07.25.23

Interiors

Yowie, the Best Design Boutique in Philly, Has Opened an Equally Cool Hotel

We've long been obsessed with the always-just-under-the-radar design scene in Philadelphia, but a decade ago — when we devoted a whole week of coverage to Philly — something like Yowie, the design store founded and curated by creative director Shannon Maldonado, simply didn't exist. That all changed when Yowie opened its doors in 2016, introducing a variety of Danish and American furniture brands and a refreshingly playful color palette to Philadelphia. Today, Yowie offers clothing, lighting, furniture, homeware, gifts, books (including our own!) and more, deservedly it earning the title of coolest boutique in Philly. And thanks to this success over the past seven years, Yowie is now not only expanding its retail footprint, but opening an entire hotel upstairs.
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07.24.23

Sighted

This Bar is a Desert Oasis (And a Design Dream) in Joshua Tree

If you've traveled through the desert in this summer’s record-breaking temperatures, you'll know that stopping to cool off and refresh is an absolute necessity. Along Highway 62 through the famed California town of Joshua Tree, siblings Brit Epperson of Studio Plow and Barrett Karber of Grain Construction have designed Mas o Menos, an ideal refuge to do just that: pause, grab a drink, and relax in a laid-back setting of terracotta tiles, warm sandy hues, and inviting furniture.
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07.22.23

Saturday Selects

Week of July 17, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a Finnish candy–inspired handbag from Marimekko, a secret garden–inspired glassware collection by Sophie Lou Jacobsen, and a Paris apartment whose palette was inspired by a Tracey Emin painting.
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07.20.23

Sighted

Designed in Australia and Woven in Argentina, These Rugs Reinvigorate Three Classic Patterns

The Australian textiles and homeware brand Pampa was founded in 2013 and quickly became a favorite of interior designers around the world. So it makes sense that for their first collaboration, Pampa teamed up with one of Australia's most beloved interior design studios: We Are Triibe, the Byron Bay firm founded by Christina Symes and Jessica D’Abadie. The two studios began toying with the idea of a collaborative rug collection at the beginning of 2020, born from a mutual desire to use textiles to introduce more warmth, depth, and texture into the home. The result of their collaboration, FORMA — newly available in olive and camel — takes three classic geometric patterns, a checkerboard, an offset stripe, and stripes of varying widths, and reimagined them with soft edges, imperfect squares, and an earthy color palette that's achieved using natural pigments.
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07.29.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

This Exhibition Shows How Cranbrook Helped Pioneer the Cross-Disciplinary, Craft-Based, Experimental Design and Art of Today

Most people know the highlights of the Cranbrook Academy of Art’s storied 90-year history, from its campus by Eliel Saarinen to its role as a breeding ground for the stars of mid-century modernism. But in June, the school launched the results of a four-year deep-dive into its own history — in the form of a sprawling exhibition and a 600-page book, both called With Eyes Opened — that offer a much more nuanced view of Cranbrook’s game-changing influence. We spoke with curator Andrew Blauvelt about 6 artworks and objects by varied practitioners that were part of that narrative.
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07.18.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

This Surrealism-Tinged Exhibition Includes Flamboyant Salad Sculptures and Snail-Bedecked Stools

On view through October 1, French curator Anne-Laure Lestage has imagined a Surrealist-inspired exhibition called House of Dreamers at Villa Empain, a storied Art Deco jewel of a building in Brussels. The group show offers visitors the chance to wander through the rooms of a home furnished with imaginative objects that fall somewhere between art and design, making a case for mixing the surreal with the decorative. Here, a tablescape boasts a flamboyant salad sculpture centerpiece; there, a wooden stool is covered in spiral snail shells. In another room, ferns grow from a planter shaped like a medieval castle. 
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07.16.23

Saturday Selects

Week of July 10, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a zesty creative hub in Milan, a set of “noisy” rugs, and a sofa modeled after boxing gloves.
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07.13.23

Sight Unseen Collection

Only a Year Out From Graduating RISD, Alexis & Ginger Already Have Two Collections Under Their Belt

Was it fate that brought Alexis Tingey and Ginger Gordon together? The designers’ studio benches happened to be positioned next to each other during their furniture design Master's program at RISD, and after two years of sharing ideas and inspirations, the pair decided to officially join forces and set up a business together after graduating in 2022. A year later, Alexis & Ginger have moved to Brooklyn, launched two collections — one as part of our Sight Unseen Collection — and already have plans for so much more.
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07.11.23

Up and Coming

Bowen Liu Was Up to the Challenge of Making Furniture in Cast Glass

Without being towering, there’s a heft and monumentality to the cast glass Helle collection by New York designer Bowen Liu. The presence of these pieces is anchoring, a solidity that’s offset by their translucency. Made by glass workers in Brooklyn, the collection includes bookends, a coffee table, floor lamp, mirror, and side table, which debuted at New York Design Week in May. While the mirror and lamp feature white oak details, the coffee and side tables and bookends are made entirely of glass. If you don’t see a lot of cast glass furniture at scale, it's because it demands expertise, skill, and time to produce. But Liu was up for the challenge.
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07.08.23

Saturday Selects

Week of July 3, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a Japanese-inspired burger bar in Geneva, an avant garde planter expo in Antwerp, and a reimagined Sardinian home.
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07.07.23

Graphic Design

Meet Ami Ami, the Boxed Wine Whose Packaging Channels 1920s Italian Futurism

If you came of age, like I did, in the '80s or '90s, boxed wine probably means one thing — and one thing only — to you. But while in the past few years there's been something of an arms race to see who can make the best boxed wine — and turn that ubiquitous Franzia into nothing but a memory — there's only one new contender that tastes delicious and also has the kind of loose, contemporary, slightly kooky vibe that we'd actually want to display on our counters or in the fridge when guests come over: Ami Ami, a new, DTC, minimal-intervention boxed wine whose playful packaging and super-memorable logotype (the dots in the I's and the negative space in the A's are meant to resemble wine glasses) were both designed by the LA- and Montreal-based studio Wedge.
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