Week of October 8, 2018

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the American designer having a breakout year, the Portuguese design studios flooding our submissions line, and the iconic Norwegian chair that's being re-released in five new on-trend colors.
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The Belgian Designers Making Candy-Colored Furniture in Their Backyard

Though now partners in work and life, Jef De Brabander and Kathleen Opdenacker of the Antwerp-based Nortstudio arrived at where they are via two very different paths: He’s an industrial engineer, she’s a graphic designer. No wonder, then, that the work they’ve produced since joining forces in 2016 has exhibited such a symbiotic relationship between color and form.
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Meet Elisa Ossino, the Milan-Based Designer and Stylist Who’s Suddenly Everywhere

This will come as a shock to no one, but the Milan design scene can be a little insular. Some of the best things don’t make it past the border, or even beyond the chic artery of Via Solferino for that matter. And unless you speak a bit of Italian and are ordering the right magazines from abroad, it’s not always apparent who’s making waves in the city. Take, for example, up and coming Italian designer Elisa Ossino, an architect and stylist who, after more than a decade of working diligently within the Milan design scene, is finally charting international waters.
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The Best of the Rest at London Design Festival 2018

For the second year in a row, Swedish Ninja launched one of our favorite objects, this year in the form of small, mix-and-match glass sculptures. Studio Anansi capitalized on the lumpy and tubular trends with its chiseled sycamore table mirror. Skandium took up the mantle of Peter Pilotto, with its similarly color-blocked townhouse takeover. And the Ace Hotel continued its Ready Made Go collaboration with Modern Design Review, with this year's designers collaborating with local social enterprises to create each piece. Here's hoping that becomes the trend to follow us into 2019.
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Week of September 17, 2018

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week was a particularly good one for maximalism, from sparkly socks and tables, to a wild "fascist futurist" bank interior, to an opulent new hotel (above) inside an old church and convent, retrofitted to perfection by John Pawson.
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VIDIVIXI Have Us Wondering: Is Everyone Cool Moving to Mexico City?

The latest transplant is Mark Grattan, a Pratt grad who founded his firm VIDIVIXI in 2014 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, but who moved to Mexico City now more than two years ago. We met Mark briefly during his time in New York, but based on the sophistication of the new collection VIDIVIXI debuted this week, we're now dying to get to know him a bit better.
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LDF Preview: The Online Design Gallery Redefining “Nordic”

For Now Nordic, Adorno invited curators from Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, Reykjavik and Oslo to assemble a collection from 5-7 designers working at the intersection of art, design, and craft. The point of the exhibition was to explore whether the label "Nordic" — or what the organizers call "design-world shorthand" for clean lines, natural materials, simplicity and functionality — can meaningfully describe an aesthetic or if lumping designs from different countries together actually does each of them a disservice.
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14 Up-and-Coming American Designers, In a Show Curated By One of Their Own

As people whose job it is to track emerging designers — particularly those on the American scene — it's rare that we walk into a show to find incredible work by a roster of relative unknowns. And yet that's exactly what happened when I rolled up to Fernando Mastrangelo's studio in deep (deep) Brooklyn last Friday night for the opening party of In Good Company: Material Culture. It's the second exhibition Mastrangelo has curated in his space — this time alongside Architectural Digest's senior design writer Hannah Martin.
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LDF 2018 Preview: A Spotlight on Uruguayan Designers

It's nestled directly between Brazil and Buenos Aires, but you don't hear a whole lot about Uruguay in this part of the world. A new exhibition launching during the London Design Festival next week, though, is set to change that: Hilos Invisibles at Aram Gallery will give seven Montevideo studios a platform to present themselves on the global design scene, and the London-based but Uruguayan-born designer Matteo Fogale has helped groom them for their debut.
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