Week of May 16, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: perforated rugs, a truly absurdist exhibition featuring these excellent glass-blown googly eyes, and an apartment that looks like the set of a sci-fi soap opera.
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Haos’s Steel and Plywood Collection is a Coolly Elevated Take on Minimalism

Haos's Sophie Gelinet and Cedric Gepner recently relocated from Paris to Lisbon, where they've opened a larger studio and workshop where they can make work on-site. But rather than take their practice to the furthest experimental reaches just because they can, they've instead created a pared-down, rigorous framework for their fourth collection, taking cues from traditional Japanese architecture, 20th-century Modernism, and the Dogme 95 movement, which sought to distill filmmaking to its essence by rejecting special effects and gimmicks.
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Enter to Win a Night at Ace Hotel Brooklyn, Whose Rooms Were Inspired by Corbu’s Cabanon

In the 9 or so months since it opened, Ace Hotel Brooklyn has emerged as one of the borough's most enjoyable hubs. Inside a 13-story concrete-and-glass building custom-designed by Roman and Williams, it boasts a restaurant with a striking mosaic installation, a consistently-packed Brutalist bar, a lobby that plays host to exhibitions like this month's furniture showcase from Black Folks in Design, and a light-filled interior courtyard that offers gentle respite from the bustle outside its doors. The property is a social lynchpin for downtown Brooklyn, even amongst locals like us. We're offering you the chance to experience it for yourself, with a giveaway for one free night at Ace Hotel Brooklyn. Click through to enter!
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In Common With ceramic lights

In Common With and Danny Kaplan Expand Their Earthy Ceramic Lighting Range

When In Common With debuted in 2018, the Brooklyn studio made their mark (no pun intended) by pairing sleek, machined lamp bases with ceramic shades that had been obviously, laboriously made by hand — pinch marks, bumps, and all. The studio soon found ways to make the shades faster and more efficient — and expanded their offerings to include glass and metal — but in a continued collaboration with ceramicist and fellow Brooklynite, Danny Kaplan, they have been able to recapture that earlier, earthier quality.
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Week of May 9, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: towering pavilions and whimsical creatures by Serban Ionescu, on view at R & Company, a bubbled glass moment, and why terrazzo will never die.
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A Plywood Pioneer and Champion of Eco-Modern Design Whose Work is Ripe for Rediscovery

Even though two of Peter Danko’s chair designs are in MoMA's permanent collection, many of his works were never all that commercially successful, leading him to view himself as something of an underdog. But the first time we discovered Danko's 1980 Bodyform chair on one of our early sourcing excursions, there was no question of whether to snap it up. Both it and and many of Danko's other designs are pieces of art and sculpture, and are ripe to be rediscovered by a generation that truly values those qualities.
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A New Lighting Brand, With Deep Roots in New Orleans and France, Putting a Modern Spin on Traditional Techniques

Swadoh — an anagram of shadow that founder Valerie Legras devised after reading the Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki’s “In Praise of Shadows” — works exclusively with small artisans who do intricate and often time-consuming hand work at their workshops in France. That, and the idea that each artist should be working in a wonderfully unique way with their chosen material, is the strict guiding principle behind Swadoh.
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Sight Unseen Furniture Collection Bestcase

Cool Chromes and Candy-Colored Resin: Introducing the First Sight Unseen Furniture Collection, Created in Collaboration With Bestcase

As an editorial platform and sometimes-IRL design show, Sight Unseen has been showcasing furniture and accessories by talented designers for almost thirteen years. But it wasn't until nearly a decade in, when our old friend Charles Constantine went to co-found a metal manufacturing facility called Bestcase, that we began to wonder — wait, shouldn't we also be making furniture ourselves? After figuring out the possibilities and constraints of designing with metal, creating a '70s-inspired mood board with references to how we wanted the collection to feel — at once icy and warm, vintage-inspired, yet of the moment — and reaching out to a handful of designers who could absolutely nail this look, the resulting six-piece collection launches today, both on Sight Unseen's 1stDibs storefront and through Bestcase’s distributor network.
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Obsessed With Materials? This Italian Brand Is Turning Them Into Wall Art

Most object designers — and object-lovers too, ourselves included — have an unusually heightened appreciation for materials. We can feel moved simply by the surface texture of clay, or by the way a piece of glass reflects light, or by the curious reaction of metal to certain chemicals or industrial processes. That notion is at the heart of Design Editions, a novel new project making its debut at Suite NY that treats materials like paintings, framing them so they can be hung on the wall and admired.
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At a Los Angeles Gallery, Ceramic Fountains and a Living Room Rendered Entirely in Clay

For those of us who’ve gotten to know our homes and domestic spaces a little too well in the last couple of years, House and Garden, a joint installation of new work by Lily Clark and Analuisa Corrigan at Stroll Garden, offers a chance to refresh the familiar. At the LA gallery, Corrigan has rendered a living room of furnishings in clay while Clark has created a garden of working ceramic fountains staged with live plant vignettes by Alice Lam of A.L. BASA. All of it Invites you to pause and give a second thought to what seems ordinary and everyday and then think yet again.
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Week of May 2, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: four more new design talents to close out our two-week series (including Kiki Goti, above), outdoor bathtubs giving us serious dream-life FOMO, and an installation in a 1920s private airport by Nilufar gallery.
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Lukas Cober’s Practice Grew From Building Surfboards in his Teens

From a young age, there was never any doubt in Lukas Cober's mind that he would pursue a career in design. “I have always been into crafts, so for me, it was clear at a very early stage that I would be building things with my hands” says the designer, who grew up in Aachen, a small medieval city at the tripoint of Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. But Cober inevitably embarked on his current path by pursuing a somewhat surprising endeavor for such a hopelessly landlocked city. “At one point in my late teens, I got heavily into the art of hand-shaping surfboards,” he recalls, “which sparked my fascination with functional art and gave me a deep understanding about to approach aesthetics."
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