Nadia Yaron Embraced Chaos — In the Form of Chainsaws — To Create This Tranquil Exhibition

In a new show at Francis Gallery in Los Angeles, Nadia Yaron presents the body of work that emerged from a burgeoning love affair with her natural surroundings in Hudson, New York. “I work mostly outside from spring to autumn and am immersed in nature,” she shares. “This show is a tribute, a way to say thank you to these elements for their beauty and wisdom and all the joy they bring to our lives.” From her studio, a repurposed 19th century barn, Yaron used chainsaws and grinders to produce a series of sculptures of striking tranquility. It is not a peaceful exchange of energy. But, she says, “out of the chaos comes some quiet.”
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Berlin Startup Raus Is Building Designer Cabins in the Woods that Let Tired City-Dwellers Become One With Nature

With its 170 square-foot bookable designer cabins, German startup Raus lets its guests leave the craziness of the city behind to experience being separated from endless trees and sky by a mere sliver of glass (without giving up the comforts of a proper mattress and shower). Its founders created the first few cabins themselves, negotiating deals with farmers outside Berlin to park the off-the-grid structures on their land, then commissioned architect Sigurd Larsen to envision model 2.0, which debuted this past spring.
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Ross Hansen Volume Gallery

Resin is Having a Moment — Here’s One of Our Favorite Uses of the Material Yet

Los Angeles designer Ross Hansen has a degree in landscape architecture — as well as a current landscape practice — so it makes sense that his first solo furniture exhibition, on view now at Chicago's Volume Gallery, would hinge on man's perception of nature. Called Super Natural, the pieces in his new series explore color, form, and industrial processes through objects made from epoxy resin — a grand, flocked, deep green armoire with a protruding, block-like grid; a bumpy, brick-red chair; and a series of bowls, tables, shelves, and chairs, whose mottled, pigment-dyed patterns almost resemble florals.
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Marcin Rusak’s Inflorescence and Other Artefacts

It may seem daring to open an exhibition on the eve of the annual design carnival that is graduate show season in London but Marcin Rusak doesn't have to worry about a lack of attention. It was a big year for the London-based designer, who kicked off his artistic career with exhibiting at the Victoria and Albert museum and securing the coveted Perrier-Jouët Arts Salon Prize for emerging talent within just a year of graduating from the RCA last year. His first solo show, "Inflorescence and Other Artefacts," is a display of dichotomies, constantly flipping between natural and synthetic, authentic and fake, beautiful and seductively grotesque, forcing viewers to form their own opinion about the value of the objects on display.
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Kate Jackling, Photographer

We first came across the work of UK photographer Kate Jackling through a collaboration with COS that was endlessly re-pinned a few months back. That campaign — with its clothes draped over pink, yellow, and blue geometric forms — was so good that we had to know more about the photographer responsible for styling such a fun and playful set. Once we came across her website, we knew we'd hit the jackpot. Jackling’s photos are clean, playing with shadows and reflections to elevate product photography into something more artistic — photos that sell the product, yet also sell Jackling herself as someone who clearly understands her craft.
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Eskayel’s Watercolor-Like New Wallpaper Collection

You know those Instagram feeds where it seems like the person is always off on some fantastic holiday in a remote locale? In our feed, that person is Shanan Campanaro, the multitalented artist and designer behind Eskayel. The San Diego native calls Brooklyn home, but in the past year, she's been to Bali, Belize, Nicaragua, Vail... the list goes on. But in Campanaro's case, all that travel isn't necessarily just for fun — it provides inspiration as well for the watercolors that will eventually become bleached, beautiful patterns for her wallpapers and fabrics. Eskayel's newest collection, which we're featuring today, is called “Jangala” which means jungle in Sanskrit. The new collection is a bit of a departure from her signature aesthetic, in that some of the colorways are more highly saturated than in the past, but the effect is the same. We love these styled shots Campanaro shared with us, with their overflowing greenery and little totems picked up on travel — not to mention their cute product loans from Rich Brilliant Willing! See more of our favorites after the jum, and then go to Eskayel's site to view the full collection.
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Jake Longstreth, Artist

If you’re familiar with the work of Jake Longstreth (which we weren’t until it was brought to our attention by our newest contributor, Laure Joliet!) you probably know him from a series of paintings that made the blog rounds a few years back. Hyper-realistic depictions of empty suburban landscapes and architecture — think tennis courts, drive-thru pharmacies, and red-roofed Pizza Huts — the paintings were unsettling, both in their flat anonymity and in their technique, which rendered them eerily photographic. But a few years ago, Longstreth’s focus shifted.
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Elyse Graham’s Geodes

It seems fitting that we were first introduced to Elyse Graham’s Geodes during our Hotel California show at last year’s Noho Design District. After all, there’s something distinctly Californian in the born-and-bred Los Angeles artist’s work. In her Geodes project, for which Graham casts layers of colorful urethane around a balloon mold, there are hints of the desert, psychedelia, yoga, and the wind. If that all sounds a little fuzzy, the objects themselves are not: Sawed open, they reveal incredibly beautiful swirls of color and texture that are the result of a process that's somehow both carefully calibrated and entirely left to chance. We asked Graham herself to explain how she achieves that effect, and to take us through her entire process.
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Max Lipsey, furniture designer

Max Lipsey’s father is an architect, and his mother is an artist, but it might be Murray Moss who’s most responsible for turning the Eindhoven-based, Aspen, Colorado native on to design.
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Renata Abbade, designer and stylist

A lot of designers call themselves multidisciplinary, but they’ve got nothing on Renata Abbade. A former stylist for magazines like Purple and fashion brands like VPL, the São Paulo–born, Los Angeles–based designer has spent the better part of the last decade involved in a wonderfully weird array of activities: creating a cult jewelry line in ceramics, dancing on stage at Lollapalooza with the Brazilian band CSS, starring in a series of self-produced dance and workout videos (including one for CSS, in which she wore masks depicting each of the band members’ faces), designing terrariums, landscapes, rugs, tapestries, and fabrics, DJing down in Brazil, and performing with a semi-fictitious band called High Waisted. She refers to herself both as a freestylist and a fashion artist, but in truth, what she’s often creating amounts to something more like performance art, where she is the subject, channeling personal interests and experiences into new and different media. “To me, it feels like I’m only doing one thing, even if I’m involved in a lot of different things,” says Abbade. “Like with the terrariums, it’s basically styling with plants instead of clothes, and land instead of people.”
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Mischer Traxler, Designers

As a high school student in Vienna, Thomas Traxler followed a course of study fairly typical for Austrian teens. Having had the choice to either study liberal arts — as his future partner Katharina Mischer was doing — or to specialize, he chose to immerse himself in the world of automation techniques. Typical school projects included constructing a kind of assembly-line handling system to transfer goods from one conveyor belt to the other. “It prepares you to work in an engineering office constructing machines that eliminate the need for people,” Traxler, now 29, explains. “It wasn’t creative at all; you had to make things the cheapest, fastest, most durable, and easiest way. After the third year, I knew I didn’t want to continue.” When he ended up at design school as an undergrad, where he met Mischer, the pair were pretty much coming from opposite worlds: She was interested in art, nature, and the unexpected, and he was still learning how to reconcile those things with his inclination for the mechanical. So in a way, their collaboration was both perfect and inevitable. “In technical school you’re trained as a technical idiot — you’re not meant to think out of the box,” he says. “So it’s important to have the perspective of someone who’s not in the box.”
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Stephan Jaklitsch, architect

In the world of retail, there is a tendency towards sameness, a familiarity designed to lull shoppers into a complacent state in which they might begin to feel it’s okay to spend a lot of money. A Zara, anywhere in the world, is immediately identifiable by its gold-toned lighting and rows of shoes lined up haphazardly underneath the clothes; a Marni boutique leaves its mark with swooping stainless-steel rails and elliptical cutouts in the ceilings. As a brand, Marc Jacobs has never been about uniformity, though — this is a fashion designer, after all, who’s gone from the most infamous collection of grunge in history to the luxurious heights of Louis Vuitton — so why should his stores? “There are certain iconic elements that are repeated,” admits Stephan Jaklitsch, the New York–based architect who’s been responsible for Jacobs's bricks-and-mortar for more than 10 years, “but in general, each store relates to its own specific building type, to the city’s specific urban condition, and to the architecture of the individual space. Although they’re identifiably connected, every one of them has a particular feel.”
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