The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today, Day 4

On the Salone fairgrounds, we found a sleeper hit in the Italian metal processing company De Castelli, who began collaborating with designers back in 2010. We especially love the snaking, patinated Scribble tables by Francesca Lanzavecchia above, as well as the painterly folding screens by Alessandra Baldereschi.
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In Milan, Luxury Objects Inspired by Industrial Parts

To kick off the Milan Furniture Fair — where we'll be reporting from week — we have to talk about a favorite exhibition organized by NOV Gallery, the Swiss-based gallery who last year produced one of our favorite things in Milan. This year, rather than luxury, designers are exploring the theme of The New Readymade, so-named for the Duchamp term that's become widely adopted by artists to describe work derived from existing industrial parts.
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A Turner Prize–Winning Architecture Collective Sets Up Shop in Brooklyn

U.K. architecture collective Assemble has created an installation — dubbed “A Factory As It Might Be” — in the courtyard of A/D/O, the brand-new, forward-looking design space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The temporary factory features an industrial clay extruder, which Assemble — and their Liverpool-based social enterprise the Granby Workshop, along with fellow collaborators — used to make the factory’s cladding as well as a host of products from dinnerware to planters. The effort is the debut US project for the team, who famously became the first architects to win the Turner Prize in 2015.
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An Up-And-Coming Dutch Duo On Why They Don’t Identify As “Designers”

In 2008, when Daphna Isaacs Burggraaf and Laurens Manders began collaborating, they kept their studios separate. It wasn’t until four years later that they officially founded their company, compounding ideas and names — the latter of which was deemed a challenge until the Internet threw up the solution. “We were looking to find out if images of our products had been published, and we found an image of our lamps with the name ‘Daphna Laurens’ written above it.” Upon reading this, they realized that it was exactly what they’d been looking for — an anonymous name that symbolized their way of working together; a new ego that has allowed them to playfully carve out a space for themselves as form-flexing experimenters.
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Faye Toogood Friedman Benda

At Friedman Benda, Faye Toogood Channels Her Spiritual and Earthly Instincts

Since showing her first ​Assemblage​ furniture collection back in 2010, British designer Faye Toogood has evolved the series, adding pieces in new materials to each subsequent collection — from sycamore and stone, to resin and steel, to patinated brass and wire mesh, to fiberglass and plaster. Her latest range, ​Assemblage 5​, on show at Friedman Benda in New York in the designer's first solo U.S. exhibition, is inspired by spiritual objects but bound by her signature balance of elemental materials, invoking a strong sense of ritual and permanence.
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In This Dutch Designer’s Hands, Even a Door Handle Becomes a Piece of Sculpture

So pretty. So minimal. That, in a nutshell, is the work of Dutch product designer Jeroen van de Gruiter. A recent graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven, van de Gruiter’s work plays with the tension between what a thing appears to be and how we choose to let it function in the world. His objects are as much about themselves as anything else: the way they take up space, shifting and fluctuating, contrasting and offsetting — other objects as well as their surroundings. They are concept made manifest; latent potential given concrete form.
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Beautiful Objects Built to Last, By a Tech Refugee Turned Furniture Designer

Not every designer considers UI when approaching a furniture collection, but then Zürich-based Isabell Gatzen isn’t every designer: A brief stint in Silicon Valley a few years back left her disillusioned with the short product lifecycle that seems to be a hallmark of so much tech industry innovation and eager to apply strategic thinking to a more traditional craft.
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Bower American Design

Bower On Becoming One of the Hottest Studios in American Design

Bower's products and furniture always feel just right for the moment in which they're made, somehow ahead of what's current but not so trendy that they'll soon fall out of fashion. That these sophisticated harbingers are made from an enormous Brooklyn woodshop with no A/C seems about right when you meet them.
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Slash Objects furniture collection

This Brooklyn Designer is Doing Amazing Things With Industrial Rubber

In a previous life, Arielle Assouline-Lichten studied architecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, created graphics for Bjarke Ingels's Copenhagen office, built models for Snøhetta, and interned for Kengo Kuma. But she landed on our radar this spring after she began working for someone a little less famous: herself. This spring saw the launch of Slash Objects — a glamorous, assured debut furniture and object collection that mixes brass, marble, concrete, ceramic, and industrial rubber in endless combinations and at various scales.
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Repossi Paris flagship OMA Sabine Marcelis

In Paris, the Anti-French Jewelry Boutique

Here's something we never thought we'd be covering on this site: A French jewelry boutique. The very idea seems too fussy for our forward-thinking aesthetic, calling to mind things like porcelain reliefs, gilded displays, and grand spiral staircases. But the new Repossi flagship in Paris's Place Vendôme, designed by Dutch architects OMA, contains precisely none of those things.
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RCA emerging designers 2016

Six Talents to Watch from RCA’s 2016 Graduate Show

Martino Gamper, Tomás Alonso, Raw-Edges, Soft Baroque — these are just a few of the designers who came from abroad to study at London's Royal College of Art and ended up making a home in the UK. So it's no wonder a dampened mood filled the air at this year's graduate showcase, in the wake of the EU Referendum, with an underlying anxiety of how the political sphere might affect the influx — and future prospects — of applying students. Still, the show was as fruitful as ever at uncovering this year's next big thing designers — click through for six of our favorites!
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