02.04.21

Sighted

While on Lockdown at the Barbican, This Duo Made Brutalist Furniture Out of Moving Boxes and Other Scraps

A Space's new Barbican collection is a series of mirrors, lights, and tables whose name references the famed London housing estate where the studio's founders spent the past year living and making it. Having moved in last May, they conceived the series as an homage to their new surroundings, then sculpted it out of the materials available to them during lockdown, including moving boxes, food containers, and plaster of Paris ordered online.

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02.01.21

Interiors

Perhaps More People Would Want to Return to the Office If It Looked Like This

There's been copious hand-wringing since the pandemic began about how people have adjusted to working from home, how WFH might actually be preferable to returning to the office, and what it all means. We would venture to guess that more people would be willing to return to their offices if they looked like this, a new London interior by Note Design Studio for The Office Group.

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10.14.20

Up and Coming

Designer Mac Collins Mines His Family History To Imagine Brighter Black Futures

Mac Collins's Iklwa series debuted at London Craft Week this month, produced by legacy manufacturer Benchmark. Comprising two lounge chairs — one large and one small — and a side table, the collection is named for a style of short spear used by the Zulu, the chair featuring armrests that echo its shape. It's a compelling introduction to the 25-year-old's distinct yet disruptive approach, informed by his Jamaican heritage as well as his background in art and sculpture.

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09.04.20

Excerpt: Magazine

We Want to Live Inside This Editorial On Conscious Consumerism

As our planet hurtles towards climate oblivion, it seems like literally the least we can do is engage in conscious consumerism. And this editorial — published last month in Elle Decoration UK and conceived collaboratively between London-based photographer Kristy Noble and stylist Katie Phillips — makes a pretty excellent case for it.

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08.17.20

Excerpt: Exhibition

Charlotte Kidger’s Crumbling Columns, Made From Foam Dust, Are Perfect For This Moment in Time

In April, just as the world was beginning to shut down, Central St Martin's grad Charlotte Kidger got a phone call from Browns Fashion in London, who wanted her to create a window display for the store's flagship on South Molton Street. Four months and 19 sculptures later, Kidger's work is on view until September 7, highlighting the store's iconic accessories collection.

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05.15.20

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Match Made in Murano — Mattia Bonetti Fuses with Famed Glassmakers for His Latest Collection

As often as Swiss-born, Paris-based Mattia Bonetti’s singular, one-of-a-kind furniture and design pieces are described as whimsical, it would make sense that they are created, well, on a whim. The designer doesn’t release work in cohesive collections, preferring to design fantastical one-off pieces whenever inspiration strikes. Bonetti’s newest pieces, handmade in collaboration with the famed glass artisans of Murano, Italy and presented by London gallery David Gill in an online exhibition, is surprisingly subdued but no less virtuosic.

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04.28.20

Up and Coming

Designer & Rendering Artist Charlotte Taylor is Imagining The Brighter Future We Need Now

London-based designer Charlotte Taylor popped back on our radar recently with her Tiled House, a 3D rendered residence that begs the question: What if your whole house could be as hard to clean as the bathroom? All jokes aside, the eye-catching space is a bit of an engineering feat, real or imagined, as well as a kind of microcosm of the portfolio Taylor's been building over the past few years bridging those two worlds.

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03.11.20

Excerpt: Exhibition

Furniture Inspired by an Architectural Jewel of the Mediterranean

This month, a special exhibition at Gagosian’s Davies Street gallery in London will see the space arranged to resemble Casa Malaparte’s main room, a stone-floored space with ocean vistas that features in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film, Contempt. Tommaso Rositani Suckert, Malaparte’s youngest descendant, has produced editions of three of the most iconic furniture pieces from Casa Malaparte for the exhibition: a table, a bench, and a console, all manufactured in Italy and comprised of solid walnut, pine, Carrara marble, and stone.

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07.10.19

Up and Coming

A Self-Taught London Designer On How to Make Furniture That’s Poetic But Not Pretentious

EJR Barnes is interested in the ways furniture can become poetic or dreamlike when reframed with unexpected materials, forms, and juxtapositions. His creations engage a wide range of materials and techniques — birch plywood, gilded silver leaf, lacquered oak, powder-coated steel, pressed cane, cork, paper pulp slathered in wheat paste, even faux fur or scruffy suedes. Through all of this experimentation, Barnes seeks a quiet sort of subversion.

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07.10.19

Current Obsession

EJR Barnes — Your New Favorite Instagram Follow — On His Top 10 Vintage Furniture Finds

Elsewhere on the site today, we're featuring the London designer EJR Barnes, whose work first came to our attention via his smooth, aptly named Buffalo Mozzarella chair. But we were actually first introduced to Barnes via his Instagram, where he chronicles his favorite — and often completely obscure — vintage furniture finds, from Borsani daybeds to Vignelli glassware to Kukkapuro lamps. Click through for a glimpse at Barnes's current obsessions.

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06.25.19

Interiors

Oscar Piccolo’s London Home Is a Perfect Reflection of His Creative Approach

The first time we saw photos of Sicilian-born, London-based designer Oscar Piccolo's home, featured on The Modern House, we had to chuckle — it's not every day you find a guy whose name means "small" in his native Italian living in a cozy one-room flat in London. But the second time we saw it featured, on Architectural Digest's Clever site last week, where our very own writer Zoe Sessums described how Piccolo has thoughtfully transformed the space over the past three years, we began to notice all the ways in which his home suits him perfectly in more than just name.

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03.07.19

Sighted

How Do You Capture Kinetic Motion in a Still Photo?

That's the challenge Kinfolk magazine recently gave London-based photographer Aaron Tilley for its current Architecture issue. Tilley's work is often concerned with motion or the moment just before motion begins; his subjects include bread whose slices appear caught in mid-tumble or paper sheets that seem to be floating on a table's edge. For Kinfolk, however, the still-life photographer was asked to create the effect of a Rube Goldberg machine — a series of photos in which one action triggers another and another until the payoff in the final frame.

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