At Three Design Hotels, A Sense of Place Rooted in the Local Environment

Hotels are often transitory, sometimes liminal, spaces. But three recently opened or newly renovated ones are rooted in their local environments, taking design cues from their surroundings and creating a distinctive atmosphere. You’re not just anywhere, or even in-between, you’re there: in Fukuoka City, Japan at Hotel Il Palazzo, in Tomales Bay, California at Lodge at Marconi (above), and at Otro Oaxaca, you’re firmly in the southern Mexican city.

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03.30.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

Nathalie du Pasquier is So Much More Than the Poster Girl for Memphis Design

When a return to Memphis became the defining design trend back in 2014, a few of the movement's original members flew to the forefront of discourse once again, among them Peter Shire, Ettore Sottsass, and Nathalie du Pasquier, whose exuberant patterning became a kind of shorthand for cool around that time. (If you came home from Milan in 2014 without an NDP Wrong for Hay tote bag, were you even there?) But while Du Pasquier became pigeon-holed for that kind of blocky, frazzled look (remember when she designed for American Apparel?!), she's always been so much more than that, and the full fruits of her output as an artist are on view this month at an exhibition called "Speed Limit" at Anton Kern Gallery in New York.

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06.02.21

Interiors

This Milanese Apartment Bridges the Gap Between a Memphis Aesthetic and Old-School Italian Glamour

When the Spanish firm Puntofilipino set out to design this apartment in Milan, the goal was not only to find a style that somehow bridged the divide between period interiors and a more contemporary, Memphis-inspired aesthetic, but also to serve as a kind of rebuke to the austerity of mid-century modernism. We'd say they hit the mark.

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New ceramics by Memphis founder Nathalie du Pasquier

04.09.18

Q+A

A New Ceramics Collection — And So Much More — From Memphis Founder Nathalie du Pasquier

After thirty years of pushing her painting practice forward — only dipping her toes briefly back into design to produce textiles for American Apparel and HAY — Memphis co-founder Nathalie du Pasquier will debut a collaboration with Tuscan ceramics company Bitossi in Milan next week.

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08.04.14

Graphic Design

Peter Judson’s ’80s-Inspired Illustrations Are A Playful Homage to Memphis Design

With all the talk of Memphis Design suddenly in the air — Gizmodo and L'Arcobaleno both recently name-checked Sight Unseen in stories about its not-so-recent resurgence — we thought that sharing these '80s-influenced illustrations would be a fun way to start the week. They're by recent Kingston University graduate Peter Judson, whose work is a playful homage to Sottsass and the gang but has been compared to everything from Nickelodeon cartoons to “a cheap rip off of the latter works by Roy Lichtenstein.”

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