Week of August 15, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a Swedish restaurant in a giant greenhouse, nostalgic items as sculptural miniature candles, and a very wiggly chair.
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This Agnes Martin–Inspired Boutique Takes Nude Tones to New Levels

“A performance by Vanessa Beecroft or a painting by Agnes Martin” are comparisons that Studiopepe founders Ariana Lelli Mami and Chiara Di Pinto make to their boutique for fashion curator Avart — by which they mean it’s calming and welcoming, but with a strong, proud presence. Located under the arcade of Lugano’s Via Canova, the interior takes nude tones to new levels through micro-sand surfaces that blanket the walls, floors, ceiling, and a helical staircase that provides a sculptural focal point for the store.
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Armel Soyer’s New Showroom is a Rustic French Fantasy

The showroom is laid out like a home, using the terracotta floor tiles, exposed ceiling beams, and iron handrails as a backdrop for its inaugural exhibition: Design at the Summit, which follows a theme first used by Armel Soyer in Megève three years previous. This second edition brings together a wide variety of the gallery’s clients, with furniture, artwork and sculpture spread across the different rooms as if someone with immaculate taste (and a fairly sizable budget) lives there amongst the collection.
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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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Week of July 11, 2022

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an entirely blue exhibition, an absolutely wild daybed, and a strong contender for bathroom vanity of the year.
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Axel Chay Channels Man Ray Through His Erotic Bent Metal Designs

“Not a bit phallic, a lot phallic!” laughs French designer Axel Chay when I suggest his lamp slightly resembles a penis. Based on a 1920s sculpture by Surrealist artist Man Ray, the playful pink design — which I later found out is actually called Phallus — and a sconce shaped like a nipple are the most blatantly erotic and humorous of Chay’s designs. Others more subtly exude sensuality through their curves or elements entangled with one another, but are finished in bright greens, yellows, and blues so could also be interpreted in a completely different way. 
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This Berlin-Based Furniture Brand Has All Your Color-Blocked Essentials Covered

Block colors, wavy pastels, and geometric glassware? Say no more. (Haaaave you seen our Pinterest?) Four years after founding his eponymous design brand, Berlin-based Moritz Bannach is expanding with a quartet of new offerings that build upon the bold simplicity of his first product: the Uno collection of dining/conference tables, which launched in 2018 and featured in our Saturday Selects. Bannach's latest design mimics Uno's strikingly simple planes of color and recalls the best of Memphis Design.
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This Copenhagen Gallery’s First Show Features a Cheese Cracker–Like Room Divider

Copenhagen may be famed for Danish Modern furniture, but the contemporary designs on show at a new gallery in the city’s Østerbro neighborhood are decidedly more exciting (for us, anyway). The debut exhibition at Carlota Oyarzun gallery occupies two rooms of a private residence, which boasts historic details and enviable herringbone floors. In wonderful contrast to the period features, the group show, titled It Will Follow, brings together 14 local and international designers who explore “how bold materials are adapted to function with simplicity in form and subtle detailing.”
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Casey McCafferty sculptural furniture

Casey McCafferty’s Mythological Furniture Keeps Getting Bigger

Whether it’s Aztec carvings, Native American totems, Norse idols or African masks that you see in Casey McCafferty’s work, the Los Angeles and New Jersey–based designer uses mythology from all of these diverse cultures to inform his fantastical furniture creations. Heavily influenced by Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth conversations, as well as historical science fiction, he blends characters from archeology and lore with shapes found in nature when carving pieces from wood and stone that each have their own personality.
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Week of May 16, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: perforated rugs, a truly absurdist exhibition featuring these excellent glass-blown googly eyes, and an apartment that looks like the set of a sci-fi soap opera.
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In Common With ceramic lights

In Common With and Danny Kaplan Expand Their Earthy Ceramic Lighting Range

When In Common With debuted in 2018, the Brooklyn studio made their mark (no pun intended) by pairing sleek, machined lamp bases with ceramic shades that had been obviously, laboriously made by hand — pinch marks, bumps, and all. The studio soon found ways to make the shades faster and more efficient — and expanded their offerings to include glass and metal — but in a continued collaboration with ceramicist and fellow Brooklynite, Danny Kaplan, they have been able to recapture that earlier, earthier quality.
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