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female italian designer The Ladies Room
08.19.19

Up and Coming

These Four Women Are Leading Milan’s Design Scene — Both Together and Apart

This July, a design show in a Parisian apartment harnessed the talents of what feels like at least half of Milan’s up-and-coming design scene. Called "You Are Welcome" by The Ladies' Room collective — a collaborative project made up of Agustina Bottoni, Ilaria Bianchi, Sara Ricciardi, and Astrid Luglio — the show took the form of an intimate, female-centered salon, where objects vibrated with their own peculiar presences. All brilliant designers in their own right, the four have been working together since 2016 when they met at the Turin-based design fair Operae.
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08.13.19

Sighted

This Norwegian Designer is Making a Vase Every Day for 365 Days

We've known artists who have committed to making a drawing a day, or graphic designers who have created a digital poster each night when they return home from their day job. But never had we seen a designer take on the task of making a three-dimensional object — much less one that needs to be glazed, fired, photographed, and Instagrammed — for each day of the year, until we were browsing the account of Ann Kristin Einarsen earlier this spring. Her #365vases project — in which she designs a vase a day with a new set of parameters each month — is next level.
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08.02.19

Up and Coming

Meet the New Mumbai-Based Studio Making Lamps Inspired by Ancient Culture

The work of the new lighting design studio 500 B.C. comes from a fairly unexpected place, in more ways than one — not only is the firm based in Mumbai, India, but founders Anandita Shah and Shiraz Noorani both have backgrounds in disciplines other than product design. Before creating their very first lamp together a year ago, Shah ran a handbag company for 15 years, while Noorani was a civil and structural engineer. Since pivoting, they've been churning out lamp after lamp under the influence of icons like Luis Barragan, Alvar Aalto, and Ettore Sotsass.
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07.31.19

Sighted

This Canadian Designer — Known for His Woodwork — Is Making the Most Epic Glass

When we posted our New York Design Week round-ups earlier this spring, there was one project we held for later because it was just. that. gorgeous. Amidst a sea of walnut, bronze, maple, and steel at Vancouver-based designer Jeff Martin's booth, we spied these craggy, colorful glass vessels, glinting under the lights of the Javits. Turns out, when we reached out to Martin for more information, that the process by which they're made — from the remnants of past projects — is as interesting as the way they look.
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07.12.19

Sighted

The Latest Collection by Rooms Evokes Neoclassical Furniture, Primitivism, and Arabian Folk Tales

Back in 2008, when we featured the first collection by the newly launched Tbilisi studio Rooms in our previous magazine, I.D., our excitement admittedly had to do partly with the discovery of high-level work coming out of a relatively unlikely place — work that blended in seamlessly with international design trends. But by 2016, when the designers left that comfort zone and began channeling inspirations that were closer to home, it became clear (ironically enough) that their success no longer owed any debt to the exotic appeal of their locale. The duo’s newest line feels like the next step in their evolution.
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06.14.19

Fair Report

Six More Things We Loved at This Year’s Design Miami/Basel

The buzziest thing about this week's Design Miami/Basel show might have been the controversy over Virgil Abloh's collaboration with Vitra, but there were a few other major standouts we saw, such as Floris Wubben's increasingly complex and ambitious experiments with extrusion for The Future Perfect, stylist Connie Hüsser's curated object menagerie, and Franco-Danish duo OrtaMiklos's collection of blobby furniture inspired by Roman decadence. See all six projects we liked, after the jump.
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06.11.19

Q+A

Philippe Malouin on How He Created What Just Might Be Basel’s Most Unusual Collection Ever

Every year, it seems like the contemporary work exhibited at the premiere design fairs gets more intricate and labor-intensive, more whimsical and wacky, more conceptual and process-driven. At this week's Design Miami Basel show, however, Salon 94 Design is departing from that convention in an epic way, with a presentation called Industrial Office that draws on basic ideas and questions from Philippe Malouin's work on commercial office furniture, but pushed to extremes in terms of materials, engineering, and fabrication. We spoke with Malouin to find out more.
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05.23.19

Fair Report

Our Favorite Finds at New York Design Week 2019 — Part II

With our OFFSITE show taking the year off, the biggest question we got this week wasn't "What have you seen that's good?" but rather "Doesn't it feel great to do nothing?" And while the latter question was valid (and the answer an emphatic yes), the fact that our schedules were free and easy this year actually allowed us to see even more that was quite good. Today we're rounding up our favorites from the two big shows, ICFF and Wanted.
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05.22.19

Fair Report

Our Favorite Finds at New York Design Week 2019 — Part I

With our OFFSITE show taking a year off, and Collective Design retired, New York Design Week could have theoretically suffered a participatory hit — and yet that was very much not the case. Below, we've rounded up more than 75 objects and exhibitions we dutifully scouted around town, including powerhouse show Next Level, and that's only part one....
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05.10.19

Sighted

Trueing’s Epic New Lights Hang From Huge Colored Glass Chains

There was a time when we would have associated the idea of chains in lighting with Restoration Hardware, or a Medieval tavern. That time has officially come to an end. Not only are chains on something of an upswing in design right now, but the rising New York studio Trueing just released an epic series of sconces, pendants, and floor lamps suspended from oversized links made of borosilicate glass, instantly banishing all rustic or industrial associations from our minds.
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05.10.19

Current Obsession

20 Design Objects and Ceramics That Prove Chains Are Trending

When chunky chains became the jewelry trend du jour earlier this year — see Sophie Buhai, Rachel Comey, ASOS, etc— it all made sense to us, since for awhile before that we'd been tracking a similar trend in design, from the classic mid-century Carl Auböck paperweight to the dramatic porcelain chains Apparatus used to suspend their Link lights back in 2015.
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