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06.25.19

Interiors

Oscar Piccolo’s London Home Is a Perfect Reflection of His Creative Approach

The first time we saw photos of Sicilian-born, London-based designer Oscar Piccolo's home, featured on The Modern House, we had to chuckle — it's not every day you find a guy whose name means "small" in his native Italian living in a cozy one-room flat in London. But the second time we saw it featured, on Architectural Digest's Clever site last week, where our very own writer Zoe Sessums described how Piccolo has thoughtfully transformed the space over the past three years, we began to notice all the ways in which his home suits him perfectly in more than just name.
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03.07.19

Sighted

How Do You Capture Kinetic Motion in a Still Photo?

That's the challenge Kinfolk magazine recently gave London-based photographer Aaron Tilley for its current Architecture issue. Tilley's work is often concerned with motion or the moment just before motion begins; his subjects include bread whose slices appear caught in mid-tumble or paper sheets that seem to be floating on a table's edge. For Kinfolk, however, the still-life photographer was asked to create the effect of a Rube Goldberg machine — a series of photos in which one action triggers another and another until the payoff in the final frame.
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03.04.19

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Showcase for Experimental Craft — And Iridescence — On View in London

Like Salon in New York, the Collect fair in London has recently evolved to become a platform for enabling more risk-taking work, showcasing the latest possibilities, processes, and technologies at play in the field of making. The peripatetic London gallery Seeds, a longtime SU favorite, returned to the fair this year with newly commissioned works from nine contemporary designers.
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02.22.19

Up and Coming

You’ll Never Believe How These Ombré Ceramics Are Made

We've seen designers do a lot of crazy things with ceramic in our career, but Philipp Schenk-Mischke's incredibly bizarre process might be our favorite yet — he uses a body vibration plate, co-opted from the fitness industry, to gently jiggle his way to a unique, slumped ceramic form.
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12.03.18

Up and Coming

A Furniture Collection in London Made From 3D Printing’s Leftovers

Years ago, when London-based designers Seongil Choi and Fabio Hendry met as students at the Royal College of Art, they were asked to make a stool — which, at the time, they had very little interest in doing. Yet by channeling their common backgrounds in industrial design and their interest in finding uses for low-value, abundant resources, they inadvertently developed an innovative process — called Hot Wire Extensions — by which they have now made many, many a stool, and so much more.
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Marcin Rusak Manufacture
10.16.18

Sighted

Liquefied Metal, Applied Like Spray Paint, Creates Texture in a New Collection

The London-based, Polish-born designer Marcin Rusak first rose to prominence a few years ago exploring how natural materials — and, in many cases, live ones, like flowers and bacteria — could be harnessed and transformed into a wholly new aesthetic. Now, Rusak is developing a more industrial-based offshoot called MRM (or Marcin Rusak Manufacture), and the brand's first collection takes as its starting point a similar urge to recast commonly found natural elements as something otherworldly.
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08.03.18

Up and Coming

This Modular Furniture Collection Might Unglue You From Your Phone

Kusheda Mensah is a British-born Ghanaian designer, based in London, whose Modular by Mensah Mutual collection began from the realization that face-to-face interaction is deteriorating from the rise of social media. As an "artistic remedy," Mensah developed 20 interlocking modular pieces of furniture, representing the closeness and connection shared between humans, as well as the human form itself.
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07.26.18

Sighted

In a New Series, A Sicilian Still-Life Artist Says Goodbye to Beige

The Sicilian-born, London-based designer Oscar Piccolo has a self-professed obsession. He is compelled to take vases and arrange them just so, manipulating how the light shines through, meticulously moving through tableaux until arriving — ecstatically — at just the right one. This fascination, he admits, “is becoming a bit of a problem.” Yet at the core of this compulsion is a relatively simple proposition: “All in all, my work explores the relation between objects and their positioning.”
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07.13.18

Excerpt: Exhibition

The Finnish Designer Using a Traditional Moroccan Wall-Surfacing Technique to Make Furniture

Amsterdam-based designer Tuomas Markunpoika aims for “tedious functionality” in his designs, but to us there is mystery and wonder in the bulbous, colorful slabs of material that compose his furniture. His new series of works is called “Contra Naturam,” or against nature — a mauve bench, a coffee table and chair in grayish and springy greens, and a side table and console in pale yellow and cream. Each looks cut from the earth or plucked from a stage set, at once natural and totally fake.
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03.05.18

Interiors

In Dreary London, A Mediterranean Eatery Inspired By the Sun

Are there new restaurants out there that aren't inspired by the seaside? First we had the Italian Riviera, then the Sydney coast, and now Omar's Place — a restaurant located smack in the middle of London but inspired by the Mediterranean. The interior was shaped by Sella Concept, a London-based female design duo whose concept for the space started with idea of the sun — the defining element of Mediterranean lifestyle.
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03.01.18

Interiors

This London Flat Will Make You Want to Cover Your Walls With Concrete Tile

Darkroom founder Rhonda Drakeford recently launched a studio under own name, Studio Rhonda, for which she creates objects, interiors, installations, and even something like public art. Our favorite project is an interior renovation Drakeford undertook in which the 4x4 tile — once relegated to builder-grade status — gets an upgrade by using pigmented concrete, color-blocked and coordinated with the furniture, to create an interior that might be the most fun we've seen this year.
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