lava rock design lamps

Lava Rock — So Hot Right Now

The Guadalajara-based studio Peca made coasters out of it. Formafantasma paired it with more refined materials like brass and glass. Aleks Pollner and Adrien Rovero are obsessed with it. Now, the latest designer to be inspired by plucking basalt from the earth and fashioning it into something, well, fashionable is Laura Bilde, a furniture and interior design student from Denmark who sent us this seriously on-trend lighting series this week.
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Thea Djordjadze

Thea Djordjadze Is Your New Favorite Artist

The Georgian–born, Berlin-based sculptor has a way of combining references to modernist architecture with a palette of diverse, process-oriented materials like plaster, foam, and linoleum that's total catnip to those of us in the design world.
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Hunting & Narud Studio Visit

Hunting & Narud Are Rewriting the Rules of Scandinavian Design

Originally from Norway, Amy Hunting and Oscar Narud both completed design education abroad — Hunting at the prestigious Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (KADK) in Copenhagen and Narud at the RCA in London — but the design heritage of their home country remains an important theme in their work. "There's obviously this romanticized cliché of Scandinavian style but a lot of young designers are now trying to push back," says Narud when we talk about their aspiration to reinterpret the stereotypical notions of a Nordic aesthetic. "Scandinavian design is redefining itself with our generation. We all struggle with the weight of the heritage, but there's a lot of stuff happening now."
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Canadian furniture designer Thom Fougere

A Canadian Furniture Designer Strikes Out On His Own

At the age of just 24, having just graduated from architecture school, the Winnipeg–based designer Thom Fougere became the creative director of EQ3 (which is something like the Canadian version of Room & Board). Now, just five years later, Fougere has opened up his own shop as well.
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Studio Cofield Emerging Designers

Brooklyn’s Cofield Is Scaling Up

Though Sara Ebert and Jason Pfaeffle studied in the same industrial design program at Pratt, it wasn’t until they started working together on a post-grad project for West Elm that a partnership developed. As they started spending more time together, they would often ask each other’s opinion on personal projects. They soon realized they shared a creative point of view; love blossomed and their design studio Cofield was formed.
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A Power-Show of Wall Hangings By Confettisystem, Mimi Jung, Clarisse Demory, and Amateurs

Le Gens Heureux, a three-year-old Copenhagen art gallery founded by Sanne Frank and Anneli Häkkinen, has two major selling points — its setting, and its knack for perfectly curated group shows. Now on view is a roundup of textile wall hangings by some of the best names in the business — Mimi Jung, Confettisystem, Amateurs, and Clarisse Demory — that are all entirely different, yet totally complementary, connected by tiny common threads of color and composition.
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Jewelry Made From Stone, Resin, and Plastic Trash

Most of Mexican designer Poleta Rodete's jewelry is made from raw granite or marble. Her special collection for the Mexico City design gallery Ángulo Cero also appears to be composed of elements scavenged from nature — the kind of plastic or glass bits you sometimes find washed up on the shore — yet Rodete has fabricated the pieces from scratch, by mixing limestone, marble, granite, epoxy resin, and plastic trash to create an entirely new material.
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Hammertone

Why Designers Are Obsessed With a Metal Finish Called Hammertone

When something previously considered irreparably uncool — like Tevas, or turtlenecks — suddenly becomes a massive trend, it can be hard to pinpoint exactly why. Today, beginning with the Eric Trine pieces above, we're unpacking the rise of the bumpy industrial metal finish known as hammertone, surveying its best examples and hearing from the designers themselves why they've become such converts.
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Liverpool’s Granby Workshop Creates Objects with Local Makers

On view now at the Turner Prize exhibition in Glasgow, the shortlisted art and architecture collective Assemble recently debuted the results of its new initiative the Granby Workshop, a crowdfunded product line aimed at fostering a "community-led rebuilding of a Liverpool neighborhood following years of dereliction."
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