Get Good Vibes Only From this Show of Grandma-Inspired Lamps and Balloon-Like Chairs

Sister-Sister, Léa Mestres's new show at the Paris gallery Scene Ouverte, is a highly photogenic pairing of two sides of the up-and-coming French designer's practice. One the one hand, there are her puffy, balloon-like chairs, benches, and tables. On the other hand, there are her colorful stucco lamps. "I see them as old ladies," she says. "They each have a names and personality. That's why I called the show 'sisters sisters' — it’s an old ladies' gang."
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Sculpture or Furniture? Supaform’s New Collection Puts Feeling Before Function

In Russian designer Maxim Scherbakov's new furniture exhibition at Rome's Contemporary Cluster gallery, he asks the question: What if design could be all about emotion, and little else? His barely functional pieces, and his general conceit, feel uncomfortable at first — we're not sure we want to live in a world where design is purely an aesthetic indulgence — but in an era when furniture is increasingly difficult to distinguish from art, it does feel in some ways like we already are.
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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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We Paired 9 Norwegian Designers With 9 American Brands — Two Years Later, Here Are the Results!

For the fourth edition of our curatorial project Norway x New York, we paired nine Norwegian designers with nine US design brands, who worked together closely for a year to develop a product for the brand's catalog. The first prototypes are on view now at Matter in New York, displayed inside a colorful landscape designed by Office of Tangible Space and built by Thirdkind Studio.
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Week of September 20, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: tables inspired by California's kidney-shaped pools, Gustaf Westman's latest furniture drop, and a colorful installation by Germans Ermics at last week's Design Miami Basel show (above).
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For a Show in the Former Home of a Sculptor, Designers Respond to His Works and Collection

When the British flamenco dancer and sculptor Ron Hitchins died, he left behind a small pink Victorian house in Hackney, London. For their first exhibition, Atelier LK — a newly formed interior design studio helmed by Lisa Jones and Ruby Kean — has taken over the home, leaving intact a curated selection of the artist's work and asking 36 contemporary artists and designers to respond to it.
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For His New Collab With Kvadrat, Artist Danh Vo Wrapped an Entire House in a Rediscovered Nanna Ditzel Textile

Kvadrat’s newest fabric release, Sisu, doesn’t look particularly remarkable in photos at first glance. A thick wool woven in 16 different two-color pairings, it closely resembles its cousin, Hallingdal, the best-selling textile designed in the 1960s by Danish icon Nanna Ditzel. But when we learned the full story behind its discovery and development — in collaboration with the artist Danh Vo — it was so interesting we didn’t even know where to begin telling it.
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This Exhibition Shows How Cranbrook Helped Pioneer the Cross-Disciplinary, Craft-Based, Experimental Design and Art of Today

Most people know the highlights of the Cranbrook Academy of Art’s storied 90-year history, from its campus by Eliel Saarinen to its role as a breeding ground for the stars of mid-century modernism. But in June, the school launched the results of a four-year deep-dive into its own history — in the form of a sprawling exhibition and a 600-page book, both called With Eyes Opened — that offer a much more nuanced view of Cranbrook’s game-changing influence. We spoke with curator Andrew Blauvelt about 6 artworks and objects by varied practitioners that were part of that narrative.
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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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Week of June 7, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: two truly excellent uses of glass blocks in interiors, a reissue of Tobia Scarpa's first-ever product design, a foot-shaped glass vase we're obsessing over, and a sinuous new table by Erik Olovsson, above.
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Week of April 26, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Yves Klein–inspired mirrors by Ben and Aja Blanc, a multi-colored Dims chair remix by Dusen Dusen, and the latest purveyor of high-quality affordable art to catch our eye (above).
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