This French Riviera Design Showcase Delivers On Emerging Talent

For those lucky enough to be sunning themselves in the south of France right now, there are two sister design shows worth peeling away from the beach for. Split across a pair of historic and impressive — yet totally different — venues in the neighboring Riviera towns of Hyères and Toulon, the annual Design Parade festival and competition brings together established and emerging designers as part of two season-spanning exhibitions. Design Parade has long been a particularly great opportunity to spy up-and-coming French talent, and there's more than enough to get us excited in this year’s edition.
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With Its Designer Collective, CB2 is Bringing a Global Design Perspective to the Masses

Big-box furniture stores doing high-profile collabs has long been one of the surest bets for those who yearn for a collection of beautiful things by internationally renowned designers — but who can't necessarily afford the luxury price tags that typically accompany such items. CB2 has long been at the top of our list when it comes to products with a point of view, hand-picking many designers we know and love — from Kara Mann to Luam Melake to Studio Anansi and Farrah Sit — to offer collections at accessible price points, bringing the designers' varied global design perspectives within reach of a much broader audience. Now, CB2 has introduced its 2024 Designer Collective, a showcase of nearly two dozen designers and independent studios, through whom the brand is able to introduce multiple design styles from around the world— giving design fans more options to find pieces that align with their aesthetic and creating a variety in perspectives that enables the range as a whole to feel fresh and current. We spoke to three members of the Designer Collective — interior designer Kara Mann, lighting designer Farrah Sit, and the Barcelona-based Mermelada Estudio — about what this collaboration means to their practice, and how their individual approaches to design each bring something unique to the brand. 
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Week of August 5, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the printed jeans of our dreams from Marimekko, Brutalist-influenced glassware by Solange Knowles, and a menswear store interior that’s unequal parts Halston, Richard Serra, and Teletubbies.
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Week of July 29, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a design gallery debuts in Ibiza and a member’s club opens in Mallorca, plus a lighting collection influenced by Mexico’s flora, a tiny vase necklace, and a one-off lamp made from a weathered brick.
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A New Kind of Spec House, This London Property is Filled With Quirky Details by Up-and-Coming Designers

Property developers aren't a beloved segment of the design/build community, for reasons too numerous to get into here. But a select few are taking an approach that's, at the very least, a bit less corporate and a bit more thoughtful. One London-based company — Flawk, founded by Ashley Law in 2022 — is going to lengths to champion local emerging designers, using development opportunities as platforms for commissioning and presenting their work. Flawk bills itself as a “creative property developer transforming under-loved sites,” and its first completed project in the UK capital is filled with custom-crafted details, from the staircases to the toilet-paper holders.
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A San Francisco Penthouse That Pays Reverence to Art Deco Icons

The popularity of historic design styles naturally ebbs and flows, but some are so impactful and well-loved that they never really go away. Art Deco has remained a powerful player in shaping spaces and objects for a century now, its strict, layered geometries, stylized flourishes, and heavy volumes all continually cropping up in design. Today, the movement is having a particularly noticeable renaissance, particularly in interiors, albeit less in a pastiche way and more through formal nods — the space featured here being no exception. When it came to renovating a penthouse in a 1927 Art Deco building in San Francisco, local firm Studio Ahead leaned heavily into the era’s primary colors and shapes, while adding contemporary touches to keep the space relaxed and “forward-thinking.”
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Week of June 24, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a show celebrating 40 years of American art furniture, a house near Barcelona with a dazzling red and blue kitchen, and a very fun palm-shaped mirror.
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This Parisian Artist Translates His Work Across Three Ancient Art Forms

When a sentence or phrase is translated from one language into another — and perhaps another, returning eventually to its native tongue — the result is often a completely different set of words whose meaning ultimately remains unchanged. For his Traduslation project, French-Swiss artist Réjean Peytavin has created an objects-based version of this kind of kinked-up inspiration funnel. Peytavin's multi-step development process typically involves drawing a found vessel, translating it first to carpet and then to wildly textured ceramics, allowing him to move his concepts through a series of physical states, carrying commonality from one form to another, yet ending up with three totally distinct collections of work.
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Saba Journeyed to Sardinia to Weave, and Photograph, Its New Cime Carpet Collection

Steeped in history and tradition, Sardinia is known — among many things — for its sheep farming and wool production, and a weaving method that’s distinct to the Mediterranean island. Handed down by generations of women, this ancient technique, called Pibiones (which means ‘cluster of grapes’ in the local dialect), creates small bumps of thread that are knotted around vertical bars. This highly textural effect has been employed for Italian design brand Saba’s latest collection of carpets named Cime, designed by Treviso-based duo Zanellato/Bortotto.
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Inspired by Italian Modernism, the Opulence of Paris, or a Brutalist Viennese Church, These Three Up-and-Coming Design Studios Wowed in Milan

Before we leave the spring design fair season entirely, we'd be remiss if we didn't call out three of our favorite up-and-coming studios from Milan. Milan Design Week this year was, as usual, awash with global brands whose impressive, big-budget presentations took up the majority of space around the city — not to mention air time on Instagram. But that doesn’t mean that the emerging and independent designers weren’t represented as well — they just required a bit more searching among the noise.
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A Modernist Villa Outside Milan Provided the Backdrop for This Stellar Showcase of Emerging Design

This year in Milan, Alcova's founders chose to host half of its exhibition in one of our all-time favorite buildings: Villa Borsani, the 1945 residence designed by Osvaldo Borsani, architect and co-founder of furniture brand Tecno, in Varedo, north of the city. Although much of Borsani’s incredible original furniture was tucked away for the occasion (a reason to go back and revisit), several designers presented impressive new works against the villa’s striking patterned marble floors, custom textiles, and that staircase. Here are a few of our favorite things we spotted there, which, coincidentally, also provides a tour of sorts around this iconic building.
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This New Rug Company Wants You to View Its Products as Works of Art

A serendipitous meeting in the mountains of Nepal birthed a new rug company called Maison Rhizomes, which employs the country’s expert artisans to create its colorful abstract designs based on the work of Belgian-French artist Charlotte Culot. Culot happened upon Berlin-based Hannah Vagedes up in the Himalayas in 2019, and the pair decided to join forces. By 2022 they had launched their first collection of 22 boldly patterned floor coverings, each modeled after a painting from Culot’s oeuvre, and which the duo hopes will be treated like artworks in their own right and passed down through generations.
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