local talents, such as Fredrik Paulsen and Note Design Studio; and there is, if you can squeeze it in, an abundance of studio visits and sightseeing field trips you can take to round out your design education while you're there. (Let this be the year I finally make it to the Ragnar Östberg–designed City Hall!) Here are 10 of the things we're most looking forward to at Stockholm Design Week, which this year runs from February 6-12.
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Europe’s Newest Design Fair Is In a Small City With a Big Focus on Locality and Sustainability

We were meant to attend and cover the second edition of Southern Sweden Design Days in Malmö last month, but since COVID had other plans for us, we had to catch up with the fair's program from afar instead, which included projects by studios like Malmö Upcycling Service, Lab La Bla, and Andréason & Leibel. In addition to being aesthetically pleasing, many of them featured a focus on local manufacturing, local crafts, and/or locally sourced recycled materials, which not every design fair can claim.
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25 Projects We Loved at This Weekend’s 2022 Collectible Design Fair in Brussels

This past weekend marked the fifth edition of the Brussels design fair Collectible, and while our schedules failed to align with an IRL visit, we did our best to round up our favorite participants from afar, everything from old favorites like Maarten de Ceulaer's stained glass lamp series — which got a few new additions this month — to exciting new discoveries like Sarah Becchio and Paolo Borghino of Errante Architetture, who debuted a series of hardware-free MDF coffee tables. Browse our finds after the jump!
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Highlights From the First Fair to Showcase Contemporary Greek Design in a Historical Context

Despite a canonical place in the annals of art and architecture history, Greece has been quiet on the contemporary design scene. Earlier this month, though, the inaugural Athens Design Forum offered a confident counter-narrative — one that asserts the country's creative relevancy and seeks to “mark Athens as both an emerging and historically established center of creative production.”
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Step Inside Object & Thing, An Intimate Art Exhibit at the 1955 Home Gerald Luss Built for Himself

The new Object & Thing exhibition, created in collaboration with Blum & Poe and Mendes Wood DM at the Gerald Luss House in Ossining, New York, opened on May 7. Since then, I've basically treated it like the design equivalent of the Mare of Easttown finale, trying to shield myself from spoilers on social media until I could visit in person last Friday. And yet, when I got there, I realized that this was a relatively pointless task: No image can replicate the feeling of stillness that comes from being inside a house that's as well-considered as the Luss House, and no Instagram tour can capture all the details that make this particular collaboration so satisfying.
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8 Must-See Projects From This Year’s Venice Design Biennial

After a year of visiting virtual exhibitions, it’s a joy to finally start venturing out IRL again. Where I am here in Italy, things really began to pick up speed last week with the opening of the Venice Biennale, which always brings with it a slew of contemporaneous projects — one of which being the Venice Design Biennial, now in its third year. Curated by Venice Art Factory’s Luca Berta and Francesca Giubilei, this year’s theme was "Design as a Self Portrait" and featured work that spoke, loosely, to the notion of self-representation in design.
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A Sneak Peek at Collectible Design’s First Fully Digital Fair, Happening This Weekend in Brussels

Collectible, the long-running design fair in Brussels, was one of the last fairs to slip under the wire last year just as COVID was beginning; we remember having a phone call with our solo exhibitors, Ben & Aja Blanc, asking if they felt safe enough to go. But though the fair went off without a hitch last March, due to changing restrictions in Europe, organizers Clélie Debehault and Liv Vaisberg decided to take the fair fully digital this year, introducing a new platform called Collectible Salon, which runs online from May 28-30 and concurrently with events around town.
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Welcome to Our First Digital Offsite Show! Here’s How — and Why — We Did It.

When our 2020 Offsite fair, scheduled to take place in May at Skylight Modern in Manhattan, was put on indefinite hold, we decided to pivot to a digital exhibition model instead — harnessing the visibility of our existing platform to create a much-needed creative and commercial outlet for the design community, as well as redefining what a fair can be in the digital age. Welcome to Offsite Online.
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The 21 Best Things We Saw at the 2020 Collectible Design Fair

Collectible has evolved to be one our favorite design fairs, what with its mix of established galleries and emerging designers, its long arm of experimentation, and its emphasis on *great* sceneography. Our favorite booth this year was obviously our own, a pink oasis framed by layered, tonal, sculptural mirrors by Ben & Aja Blanc. Called Chasing Beauty, Ben & Aja's collection explores the very nature of reflection; at the fair, mirrors on opposite walls reflecting each other added yet a another meta layer of interpretation.
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Your Guide to the 40+ Designers Who Made This Year’s Design Miami Great

Whatever anyone's opinion on last week's Design Miami fair, we could all agree on at least one thing — thank God there were no bananas. There were a few cheesy star power moments, to be sure, but compared to the circus at Art Basel, the design fair felt like a bastion of integrity and sound judgment. In our tent, we had lustrous, emerald-green consoles, a sustainably-sourced hairy pink bench, and the coolest hand-sculpted fireplace we've ever seen. In theirs, people were lined up for miles to take a selfie with a piece of fruit.
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Dutch Design Week 2019

30 Projects We Loved from Dutch Design Week 2019

A feeling of urgency pervaded this year's Dutch Design Week. It was clear from many of the works on show that the focus of the designer is shifting; no longer is good aesthetic judgment and a well-designed clever product the aspiration. Ego and vision are going out of style, to be replaced by attempts to understand the inter-connected systems in which design sits.
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