Week of August 19, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: new hanging mobiles by two geometry-obsessed design studios, an auction for the ACLU of artworks by the likes of Sam Moyer and Zoe Latta, and a trio of 3-D rendering talents — including Oscar Piccolo, above — imagine their ideal smoking rooms.
More

Week of July 29, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: The Spanish artist making some of the coolest lamps we've seen, two different projects involving metallic furniture and lighting, and (another) incredible new hotel interior, this time in Portugal.
More

Meet the New Mumbai-Based Studio Making Lamps Inspired by Ancient Culture

The work of the new lighting design studio 500 B.C. comes from a fairly unexpected place, in more ways than one — not only is the firm based in Mumbai, India, but founders Anandita Shah and Shiraz Noorani both have backgrounds in disciplines other than product design. Before creating their very first lamp together a year ago, Shah ran a handbag company for 15 years, while Noorani was a civil and structural engineer. Since pivoting, they've been churning out lamp after lamp under the influence of icons like Luis Barragan, Alvar Aalto, and Ettore Sotsass.
More

Is Menorca the Next Puglia? Probably, Thanks to This Hotel Designed By Dorothee Meilichzon

When we first saw photos of the Experimental Menorca, the latest hotel to be outfitted by one of our very favorite interior designers, Paris-based Dorothee Meilichzon, part of us wanted to keep it to ourselves — at least until we got a chance to personally visit it. Especially since its resume is so hip it's almost ridiculous: 43-room agriturismo on an under-developed and overlooked island, Meilichzon's signature style, au courant branding, textiles and ceramics by LRNCE, food sourced from the hotel's garden, pottery and painting classes on offer, owned by a boutique hospitality agency... We could keep going.
More

The 2019 Design Parade Festival Is a Total Visual Overload — In the Best Possible Way

If you've ever looked closely at coverage of the annual Design Parade festival in France, we're guessing that like us, your reaction was probably a mixture of bafflement and awe. How do they manage to get so many new objects and new ideas in one (tiny) place, not to mention so many balls-to-the-wall interiors with what appear to be no-expense-spared, move-in-tomorrow production values? Design Parade is practically on the level of the Milan Furniture Fair in terms of the volume of visual inspiration it provides — check out our sprawling overview of 2019's show here.
More
Design Parade Toulon

At Design Parade 2019, a Contemporary Homage to the Ancient Roman Triclinium

For the fourth year in a row, the French design festival Design Parade was divided into two distinct parts: a design competition and exhibition taking place at the Villa Noailles in Hyères, and an interior design competition and installation in the neighboring town of Toulon. Tomorrow we'll be posting a full roundup of the projects that were on view across both halves of the show, but today we're focusing on one of our favorites, an entry in the Toulon competition designed by the Brussels duo Sandro Della Noce and Caroline Wolewinski.
More

The Latest Collection by Rooms Evokes Neoclassical Furniture, Primitivism, and Arabian Folk Tales

Back in 2008, when we featured the first collection by the newly launched Tbilisi studio Rooms in our previous magazine, I.D., our excitement admittedly had to do partly with the discovery of high-level work coming out of a relatively unlikely place — work that blended in seamlessly with international design trends. But by 2016, when the designers left that comfort zone and began channeling inspirations that were closer to home, it became clear (ironically enough) that their success no longer owed any debt to the exotic appeal of their locale. The duo’s newest line feels like the next step in their evolution.
More

Week of July 1, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Three very different new ceramics projects that just shot to the top of our wish list (including the stone-topped jar above), a verdant new restaurant interior by Joseph Dirand, and a new exhibition curated by Charlap Hyman & Herrero that has us seriously coveting an Italian throne.
More

Oscar Piccolo’s London Home Is a Perfect Reflection of His Creative Approach

The first time we saw photos of Sicilian-born, London-based designer Oscar Piccolo's home, featured on The Modern House, we had to chuckle — it's not every day you find a guy whose name means "small" in his native Italian living in a cozy one-room flat in London. But the second time we saw it featured, on Architectural Digest's Clever site last week, where our very own writer Zoe Sessums described how Piccolo has thoughtfully transformed the space over the past three years, we began to notice all the ways in which his home suits him perfectly in more than just name.
More

Week of June 10, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: four new options for filling up an empty white wall, an exhibition of color field paintings by German artist Ulrich Erben, and a new American-meets-Iranian furniture collab that includes the epic color-blocked pastel throne above.
More

Philippe Malouin on How He Created What Just Might Be Basel’s Most Unusual Collection Ever

Every year, it seems like the contemporary work exhibited at the premiere design fairs gets more intricate and labor-intensive, more whimsical and wacky, more conceptual and process-driven. At this week's Design Miami Basel show, however, Salon 94 Design is departing from that convention in an epic way, with a presentation called Industrial Office that draws on basic ideas and questions from Philippe Malouin's work on commercial office furniture, but pushed to extremes in terms of materials, engineering, and fabrication. We spoke with Malouin to find out more.
More

Four Emerging Artists Whose Work You Should Know Now

With the increasing blurriness of the line between design and art, it's difficult to have a comprehensive conversation about one without maintaining an awareness of the other. And so we make a constant effort to keep up with the art world, and keep an eye out for new talents that appeal to our aesthetic sensibilities. Today, we're sharing four up-and-coming international artists whom we bookmarked in the first half of 2019, and whose names you should know if you don't already — check out their work after the jump!
More