In Modena, art dealer Emilio Mazzoli and architect Fabio Bortolani have combined talents to design an apartment where the line between interior design and art all but disappears. Destined to be the city pad for guests of Mazzioli’s nearby gallery, the apartment retains a warmth and intimacy not always possible when living spaces play host to serious art.
Just as I decided to post about Front‘s softly, softly twist on conventional furniture decoration for Porro, I stumbled across the work of their Dutch soul mates, Scholten and Baijings. The duo is presenting fuori salone in Milan, alongside a bevy of new Dutch talent at the Romeo Gigli Cafe’/Design Academy Eindhoven HQ in the Porta Genova precinct. Their exhibition, Truly Dutch, Conversation Pieces for the Interior, is a five-piece collection of ”contemporary, decorated pieces of furniture, designed by Scholten & Bangs and made by artists and master craftsmen.” The pieces were inspired by classic master works from the intriguingly divergent collection of the Zuiderzee Museum of art, design and culture. The tuna boat motif travel case for me kind of says it all about Dutch design at the moment. You may not quite get what’s really going on, but it makes you look.
Big parquetry, big pattern, big colour. But this idiosyncratic restoration of an art nouveau apartment fallen on hard times by architectural duo Than & Videgard Hansson is remarkable for much more than its controversial good looks. The architects may have shunned the international zeitgeist in favour of a localized, artisan-inspired bespoke, but the result is much more progressive poetic than provincial.
photos: Than & Videgard Hansson via designboom
Melbourne lighting innovators Mance offers its Slim light in 153 colours. I like the idea of randomly bunching the tubes, a little like a floating game of pick-up-sticks. Or for a more elegant feel, simply hang vertically. I’d say the hardest thing about using Slim is choosing the colour.
Using ‘the most nothing building material they could find’, the creative types from Amsterdam communications agency Nothing have constructed their new office interior out of good, old, uncomplicated cardboard. Designer Joost van Blieswijk – a self-styled new generation artisan ‘more interested in designing chess sets than mobile phones’ – has used his trademark ‘no screw, no glue’ technique to fashion more than five hundred square metres of laser cut cardboard into a series of otherwise classically-styled partitions, workstations, meeting table and even bookshelves.
If charity retail and the pinnacle of Paris chic sound like unlikely bedfellows think again. Merci, the newly opened exquisitely styled ‘mixed bag’ boutique by the founders of children’s couture brand Bonpoint, is what can happen (in the French capital at least) when cashed up creatives and their A-list clique of design stars and intellectuals, develop a social conscience. And the results are stunning.
Already being talked about as a new direction in retailing (for luxury brands especially), the really intoxicating thing about Merci is how its creators have so cleverly and elegantly reinvented the often awkward idea of the charity store, turning it into what Trendwatching might call the most desirable ‘status story’ in town. Simply by insisting on the best. For everyone.
The ultimate Italian property fantasy for many of us pretty well begins and ends here: a recycled medieval oasis, complete with secret garden, Roman wall, and just a stone’s throw from the borderline pandemonium of Stazione Termini and Santa Maria Maggiore… These days more dream than temptation perhaps?
Still we can all take heart. The house – product of the unlikely union of a disused bakery and former dairy – is not on the market. Instead its odd, beautiful rooms are home to the (much envied) Milan-born collector, and PR consultant to the architectural profession, Paola Maugini.
Like the Arezzo villa I posted a liitle while back, this much design and art and regalia of family life packed into one apartment really shouldn’t work this well. But then, this is the Cologne apartment of Belgian art director and artist, Mike Meire a consummate collector not afraid to mingle the personal and the public. (Meire’s collection includes the work of ‘names’ like Damien Hirst amongst others). All up, more exquisitely curated proof that sometimes more really is more beautiful.
