Week of August 1, 2022

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a new French studio founded by Fabrizio Casiraghi and Pierre Yovanovitch alums, works in stone and wood on view at Radford Gallery in London, and a new vanity set meant to encourage the commercial liberation of independent designers.
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Nick Pourfard furniture

Nick Pourfard, the Guitar-Maker Turned Furniture Designer On the Rise

Skateboarding gave Nick Pourfard his foundation in design. Building ramps and obstacles for his friends provided an early education in how to put materials together effectively, and old skateboard decks are what he’s used to construct the body of the guitars he’s been producing since 2014. Recently, this San Diego–based luthier (maker of stringed instruments) has moved into furnishings, bringing his meticulous skills and try-it-and-see approach with him.
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This Swedish Duo is Giving a Second Life To Industrial Waste

Axel Landström and Victor Isaksson Pirtti founded their design practice Lab La Bla in 2018 but their connection sparked way before that. The pair first met, hilariously, as toddlers in their native town of Luleå on Sweden’s Lapland coast, a remote region known for its subarctic climate, dense spruce forests, and history of iron mining — all topics Landström and Isaksson Pirtti continue to draw on in their practice.
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Furniture Made With Everything From Chipboard to Concrete

For last month's Malmöfestivalen, a creative arts weekend in Sweden, design collective Malmö Upcycling Service created an installation and furniture collection using waste from local industries — from textile boat covers to chipboard, rusty metals to polyester foam.
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At a New Show, Thomas Barger Upcycles Your IKEA Discards Into Collectible Design

At just 25 years old, Thomas Barger finds himself wrestling with the ordinary — the idea that he’ll soon be kicked off his parents’ health insurance when he turns 26 — and the extraordinary — raising a solo show of sculptural furniture, on view through March 31 at Salon 94 Design. A recent nod from Architectural Digest and a sale to prominent art dealer and collector Javier Peres also signal Barger’s ascendency into the artistic stratosphere. But while all of these realities point to his newfound adulthood, the works on display at the gallery look backwards to the underpinnings of a youth spent growing up gay on a farm in Mattoon, Illinois.
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A Swedish Design Collective Turning Factory Waste Into Covetable Objects

Who knew a collection of waste — from industries spanning across southern Sweden — could come together in such a beautiful way? Using glass, sheet metal, acrylic, stone, and brick, a design collective called Malmö Upcycling Service has created a collection of household goods and decorative objects, from a circular standing mirror to a series of vases with interchangeable glass parts.
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You’ll Never Guess What These Five New Furniture Collections Are Made From

We asked five Brooklyn-based studios to each create a set of benches, chairs, and tables that might reflect the 29Rooms theme of "Turn It Into Art," and we're sharing the results today — colorful, fishing-inspired pieces by Asa Pingree; pink, turned-wood benches by Pat Kim; upcycled Home Depot chaises by The Principals; studio scraps–turned–coffee tables by Vonnegut / Kraft; and carved wood, stone, and glass by Chen Chen & Kai Williams, among others.
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In This Designer’s Hands, Recycled Leather Becomes Something Undeniably Cool

Continuing with a self-produced material he calls Structural Skin, Madrid-based designer Jorge Penadés has turned his exploration of recycled leather waste into a sleek collection of mirrors and table lamps, on display earlier this month at the Rossana Orlandi gallery in Milan. Penadés gets the leather offcuts for his pieces from Hermès, which means the color palettes become a kind of artistic constraint — and yet, the shredded leather, combined with resin to create a reconstituted material, is undeniably cool, resembling marble or a particularly colorful particleboard.
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