12.12.16

Sighted

A Belgian Textile and Fashion Designer By Way of Marrakech

With an aesthetic that's part Proenza, part Aelfie, LRNCE is the textiles and accessories label you get when a trained Belgian fashion designer moves to Marrakech. Founded in 2013 by Laurence Leenaert and inspired by tribal rituals, the line includes super modern, thickly embroidered rugs; sandals that mix materials like raffia, rope, and suede; graphic-printed kimonos; plus bags, ceramics, and other objects. In other words, traditional Moroccan handcrafts as distilled through the lens of contemporary graphics and design.

10.27.16

Fair Report

The Best of Mexico Design Week 2016

This year's Mexico Design Week was proof that there's more happening in the country's design scene than ever, as the number of young studios launching work with a global sensibility steadily grows. We came back with dozens of photos to prove it, plus a long list of talents we'll definitely be keeping an eye on.

Nacho Alegre Ricardo Bofill architecture porn

01.12.16

Sighted

Nacho Alegre Just Dropped Some Serious Ricardo Bofill Architecture Porn

The Spanish photographer and Apartamento co-founder recently begun documenting his travels for Vogue.com, and the burgeoning series depicts architectural icons so beautifully that you won't mind if they come along with a bit of vacation envy. Today we're excerpting shots from his travelogue on a colorful 1973 housing complex in Alicante by Ricardo Bofill, the Spanish architect best-known for his eclectic style and for taking up residence in a crumbling 19th-century cement factory.

10.12.15

Up and Coming

Istanbul’s Day Studio Merges Turkish Crafts With Contemporary Design

DAY Studio began as an extension of Doganberk Demir and Yesim Eroktem's ECAL thesis project, in which they channeled their Turkish heritage to work collaboratively with local manufacturers and craftsmen in and around Istanbul's Grand Bazaar, creating reinterpretations of traditional Turkish objects.

09.16.15

An Afternoon With

Patrick Parrish and Alex Gilbert, Antiquing in Hudson

On a recent blazing-hot Saturday afternoon, we joined Artsy's Alex Gilbert and gallerist Patrick Parrish on an antiquing trip along Warren Street in Hudson, New York, documenting all the objects and furnishings that managed to stop the couple in their tracks, which — considering their level of expertise — is no easy feat. See their favorite finds after the jump.

06.15.15

Up and Coming

Italian Product Designer Giorgia Zanellato

About six or seven years ago, when Jill and I were still editors at the late, great I.D. magazine, we had a gut feeling that something was happening in Italian design. For years its reputation had been seemingly stuck in the '80s — no one ever, ever talked about its contemporary scene — and yet suddenly we were seeing a few young talents pop up here and there. We commissioned a story on the subject, but despite our prescience (as evidenced in part by the subsequent head-spinning rise of Luca Nichetto), we missed something seriously major: Fabrica. Neither of us realized the impact its residency program and Sam Baron–led design studio would have in nurturing Italy's brightest new voices, from Matteo Cibic to Matteo Zorzenoni to today's subject, Giorgia Zanellato.

12.09.14

Fair Report

At Art Basel and Design Miami 2014

Glancing out the window on this cold, grey, rainy day in New York City, it's hard to believe that just last week we were frolicking in the sunshine in Miami, immersing ourselves in art and design and running into friends like Su Wu and Brent Dzekciorius on the street while flitting between parties and champagne brunches. While the primary purpose of our time there was to launch a new collaboration with Print All Over Me for the shop at the Standard (read all about that here), we managed to squeeze a million other activities into our four-day trip, from a visit to the impeccably curated Untitled art fair to a bizarre slide lecture and fashion show by Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe to a 3AM performance by rapper Rae Sremmurd at a local nightclub that left our ears ringing for three days straight. While you won't find that particular dalliance documented here, we did take plenty of photographs of art and design; some of our favorites are posted after the jump.

09.29.14

Excerpt: Book

First Impressions of Greece, by Mary Manning

Sam Cate-Gumpert, of the artist’s book publisher Peradam, had, like many of us, been following the photographic essay that is Mary Manning’s life through her blog Unchanging Window for several years before he approached her with the idea of publishing a collection of her images in a real-life book. Initially, Manning explains, she had a whole other idea of what the book would be, but then a succession of events — a spontaneously booked vacation to Greece with her girlfriend Monique and a gift from a friend of a very beautiful copy of Henry Miller’s First Impressions of Greece (accompanied by an elaborate list of tips and recommendations for the trip), led to a very different publication. Manning says that upon receiving the copy of Miller’s book she knew instantly that instead of what she had been planning, her book would be ‘Greece and Monique. Impressions’. The images, which were all captured on film, were curated into the gentle rhythm seen on these pages by Manning herself and show all the characteristic genius of her previous work.

08.19.14

Travel

Helen Levi in the American Southwest

Sometime in the past year, Brooklyn potter Helen Levi began making her popular Desert Tumblers, which evoke a kind of faded, windswept, Southwestern landscape by marbling white porcelain with sandy red clay. But the funny thing is, until this summer, New York–born Levi had never even been to the desert. "I’d been wanting to go to New Mexico since high school," she says. "That landscape has always been kind of a dreamy thought, but my tumblers were based on my imagination of a place I'd never seen." This summer, Levi decided to bite the bullet, taking a month off from work to road trip 7,000 miles — all the way to Albuquerque and back — making sure to stop along the way at places like the Pittsburgh factory where her clay is made and leaving enough time to simply wander off the road in search of this country's vast natural beauty.

07.09.14

Studio Visit

David Taylor in Hälleförsnäs, Sweden

Every summer, the Stockholm-based, Scottish-born designer David Taylor retreats to his family's cottage in the Swedish countryside for a spell and spends his days foraging in the woods. It isn't greens and mushrooms he's after, though, but slag — the decidedly un-edible clumps of waste compounds left behind in the production of metal. Taylor's cottage happens to be in a town called Hälleförsnäs, also home to an iron foundry that was built in the 1600s and shut down for good in 2006. "Slag can still be found just about everywhere around here," Taylor says. "It’s a worthless by-product that was produced in huge quantities and mostly just dumped out of sight in the forest for centuries." For a recent project that debuted during the Saatchi Gallery's Collect fair in May, Taylor gathered up chunks of the stuff and upcycled them into a series of colorful candlesticks.

06.24.14

Travel

Taking the Temperature of the Scandinavian Design Scene In Norway

If anyone needed proof this year that Scandinavia had quietly usurped London's status as the world's hottest contemporary design scene, it could be found at the Salone del Mobile in April, where the presentation that Danish brand Hay put on, complete with a pop-up shop and an utter madhouse of a cocktail party, was pretty much the talk of the town. It's entirely thanks to the rise, in the past few years, of not just Hay but brands like Menu, Ferm Living, One Nordic, Muuto, Gubi, and Design House Stockholm, all of whom are working with emerging talents across the region. As we've watched the Nordic scene grow, we've managed to pay visits to Sweden (three times), Denmark (twice), and Finland (once, in the dead of winter, natch) — even to Iceland, for its DesignMarch festival three years ago. That left Norway as our personal holy grail, made doubly intimidating because of its famed reputation for being outrageously expensive. Two weeks ago, as you may have noticed on Instagram, we finally took the plunge.

05.12.14

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Field Experiments

From June to September 2013, Benjamin Harrison Bryant (New York), Paul Marcus Fuog (Melbourne) and Karim Charlebois-Zariffa (Montreal) set up a studio in Lodtunduh, a farming community on the outskirts of Ubud in Bali, where they generated a trove of conceptual works through daily experimentation. They collaborated with local stonemasons, woodcarvers, batik-makers, kite designers, and painters, all while "absorbing the sights and sounds of everyday Balinese life and documenting commonplace objects, agricultural implements, traditional dress, and makeshift items from the local culture," they write on the project's website. The result is a collection of more than 100 handmade objects meant to "challenge the traditional notion of the souvenir." At Sight Unseen OFFSITE, the collective will present these Field Experiments for the first time, including sketches, photographs, and personal stories from the makers.