06.15.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

At the Venice Design Biennial, Popping Up in an Out-of-Season Beach Cabana and a 100-Year-Old Bocce Court

Behind a battered green door on a quiet canal snaking through Venice’s Dorsoduro neighbourhood, far from the shoulder-to-shoulder throngs of tourists that populate the narrow corridors close to Piazza San Marco, is the city’s last bocce court, opened over a century ago. Most days, the area’s elderly residents convene there to throw bowls, gossip, and sip apéritifs (usually a ruby red Select spritz). But for a few weeks this May and June the sports club has given up one of their precious lanes to an entirely novel endeavor, the recently opened Venice Design Biennale.

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06.14.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Controversial Seinfeld Character Inspired One of Ethan Cook’s New Paintings

The depth of color in Ethan Cook’s work is entrancing: It draws you in and then proceeds to work its spell, stirring up meaning and feeling. Cook is known for his abstract “woven paintings” in which color isn’t applied at all but is part of the canvas itself. He uses a four-harness loom to hand weave fabric, which is then stitched together and stretched on bars. But recently, Cook has been exploring additional materials and techniques, evident in his latest exhibition Entities, at the Brussels location of Nino Mier.

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06.10.23

Saturday Selects

Week of June 5, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a set of very austere chairs, a contemporary take on Asian-influenced tableware, and a Barcelona apartment that’s reminiscent of a lemon meringue pie.

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06.09.23

Interiors

Curved Walls — and Color — Are French Architect Pauline Borgia’s Secret to Designing a Small Space

At Pauline Borgia’s childhood home in Corsica, every room was a different color. Growing up in this polychromatic environment, she quickly understood the power of color to create associations and identity, and now applies hues in a highly considered way — to focus a sightline, play with proportion, or create a trompe l’oeil effect — in projects by her Paris-based studio, Atelier Steve.

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06.08.23

How to Live With Objects

Almost Everything in Lisa Mayock and Jeff Halmos’s LA Home is Vintage or Handmade

Next up in our How to Live With Objects house tours: Lisa Mayock and Jeff Halmos, who live in a 1920s-era Spanish-style house in the Glendale neighborhood of Los Angeles. Before moving to LA with their two children, Mayock and Halmos met in New York City, as designers of the somewhat legendary early-aughts cult-favorite fashion brands Vena Cava and Shipley & Halmos. After a brief stint co-running the graphic T-shirt line Monogram, they’ve both branched out into new lines of work — Mayock as an interior designer and Halmos in commercial real estate development. We visited them on a brilliantly sunny day in the summer of 2021, and although you'll have to wait for the Instagram-only behind the scenes content to peep their incredible backyard and pool, take a tour through some of their favorite vintage and handmade treasures after the jump. 

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02.20.21

Saturday Selects

Week of February 15, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a Disneyland-inspired renovation, Gaudí-inspired floor lamps, and a can't-miss wallpaper collaboration by a dream duo.

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06.07.23

Fair Report

10 Projects We Loved from the 2023 Melbourne Design Week

If anyone here is in the business of bringing journalists to Australia for Melbourne Design Week, please allow this to be us throwing our official hat in the ring. Because there's no other design fair right now that's both so exciting and yet that we feel so removed from, having never even set foot on the continent. The 10 projects we're featuring here today absolutely crackle with energy and are sensitive about material reuse in a way we hope to see replicated from here on out in other design fairs; we'd love nothing more than to have seen them in person. But we'll settle for this: choosing the best of the best, and sending them our digital love.

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06.06.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

Inspired by a Children’s Poem, Giopato & Coombes’ Milan Exhibition Took Visitors on a Journey Through Memory

The children’s poem Il Cosario describes finding forgotten small items collected in pockets and looking at them with fresh eyes. Italian-British design duo Giopato & Coombes initially bought this poem for their son, but they kept a copy at their workstation because they found it so inspiring. When the time came, they used the process outlined in the poem's verses to guide 18 Pockets, an exhibition during the recent Milan Design Week that presented reimagined pieces from the pair’s back catalog and ideas that had yet to be realized, combined in multiple ways to help tell the designers’ personal stories. A journey through their own memories, you could say.

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06.05.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

Sarah Burns’s Collection for Marta is Dreamy But Humble — In Other Words, a Little Midwestern

As a designer, New York–based Sarah Burns has a remarkable fluidity when it comes to scale. She can go small and intricate, like the jewelry she creates as co-owner of the Chinatown shop Old Jewelry. But she’s also adept at working with larger, place-defining forms, as with the furniture collection in her first solo show, Prairie’s Edge, now running at Marta in LA through June 10.

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06.04.23

Saturday Selects

Week of May 29, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discovered, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a Wes Anderson-esque LA bottle shop (above), an innovative plant holder, and a majorly chic Stockholm gallery reopening.

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06.01.23

How to Live With Objects

Jonathan Pessin Shops 7 Days a Week to Amass the Collection of Objects He Jokingly Calls “Not For Sale”

A collector with a penchant for the oversized and the absurd, Pessin runs the cheekily named vintage showroom Not For Sale from a giant space next to his (now-former) loft in Los Angeles. When we visited, the boundary between the two spaces was practically nonexistent, cycling in as he does favorite finds like a giant Mr. Goodbar, a papier-mâché Bart Simpson, and, always, French industrial furniture from the 1950s. An excerpt from How to Live With Objects.

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05.31.23

Sighted

Atelier Areti’s New Lighting Collection Embraces Romance

For their 2022 lighting collection, Elements, the sisters behind Atelier Areti set a challenge for themselves: to create something innovative using only the simplest composition of a light (base + arm + illuminating element). Their latest collection, Reflections — which debuted last month as part of Alcova in Milan — was a kind of response to working within those parameters. Embracing their freedom from a restrictive framework, the collection welcomes romance: While Reflections is still distinctly within Areti's visual vocabulary, the collection also includes a series of lights inspired by the shape of tulips, one that features filigreed trees sprouting from its base, and a piece, designed by Alberto Gaiotto, inspired by the elegant neck of a swan.

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05.30.23

Up and Coming

Caroline Chao Uses Glass, Mirror, Lucite, and Light Itself to Create Optical Illusions in Her Furniture Debut

The nature of furniture is participatory — chairs invite us to sit, tables to gather round — but this holds especially true for the work of New York–based designer Caroline Chao. Her pieces engage our powers of interaction and perception — perhaps because in addition to the glass and Lucite she uses, light itself is a kind of material for her. We recently spoke with her about interiors vs furniture, how to re-contextualize ordinary materials, and her work towards changing the concept of a “good view.”

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