At Zona Maco, Agnes’s First Solo Exhibition is Bestrewn With Symbols of Luck

When the Guatemala City-based duo Agnes first burst onto the scene in 2017, they did so in a decidedly iconic fashion: Their debut collection was immediately embraced by the international design community, with splashy press clips, interesting placements, and influential commissions (AGO Projects founders Rodman Primack and Rudy Weissenberg asked the two to create a rug for their own CDMX home, which was later featured in our book, How to Live With Objects). Now AGO is spotlighting Agnes’s sophomore collection at their Mexico City–based gallery as part of the designers’ first solo exhibition, which opened during last month’s Zona Maco festivities. 
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“The Willingness For Something to be Imperfect” — Inside the Mexico City Home of Rodman Primack & Rudy Weissenberg

Rodman Primack and Rudy Weissenberg are all over the map, both literally—with houses in Guatemala, Mexico City, and New York—and figuratively, with multiple professional interests that ultimately converge around contemporary design. Primack is a former director of Design Miami and currently runs the textile and interiors studio RP Miller, while Weissenberg, a former television exec, now works in real estate development. Together, the pair founded the design gallery AGO Projects, which is just a short drive from their colorful Mexico City apartment, featured here.
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Mark Grattan’s Mexico City Apartment Oozes a Kind of Sensual Charm

Mark Grattan’s work is moody, smoky, sensual, and chic — all qualities that, a few years back, earned him first prize on the erstwhile TV show Ellen’s Next Great Designer (which also featured longtime SU friend Arielle Assouline-Lichten). Grattan's Mexico City apartment, on the fourth floor of a building by famed architect Luis Barragán — which we photographed for How to Live With Objects but which he has since left for New York City — had a similar vibe, filled with black leather, velvet, wall-to-wall carpeting, and sleek, low pieces designed by Grattan himself.
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In Her Object-Filled Mexico City Home, Su Wu Surrounds Herself With Gifts, Mexican Crafts, and Contemporary Design

Even though Su Wu's home has since become, in our circles, one of the most well-known stops on the Mexico City circuit of cool, it felt inevitable that we should include it in our book, How to Live With Objects — both to commemorate our long professional relationship, and to acknowledge that when you're talking about the beauty and power of objects, hers is a voice that deserves to be part of the conversation. Wu is a staunch champion of the local Mexican design scene, using her home — which she shares with her husband, the artist Alma Allen, and their two children — as a place to co-curate exhibitions and showcase her ever-growing collection of gifts, Mexican crafts, and contemporary art and design.
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Here Are a Few of Our Favorite Things From This Year’s Salón Cosa in CDMX

For its third edition, the burgeoning Salón COSA, Mexico’s biannual “gathering of contemporary objects,” returned to its roots in CDMX after a stint in Guadalajara last fall. On a relatively intimate scale — 22 participating artists and designers showed recent and unpublished works — Salón COSA occupied the dance floor of an old cantina nestled among the cafés, nightclubs, and shops of Calle de Motolinia, one of the oldest streets in the city. With the walls and furniture of the bar-turned-exhibition-space cloaked in a fresh coat of cerulean blue, this year’s curation reflected Salón COSA’s nocturnal setting.
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The Experimental Mexico City Design Shop That’s On Our Must-Visit List

We've experienced such a shrink in the retail industry over the past two years that it honestly feels incredibly heartening to see a brick-and-mortar design store of all things opening in Mexico City this week. Called ORIGINARIO and led by Andrés Gutierrez — whose work we featured early last summer — the store is a destination where design folks can shop for furniture, objects, and art by homegrown talents, including Comité de Proyectos, CHUCH, Bestia, Raúl de la Cerda, Flama, A-G studio, and more.
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In Mexico City, An Up-and-Coming Design Studio Inspired by Institutional Aesthetics

The objects and furniture made by the Mexico City–based design studio Panorammma are difficult to pin in one particular box. Their concepts pivot from material focus — such as in their Neolithic Thinker chair, an upturned U-shaped seat made of volcanic tezontle stone — to abstract ideas, like the Sisyphean Table, a glass-topped Vignelli-esque cocktail table inspired by the concept of the absurd. But the thread that connects all of these approaches is a steady preoccupation with narrative and memory.
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Inside Circulo Mexicano, a Shaker-Inspired Retreat in the Middle of Mexico City

Mexico has no ties to the Shakers, the 18th-century New England–based Christian sect who were known for their minimalist and utilitarian furniture made from honest materials like local wood. And yet somehow, the Shaker-inspired interior at the new Circulo Mexicano hotel in Mexico City seems a perfect complement to what is perhaps the most colorful city in the world.
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This Mexico City–Based Designer Just Wants His Furniture and Interiors to Make You Feel Something

When I ask the Mexico City-based designer Andrés Gutiérrez what he hopes to achieve in his work, his answer, to be honest, makes me a bit emotional: “To make people feel something… If someone has a good time, or a better day in one of the spaces I helped to design, it’s all worth it.” How could you not catch feelings? Peppering his delightfully sensory portfolio are expanses of highly saturated tiled surfaces, an interior splashed in a hue best described as ube, and oversized wooden furniture with deliciously smooth knobs begging to be touched.
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This Mexican Modernist Masterpiece by Mario Pani Is Now a Rentable Guest House

Architect Miggi Hood, Yola Mezcal co-founder Yola Jimenez, and entrepreneur Marie Cazalaa knew they’d struck gold when — having set out to find a property in their part-time home of Mexico City that they could turn into a stylish guest house — they acquired a charismatic residence built in 1962 by the famed Mexican architect Mario Pani. The home had been in the same family since its construction and was extremely run-down; the three friends won the bid by promising to fully restore it and invite others in to experience its design and its history. They spent two years turning it into Casa Pani, which is now bookable on Airbnb.
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Week of March 8, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week had two distinct themes: lockdown projects — including a ceramic table, a neon-green sculpture, and a Rooms collaboration — and really kooky shit, including the anthropomorphized furniture above.
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James Evans’s Photorealistic Paintings Are a Meditation on Impermanence

The suffocated images of artist James Evans’ “Constraint Equation” series are a photorealistic depiction of what appears to be houseplants wrapped up in sheets of humid plastic that obscure and abstract them. Created during a period in quarantine, they are a fitting expression of the limitations and discomfort most of us have experienced this year. Evans, who grew up in Colorado and now splits his time between New York and Mexico City, is a prodigious new force in the art world.
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