Punk and Playfulness Co-Exist in Nice Condo’s Monumental Furniture

Combining influences from Brutalism and Memphis with traditional wood craft, Nice Condo’s Chris Held and Sara Graham create monumental designs that — while often statement-making in some way, from the off-kilter color palette of a dining table to a cabinet with sawtooth hardware — are each intended to anchor a space and fit with a variety of interior styles. "Challenging the expectations of a client in formal ways quickly veers into sculpture, and I'm not interested in making sculpture," Held says. "I'm interested in making things people put in their homes and spill drinks on — live life on and around."
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Known Work — the Furniture Spinoff of Interiors Studio Parts and Labor Design — Just Launched an Immediately Iconic Debut Collection

Perhaps it was inevitable that Parts and Labor Design, a New York interiors studio noted for its atmospheric hospitality projects — including the subterranean Negroni bar Sotto, which we featured last fall — would launch a furniture design studio. After all, some of the more memorable details from their interiors have often been custom, in-house designed fixtures, which explore the tension between kinetic material and earthly texture. Called Known Work, their furniture arm debuted its first collection, Perceptions, at Zona Maco in Mexico City last month as part of Sculpted, a joint show with artist Jorge Yazpik, curated by Materia. The collection consists of nine pieces, each as alluring as you might expect.
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At the New Permanent Eames Archive in California, You Can Deep-Dive Into the Design Process of Charles and Ray Through 40,000 Artifacts

From the moment that Charles Eames, formerly an architect and teacher, and Ray Eames, formerly a fine artist, began a shared design practice in 1941, they cultivated an unusually meticulous creative process: in lieu of drawings and schematics, they worked out ideas and solved problems in real-time by creating endless physical models and prototypes. It's no wonder, then, that until the Eames Office closed after Ray's death in 1988, they were able to rack up more than 40,000 artifacts of their design process — and also no wonder that it took the family nearly 25 years to catalog them and finally make them available for public viewing all in one place, at the newly opened Eames Archive in Richmond, California.
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Anna Karlin’s New Collection is All Sculptural Forms and Sophisticated Whimsy

There was no definitive starting point for Anna Karlin’s new collection, no big moment, but rather a gradual becoming over a stretch of time. “The way that I work is essentially all one long conversation,” Karlin says. Some pieces are the result of an experiment from years back, set on the backburner until it finally makes sense in relation to something else. “I think about pieces in dialogue rather than in isolation, and a language develops.” It’s a call and response: a curve begs for a clean line, a futuristic turn hankers for heritage. And Karlin listens. “Once it gets to a point where every piece has bounced off another and the circle closes, then that's the collection,” she explains. “It sort of decides itself.”
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EJR Barnes On Cast Glass, Instagram, “Freaky Stuff,” and His Excellent New Show at Emma Scully Gallery

Elliot Barnes’s work is full of historical references and subtle echoes that are at once familiar but hard to pin down. It’s not so much an expression of nostalgia as it is a longing for a time and place that never actually existed. In his work, Barnes messes with temporality, giving shape to things that feel anachronistic or out of time — and that are both sophisticated and a little mischievous. In his first solo show, A Room on East 79th Street at the Emma Scully Gallery in New York, the self-taught designer has created a dreamscape in the form of a living room.
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This Graphic Designer–Turned–Cabinetmaker’s Dyed-Wood Furniture is, Well, To Die For

Paris-based designer Jonathan Cohen has been working in wood for only a couple of years. Initially trained as a graphic designer, his eye for flat compositions naturally transferred into the three-dimensional world of furniture, with his creations quickly catching the eye of top architects and designers and local galleries. “When you have knowledge of good proportion, shape, and balance, you can design a letter or furniture,” Cohen says. “For me, it’s almost the same.” What lends the designer's work a certain je ne sais quoi, however, is the unique dye treatment he uses, applied in various techniques to bring out the grain and texture of the wood — forming patterns reminiscent of those created by Memphis artist Nathalie du Pasquier. 
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Objects & Ideas Are Making Sculptural, Relational Objects in the Canadian Wilderness

Since we last checked in with Di Tao and Bob Dodd of Toronto’s Objects & Ideas, their furniture designs have moved increasingly towards functional sculpture. “We’ve always thought that every piece we make needs to have a strong character and a strong expression — that has never changed. But the way we express our ideas has evolved,” says Tao. The latest pieces are visually alluring objects that have a use, of course: The enveloping Beaver Tail chair offers a seat, the curving Ascend floor lamp provides illumination. But these works also — and just as importantly — are relational, changing the space that they, and you, occupy.
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The New Gallery Making It Easier to Acquire South African Design in the States

New York City is close to 8,000 miles from Cape Town, where Fiona Mackay grew up. Now based in Brooklyn as an art adviser and entrepreneur, she wondered why more of the great design she saw in South Africa on her trips home wasn't available in the US; it turns out, for independent designers, shipping an object those 8,000 miles can easily double its price. “I wanted to create a platform that would not only introduce Americans to the nuanced beauty and unique POV of South African design, but also create an opportunity for South African designers to sell their work in the United States,” Mackay says. By launching Kombi, a new design gallery in New York, Mackay is bringing contemporary collectible Southern African design to the States with a co-ordinated solution: to consolidate orders through one platform to be shipped together every few months.
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CB2 Black in Design Collective

Studio Anansi’s Latest Collaboration with CB2 Materializes the Unlimited Possibility of Black Futures

Evan Jerry was, in his own words, on a quest to explore the relationship between contemporary design and Black culture when he founded Studio Anansi in 2018. Now five years into the artist’s practice, he has launched the Black in Design Collective, a collection of works curated in partnership with and for sale at CB2 that brings together 10 Black artists from Los Angeles to Lagos, including Jerry himself. The range of pieces respond to Studio Anansi’s initial question around the project: How do you see the future of design if Blackness was included? The result makes tangible the heterogeneity of Black culture — spanning centuries, materials, objects, and themes.
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Each Piece in Kim Mupangilai’s Debut Furniture Collection is a Meditation on Cross-Cultural Identity

Each of the pieces in Kim Mupangilaï’s debut furniture collection, on view in a solo exhibition called HUE/I/AM – HUE/AM/I through August 20 at Superhouse Vitrine, is comprised of numerous, sometimes unexpected aspects that all cohere. Without being heavy-handed, and as the name of the show implies, the collection embodies the ways we might understand and conceive of our own identities.
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Only a Year Out From Graduating RISD, Alexis & Ginger Already Have Two Collections Under Their Belt

Was it fate that brought Alexis Tingey and Ginger Gordon together? The designers’ studio benches happened to be positioned next to each other during their furniture design Master's program at RISD, and after two years of sharing ideas and inspirations, the pair decided to officially join forces and set up a business together after graduating in 2022. A year later, Alexis & Ginger have moved to Brooklyn, launched two collections — one as part of our Sight Unseen Collection — and already have plans for so much more.
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Bowen Liu Was Up to the Challenge of Making Furniture in Cast Glass

Without being towering, there’s a heft and monumentality to the cast glass Helle collection by New York designer Bowen Liu. The presence of these pieces is anchoring, a solidity that’s offset by their translucency. Made by glass workers in Brooklyn, the collection includes bookends, a coffee table, floor lamp, mirror, and side table, which debuted at New York Design Week in May. While the mirror and lamp feature white oak details, the coffee and side tables and bookends are made entirely of glass. If you don’t see a lot of cast glass furniture at scale, it's because it demands expertise, skill, and time to produce. But Liu was up for the challenge.
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