A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: two design projects made from discarded materials, an exhibition that’s a who’s-who of young Scandinavian designers, and an opulent new space for the intersection of French and American culture.

Interiors

In Warsaw, Loskiewicz.Studio recently completed an Italian restaurant, Lupo, inside a ’90s Postmodernist building, taking inspiration from the architecture to create a Memphis-inspired space filled with contemporary designers and brands like Muller van Severen and Flos. The rugs were custom made for the space by local kilim company Splot. Throughout the space, the designers say they “used contrasting materials like onyx and polyamide bars, cork and marble, faux leather and solid wood,” a very Memphis-y high-low approach. Two years ago, we featured the up-and-coming design dealer Carlota Oyarzun, who had opened a very beautiful gallery inside her own flat in Copenhagen. Then, almost as fast as she’d started it, it disappeared, only to reopen this spring in her new apartment in Madrid, her hometown. Her first show in the new space includes some of her original pieces, plus new lamps by NYC designer Ryan Jones, benches by Joscha Finhold, and an amazing raw-fiberglass coffee table by Vavaobjects, plus tons of vintage too. Loving this minimal interior for a psychology center in Valencia, Spain, by local firm Viruta Lab — the calming blue ceiling, the stripes, the simple perforated-wood walls. There’s also a detail you might not be able to spot in the photos, which is that the subtly striated walls underneath the striped trim are plaster that’s been grooved by hand with a toothed trowel, so they’re a little wobbly and irregular — “an ode to the search for beauty in imperfection,” the designers say. So excited about Hank’s, a high-end Southern-style seafood restaurant that was founded in Charleston and recently opened a second location in Columbus, Ohio — my hometown! It’s not often we get great restaurants in Columbus that are on par with any in New York, much less ones designed by a-list interiors firms like Home Studios, who outfitted the space with custom lighting, zellige tiles, a pretty green ceiling in one of the dining rooms, and little accents of 80s-style stained glass. If you’re a design fan living in the Midwest, it’s a real win; if you’re a fried okra fan, that goes double. Spotted in Yellowtrace recently is this interior by Hugo Toro for the French-American cultural exchange institute the Villa Albertine, inside NYC’s historic Payne Whitney house. The five-story building was already home to the French Ministry of Culture, and the Villa Albertine will expand on its activities with a residency program, events, symposia, and more; Toro incorporated elements like a custom-made rug by Pierre Frey, a custom table shaped like water lilies, and a dozen Art Deco pieces from the collection of the Mobilier National.

Discoveries

The Venezuelan-born, New York and Athens–based designer Valerie Name Bolaño — who also creates amazing carved-wood purses under the moniker Spolia — spent the past year investigating a 20th-century Italian glassblowing technique called scavo, which she stumbled upon after spotting an intriguingly crackly Roman vase in a Swiss antique gallery. Her own creations using the technique include a platter, vessels, and an asymmetric lamp meant to highlight the surface pattern of the glass even further by making it glow from within. Our favorite Icelandic ceramicist, Hanna Dis Whitehead, exhibited new work at this spring’s DesignMarch festival, including a wooden wall cabinet made with straw marquetry, some vessels festooned with weirdo flowers, and a box covered in ceramic bows. Much of the wood she used was un-sellable castoffs scavenged from a local hardware store: “It’s a shame since we have so little wood here in Iceland that we then throw wood away that has travelled all the way here from all over,” she says. Photos: Sunna Ben Rotterdam designer Rik van Veen is also working with discarded materials, in this case transforming them into something completely unrecognizable: His Leopard bench is made from pieces of yellow salvaged gas pipe that he collects from construction sites, fuses together, and then carves out roughly to expose the black layer underneath in a way that makes it resemble leopard fur.

Exhibitions

Recently closed at London’s Standpoint gallery was a show by the Taiwan-born, London-based artist Steph Huang, and while the gallery put a primary focus on how her background as a chef influenced her work as a sculptor, the biggest genre-crossing we saw when we came across the body of work was how much it overlapped with design (not least because it incorporates actual lamps and benches). If you’re curious to see the show in person, it will actually reopen in Manchester in September.
During this year’s Southern Sweden Design Days festival in Malmö, curators/designers My Comét and Stina Henriksson organized an exhibition called Väntrum (“waiting room”) that’s a veritable who’s who of Scandinavian (mostly Sweden-based) designers, including Jenny Nordberg, Henrik Ødegaard, Lab la bla, Better Weather, Kajsa Willner, and many more we haven’t heard of, but are going to Instagram deep-dive on soon. If you’d like to do the same, here’s the page for the exhibition itself.