A Creative Director Brings His Fashion-World Cred to Candles

We fell in love with Overose, a new Parisian candle and perfume house founded by Matthieu Belhandouz, the moment we saw the photos in this post. Belhandouz studied fashion design at La Cambre and had a brief stint at Stella McCartney, both of which could explain his keen eye for visuals and his acute understanding of the importance of branding.
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A Parisian Creative Studio With An Epic Client List (We’re Looking At You, Rihanna)

In some ways, the five-year-old Parisian creative agency Bonsoir Paris has everything a modern-day entrepreneurial venture could want — creatively fulfilling commissioned work from cool, high-profile clients (everyone from COS to Rihanna) as well as the time and space to pursue their own work on the side. The studio has a lab that encourages its workers into "boundaryless exploration," as managing director Ben Sandler puts it.
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We Spent Two Months With 12 Artists in a Tuscan Paradise

When you tell people that you just got back from a two-month stay in a 19th-century Tuscan villa with three swimming pools where you had your own artist's studio and a gourmet chef cooking you dinner every night, the first thing they tend to do is giggle: It sounds like you're making it up. But the Villa Lena is no fairy tale, it's a very real place with a very real residency program that we participated in this summer, and documented here with the help of Berlin art director Sarah Illenberger.
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A New Photographic Series Channels All Our Favorite Trends

When we first met our frequent collaborator Pippa Drummond, it was via a series drawn from her personal portfolio: Using beauty-salon staples, in collaboration with a prop-stylist friend, she created beautiful assemblages with a fair amount of optical trickery. (The fake nails and brushes, disassociated from their typical use, became almost random, abstract shapes.) Her latest work employs an optical-illusion effect as well, but the Barbara Kasten-y aesthetic here is more sophisticated, drawn as it is from a series of high-brow influences.
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The Faded Pastels and Geometric Glamour of Ward Roberts’s Courts Series

If you're familiar with the work of photographer Ward Roberts, chances are you found his work, like we did, on Pinterest. After all, the New York–based photographer's images were practically made for social media, featuring as they do the aesthetic memes du jour: muted, pastel colors; graphic, geometric compositions; and architectural wonders seemingly devoid of any people. In Roberts's case, the backdrop common to all of his photos are the basketball and tennis courts of Hong Kong, where the Australian-born photographer was raised from the age of three.
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Week of April 4, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week we tried to restrain ourselves from posting all the Milan Furniture Fair goodness we've been gathering by sharing our top picks from Miart (above), plus recent examples of three trends we expect to see plenty of at the Salone next week: colored mirror, brushstrokes, and terrazzo.
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A New Berlin Creative Studio Puts the Art in Art Direction

Before forming the design studio Eurodance in Berlin last year, Tom Singier and Jean Leblanc worked as, respectively, an art director with his own gallery specializing in fine-art prints, and an illustrator for clients like Nokia and Louis Vuitton — hence they were both fully acclimated to existing in the grey area between form and function.
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#weseefaces In These Clever Photos of Everyday Objects

When the Swiss-born, Paris-based product designer Miriam Josi started to feel restless with the pressure to constantly create new objects, she decided to collaborate with photographer Corinne Stoll to make something new out of old ones. To assemble the playful totemic compositions featured in their "Common Faces" series, the pair scavenged everyday objects both from their own homes as well as from a neighbor's basement.
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These Mirrors Will Make You Question the Meaning of Humanity

Chen Chen and Kai Williams's new Mirror Masks for Areaware are clearly just flat slabs of industrially produced glass printed with a few simple shapes. And yet somehow they ooze emotion — that's how strongly our brains are wired to read the feelings that lie behind facial expressions. To underscore that dichotomy, Areaware's art director Elsa Brown hired the up-and-coming Brooklyn artist Carson Fisk-Vittori to take the mirrors to Mexico City, then shoot evocative photographs of them in various settings around town.
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accessible design objects Good Thing

The Design Brand That Wants to Be America’s Answer to Hay

When the New York–based housewares brand Good Thing relaunched its website this morning with new branding, a new design, and colorful new imagery by Seattle art director Charlie Schuck, it wasn't so much an attempt to simply update its visuals as it was to recast its entire mission statement: to be America's answer to all the popular Scandi brands offering super-accessible design.
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Nacho Alegre Ricardo Bofill architecture porn

Nacho Alegre Just Dropped Some Serious Ricardo Bofill Architecture Porn

The Spanish photographer and Apartamento co-founder recently begun documenting his travels for Vogue.com, and the burgeoning series depicts architectural icons so beautifully that you won't mind if they come along with a bit of vacation envy. Today we're excerpting shots from his travelogue on a colorful 1973 housing complex in Alicante by Ricardo Bofill, the Spanish architect best-known for his eclectic style and for taking up residence in a crumbling 19th-century cement factory.
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The Beautifully Bizarre Franken-Candles of Dutch Artist Helmut Smits

Helmut Smits is a Rotterdam-based artist who works in the vein of designers like Dominic Wilcox or Sebastian Errazuriz — his portfolio is bursting at the seams with quick, clever creative experiments, the product of a hyperactive mind with a healthy sense of humor. Some of the projects are silly, some are conceptual, and others are just plain visually lovely, like a series featuring candles of all shapes and sizes melted together into color-blocked totems.
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