Nicolette Johnson Assemblage vases
06.29.20

Sighted

These Surrealist-Inspired Vases Are the Breakthrough That Resulted From a Creative Block

At the beginning of the pandemic, some designers may have viewed the ensuing solitude as an opportunity to "bloom where you grow." But not everyone found it easy to stay inspired. "After lockdown started in the early months of 2020, I felt completely unmotivated to make work," confesses the Brisbane ceramicist Nicolette Johnson. After a while, however, Johnson gave herself permission to make literally anything, and began sculpting shapes out of soft clay — inspired by Surrealist and Constructivist motifs — and attaching them to small wheel-thrown vases.
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06.27.20

Saturday Selects

Week of June 22, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: two group design exhibitions with a charitable component, two new tubular lighting releases, two artisanal building materials making us wish we owned a home, and one showroom interior (above) that we can hardly believe is for a high-end paint company.
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06.25.20

Up and Coming

These Duotone Vases Are Reversible, Depending On Your Color Scheme — Or Mood

The up-and-coming Australian designer Dean Toepfer had been primarily working on commissions and larger furniture pieces — like a bar cart made from a faux terrazzo composite and a sling chair upholstered in pink shag — since graduating from RMIT. But with the onset of the pandemic, Toepfer decided to reassess. "Vase Versa is my first object collection, and first self-produced range," Toepfer explains.
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06.23.20

Q+A

Lex Pott’s Pandemic Pastime: A New Series of Hand-Woven Checker Chairs

Just when we'd almost begun thinking of him as "the candle guy," his pillars and tapers seemingly having colonized every store in New York, Dutch designer Lex Pott posted a photo on his Instagram late last month of a single eye-catching chair wrapped entirely in hand-woven nylon straps. We did a mini interview with Pott to find out more about the project.
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06.22.20

Excerpt: Exhibition

At Villa Cavrois, Muller Van Severen is an Eerily Perfect Match for the Modernist Estate

This month, the Belgian design duo Muller Van Severen begin a four-month intervention at Villa Cavrois, the modernist French estate designed in the late 1920s by Robert Mallet-Stevens. The show is a retrospective of sorts for the husband-and-wife duo, featuring everything from their leather-and-steel Duo Seats to brand-new work like the Alltubes series they launched this spring with Valerie Traan at Collectible and a sofa they've designed specifically in response to the installation site.
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06.20.20

Saturday Selects

Week of June 15, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: limestone-tiled benches inspired by a color system that predates pixels, chairs that reimagine construction materials, and a ceramicist raising funds for a community arts center in the heart of Atlanta.
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06.18.20

Sighted

In This Pride Month Fundraiser, 11 LGBTQ Designers Share Their Experiences and Advice

By focusing on a diverse array of experiences with facial and body hair in its branding, the shaving brand Harry’s has always (in its short history) taken pains to avoid the machismo messaging its competitors rely on to move a product that is, essentially, genderless. For Pride Month, the company is doubling down on that message with a new campaign and fundraiser celebrating a dozen queer designers and artists, Design With Pride.
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Kalon Studios Rugosa Offsite Online
06.17.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Kalon Studios On Their Pared-Down Rugosa Collection and What It Truly Means to Be Essential

The word “perfect” is subjective. It holds within it an individual’s taste and proclivities, needs and non-starters. The search can be elusive, exhausting — but also thrilling and very satisfying. But we'd venture to say the new Rugosa collection from Los Angeles–based Kalon Studios offers a seven-piece slate of perfect living room pieces, for anyone tired of the hunt but also for anyone who’s over the idea of furniture that doesn’t actually get used, sat upon, or well-loved.
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06.17.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

In SAIC’s Whatnot Studio — As in Life — Utopia is an Impossible, But Ultimately Worthwhile, Pursuit

There’s no such thing as utopia. Coined by Thomas Moore in his 1516 book of the same name, the word "utopia" combines the ancient Greek roots for “not” and “place.” It’s a fiction, a nowhere, or at least a not-here-yet. But its perpetual absence — or deferral — shouldn’t leave us discouraged; its inaccessibility is precisely the point. “Utopia is an impossible ideal,” says designer Pete Oyler, “but one that designers continue to pursue. I think it's a testament to the persistence of the imagination and the ongoing quest for something better.” It was with this in mind that Oyler, along with designer Jonah Takagi, taught this year's Whatnot Studio within the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Designed Objects program.
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06.16.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Cuff Studio’s New Collection Explores the Idea of Common Ground

So much of design can be about standing apart from the crowd. But for Cuff Studio, it was commonality that inspired their Offsite collection. For their Common Ground collection Kristi Bender and Wendy Schwartz of the Los Angeles–based studio looked to shared design elements that form not only a foundation within their practice, but in art and design as a whole. What they found was nature, form, shape, negative space, even community.
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