Week of February 12, 2018

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Alessandro Mendini's wildly colorful Italian vacation home, Mexico City's booming contemporary art scene, and two green benches, created for a Korean sunglasses flagship, that we'd basically kill for.
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Note Design Studio Stockholm Furniture Fair

The Coolest Booth in Stockholm Was for a Vinyl Flooring Company

While it's not exactly news that formerly uncool materials can be made to look beautiful and sophisticated, it's perhaps never been done as well or on as large a scale as it was this week at the Stockholm Furniture Fair, in a booth Note Design Studio created for the French flooring company Tarkett. Called the Lookout, the booth was made from a mix of wood, textiles, linoleum and a vinyl flooring material called iQ Megalit; the trick was in employing Note's frequent use of geometry and a tight, tonal color palette of rust, coral, apricot, moss green, and mint.
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Salon Art Design New York

Our Favorite Finds from the 2017 Salon Art + Design

We've never been ones who needed an excuse to dress up, so last Thursday we happily headed uptown to the Park Avenue Armory for The Salon Art + Design, generally considered to be New York's fanciest design fair. We've only recently begun attending the Salon in part because the fair has only recently reached a tipping point, where the quality and number of boundary-pushing contemporary pieces matches the number of vintage ones on display — all of which, of course, reflects a more general trend in the collectible design world.
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Maniera Gallery for the Operae design fair

Fake Wood, Real Stone, and Imagined Foam: Our Favorite Collection from the Operae Design Fair

This year's Operae show was curated by Alice Stori Lichtenstein and the fair, always notable for its mix of designers and galleries, featured Sight Unseen favorites like Campbell Rey, Carwan Gallery, and Maniera. It was the latter gallery who hosted our favorite presentation: a series of layered particle-board furniture developed by the Belgium firm aDVVT as well as a newer series called "Light Conversation Pieces," by the Italian architecture firm Piovenefabi.
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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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Our Favorite Finds From Stockholm Design Week 2017

Though the design world often looks to Scandinavia for trends, this year's Stockholm Design Week didn't so much define new patterns in design as give us perfect examples of the current styles. There were new takes on channel tufting; color-blocked interiors; peaches, rusts, aquas and pinks; tubular metal; and lots of bleached wood.
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At the 2017 Maison et Objet and IMM Cologne Fairs

Neither the shadow of Milan nor the frigid, grey weather prevents us, each year, from being able to bring you all kinds of February goodness from the 2017 IMM Cologne and Maison et Objet fairs, which we’ve catalogued below. You’ll find such gems as a confetti-sprinkled carpet, a new design line out of Portugal, and no less than three distinct releases with patina-mottled surfaces that have officially triggered our trend-spotting sonar. Not a bad opening for what’s promising to be a turbulent year in all other regards.
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design miami 2016 preview

The 40 Best New Works You’ll See at Design Miami This Week

When we think of Design Miami, which opens tomorrow, the idea of the fair as a place to scout exciting new work by an elite cadre of emerging designers isn't necessarily the first thing that comes to mind. Lush, immersive installations and epically cool lounges, yes; vintage gems by French designers like Prouvé, Royère, Perriand, and Pergay, of course. But the past couple of years have featured a notable swing towards a younger, more experimental crowd.
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Tomas Alonso at Victor Hunt

This May Be the Coolest Furniture Collection We’ve Ever Seen

The Vaalbeek Project, new suite of furniture by one of our longtime favorite designers, Tomás Alonso, for the Belgian gallery Victor Hunt, is a teaser for an interior Alonso is working on in Belgium, to be completed next spring. It includes new editions of some older designs — such as that insanely chic, stackable rose and green marble coffee table from 2014 — but each piece feels like an instant classic.
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Our Top Finds From Dutch Design Week 2016

It’s been fifteen years since the first-ever Dutch Design Week, and since then, Eindhoven’s 10-day celebration has seen both highs (international success and prestige) and lows (the slashing of arts funding as well as high-profile resignations from the esteemed Design Academy). What has stayed constant is the country’s ability to remain relevant in response to new challenges and issues and the city's reputation for churning out some of the next best design talents.
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The Best of Mexico Design Week 2016

This year's Mexico Design Week was proof that there's more happening in the country's design scene than ever, as the number of young studios launching work with a global sensibility steadily grows. We came back with dozens of photos to prove it, plus a long list of talents we'll definitely be keeping an eye on.
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