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01.30.20

Shopping

If You’re Looking for a New Set of Flatware, Your Search Stops Here

When I first set out to do this story, it was purely for selfish reasons: I was looking to replace a now out-of-stock Ikea flatware set (with bizarrely tiny forks) that I'd purchased as a cheap placeholder years ago. Why not share the results of my search? For fun, I polled some design friends on Instagram and that's when the floodgates opened. You guys. I had no idea people had so many opinions about flatware.
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Italian interiors stylist Greta Cevenini
06.03.19

Up and Coming

Meet Greta Cevenini, The Best Italian Interiors Stylist You’ve Never Heard Of

Greta Cevenini has been quietly circling behind the scenes of the Italian design world for the past few years, styling lookbooks for Spotti and cc-tapis and envisioning spreads for Icon Design; she most recently took the helm for Cassina’s new catalogue, which was released during Salone. Her work is quiet — cool and rich with light-touch visual references well before they become ubiquitous, leaning more on texture and subtle color variations rather than dramatic, scene-stealing statements.
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08.04.17

Shopping

Need an Ikea Upgrade? Here are 34 Accessories for Your New, Grown-Up Kitchen

This week we happened to be browsing one of the most comprehensive online sources for contemporary housewares, when it struck us as a pretty great bet — particularly for anyone who needs to fill a cabinet (or registry) with designy kitchen items. AllModern's sheer size can be disconcerting, but here we've done the work for you, unearthing all the gems we could find by the likes of Aldo Rossi, Os & Oos, Norm Architects, John Pawson, The Principals, Achille Castiglioni and more.
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07.28.17

Excerpt: Magazine

Studiopepe Just Made Us Fall in Love With Italian Design All Over Again

As much as Italian design sometimes feels like an oppressive shadow from under which every other design movement will eternally struggle to emerge, we can't deny that it's also an eternal wellspring of inspiration — as a budding adult we loved its plastics, in our mid- to late-20s it was Memphis, and these days we find ourselves coveting pretty much everything Cini Boeri ever made. Last week we happened across a perfect reminder of this, in the form of a 2016 AD Germany shoot styled by Studiopepe and celebrating the best of Italian design, both then and now.
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06.04.16

Saturday Selects

Week of May 30, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Beige is back, so are Tevas, and yet another Wright auction is absolutely killing it (the upcoming Contemporary Glass — which introduced us to this granite and glass concoction by glass artist William Carlson — is just. so. good.)
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04.15.16

Sighted

The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today: Day 4

Visiting the pavilions at the Milan furniture fair is basically the exact opposite of going to the beach — there's tons of artificial lighting, way too much exertion, and not a piña colada in sight. Which is why we were tickled to get these images of Italian designer Cristina Celestino's Opalina collection for the glass furniture manufacturer Tonelli — the sheer dissonance made us laugh out loud. But the collection is pretty great on its own, photography (or excellent Photoshopping) notwithstanding. It includes a dressing table, a writing desk, a mirror, a coat stand, and a stool, all made from thick slabs of etched or painted opaline glass that give off a translucent and silky appearance.
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05.02.15

Saturday Selects

Week of April 27, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: A look way back at — what else? — 1970s-era Italian design; a dip into the recent past in Milan; and a forecast of things to come at our OFFSITE event, debuting in just two weeks! Plus, the amazing risograph talents of Glasgow-based artist Gabriella Marcella, above.
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Jewelry By Architects
11.05.14

From the Library Of

Sight Unseen: Jewelry By Architects

Until about six months ago, there was only one Munari we idolized: Bruno, one of our favorite 20th century designers and design theorists. (If you haven't read Design As Art, we suggest you hop to it!) But then, one fateful day this past spring, we were wandering aimlessly around the internet when we stumbled on what is perhaps the biggest editorial coup we've scored in years, and thus began our love affair with Cleto Munari — the Italian designer, who as far as we can tell is unrelated to Bruno, commissioned a dream-team of architects like Ettore Sottsass and Peter Eisenman in the early '80s to create a jewelry collection for his eponymous company, and the project had almost no coverage anywhere on the web. We immediately snapped up a copy of the incredible out-of-print book that documented it, which we're excerpting just a small portion of here.
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12.23.13

Excerpt: Magazine

Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Lost Interview with Ettore Sottsass, From Surface Magazine

It's no secret that we're devotees of the work of the late Italian design legend Ettore Sottsass, but to the extent that everyone we know has been caught up lately in the more superficial elements of his influence — the post-modernist colors, patterns, and geometries — we jumped at the chance to share with you this reminder of his intellectual legacy: one of several previously unpublished interviews with Sottsass conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2001. It was given to us as a little holiday present by Surface magazine's new editor Spencer Bailey, who oversaw its inclusion in the Dec/Jan Art Issue, which was co-edited by ForYourArt founder Bettina Korek and is the fourth since Surface was redesigned and reimagined this past July. Says Bailey: "Last fall, I was talking with Serpentine Gallery co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist over dinner in London about his unpublished interviews with artists and designers. He mentioned that he has several with Ettore Sottsass, so I asked him to send them to me. This one in particular blew me away. Hans Ulrich is a master interviewer, and Sottsass is, well, Sottsass. When I was putting together Surface's first annual Art Issue, I just knew I had to publish it." Sight Unseen is the only place on the web you can read the entire edited interview as it ran in the magazine — check it out after the jump, including images added by us, and don't forget to subscribe to Surface when you're done!
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12.09.13

Excerpt: Exhibition

Martino Gamper’s “Tu Casa, Mi Casa” at The Modern Institute

I can think of plenty of designers whose works I’ve never even seen, or those I’ve only seen from afar, either raised on some plinth or sheltered under a vitrine. I’ve had the lucky opportunity, though, to not only see but experience the work of London designer Martino Gamper: walking under his colorful Chair Arch in the courtyard of London’s V&A museum, or digging my feet into the hand-knotted wool Houseplan Carpet he designed for Nilufar gallery in 2009. It’s especially nice to experience a designer like Gamper’s work in person because there’s always the possibility that the piece you’re seeing is the only one of its kind that will ever exist. Gamper has always maintained that he prefers to create either pieces for unlimited production, like his lopsided Arnold Circus stool, or one-offs — with no middle ground between the two. Most of the work on view at Gamper’s new exhibition, “Tu Casa, Mi Casa” at Glasgow’s Modern Institute, falls into the latter category. The majority of the 69 designs created for the exhibition are wholly unique:
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