Bojne by Nike Karlesson is a brilliant new chair from Ikea that’s not only gives its (much pricier) contemporaries a run for their money in the personality stakes, but is a cinch to move around, can be hung from the table top to make cleaning easier and even offers the perfect spot to hang your handbag. Democratic design just look another leap.
OK I admit it, I have a thing for older men lately, especially passionate, talented, distinguished ones like the Milanese Maesto Angelo Mangiarotti, still going strong at 88, and whose ethos includes “happiness comes from correctness”… The Mangiarotti anthology exhibition now showing in Mantova at the Casa del Mantegna until November 8 includes sculpture, architecture, design that looks like sculpture and the poignant, evocative free-hand drawings for which the architect is famous – and so well loved.
9ex AT Casa
As virtuous as they are beautiful, Arba are a new family of environmentally responsible lighting designed by Matteo Thun and Antonio Rodriguez for Belux. Choosing sustainable maple wood for both the shade and the base, Thun isn’t shy about highlighting the struggle many of us have with low-energy lamps, describing the aim for the project as creating light that is warm, natural and familiar, ‘despite state-of-the-art sources’.
‘Coming back home makes me happy’. Words of design art maverick, aesthete extraordinaire and owner of this carefully composed London apartment David Gill.
As readers may know, I’m not overly enamoured of the work of Philippe Starck but his Sleepy Working Bed for Cassina may be a watershed. Together with the Frenchman’s recent (somewhat surprising) pronouncements on design art, Starck’s no nonsense bed-cum-workstation has stuck in my mind since I stumbled on the design in the pages of WOI a few days back. My fascination will no doubt have something to do with my own penchant for working in bed late at night. But, personal habits aside, it surely remains that one of life’s luxuries has to be a boudoir big enough for the bed to sit slap bang in the middle.
This window display by artist Arnold Goron for French clothing label Isabel Marant is a sublime example of how one brilliant, elegant, well crafted concept can win.
This is Puglia on Italy’s southern coast where, a little ironically perhaps, big, honest, hard-working old farmhouses, masserie, are being converted into some of the most beautiful sanctuaries from the stress of modern living on the planet… Just don’t expect a holiday from design.
These beautiful rooms are the London city home-studio of international artist Thomas Kuppler… After decades in the design wilderness, the return of face brickwork in modern interior design just took a big step forward.
The Coat Shed by young ‘cross-continental’ design group Outofstock is part of a fabulous five-piece collection presented at the Salone Satellite during Milan design week. The group’s website tells of a ‘vision to bring back romance and poetry in the design of everyday objects’. High ideals, sure, but more than matched by some of the most sensitive and sensible new design out there. Check out the Milan collection over at dezeen and then read the story of how a chance meeting in Stockholm changed everything for this prodigious foursome.
Kvadrat’s new Copenhagen showroom has to be the ideal place to show their easy-to-love-but-a-little harder-to-know-what-to-do-with textile tile concept Clouds, designed by Erwan and Ronan Bouroullec. But while the French duo were responsible for the interior design of the space, including the most of the furniture the project is far from a covert exercise in self-promotion for brand Bouroullec. For the Copenhagen flagship store the designers have adopted a very context-sensitive approach, using a classic Scandinavian palette for all the built elements and even referencing the company’s new port side address in the hip gallery precinct of Frihavnen in the design of the open plan meeting zone.
via designboom