03.04.23

Saturday Selects

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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03.03.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

In a New Milan Exhibition, These Elemental Materials are Anything But Basic

Wood and metal — often used interchangeably for the same purposes, known as symbols of strength, both are innately rigid, while also malleable and capable of being crafted into almost any shape imaginable. As part of the recent Makers 1 exhibition in Milan, these two materials, which dominate the construction and furniture industries, were investigated in their many weird and wonderful guises by no less than 28 designers.

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03.01.23

Invitation

The DALL-E Invitational: We Asked Designers to Create Rooms, Objects, and Other Weird Experiments Using Image-Generating AI

With the sudden explosion into mainstream culture of AI tools like ChatGPT and the image-generation program DALL-E, the past few months have seen lots of speculation and big talk about what AI means for the future: Will machines take over the world? Will they take over the design industry? How scared should we be? These are questions that require serious consideration, but at the same time, we could hardly be blamed for simply being curious about what these tools can do, DALL-E in particular. DALL-E allows you to generate an endless stream of fictitious images based on whatever prompt you plug in, and it's insanely addictive; a few months back I went down a rabbit hole asking it to design rooms, to mash-up the work of famous designers and artists, or to create imaginary products from scratch; it was fun, so I invited a dozen designers to join me. You can see both my creations and theirs after the jump.

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02.28.23

Interiors

London’s Daytrip Studio on Mining for References and Why “Pinterest is a Dangerous Place”

The London-based interiors firm Daytrip Studio can do soothing, pared back minimalism; they can do more maximalist drama. Still, whatever it is, it all derives from the same place: a fixation on materials and a layered attention to sensory details. They bring together elements of texture, light, depth, proportion, and color palette and the overall effect is one of deceptive simplicity: the whole looks effortless and inevitable, yet every part is thoroughly researched and considered.

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02.26.23

Saturday Selects

Week of February 20, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: megalithic sculptures carved from storm-felled trees, lamps inspired by summer siestas, latex skirt sculptures, and a series of delicately decorated ceramics that are unexpectedly influenced by Soviet propaganda. 

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09.19.20

Saturday Selects

Week of September 14, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: three new (ish) puffy chairs, a collection of graphic ceramic tiles by Nathalie du Pasquier, and a suite of styrofoam-and-resin floral furniture with millennial-weirdo vibes.

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02.22.23

Fair Report

All the Best Art — and Design — We Saw at the 2023 Frieze Week in Los Angeles

Los Angeles is certainly not the most social town — compared to New York, where design and art events happen nightly and, as a professional, you could pretty much get by never paying for a glass of wine, LA's calendar can't really compete. Which is why things feel so much more exciting when Frieze comes to town each February, and suddenly your calendar fills up and you're running into interesting people left and right, multiple times a day. For those of us who crave creative stimulation, it's a boon, the time of year when galleries, stores, and makers sync up to showcase new works and new ideas. See (almost) everything we saw after the jump.

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02.18.23

Saturday Selects

Week of February 13, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the hits from Zona Maco, an exhibition that's meant to recall an imaginary speakeasy by the sea, and our favorite new candy-like glass goblets, by the Franco-Russian designer Alissa Volchkova.

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02.16.23

Fair Report

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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02.15.23

Fair Report

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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02.14.23

Sighted

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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02.07.23

Up and Coming

The Istanbul-Based Animate Objects Makes Statement Objects, With a Surrealist Touch

We often talk about objects that have a life of their own, that shape the space around them and affect the atmosphere and tone of a room. The limited-edition décor and collectible furniture from Animate Objects – an apt name – not only seem to live and breathe, like characters in a story, but they emote, they perform. Zeynep Satik, an Istanbul-based designer, launched Animate Objects a few months ago, with the idea of creating “theatrical environments.” Think statement pieces, with a Surrealist touch, that are as functional as they are distinctive and playfully attention-getting.

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02.06.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

Alekos Fassianos’ Hellenic Designs Offer a Fanciful Take on Ancient Greece 

The simplicity of Greek classical and folk art was an eternal muse for the late artist Alekos Fassianos. Best known for his paintings, which blend ancient iconography and contemporary scenes in vibrant swashes of blue, red, and gold, his overtly Hellenic influences and signature palette also gave birth to a wide range of furniture designs. Carwan Gallery in Athens is presenting the first retrospective of these pieces, following the artist's death last year, and they’re just as transportive and delightful as his 2D works.

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