Everything We Loved at Collectible’s First Design Fair in New York City

Last Sunday afternoon, as the first NYC edition of the Brussels-based contemporary design fair Collectible was just about to wrap, one of the fair directors paused in front of our booth and asked me how I thought the show had gone. “There are designers here we’ve never heard of,” I marveled, intending it as high praise indeed: For a European fair to show up on New York’s doorstep and show us something new (especially a fair planned in less than four months), well, I’d call that a success. Collectible, which took place at the burgeoning FiDi creative hub WSA, managed to both assemble a cornucopia of new ideas and draw a crowd, all from across the Atlantic. We brought our own dose of novelty to the show, with a booth that — while similar to our NY Design Week exhibition — showcased a new batch of 11 cabinets by 11 different design studios, all punctuated by hardware from my recently launched showroom, Petra.
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At the Istanbul Design Biennial

Last week marked the beginning of the inaugural Istanbul Design Biennial, curated by Joseph Grima and Emre Arolat and organized by the local cultural foundation IKVS — the same organization behind the city's contemporary art biennial. We're homebound until Design Miami but our intrepid London-based correspondent Claire Walsh bravely reported back on her maiden voyage, which included a tour of the official biennial festivities (on view until mid-December) but also the occasional foray into Istanbul's neighborhoods to capture urban texture, like the Memphis-style painted columns above. "Istanbul's art biennial is renowned for tackling heavy themes, so there was a lot to measure up to!" she says. "Titled Kusurluluk (or "imperfection" in plain old English), this biennial posed pivotal questions about design's role in growing metropolises like Istanbul, archaic organization, and what we understand design to be. This wasn’t about tables and chairs. Hell no — this was cerebral. Here are some of my favorite photos and moments from my trip."
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At Design Miami/Basel 2012

When Design Miami rolls around each winter, it’s hard to resist the siren’s song of sunshine in December, no matter how much you've decided you hate standing in line for parties or how high the hotel rates might balloon during that frenetic week. We’ve been known to pool resources with friends far and wide in order to hop on flights and hightail it out of New York on the promise of a stolen afternoon at the Standard’s pool, or even a press brunch at some Collins Avenue hotel du jour. But we’ve never made it to the event that started it all: Design Miami/Basel and its legendary accompanying art fair. Lucky for us, then, that we alighted this year on the perfect correspondent: Marco Tabasso, known in design circles as Rossana Orlandi’s right-hand man, who took advantage of a rare two-day break (the gallery sat this year out, after having debuted a massive Nacho Carbonell installation in 2011) to zip around the Swiss metropolis, capturing everything he saw for us on proverbial film.
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