Estudio Persona

These Uruguay-Born, Los Angeles–Based Women are Poised for Furniture Stardom

Four years ago, Emiliana Gonzalez and Jessie Young moved to Los Angeles from their hometown of Montevideo. Back in Uruguay, they'd known each other only peripherally, but as creatives in a new city, they were drawn to one another. Gonzalez had trained as an industrial designer, while Young was a conceptual artist and a new mother who didn't have the energy to navigate a new art scene. After designing a few houses together, they moved on to products — first geometric walnut planters, then furniture — and founded Estudio Persona.
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Week of March 6, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: linoleum gets a big thumbs up, a dive bar in a Super 8 motel gets a jaw-dropping reinvention, and a master of Dutch design gets a beautifully designed retrospective (above).
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Hayley Eichenbaum Instagram Photographer

Hayley Eichenbaum on Going Viral, Being Instagram-Famous, and How Photography Almost Saved Her

The romance of the American road has a lot to do with renewal, how to take what’s fallen into cliché and make it alive again. This is just what Hayley Eichenbaum has done in several photographic series — going on road trips to capture and create images that reframe the familiar as unearthly and surreal. Her work is guided by the geometry and clean lines of minimalist architecture and design, revealing a mysteriousness beneath flat facades and surfaces. But her pictures are also cinematic, echoing everything from Technicolor melodramas to Stanley Kubrick.
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The Future Perfect Los Angeles

A Flawlessly Appointed Interior, On View Now at The Future Perfect Los Angeles

If you're anything like us, you've probably allowed yourself to dream about one day having a home (and a salary) where you might be able to show off your Calico wallpaper, your Michael Anastassiades lights, your terrazzo Rooms tables, your Ben & Aja Blanc mirrors, and your perfect, rust-colored, velvet De La Espada chairs. If, like us, you fear that day might never come, now at least you can visit your idealized domestic vision in the form of Casa Perfect, a new, appointment-only Los Angeles outpost of The Future Perfect, housed in a mid-century ranch in the Hollywood Hills.
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At 83, Vasa — and His Famed Acrylic Sculptures — Are Still On Top of the LA Art World

When our friend and sometime contributor Robin Stein emailed us to reveal that Los Angeles artist — and longtime SU obsession — Vasa Mihich was an old family friend, and ask if we might be interested in shooting his Los Angeles studio and archives, we jumped at the chance. What Stein's photos reveal is something that we, who often focus on design's newest and youngest practitioners, rarely have access to: a portrait of an octogenarian artist, still producing at a rapid clip, at the height of his career and his potential; a maker clearly in love with both his materials and his process.
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Inside the Downtown Los Angeles Loft Where Five Creatives Collaborate

Somebody knew somebody. That’s the short answer, according to Claire Cottrell, to the question of how five creatives — Cottrell, Michael Felix, David Rager, Cheri Messerli, and Saul Germaine, each distinguished in their respective fields — found themselves working out of a shared studio in LA’s Arts District, and occupying its airy second floor. “There are two degrees of separation between all of us,” she says.
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Pink Houses and Ombré Hot Tubs, On View at a Los Angeles Gallery

An ombré hot tub, a bubblegum pink house, gorgeous, multi-colored, woven wall-hangings — Kayne Corcoran Griffin’s current two-person show with Mika Tajima and Jean-Pascal Flavien is chock full of splashy sculptures, paintings, weavings, installations and more that are right up our alley. The two artists are fascinated with the human tendency to gather in groups, and both Tajima and Flavien create playful work that explores what happens at those sites of assembly.
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Kathleen Whitaker Just Took Her Simple, Geometric Jewelry Up a Notch

Nearly a year ago, we profiled the Los Angeles jewelry designer Kathleen Whitaker, known for starting the whole staple and dot stud earring trend that went viral a couple years back, and previewed the limited-edition project she was starting in parallel to her base collection — one that would elevate those designs into more rarefied territory by adding semiprecious stones to their simple, minimalist geometries. Earlier this spring, she officially debuted the results in the form of the Stone Collection, and we are coveting every. single. piece.
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4 Art and Design Shows You Should See This Weekend

Some of us are currently having the busiest week of our year, juggling two major shows at once. But for all our readers whose schedules are slightly more forgiving at the moment, we envy you, because there's some excellent art and design to be seen out there this weekend, and not just at Frieze or Collective Design. Here's a quick roundup.
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Eric Trine Wants to Bring Powder-Coated Joy to the Masses

In the three years since we met Eric Trine — who, at the time, was a grad student skipping his art-school graduation to show with Sight Unseen during New York Design Week — the Long Beach, California–furniture designer has emerged as a true talent. And though his powder-coated pieces — geometric, clean, bright, and fun — have wowed us from the start, over time he’s honed his approach and philosophy, shifting from a DIY mentality to a full-fledged operation with a driving vision behind it: to make great-looking, high-quality products that are actually affordable.
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Kathryn Bentley's midcentury Los Angeles home

Kathryn Bentley’s LA Home is a Beautiful Showcase for Talented Designers and Friends

When we think about our dream home, here are some of the things we think about: bountiful sunlight and lots of green plants; layered, colorful Moroccan rugs and deep, caramel-colored leather sofas; and tons and tons of intimately personal art, objects, and furniture made by designers we know and love. (And, let's not forget, our well-documented penchant for a great yellow and blue combo.) So imagine our surprise and delight when a sneak peek for this weekend's T Magazine hit the internet and we came face to face with all of those things packed into one beautiful, mid-century Los Angeles home — owned, no less, by jewelry designer and shop owner Kathryn Bentley of Dream Collective, a woman whose style we've admired for years.
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