Meet the Belgian Designer Pushing the Limits of Stained Glass

The Stained Glass Lights collection from Belgian designer Maarten de Ceulaer — in which illuminated sheets or cylinders of handmade, mouth-blown glass essentially become three-dimensional abstract paintings — is a beautiful balance of control and chaos. While the colors are deliberately chosen and it’s possible to guide the fabrication process to some extent, there’s no way to wholly calibrate the outcome with this material; each piece is a bit of an experiment.
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New York Design Week, Did You Miss Us? We’re Back, With a Show of Work by 23 Designers

Predictably, the question we always get around this time of year is: Are you bringing back Offsite?! Alas, our much-loved New York design week show, which ran in some form or another from 2010-2020, is on indefinite hiatus. But this year we'll be bringing a piece of its spirit back to life: From May 18-24, Sight Unseen will host an exhibition featuring the newest additions to the Sight Unseen Collection, which comprises furniture, lighting, and objects from a stable of emerging and mid-career designers from around the world, all orderable directly through Sight Unseen. The exhibition — taking place at Voltz Clarke gallery on the Lower East Side — will feature new work by 23 designers and studios, displayed alongside the paintings of France-based artist Heather Chontos.
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The Best of Salone Del Mobile 2023, Part II

Today we're focusing on brands: We loved the collection at Cassina — though it was hard to see through the throngs — and the brand's iMaestri exhibition, in a former bank vault, curated by Patricia Urquiola against a backdrop of blood red. Other standouts included a quiet presentation of lovely geometric rugs by Ruckstuhl at Assab One, Studiopepe's shock of lime green coffee table for Sancal, the addition of two friends of SU to the Tacchini stable (Umberto Bellardi Ricci and Brian Thoreen), Phillippe Malouin's cheeky magnetic lamp for Flos, Knoll's desert jungle pavilion, Acerbis's 1970s throwback in the form of a John Chamberlain-esque sofa system by Claudio Salocchi, and the debut of one of our favorite lamps — Mangiarotti's Lari lamp for Karakter — in a new, tiny, USB-charged portable size. 
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The Best of the 2023 Salone Del Mobile — Part I

While Salone del Mobile has often felt too sprawling for one person to take in, this was the year it seemed to fracture entirely. Scrolling through other people's Instagram Stories, seeing exhibitions that hadn't even made it onto my radar, much less my extensive Google doc, made me stop and wonder: "Are we even at the same fair?" The exhibition we loved the most though — and heard uniformly wonderful things about — was by Objects of Common Interest, who developed their experiments in opalescent resin into a full-fledged collection for Nilufar Depot, so we'll kick off our Milan recaps with that!
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The New Hennepin Made x Victoria Sass Lighting Collection Wants You to Experience the Full Spectrum of Emotion

When two longstanding Minneapolis creative forces — Jackson Schwartz, head of the lighting company Hennepin Made and Victoria Sass, founder of interior design studio Prospect Refuge — team up to create a new lighting collection, you can expect the results to be thoughtful conversation starters. Not simply in the obvious way of getting your attention and eliciting a reaction, of course — though their Ontologia series does just that, with one-of-a-kind, handblown glass globes in various sculptural permutations composed of cords, metal, and mahogany spheres. But there’s a deeper form of conversation that Sass envisioned for her first foray into lighting design, and that Schwartz made a reality: a sort of ongoing dialogue, a two-way relationship between the people living with these lights and the lights themselves, which really do seem to have distinct personalities and moods.
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Rodolphe Parente’s Apertura Collection Includes a Lamp With Two Adam’s Apples

When Pierre Chareau, Gio Ponti and Carlo Scarpa are listed as a designer’s heroes, chances are their own work is going to be expressively shaped, functionally intriguing, and artistically quite lovely. And, happily, that’s exactly where Paris-based Rodolphe Parente’s new collection of furniture and lighting has landed in Apertura, a range of limited editions that complement the refined residential and retail interiors for which his studio is better known.
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In Common With and Sophie Lou Jacobsen’s Collab Lighting Collection is the Drama We Need Right Now

There’s a wonderful sense of mystery in the new lighting collaboration between Brooklyn-based studio In Common With and French-American glassware designer Sophie Lou Jacobsen. The Flora collection, as its name suggests, draws on the forms and proportions of plant life — but not your average bouquet or potted succulent. More like an unknown but totally intriguing specimen you might encounter growing on the forest floor. The 20 pieces here feature hand-blown, mold-blown, and slumped glass in milky off-white, amber, lavender, soft browns, and reds. Sconces are edged with dark, scalloped details, tables lamps and pendants are mushroom- and bell-shaped; and on a gorgeous chandelier of curving brass arms, delicate shades of draped glass resemble the blossom of an Angel’s Trumpet.
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Week of July 18, 2022

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the first furniture collection from interior designer Robert McKinley, colorful glass candlesticks by Lex Pott, and a Wright auction full of postmodern treasures.
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Axel Chay Channels Man Ray Through His Erotic Bent Metal Designs

“Not a bit phallic, a lot phallic!” laughs French designer Axel Chay when I suggest his lamp slightly resembles a penis. Based on a 1920s sculpture by Surrealist artist Man Ray, the playful pink design — which I later found out is actually called Phallus — and a sconce shaped like a nipple are the most blatantly erotic and humorous of Chay’s designs. Others more subtly exude sensuality through their curves or elements entangled with one another, but are finished in bright greens, yellows, and blues so could also be interpreted in a completely different way. 
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The Best of the 2022 Salone Del Mobile — Part I

After a rocky two years, life is inching closer to normal these days, and one could use the design-world fair schedule as a barometer: After outright cancellation in April of 2020, the annual Salone del Mobile in Milan managed to squeak through a mini-show in September, only to come back with full force last week just in time for its 60th anniversary. More than 2,000 exhibitors showed at the fairgrounds this year — which we're recapping today — and we walked away from all the huge Italian dinners, garden parties, and launch presentations feeling like our sanity had finally been restored.
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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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