At a New Show, Thomas Barger Upcycles Your IKEA Discards Into Collectible Design

At just 25 years old, Thomas Barger finds himself wrestling with the ordinary — the idea that he’ll soon be kicked off his parents’ health insurance when he turns 26 — and the extraordinary — raising a solo show of sculptural furniture, on view through March 31 at Salon 94 Design. A recent nod from Architectural Digest and a sale to prominent art dealer and collector Javier Peres also signal Barger’s ascendency into the artistic stratosphere. But while all of these realities point to his newfound adulthood, the works on display at the gallery look backwards to the underpinnings of a youth spent growing up gay on a farm in Mattoon, Illinois.
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If You Can’t Get a Table at Noma, At Least Now You Can Buy a Piece of the Decor

Talk about the ultimate design karma: Two friends graduate from the design program at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, conceive two vases in pigmented concrete as Christmas presents for their mothers, and just like that are discovered on Instagram by the designers behind Noma — aka the best restaurant in the world — and commissioned to create three new styles for the restaurant's recently reopened Copenhagen location.
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Fiberglass, Corian, Rubber, and Resin: Welcome to the Materials-Obsessed World of Wentrcek/Zebulon

Brooklyn design duo Kristen Wentrcek and Andrew Zebulon began making work together six years ago as Wintercheck Factory. And while their moniker has recently changed, their work has always derived its impact from the tension between the what and the why — the “what” being a material language that enforces approachability, and the “why” embedded in how it all comes together to elevate the mundane.
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In Artisan-Heavy Guatemala, a Young Maker Forging a New Path in Industrial Design

The last time we featured the work of Sofia Véliz — a two-piece set of folded-steel gallery furniture made for a Diego Sagastume exhibition — we wondered what else the Guatemala City designer might have up her sleeve. Over a year and a half later, we’re finding out: From extracting rubber powder from tires to seeking inspiration from Finnish film sets, to exploring the balance between utilitarian design and the urge to experiment, there’s no question that the 25-year-old designer keeps herself busy.
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Week of January 29, 2018

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a list of things that are currently, emphatically IN: iridescent Plexiglas, figurative wire sculptures, pink drinks trolleys and — we warned you — seashells.
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Hudson home tour with Elise McMahon of LikeMindedObjects © Pippa Drummond

At Home in Hudson, With A Designer Embracing the DIY Culture of Upstate New York

Over the past few years, as designers from Bushwick to Red Hook have begun moving farther and farther up the Hudson River, we've begun to wonder: Is upstate New York the new Brooklyn? Five years ago, one of those such designers was Elise McMahon of LikeMindedObjects, a RISD grad who works within a kind of freeform, collaborative, ad hoc aesthetic. We visited her art-filled home in Hudson, New York late last summer to find out more.
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Up and coming Swiss designer Dimitri Bähler

This Swiss Designer Blends the Rational With the Emotional to Create Some of the Most Beautiful Objects We’ve Seen

"When I started at ECAL at age 18, I actually didn’t know much about design," admits Dimitri Bähler. "As a kid, I was more interested in music, fashion, and illustration, along with biology and chemistry. In fact, I've always combined those two poles of interests: the rational and the emotional." That seems as good a way as any to describe Bähler, a young Swiss designer whose work has always seemed the result of both meticulous planning and wild experimentation. In many of his pieces, a relatively strict basic form is married to a more complex and renegade surface treatment.
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This Up-And-Coming Italian Designer is A Master of Materials

Looking like glossy collages left too long in the sun, Strata — a collection of glass plates and lamps by Venetian designer Lucia Massari for Swing Design Gallery — are vibrant, delicate, and weirdly fun. Massari fuses differently colored flat sheets of glass in an oven, and the results teeter between two and three dimensions. Sticking with a few neutrals and a pop of color or two — yellows, violets, and blues — the casual overlapping of smooth ovals, chunky grids, and basic rectangles create unexpected, but harmonious, geometric textures.
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An Up-and-Coming Brazilian Designer On Lightness, Gravity, and the Future

“Before studying product design, I almost graduated with a business degree,” says Guilherme Wentz, the São Paulo–based designer who, in 2016, partnered with entrepreneur Rafael Gehrke to form WENTZ, a new line of furnishings, lighting, and accessories. “But at the time, I was not happy with the job and life I had. I realized I wanted to live in a simpler and maybe more disruptive way.” Since then, the up-and-coming Brazilian designer has become a serious talent to watch, what with his spare, nature-infused creations blurring the boundary between old and new.
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This Dutch Designer is Giving Concrete a Serious Makeover

At this point, we've seen pretty much every formerly humdrum thing in the universe get a design-forward makeover, from watering cans to luggage. But Dutch designer Iwan Pol wasn't happy to simply renovate a product category — he wanted to recast an entire architectural material. "Concrete can take any shape or form, so why not aim for a softer look and feel?" he says.
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Dutch Design Week 2017 - Hardcore Exhibition

At Dutch Design Week, 17 Designers Turning Everyday Materials into Sculptural Furniture

It’s Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, and we'll be publishing a round-up of our favorites first thing next week. But for the second year in a row, one of the best exhibitions on view came from the young trend-forecasting and design firm Core Studio, who last year curated the colorful exhibition Popcore. This year, the theme was HARDCORE, and the curators asked participating designers to create works exploring "a counter-digital movement."
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