01.26.15

Travel

Glass Villages, Ceramics Factories, and Split-Pea Soup: Our Week in Finland

If you’re a longtime reader of this site, you know that we are, above all, sunshine-seeking people who happen to be inextricably linked to New York and its fickle seasons. Normally we leap at the chance to hightail it off the East Coast anytime between November and April, in search of beaches, pools, palm trees, and vitamin D. But somehow, while Monica and the rest of the design world headed to Miami at the beginning of December, I found myself saying yes to a week in Finland, home of 30-degree temperatures and 3PM sunsets. When I arrived, no fewer than three people delighted in telling me that the previous month in Finland had seen only 15 hours of sunshine.

01.20.15

Sighted

Peter D. Cole, Sculptor

Let's be honest for a second: The internet is wonderful. It's a fantastic platform for research, and it enables creatives all over the globe to gather inspiration. It allows for artists and designers to see what exists, what's missing, and to create accordingly. It's hard to imagine a world without it. But what if you were a young artist trying to make it in 1960s Australia? Where did one find insight and inspiration? If you were artist Peter D. Cole, you probably looked to your art-history textbooks and the latest imported magazines from that hotbed of modernism, New York. Perusing his work, you begin to see patterns, and his influences become ever more apparent. There's the very basic color palette of fire-engine reds, cool sky blues, and bright sun yellows, reminiscent of a Mondrian palette. There's the tilted shapes, which could be a nod to the fathers of abstraction, the Russian Suprematists. Further still, you begin to see a pattern of grids and cubes, an obvious allusion to Sol LeWitt, one of the most famous artists practicing when Cole graduated in 1968. Mobiles similar to Calder's, colorful forms attached by thin black lines reminiscent of Miró — we could go on but we'll stop ourselves there. It's through this weird, sometimes obvious amalgamation of influences that Cole is able to create original, inspired work that's evocative yet far enough removed to be his own style.

01.16.15

From the Library Of

Lisa Mayock: Welcome to Big Biba

If there's anyone we would trust to guide us through the annals of vintage fashion literature, it's Lisa Mayock, co-founder of the sadly defunct, cool-girl label Vena Cava and now a Brooklyn-based creative consultant. So we were pretty thrilled when we sent out a call for this column a few months back and Mayock immediately responded with one of her most beloved and referenced books, BIG BIBA: Inside the Most Beautiful Store in the World. The book traces the short life of the 7-story Big Biba department store, which opened in 1973 after the fashion label's massive success as first a mail-order catalog and then a series of London boutiques.

12.20.14

Saturday Selects

Week of December 15, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: new jewelry based on Superstudio sketches from the '70s, a new BDDW housewares line based in the middle of nowhere, and a tropical photoshoot by Studiopepe that basically makes us want to jump on a plane immediately and fly south.

11.19.14

Studio Visit

Egg Collective, Furniture Designers

When Egg Collective launched their debut furniture collection at ICFF in 2012 — snagging a Best New Designer award in the process — they seemed to the design world to have come out of nowhere. And in fact, though the three — Stephanie Beamer, Crystal Ellis, and Hillary Petrie — met and began collaborating as 18-year-old freshmen at Washington University's architecture school more than a decade ago, the truth is they had formally joined forces and had begun crafting an ICFF plan only six months earlier. "I remember the three of us sitting outside the Javits Center in our Budget truck, about to move in furniture that we’d been working on with no one having seen for six months," says Beamer. "I was like, you guys, this is it. People could just walk by us the entire fair. But thankfully we seem to have struck a chord and the work resonated."

11.05.14

From the Library Of

Sight Unseen: Jewelry By Architects

Until about six months ago, there was only one Munari we idolized: Bruno, one of our favorite 20th century designers and design theorists. (If you haven't read Design As Art, we suggest you hop to it!) But then, one fateful day this past spring, we were wandering aimlessly around the internet when we stumbled on what is perhaps the biggest editorial coup we've scored in years, and thus began our love affair with Cleto Munari — the Italian designer, who as far as we can tell is unrelated to Bruno, commissioned a dream-team of architects like Ettore Sottsass and Peter Eisenman in the early '80s to create a jewelry collection for his eponymous company, and the project had almost no coverage anywhere on the web. We immediately snapped up a copy of the incredible out-of-print book that documented it, which we're excerpting just a small portion of here.

10.30.14

What They Bought

Ouli

Founded by longtime friends Scott Barry, a Cal Arts–educated graphic designer, and Brooke Intrachat, a CCA grad who was disillusioned with textile work, Ouli originally existed as a showroom, gallery, and pop-up retail space in Echo Park, in a tiny sun-filled storefront studio that was inherited from a mutual friend. There, the two exhibited their own burgeoning furniture and accessories line alongside the little-known work of friends and like-minded artists, and in the beginning, the space existed as some sort of halfway house for brilliant pieces without a home. Ouli quickly gained a cultlike following among Angelenos looking for something a bit off the beaten path, but just as quickly as it began, the retail enterprise was over; the two lost their space in August.

09.23.14

At Home With

Su Wu, Writer

There are people you meet in life to whom you feel a deep and immediate connection, so much so that the particulars of how and why you both arrived at the same place at the same time matter much less than the fact that you did. That’s pretty much how we feel about Su Wu, whose inspiring blog I’m Revolting we admired from afar for months before reaching out two years ago, asking her to collaborate, and becoming instant friends. Earlier this summer, however, when we found out that one of our favorite photographers would be visiting LA, we realized this was the perfect time to find out a bit more about the circumstances that led Wu to where she is right now, both philosophically and quite literally — the downtown LA loft she calls home.

08.30.14

Saturday Selects

Week of August 25, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: shockingly beautiful interiors, sophisticated student work, and a surprising new (Canadian!) design hub.

06.05.14

Q+A

20th Century Carpets at Wright

At the modern design auction house Wright, rugs have long suffered that classic rom-com affliction: Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Despite being the key focal point of most interiors and often being as artful as art itself, they've only played supporting roles in larger furniture auctions — a tendency not exclusive to Wright, either. Next week, though, the Chicago- and New York–based dealer is hosting its first sale devoted entirely to the genre: "20th Century Carpets," comprising nearly 150 lots curated by Nader Bolour of Doris Leslie Blau, beginning with a late 19th-century animal-themed Indian tapestry and ending with contemporary kilims. In the middle, there's an incidental emphasis on Swedish rugs, particularly mid-century examples made by the manufacturer Märta Måås-Fjetterström. To jazz up the sale's catalog, Wright shot the images you see here, pairing some of its most beautiful lots with furniture and art by the likes of Jonathan Muecke and Ben Jones. Read more about it after the jump, in our interview with Wright's Senior VP, Michael Jefferson.

05.18.14

Fair Report

Collective 2 and Frieze New York 2014

A little more than a week ago, we were eyeball-deep in preparations for our Sight Unseen OFFSITE show, which runs for two more days in New York City. We had insurance permits to apply for, electricity installations to oversee, and staffers to train, but we were still determined to drag ourselves away long enough to see two of our favorite shows of the year: the Collective Design Fair, and Frieze New York. And oh, was it worth it — Collective had nearly doubled in size since its first edition last year, and Frieze once again gathered some of the most gorgeous art we'd seen in ages under one roof (not to mention with killer food by the likes of Roberta's and the Fat Radish). See a small selection of our highlights after the jump, then head over to our Facebook page to see much, much more.

03.19.14

Excerpt: Exhibition

Renate Müller at R & Company

Renate Müller is 68 years old and has been designing children's toys for half a century, some of which she created for her family's toy factory in Sonneberg, Germany, in the '60s and '70s, and the rest of which she still makes by hand in her nearby studio, as part of the personal line she began in 1978. The materials she uses for that line have stayed exactly the same ever since (jute, wood, leather), as has her process and her policy of working alone, save for the occasional hand lent by her daughter. Many of her animal typologies have remained perennial, too. Yet when it came time to create 26 new pieces for her second solo show at New York design gallery R & Company, which opened yesterday, Müller decided to bust out a pretty major — and amusing — twist: Surrealist creatures with two heads, or no heads, that only someone with a very vivid, childlike sense of imagination could possibly dream up.