The Best of Salone Del Mobile 2023, Part II

Today we're focusing on brands: We loved the collection at Cassina — though it was hard to see through the throngs — and the brand's iMaestri exhibition, in a former bank vault, curated by Patricia Urquiola against a backdrop of blood red. Other standouts included a quiet presentation of lovely geometric rugs by Ruckstuhl at Assab One, Studiopepe's shock of lime green coffee table for Sancal, the addition of two friends of SU to the Tacchini stable (Umberto Bellardi Ricci and Brian Thoreen), Phillippe Malouin's cheeky magnetic lamp for Flos, Knoll's desert jungle pavilion, Acerbis's 1970s throwback in the form of a John Chamberlain-esque sofa system by Claudio Salocchi, and the debut of one of our favorite lamps — Mangiarotti's Lari lamp for Karakter — in a new, tiny, USB-charged portable size. 
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The Best of the 2023 Salone Del Mobile — Part I

While Salone del Mobile has often felt too sprawling for one person to take in, this was the year it seemed to fracture entirely. Scrolling through other people's Instagram Stories, seeing exhibitions that hadn't even made it onto my radar, much less my extensive Google doc, made me stop and wonder: "Are we even at the same fair?" The exhibition we loved the most though — and heard uniformly wonderful things about — was by Objects of Common Interest, who developed their experiments in opalescent resin into a full-fledged collection for Nilufar Depot, so we'll kick off our Milan recaps with that!
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Three Exhibitions Explore a Multiplicity of Color at Salon 94 Design’s New Permanent HQ

Kwangho Lee's first-ever New York solo exhibition, which recently invaded the ground floor of Salon 94 Design's newly established permanent uptown HQ, is called Infinite Expansion. And in a way that's the best phrase we can think of to describe most of the pieces displayed over five floors of the enormous former townhouse, no matter who they're by. Each mini-exhibition shows an artist who has often dwelled on similar processes or forms throughout their career but has infused them each time with a sense of the new.
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A Barbie Pink Living Room, A Patchwork Metal Cabinet: Everything We Loved From the 2023 Collectible Fair in Brussels

Consistently one of our favorite fairs on the design circuit, the sixth edition of Collectible opened last week in a new venue in Brussels, and even from afar we were struck by the fair's continued push towards experimentation. In a new section called Dialogue, galleries were invited to show works from the '80s and '90s in conversation with more contemporary pieces (probably our favorite exhibition trope, tbh); another new section, called Architect <=> Designer, showcased only work by architects and interior designers, while a third, called New Garde, featured the best recently launched galleries and collectives.
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The Latest Iconic Italian Sofa Reissue, Bellini’s 1972 Le Mura, Has Arrived in the US

First came the return of conversation pits. Then came the resurgence of that other '70s-era seating mainstay — the ultra-comfortable, oft-squishy, sometimes-modular sofa, conceived by an array of (mostly) Italian designers, and built for conversation, intimacy, and that ephemeral but much sought-after quality of "conviviality." The trend only picked up steam during the pandemic, spurred by our collective desire to entertain at home. Now, alongside a slew of other sofa reissues throughout the industry, comes a Mario Bellini masterpiece back onto the market: The Le Mura sofa, first released in 1972 and reissued last year by Tacchini, will get its U.S. debut this week at the New York design gallery M2L, in a special presentation on view though March 27.
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Week of February 27, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a Los Feliz house done up in a who's who of contemporary design, new art-inspired textiles from Areaware, and a Louis Poulsen lighting reissue that's close to our hearts.
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The Best of Stockholm Design Week 2023, Part II: The Fair and Around Town

Some of the things I loved at this year's fair included the Frama installation inside Konstnarsbaren, a 1930s-era bar with murals lining the wall that I dubbed "the Swedish Bemelmans;" a visit to Hem's new studio, decked out in four of my favorite colors, cobalt, highlighter yellow, powder blue, and pink; a packed-house fried-chicken party at Note Design Studio; a curving emerald green chair made from 3-D printed recycled fishing nets by a collective called the Interesting Times Gang; a beautiful seating system for Offecct by the late designer Pauline Deltour; a presentation by Beckmans College of Design that paired students with Sweden's leading furniture companies; and Alvsjo Gard, the new platform for experimental design that we wrote about yesterday. Check out the rest of our favorites after the jump!
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The Best of Stockholm Design Week 2023, Part I: Alvsjo Gard

After a three-year COVID hiatus, Stockholm Design Week returned in full force last week. And while we'll be covering the fair and its happenings around town tomorrow, today we're putting the spotlight on a new exhibition that also happened to be our favorite. Called Älvsjö Gärd, it was a showcase of experimental, research-driven, and collectible design, set across 13 rooms in one of the oldest manors in Stockholm — basically Sight Unseen catnip.
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A Color-Blocked Exhibition By the Swedish Queen of Color

The theme of this year's FORMEX fair was "Color Vibes," and who better to expound on that than Tekla Severin, the Swedish designer who has built both her career and her wardrobe on an extraordinary sensitivity to color. In a 2,500-square-foot space at the entrance to the fair, Severin curated 200 products from 400 different exhibitors; Severin's genius lies in the fact that it doesn't read like a curation of product at all but rather like a perfect piece of set design or a real-life interior.
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How These Vintage Dealers Restyle Their Jersey City Home on the Regular

When we first encountered Joey Meyers and Mark Baehser, it was online, via their vintage shop Ball & Claw — since renamed Unnecessary Projects — which had taken a place in the sprawling North Brooklyn vintage empire Dobbin St. Co-op. We assumed the two were old-hat dealers. But, as we discovered when we approached them about shooting their Jersey City Victorian home for our book, How to Live With Objects, it turns out they only entered the game a few years ago, out of love but also out of necessity: Meyers had taken to constantly cycling furniture in and out of their home, and they needed an outlet to offload the amazing finds that didn't quite work with their own space.
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Week of January 16, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, sculptures themed around the magic and mystery of the forest, a set of Matisse-inspired desk accessories, and a book full of hundreds of weird and wonderful chairs that we can’t stop thinking about.
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10 Things We’re Looking Forward To at This Year’s Stockholm Furniture Fair

Stockholm functions in many ways like a mini-Milan, which comes, in part, from being a city with an incredibly high baseline of appreciation for design: There's a predictably excellent emerging design showcase at the fair; there are exhibitions around town in the most wonderful and surprising locations (see this year's new experimental showcase at Älvsjö Gard, a never-before-used 16th-century manor on the fairgrounds); there are exciting launches from local talents, such as Fredrik Paulsen and Note Design Studio; and there is, if you can squeeze it in, an abundance of studio visits and sightseeing field trips you can take to round out your design education while you're there. (Let this be the year I finally make it to the Ragnar Östberg–designed City Hall!) Here are 10 of the things we're most looking forward to at Stockholm Design Week, which this year runs from February 6-12.
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