At Villa Cavrois, Muller Van Severen is an Eerily Perfect Match for the Modernist Estate

This month, the Belgian design duo Muller Van Severen begin a four-month intervention at Villa Cavrois, the modernist French estate designed in the late 1920s by Robert Mallet-Stevens. The show is a retrospective of sorts for the husband-and-wife duo, featuring everything from their leather-and-steel Duo Seats to brand-new work like the Alltubes series they launched this spring with Valerie Traan at Collectible and a sofa they've designed specifically in response to the installation site.
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Meet Léa Munsch, the In-Demand French Ceramicist Working from the Woods

In 2018, French ceramicist Léa Munsch traded Paris for Lorraine, and a new studio in a former factory that’s perched on a river in a forest. There, she has been particularly called to draw inspiration from nature — producing unglazed stoneware pieces that preserve the texture, imperfections, and color of her raw materials.
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The 2019 Design Parade Festival Is a Total Visual Overload — In the Best Possible Way

If you've ever looked closely at coverage of the annual Design Parade festival in France, we're guessing that like us, your reaction was probably a mixture of bafflement and awe. How do they manage to get so many new objects and new ideas in one (tiny) place, not to mention so many balls-to-the-wall interiors with what appear to be no-expense-spared, move-in-tomorrow production values? Design Parade is practically on the level of the Milan Furniture Fair in terms of the volume of visual inspiration it provides — check out our sprawling overview of 2019's show here.
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An Artist Responds to the Work of Victor Vasarely, Father of the Op-Art Movement

An internationally exhibited conceptual artist working in photography, sculpture, and installation, Oran Hoffmann was invited to the Fondation Vasarely in Aix-en-Provence in 2017, where he sifted through boxes of Vasarely’s tiles, parallelograms, serigraphs, and other ephemera used to inspire and lay the groundwork for the unusual architecture of the foundation and the optically boggling sculptures and spaces within. Hoffmann’s new book is the culmination of a year of research and working with Vasarely’s archives.
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The 40+ Best Things We Saw at IMM Cologne and Maison & Objet 2019

Our trend-spotting needle hasn't exactly gone haywire in the first few weeks of this year — and we, for one, think that might be a good thing, considering how frenetic the pace of trends has been of late. IMM Cologne and Maison & Objet, the first two big furniture fairs of the year, have also traditionally not been the first places you might go to scout for said trends, whether owing to their spot on the design calendar (just before Milan) or the regional peculiarities of each host country (Cologne, to this day, always has a preponderance of Bauhaus-inspired pieces). And yet, scrolling through our picks this year, you'll see a few things that look just different enough that they might be harbingers of things to come.
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Five Rooms, Five Ways: From ’80s Brushstrokes to Meditative Minimalism

Hundreds of design lovers will find themselves in Provence this week on the occasion of the Villa Noailles Design Parade. But one of the coolest things can actually be found a scenic, 90-minute drive from Hyères in the small town of Grasse. There, in a 300-year-old farmhouse owned by design patron Silvia Fiorucci-Roman, is the 5Rooms project at Moulin Des Ribes, for which five design studios were each asked to create a bedroom with ensuite bathroom, with every detail inspired by the colors, crafts, and traditions of the surrounding region.
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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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These Ceramics in a Former French Salon Are the Exact Amount of ’80s Nostalgia We Need Right Now

When Italian designer Valentina Cameranesi and curator Matylda Krzykowski first saw the former hairdresser's shop in Toulon, France — where the interior design portion of the annual Design Parade festival is held this year — its windows were plastered with the word "Féminin." Perhaps it was fate, because the word is an apt reference to Cameranesi’s work, which is on view in the former salon in her first solo exhibition until September 24.
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The “It” Colors of the Season, According to AD France

A new AD France photoshoot, created by creative director Thibaut Mathieu in collaboration with photographer Peter Langer, focuses on this season's color palettes — which, according to them, include "soap bubble" shades, dense blues, golden hues, intense reds, and copper. It was too good not to repost here.
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Designers Interpret the Classic Tolix A Chair

We aren't quite sure how we missed this project — considering both our affinity for the classic Tolix A chair (we might own seven (!) of them ourselves) and our affection for the designers involved — but in Milan last month, the French company celebrated its 80th anniversary and in doing so invited eight design studios to reinterpret its most famous offering.
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