Week of October 9, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Three designer coffee shops we're dying to visit, a show of little-known furniture made by Rei Kawakubo for her Comme des Garçons stores, and a group exhibition in Madrid that features the seriously stunning wall hanging above.
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Albers-Inspired Tableware in Glass and Acrylic, On View in New York

If you happened to have stopped by Canal Street Market during New York Design Week last spring, you might have noticed a series of objects and furniture pieces united in their fascination with materiality: low tables made from planes of marble slotted into translucent acrylic tops, copper mirrors backed by slices of aerated concrete, and curved side tables made from various colors of stone. These objects were the first inkling of a full collection that's debuting next week at Matter by Objects of Common Interest.
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A Hip New Furniture Brand Launches in Paris

If we could describe the new French furniture brand Youth Éditions in one word, it would probably be vibey. It's got a hip logo, a website punctuated with photos of classical sculptures, an Instagram full of perfectly calibrated inspiration images, and poetically mysterious catalog text that feels like it could have been penned by a copywriter for Millennial-focused car commercials. And yet it all works, in a this-is-not-your-grandmother's-furniture-line sort of way.
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Let’s All Take a Moment to Appreciate Tokujin Yoshioka

These days we tend to think of Yoshioka as an old-guard stalwart who makes interesting immersive installations for brands, and nice-enough objects for Glas Italia. So we thought it was worth a reminder that he was one of the godfathers of the current craze for transparent furniture, and that he also made upholstered pieces that — had they been released today — would have been among the best things we'd seen all year.
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Our 50+ Favorite Finds From the 2017 London Design Festival

We traveled to last week's London Design Festival because, for the first time ever, we were actually participating in it. But we still managed to sneak away long enough to survey the goings-on city-wide, from the Kvadrat installation we featured yesterday to a cluster of exhibitions in the Brompton Design District to a solo show at the Aram Gallery. Here are the more than 50 finds we managed to gather on our four-day romp around town.
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How 19 Designers Interpreted Kvadrat’s Most Famous Fabric

For My Canvas, Kvadrat asked 19 international designers to create anything they'd like using reams of the Danish textile company's colorful Canvas upholstery, created in 2012 by Italian designer Giulio Ridolfo. The show followed the familiar framework of previous Kvadrat showcases, but the items themselves were perhaps the most inventive this series has ever produced.
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LDF Preview: New Accessories By Four Up-And-Coming Designers

There's nothing like a brand expanding its roster of up-and-coming designers to get our attention — at next week's London Design Festival, Pulpo will launch a new collection of accessories by way of a pop-up shop in Shoreditch, created by a trove of young talents, including Férreol Babin, Meike Harde, and more.
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Salvatore Fiume Italian Ceramicist

Meet the Late Italian Ceramicist Inspiring Today’s Coolest Artists

As trend scouts, avid social media consumers, and Google Image Search addicts, we often happen across works, names, and images that cause our internal YES bells to go off. Starting today, we've decided to give them the airtime they deserve in our new Current Obsession column, the first of which is devoted to Salvatore Fiume — the late Italian artist whose lumpy, curvaceous sculptures seem to somehow be having a resurgence in the work of designers like Sigve Knutson, Thomas Barger, and Carl Emil Jacobsen.
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Hay Kitchen Market Frederik Bille Brahe

The New Kitchen Essentials, from Hay and Danish It-Chef Frederik Bille Brahe

The collaboration between Hay and Danish chef Frederik Bille Brahe began, as so many collaborations do, at the furniture fair in Milan a year and a half ago. Charged with outfitting the tables for a Hay pop-up café, Bille Brahe set out with Hay co-founder Mette Hay to scour the Milanese flea markets for flatware, dishes, and serving pieces. The two liked working together — and the hodgepodge effect their vintage-sourced table settings had — so much that Mette called upon Frederik to help curate the pieces in a new line launched this week called Hay Kitchen Market.
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These Classical-Meets-Contemporary Ceramics Are a Major Discovery

It's not every day that we make a discovery on the level of Nicolette Johnson, when some random Instagram rabbit hole leads us to a trove so vast we can hardly believe no one had tipped us off to it sooner. But that's exactly what happened last month, when we stumbled onto an image of Johnson's vases and found ourselves practically hyperventilating — not just over the works themselves, but the fact that the young Brisbane-based talent only started working with ceramics at all less than two years ago.
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