Home textiles
06.21.23

Sighted

This Campaign for a Sailboat-Inspired Sofa Transports You to a 100-Year-Old Sailing School in Venice

The Vela, designed for Saba Italia by Zanellato/Bortotto, is an interesting take on the puffy sofa: It's soft and cushy yet somehow still crisp, with arms that taper to a subtle point and striking diagonal tufting seams that gently reign in its voluminousness. That contrast is intentional, reflecting the inspiration for the sofa, which also lent it its name ("sail" in English): "We both love the sea and have always been fascinated by the unfurled sails blown by the wind near the Venice lagoon," says Daniele Bortotto. For its new campaign, Saba sent photographer Mattia Balsamini to photograph it at the Compagnia della Vela, a nautical school founded in 1911 on the island of San Giorgio.
More
Raf Simons Kvadrat Shaker System
08.11.22

Sighted

Raf Simons Just Dropped a 16-Piece Shaker-Inspired Accessory Collection for Kvadrat

Over the course of nine years, the ongoing collaboration between Raf Simons and Kvadrat has brought us bold textiles attuned to color, texture, and proportion. Their latest project, the Shaker System, is no exception, while also being a bit of a departure. It’s a storage and accessories collection that fuses a precise simplicity with the comfort and ease of home.
More
06.30.22

Fair Report

The Best of the 2022 Salone del Mobile — Part VI

Remember when we said that it was impossible to actually see all of the good things that launched during this month's Milan Furniture Fair? Well, apparently it's equally impossible to actually capture all of those launches in digital form, because the hits just keep coming into our inbox. So today, we're devoting an extra post to some of our favorites from a week that already seems like a lifetime ago. (Please, take us back to risotto and martinis!)
More
06.03.22

Q+A

Gabrielle Teschner on Why Being an Artist Is a Job You Can’t Lose

Gabrielle Teschner’s signature “Sculptures-That-Are-Flat” are made of individually painted planes of muslin that are stitched together, then ironed. Their scale ranges from hand-held (called ‘Minutes’ and measuring around 7x10 inches) to environmental, monolithic (up to 16x14 feet). Employing the symbolic and physical language of architectural forms, spatial relationships, and, often, weather patterns, Teschner explores dichotomies, concepts of strength and softness, force and flow, and phenomena of perception, among other impulses and ‘attractions,’ as she calls them. All of these are a way of understanding and questioning what it is to be in the world.
More
12.02.21

Interiors

A Chat with Erwan Bouroullec About Textiles, Layering, and His Studio’s Newest Showroom for Kvadrat

French designers Erwan and Ronan Bouroullec have such a long and creatively productive history with the celebrated textile producer Kvadrat that they’ve become something like family. So when the Danish company decided it wanted to establish a foothold in Los Angeles this fall, the Bouroullecs came up with a concept that’s a little less like a showroom and a little more like a home — literally. We spoke to Erwan about the project, as well as about how textiles change the way people behave, which design elements make a home, the importance of layering, and the power of stairs.
More
10.23.21

Saturday Selects

Week of October 18, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an affordable(ish) amorphous plaster mirror, new chairs by Moroccan Renaissance woman LRNCE, lamps that are like little paintings, and a dreamy Kips Bay room by Michael Hilal (above).
More
09.02.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

For His New Collab With Kvadrat, Artist Danh Vo Wrapped an Entire House in a Rediscovered Nanna Ditzel Textile

Kvadrat’s newest fabric release, Sisu, doesn’t look particularly remarkable in photos at first glance. A thick wool woven in 16 different two-color pairings, it closely resembles its cousin, Hallingdal, the best-selling textile designed in the 1960s by Danish icon Nanna Ditzel. But when we learned the full story behind its discovery and development — in collaboration with the artist Danh Vo — it was so interesting we didn’t even know where to begin telling it.
More
07.26.21

Sighted

With Prints Inspired By Art-Store Pen-Test Doodles, These Curtains Are ‘Free and Wild’

Sarah Illenberger has a talent for recontextualizing everyday items in ways that are deceptively simple, yet at the same time so clever that there's an irresistible kind of magic in it. The same is true for her new collaboration with Danish textile purveyor Kvadrat, a series of three vibrant curtain panels created by scanning the little pads of paper people test pens on in stationery stores — the unremarkable made remarkable, through little more than a flash of creative inspiration and a change in scale.
More
06.08.21

Eye Candy

The Designer Making Chairs From Discarded Puffy Coats

If you're like me — and by that I mean you spent a very cold, COVID-filled winter socializing outside — you might be ready to never see a padded puffy coat again. But I was thoroughly charmed by the work of South Korean designer Jinyeong Yeon, who uses padded goose down jackets, which remained unsold by fashion brands and manufacturers, as upholstery for his series of puffy chairs.
More
03.13.21

Saturday Selects

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.
More
01.26.21

Current Obsession

Justin Morin’s Silk Draperies Reference Pop Culture and Natural Phenomena in Equal Measure

Justin Morin’s printed silk installations take many forms — some unfurl dramatically against an expansive gallery wall; others are cinched and pleated like couture; still others are knotted, tied, looped, bunched, gathered, or, simply hang listlessly like a flag. Morin’s specific visual vocabulary, developed over the course of a decade since he created his first printed silk work in 2011, proposes that anything and everything in our information-dense and visually overwrought world can be unraveled and represented in sensual, gradient silk.
More