Just a really smart looking front door really…
Archives for category: craft
Like a moth to a flame, I keep coming back to these beautiful new pendants by London designer Samuel Wilkinson, where light bulb and shade share equal billing.
A bench to rest your shopping and somewhere to hang your hat and umbrella – little comforts that seem to be overlooked more often than not these days. Not so in this home for an artist in Belgium.
Sometimes (often really) using words to underscore the images in this blog can feel a tad superfluous. And never more so than when I gaze upon this. The scene from the bedroom window is the ancient UNESCO listed town of Modica, but the real hook for me lays on the inside, somewhere between the curve of the headboard and the fervid red of the bedcover. Only in Sicily.
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
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.
Goldsmith turned industrial designer turned jewellery designer again, Saskia Diez is chaneling the zeitgeist in spades with her sensational new range of low key, classically styled travellers. Papier bags are hand crafted from Tyvek (a super tough synthetic paper by Dupont) making them lightweight, water resistant, recyclable and tear proof. The goldsmith’s touch isn’t missing though with the bags labelled in sterling silver. And I love the way Diez insists on presenting the bags in both their pristine ‘unused’ and rather more lived-in ‘used’ forms. Either way they look great.
And there’s not long to wait. The Munich-based designer is launching the Papier range through her online shop and selected stores in April 2009.
I stumbled upon this apt and eloquent reminder of why the old luxury just doesn’t cut it anymore…
The post reproduced below was written by James Pearson. Entitled The New Luxury, it comes from the website of Acholi Beads, a ‘Socially Proactive Business’, based in Uganda, that sells handmade jewellery crafted from beads of recycled paper.
The New Luxury is our society’s response to consumerism’s inability to add meaning to our lives, while recognizing its power to improve livelihoods.
The New Luxury is smarter than advertising. It doesn’t seek its values in airbrushed images or phrases engineered to be memes. The New Luxury abides in story. It basks in the soft fabric of lives woven together by intention and fate.
The New Luxury transcends the sterile front of retail shelves. It peers into the true history of products, joining hands with the many people behind the supply chain, on the far side of the world, who brought the products into existence.
The New Luxury doesn’t rely on the weight of a price tag, but knows the glory of connection to stories larger than any dollar figure, more important than any bragging rights.
The New Luxury acknowledges that value cannot be bought, but that we can buy based on values. It asserts that meaning is broader than a slogan, more attractive than a photo, and deeper than any pockets. It assures us that beauty created in a studio pales when compared to the faintest reflection of real love. And The New Luxury insists that we will not be blinded by advertisements or manipulated by marketing; we are too smart and passionate to allow our dollars to be tempted away by false promises of happiness.
The New Luxury chooses joy, truth, hope, and love.