This Brooklyn Designer is Trying to Create a Zero-Waste Studio

Coming from an art background, Nathaniel Wojtalik had no interest in creating furniture that was purely functional and offered no meaning behind it. But through Cultivation Objects, the Brooklyn studio he founded during the pandemic, Wojtalik has been able to find a way to craft intentional narratives by virtue of concept and technique to end up with designs that are beautiful and intriguing, yet still maintain a utilitarian quality.
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Aaron Poritz sculptural wood furniture

Aaron Poritz’s Henry Moore–Inspired Sculptural Wood Furniture is Next Level

Aaron Poritz's latest furniture collection — Big Woods, currently on show at Cristina Grajales Gallery in New York City — is both a fond look back at his childhood spent in the forests of Massachusetts, and an evolution of years spent working with, learning about, and appreciating the material for its visual, tactile, and workable qualities. His odyssey began in Nicaragua in 2012, where a chance encounter with an exporter of hurricane-felled trees resulted in the creation of his first range of wooden furniture. Focused on joinery techniques and traditional Danish shapes, and informed by his background in architecture, however, the designer’s initial work is miles apart the Henry Moore-influenced soft curves, organic shapes, and bulbous protrusions of the sculptural designs he’s currently exhibiting. 
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The Parisian Design Duo Channelling 1970s French Glamour

The 1970s were, arguably, one of the best eras in French design. It’s a decade that saw then-president George Pompidou commission Pierre Paulin to reimagine the Élysée Palace’s interiors in his unorthodox space-age designs, and the stiff conventions of mid-century modernism finally loosened into an ironically cosmopolitan glamour. So when we came across French design duo Hauvette & Madani’s sumptuous interiors that so perfectly channel that decade’s vibe, we were instant fans.
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Travertine, Salt, and Wood: Gregory Beson and the Beauty of Tangible Materials

There’s something refreshingly thoughtful about the way New York–based furniture designer and Parsons professor Gregory Beson talks about his practice. He may be represented by Love House in New York and Rossana Orlandi in Milan, but when discussing his recent collection, Home Group One, it’s not some white-gloved gallery where he pictures it. “I see the pieces as plinths for living,” says the Massachusetts-born designer, describing the series of tables, chairs, and shelving formed of interlocking planes of solid walnut.
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Christopher Norman is Turning the Castoff Urban Trees of Los Angeles Into Art

Los Angeles–based architect and designer Christopher Norman’s new collection of hand-machined minimal forms resists standardization. His untitled “extrusions” in ash and cedar and pine riff on a hardware aesthetic, while maintaining the organic ethos seen in much of his other, more fluidly-shaped work. Forgoing pre-cut lumber, Norman uses wood from freshly cut trees. “If you’re working with commercial wood, you get a very normalized look and set of proportions. It’s basically highly mediated,” he explains.
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Sorry, Hygge Hive — Mattias Sellden Just Took Nordic Design Out Of Its Comfort Zone

For Swede Mattias Sellden, the first step towards making a name for himself was, for better or worse, admitting that he wanted to. “For me, even showing what I do was a hurdle. I still don’t have a website and I started my Instagram only in August of last year — three months after my graduate exhibition.” Sellden chalks this reticence up to the Nordic code of conduct known as Janteloven, which he describes as “the very Swedish notion not be a show-off.”
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Fort Standard’s New Striped Wood Collection Goes Against the Grain

Gio Ponti, cabana stripes, hoop skirts — these are just a few of the references that come to mind when you first see Fort Standard's new Cooperage collection, made from alternating stripes of light and dark wood, which launched this week in New York at Colony Design. But what you don't necessarily think of is the process by which Fort Standard founder Gregory Buntain achieved the collection's incredibly playful, graphic look.
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Canadian furniture designer Thom Fougere

A Canadian Furniture Designer Strikes Out On His Own

At the age of just 24, having just graduated from architecture school, the Winnipeg–based designer Thom Fougere became the creative director of EQ3 (which is something like the Canadian version of Room & Board). Now, just five years later, Fougere has opened up his own shop as well.
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Nicolás Aracena Müller at Chamber

If you happen to have been wandering under the High Line in New York's Chelsea neighborhood sometime over the last week, you might have seen something you don't see every day — the bespectacled, wild-haired Chilean designer Nicolás Aracena Müller making chairs from found scraps of wood in the gallery windows of Chamber, a concept shop and exhibition space opened last year by Juan Mosqueda.
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Fredrik Paulsen chairs

A Furniture Collection Inspired By Pick-Up Sticks

We gave you a sneak peek of Fredrik Paulsen’s solo exhibition at Paris’s Galerie Torri earlier this summer, but when we saw the Stockholm-based designer had properly photographed the whole collection, we wanted to share the results. Called Mikado — a name we assume originates from the European form of pick-up sticks — the chairs are made from simple pieces of pine that Paulsen stains a brilliant teal blue.
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