This week at the Collective Design Fair the Polish-born, Chicago-based interior designer Lukas Machnik is presenting an array of furniture and objects from Rick Owens, Parts of Four, Lonney White III, and Phoebe Knapp.
The Barcelona-based fashion designer Boris Bidjan Saberi has revealed his new capsule of home fragrances in collaboration with the French scent maker Mad et Len. The collection consists of two candles and two scented lava stone jars. The main scent note is vegetable tanned horse leather. Needless to say, it’s an olfactory match made in heaven.
If you find yourself in Munich, Germany, you might visit the Nymphenburg Palace, which was built in 1679. But you could easily miss one of its hidden treasures, Porzellan Manufaktur Nymphenburg, which has been producing porcelain wares since 1747.
The manufactory still belongs to the Bavarian crown. Although calling it a manufactory is misleading, because today the word implies mechanized production on industrial scale.
On a recent trip to Paris I visited the showroom our favorite perfumer, Mad et Len. Moving to a dedicated showroom has allowed the brand to fully showcase its universe, which includes candles, lava rock home scents, and blackened iron objects hammered by hand. At the core of Mad et Len’s ethos is combining the light and the ethereal (scent) with the dark and earthy (hammered iron).
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I first discovered the work of the Belgian architect Vincent Van Duysen in the Copyright bookshop in Antwerp last year. His monograph caught my eye; its cover showed the texture of gray stone, alluring in its deceptive simplicity. While flipping through the book I realized that I am standing inside a space designed by Van Duysen.
Before Apple, Bose, and Bang & Olufsen, there was the German manufacturer Braun and its head designer Dieter Rams, an icon of consumer goods design. His minimalist style, characterized by the maxim “Less but better,” has had unparalleled influence on design of consumer electronics, appliances, furniture, and even fashion (Jun Takahashi of Undercover once designed an entire collection based on Rams’s work). His famous Ten Principles of Design are the Ten Commandments of the design world.
Earlier this week we visited the ICFF interior design fair in New York. Below are some of our favorite things.
Aoi Kotsuhiroi, the enigmatic Japanese-born object designer we profiled in the second volume of our print magazine is presenting hew latest creations in an installation called “I Vomited the Wearing Out of Nameless Things” at the new exhibit on contemporary French jewelry at Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. This should be all the more interesting because her dark and quiet visual poetry will be juxtaposed against the pomp-and-circumstance of the museum’s permanent collection. The exhibit opens tomorrow.
Here at StyleZeitgeist we are fascinated with all things Belgian. There is just something in the air in that country – a mix of unparalleled cultural literacy and awareness coupled with a lack of snobbery so often found in design capitals of the world – that makes Belgian design both prescient and fresh. Below, our Brussels-based editor, Philippe Pourhashemi, reports on his Belgian interior design finds during Milan Design Week.