A Deft Mix of Materials Earned This Swedish Studio Sight Unseen’s Best in Show Award at Greenhouse, the Exhibition for Emerging Design at Stockholm’s Furniture Fair

Adrian Bursell and Siri Svedborg were students at Konstfack back in 2018 when they made the tables that would become the initial studies for their Burn & Turn collection, which debuted at the Stockholm Furniture Fair earlier this month, and which earned them Sight Unseen's Best in Show award at Greenhouse, the fair's up-and-coming designer showcase. At the time, they were studying the Arts & Crafts movement in a degree program for Interior Architecture and Furniture Design, and they agreed to explore a table that might reflect the movement's values — one that could be functional yet decorative, using a kind of stripped-down ornamentalism inspired by the Swedish folk tradition.
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On the Great Pine Resurgence of 2023 — AKA For Pine Nuts Who Love It Knotty

Have you been reading For Scale? It's the new furniture-focused Substack that seemingly everyone is already turned onto, and we get it — it's an absolute joy to read, with favorite topics so far including but not being limited to: plastic, children's furniture, the "twink aesthetic," and Psycho-Decorating 101 (a favorite Sight Unseen tome). So, we did what any editor with half a brain would do: We hired For Scale's excellent and very fun writer, David Michon, to pen what we hope is the first of many columns! Today's subject: a paean to PINE.
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A Barbie Pink Living Room, A Patchwork Metal Cabinet: Everything We Loved From the 2023 Collectible Fair in Brussels

Consistently one of our favorite fairs on the design circuit, the sixth edition of Collectible opened last week in a new venue in Brussels, and even from afar we were struck by the fair's continued push towards experimentation. In a new section called Dialogue, galleries were invited to show works from the '80s and '90s in conversation with more contemporary pieces (probably our favorite exhibition trope, tbh); another new section, called Architect <=> Designer, showcased only work by architects and interior designers, while a third, called New Garde, featured the best recently launched galleries and collectives.
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A New Lighting Brand, With Deep Roots in New Orleans and France, Putting a Modern Spin on Traditional Techniques

Swadoh — an anagram of shadow that founder Valerie Legras devised after reading the Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki’s “In Praise of Shadows” — works exclusively with small artisans who do intricate and often time-consuming hand work at their workshops in France. That, and the idea that each artist should be working in a wonderfully unique way with their chosen material, is the strict guiding principle behind Swadoh.
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Obsessed With Materials? This Italian Brand Is Turning Them Into Wall Art

Most object designers — and object-lovers too, ourselves included — have an unusually heightened appreciation for materials. We can feel moved simply by the surface texture of clay, or by the way a piece of glass reflects light, or by the curious reaction of metal to certain chemicals or industrial processes. That notion is at the heart of Design Editions, a novel new project making its debut at Suite NY that treats materials like paintings, framing them so they can be hung on the wall and admired.
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A New Exhibition Defines the Next Generation of Danish Design

The purpose of Ukurant Perspectives was to showcase a new generation of designers who are pushing the conversation forward through practices that “revalue discarded materials, create innovative composites and explore the limits of craft to redefine its importance.” Seventeen mostly Denmark-based designers were featured, all of whom pursued wildly different approaches to object and furniture design.
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Three New Collections in Metal That Get Creative With Industrial Parts

We recently noticed a fascination, shared among three up-and-coming designers from two different parts of the globe — Sebastian Kommer, Jinyeong Yeon, and Nice Workshop — with using off-the-shelf metal materials in new, more beautiful ways. The concept itself is nothing new, but it underscores just how much endless versatility can be found in industrial parts and profiles — and how they offer emerging designers access to industrial fabrication without the expensive factory tooling and MOQs.
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Meet UNNO, the New Online Gallery Championing Latin American Design

UNNO, a new online-only gallery from architect Laura Abe Vettoretti and interior designer Maria Dolores, is making the most of the situation after plans to open a physical gallery in Milan last year were put on hold. Their mission, they tell us, is to introduce the richly varied landscape of Latin American design to collectors across the globe, spurred on by the region’s fertile mix of craft tradition and yet-to-be-discovered crop of contemporary designers.
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James Shaw On Why He Hopes His Design Practice Will One Day Eat Itself

“Daffodils are great,” says British designer James Shaw when I point out the bright yellow bunch sitting behind him in his southeast London workshop during our Zoom call. “They always start off really unpromising as those little green buds, and then they get better and better and they last for ages.” It’s an apt metaphor for Shaw’s own work, which often begins as discarded post-consumer plastic that he turns into slightly trippy organic forms reminiscent of crude cake frosting, created with his self-built plastic extruding gun and sculpted into quotidian objects from toilet paper holders to bowls, candelabras, and chairs.
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Travertine, Salt, and Wood: Gregory Beson and the Beauty of Tangible Materials

There’s something refreshingly thoughtful about the way New York–based furniture designer and Parsons professor Gregory Beson talks about his practice. He may be represented by Love House in New York and Rossana Orlandi in Milan, but when discussing his recent collection, Home Group One, it’s not some white-gloved gallery where he pictures it. “I see the pieces as plinths for living,” says the Massachusetts-born designer, describing the series of tables, chairs, and shelving formed of interlocking planes of solid walnut.
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While on Lockdown at the Barbican, This Duo Made Brutalist Furniture Out of Moving Boxes and Other Scraps

A Space's new Barbican collection is a series of mirrors, lights, and tables whose name references the famed London housing estate where the studio's founders spent the past year living and making it. Having moved in last May, they conceived the series as an homage to their new surroundings, then sculpted it out of the materials available to them during lockdown, including moving boxes, food containers, and plaster of Paris ordered online.
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