For this year’s Alcro Designers Collection, the paint manufacturer challenged ten students from Beckman’s College of Design to breathe new life into old pieces of furniture, using nothing but a lick of paint. The result is the ad.retur collection.
Green was a big trend at the Stockholm Furniture Fair; from the color of products, to a genuine move to bring the outside in. “Grow” was no exception. Under the guidance of teachers Franz James and Asa Nystrom, furniture designer and guest curator Peter Andersson, landscape architect and guest critic Simon Irvine, students from University Gothenburg, Steneby Craft and Design, were challenged to find unexpected and playful ways to bring chlorophyll, oxygen and plants into people’s homes. Jacob Grant’s The Sound of the Forest (above) was inspired by findings that spending time in a leafy forest can reduce stress and mental illness and is a call to “bring trees inside.”
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design, had one of the stand-out student stands of the Stockholm Furniture Fair. Wittily entitled New Bacon, it was styled by a team of six students (Mads Sætter-lassen, Eva Fly, Sanna Movafagh, Emil Krøyer, Mathias Wiik and Celina Hirsch Rolmar) to look like a butcher’s shop with products and information tags hanging from butcher’s hooks in a white-tiled environment.
Watching Mad Men has given me tons of inspiration for my home. I can’t help but constantly find myself nudging my husband and saying “I want one of those chairs!” or “Look at that lamp!” I hope I’m not alone…
Photo via Dr. Television
I fell in love with a sculpture that I believe was in Roger Sterling’s original office from Season 1 (not the crazy Saarinen op art space-age one he’s in now!). Above the fireplace in our living room, there was a bare space that begged for something like this. Jordan and I made a commitment for our new house that we’d make more investments in art instead of buying tons of posters and prints and putting them in frames that cost more than the prints themselves. So, I did some Googling to find something similar and stumbled on Marc Creates Inc. I immediately emailed them to see whether they had some pieces available.
One of the fantastic things about the Stockholm Furniture Fair was the amount of student and graduate work on show, and one of the fantastic things about the student and graduate work on show was Malin Isaksson. The Swedish-born gilder and framemaker had two pieces in the show, Gilded Butterflies (above) and He Who Laughs Last, Laughs the Longest (below).
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Marginal Notes 2012 is a collection of prototypes by the Stockholm-based design firm Note Design Studio. The collection is in collaboration with Lerch Träinredningar and was presented this week, which is Stockholm Design Week. The group of designers examined the sketches that had been made in the margins of their notebooks and upon a second look realized they needed to be made.
Jaime Hayón has created The Guest for Lladró Atelier, launched at Maison & Objet.
Founded in 1953 by brothers Juan, José and Vicente, Spanish ceramics brand Lladró is well-known for its porcelain figurines. Artistic Advisor to the board, Jaime Hayón began working with Lladró in 2006. His latest project is a platform for collaboration between Lladró Atelier and artists from all over the world; American multi-disciplinary fine artist Tim Biskup and Devilrobots, a five-man design team from Japan.
Maison & Objet’s designers of the year 2012 are Humberto and Fernando Campana, originally from Brazil, Hubert le Gall from France and Tokujin Yoshioka of Japan.
To celebrate, each designer was given the opportunity to create an installation for the show. It was the Campana Brothers’ installation that really caught my eye.
One of the stand-out pieces at Maison & Objet for me was Doreen Westphal’s concrete lace curtain. Not only visually stunning, it plays with our conception of gravity, delicately suspending something we perceive to be very heavy in mid-air.
