Hem, Our Go-To Destination for Accessible, Scandinavian-Inspired Design, Just Popped Up in NYC

America has a furniture problem: If you are young, aesthetically minded, and upwardly mobile but not quite rich, where do you buy your furniture? When you're looking for something with more staying power than Urban Outfitters, a greater cool factor than CB2, and less ubiquitous than West Elm, where do you turn? For the last few years, whenever we've been asked that question (which is, to be honest, all the damn time), we've answered: Have you heard of Hem?
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Week of October 23, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Highlights from Design Week Mexico (including these graceful screens by Swiss designer Julie Richoz), a new direction for Pritzker Prize winner Tadao Ando, and a series of modular, millennial-friendly furniture made from metal, MDF, and — major wild card here — resin-infused buckwheat groats.
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This Dutch Designer is Giving Concrete a Serious Makeover

At this point, we've seen pretty much every formerly humdrum thing in the universe get a design-forward makeover, from watering cans to luggage. But Dutch designer Iwan Pol wasn't happy to simply renovate a product category — he wanted to recast an entire architectural material. "Concrete can take any shape or form, so why not aim for a softer look and feel?" he says.
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In a New Exhibition, Six Ceramicists Try Their Hand At Furniture

For Lawson-Fenning in Los Angeles, Bari Ziperstein, Michele Quan, Jonathan Cross, Heather Rosenman, Victoria Morris, and Beth Katz (the artist behind Mt. Washington Pottery) have each created a series of ceramic tables, including stacked, saturated totems by BZippy, Brutalist slabs by Jonathan Cross, and Eastern iconography by MQuan. In other words, each piece is a recognizable extension of the artist's current body of work, but unique in its point of view.
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Inside Berlin’s Most Instagrammable Installation

Like some kind of latter-day Helio Oiticica, the French artist Jean-Pascal Flavien has constructed a life-sized house, surrounded by sand, within the exhibition space at Esther Schipper gallery in Berlin. But while Oiticica's work was dependent upon interaction, it's unclear how immersive Flavien's installation is really supposed to be.
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16 Statement Sofas to Consider Blowing Your Budget On

When it comes to decorating, most people tend to follow the same, tried-and-true, low-risk method: Buy a nice but ultimately unremarkable sofa and bring personality into the room via colorful or patterned throw pillows, statement-y rugs, a killer gallery wall, or dramatic lighting. But today, we're wondering if it might be worth it to consider throwing away that number one rule of decorating and making the sofa the focal point of your whole room.
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These 3D Interior Images Have Us Drooling Over a Tile Catalog

In the old days, this would have been one hell of an expensive photoshoot: Sourcing design icons-in-the-making from people like Lex Pott, Faye Toogood, and Sabine Marcelis; building out a set; and then painting, styling, and photographing the whole thing. But perhaps this will be known as the year when the rendered, three-dimensional image became almost more exciting — and decidedly cheaper — than the real thing, thereby making it almost de rigueur for brands to invest in these kinds of digital set-ups, no matter the product.
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Albers-Inspired Tableware in Glass and Acrylic, On View in New York

If you happened to have stopped by Canal Street Market during New York Design Week last spring, you might have noticed a series of objects and furniture pieces united in their fascination with materiality: low tables made from planes of marble slotted into translucent acrylic tops, copper mirrors backed by slices of aerated concrete, and curved side tables made from various colors of stone. These objects were the first inkling of a full collection that's debuting next week at Matter by Objects of Common Interest.
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Week of October 2, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Katie Stout's "girls" take over the basement at R & Company, Doshi Levien debut the coolest work at PAD London, and the late Vladimir Kagan reminds us that no one will ever make a sofa as cool as he did.
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