February 21, 2012
Last month, we came across the charming knit-bombed Eames wire chair, a cheeky marriage between industrial steel and soft yarn. DIY craft and mass production came together in a seemingly predestined pairing, as if that metal grid were meant for crocheted variation all along. But just when you thought it couldn’t get better, Swedish designer Ola Gillgren introduces his Big Basket chair, a sort of bespoke Darth Vader pod made out of colored felt woven into a steel frame. The designer combines old basket-weaving techniques with thin steel geometries to create a womb-like pod that is both sleek and vernacular. We’re sure you don’t have to be a Scandinavian model in icy blue pants to enjoy this.
[All photos: Emil Thomsen Schmidt, via The Contemporist]
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February 17, 2012
Cats. They make great additions to the home, but god knows their litter boxes don’t belong anywhere near that Wassily Chair. To reconcile this, Seattle-based Modernist Cat have designed a series of dignified plywood litter boxes that allow your little Mies van der Meow to play, perch, sleep and do his or her business in mid-century modern fashion. Design always has an answer!
[All images via Modernist Cat]
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February 16, 2012
“I always imagined I would be an architect when I was younger because I was nerdy enough to enjoy the math and science portion of school while also being really interested in art,” says Chris Brigham of Knife & Saw. But when college came around, one decision led to another, and after graduating with a fine arts degree, Brigham found himself staring into the screen as a graphic designer for “one of the many doomed dot-coms of the time.”
After hopping from one start-up to the next (one of them being Google), Brigham couldn’t suppress his architectural streak any longer. No, he did not return to the throes of design school. Instead, he turned his garage into a wood shop. “With that,” says Brigham, “Knife & Saw was born.” Brigham’s intuitive reverse engineering and affinity for minimalist design led him to build the Bike Shelf. Weighing in at 15 pounds, built out of solid black walnut or white ash, and starting at $299, the Bike Shelf is the slimmest and by far the most affordable of the bike-rack-bookshelf hybrids we’ve surveyed. With a Bike Shelf affixed to your wall, you can keep your bike indoors by slipping it into the level slot and plop your helmet, keys, or your collection of rare books right on top. Order yours here.
[All images courtesy Knife & Saw]
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February 15, 2012
Pizza, the lovable flat bread with toppings, has been having a bit of a moment. Outside of its native country, the food item has spawned numerous kinds of ‘authentic,’ each with its loyal followers. Its reliance on distinct, rigorously honed techniques and its diverse appeal to everyone from sodium-loving children to fine dining aficionados, have made pizza something of a cult food item. The receptiveness of its form and flavor allows for chefs and restauranteurs to simultaneously uphold and reinvent gastronomical tradition. It is no surprise then that pizza restaurants have become sites for architectural as well as culinary innovation. Centered around a massive oven—a piece of machinery that can sometimes drum up the same kind of talk as a sports car—the pizza restaurant has inherent architectural concerns and features that have now become the inspiration for creative design.
As we learned from Fast Co. Design, British chef and television icon Jamie Oliver has a colorful legacy back at home, including a chain of pizza joints called Union Jacks. The newest Union Jacks to join the wood-fired British pizza scene is located in none other than the Central St. Giles building designed by Renzo Piano. But starchitect aside, Oliver’s latest pie-slinging enterprise boasts a lively interior designed by local studio Blacksheep that sprinkles in kitschy elements of post-war nostalgia with bold graphics and cheeky decorative accents. Take a look at Union Jacks and a few other pizza restaurants deserving of some architectural spotlight, after the jump.
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February 15, 2012
Frank Lloyd Wright famously emphasized the importance of a centrally placed fireplace in the home. Radiating warmth, the hearth was the architectural and spiritual focus of the home, grounding it and becoming a salient feature of Wright’s architectural practice and philosophy. In his time, Wright was an innovative pioneer of early natural heating and air circulation solutions, but much has changed since the American architect revolutionized the industry with his patented Prairie Style.
The fireplace, for one, has undergone a renaissance. Largely dormant after the advent of efficient and concealed gas and electric heating, the primitive, flickering flame has once again found renewed context in the modern home. Take a look at some of these sleek, modern fireplaces from Ortal that are once again restoring the hearth to its original place as the heart of the home. More after the jump.
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February 2, 2012
The latest from the Korean design front: designer Jongho Park’s ‘Costume Collection,’ a series of works that play with material and shape to reinvigorate familiar forms of furniture. In the series, Park uses laser-cutting techniques to manipulate iron to look like wood and wood to look like fabric. Chairs, lights and stools appear like children draped in bed sheets on Halloween, with their feet sticking out endearingly from below. More after the jump.
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February 1, 2012
Downton Abbey. Needless to say, this British television import has had many of us across the pond glued to the screen, honing our British accents, and producing memes on Tumblr with frightening voracity. While season 2 is breaking down some of our favorite upstairs-downstairs social barriers, we can’t help but still wish we were estate-owners ourselves in those glory days, prancing about the opulent halls of Downton while sprinkling benevolent gestures here and there so that we may consider ourselves righteous people.
The State Dining Room at Highclere Castle, Hampshire, England. Image via Linda Miller.
Well, home décor enthusiast and writer Linda Merrill can help some of us get there by deciphering the interior composition of some of our favorite rooms in that big ol’ abbey. First stop, the dining room, a site decorated not only with Maggie Smith’s acerbic quips but also by an enormous 17th century Anthony Van Dyck painting, gorgeous wood wainscoting, a mahogany table and assorted silver candelabras and serving pieces. Not only does Miller pick out the small details of the State Dining Room at Highclere Castle, where Downton’s dining scenes are filmed, but she has also compiled a Pinterest board of objects the Crawley family is accustomed to dining with nightly. All we need now is that fleet of cooks, maids, valets and footmen (not Thomas though).
Filming in process for a dining scene in Downton Abbey. Image via Linda Miller.
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January 30, 2012
Since taking the interiors market by storm in 2005, Canadian design studio ROLLOUT has been known for the eclectic designs and community-based inspiration behind their custom-printed wallpapers. While many designers have been eager to embrace and faithfully reproduce the minimalist aesthetic, ROLLOUT chose to hail texture, expression, emotion and color as pillars of design that have been unduly silenced since the peak of modernism. Cheering the mantra of “more is definitely more,” ROLLOUT has scoured every corner of the graphic arts, from illustration to photography to pattern the spaces of countless clients with vibrant expressions of art, innovation, individuality and community.
On their trip to IDS Toronto, MoCo Loco spotted one of the latest designs from ROLLOUT, a wallpaper that mirrors and arranges the iconic photograph of the Eiffel Tower during its stages of construction to appear like kaleidoscopic ink blots. Modern in its subject matter, baroque in its detail, and abstract in its full-scale form, the wallpaper tastefully welcomes the city of lights into any room. The design is part of the first collection from a series called Wanderlust, a series inspired by travel and cities. First stop—if you couldn’t guess: Paris.
[Click the image for larger view]
[All images via MoCo Loco]
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January 23, 2012
While some airport lounges try to assuage their stomach-turning design schemes with free danishes and multi-lingual magazines, Turkish Airlines knows that there are few things more sumptuous than feeling as if you’re in a private pod, and jetsetters at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport were not to be denied such a luxury. More after the jump.
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January 18, 2012
KBP West Offices by Jensen Architects
With the explosive growth of the tech industry in the last decade came a complete regeneration of the modern office: to keep brands cutting edge, recruit talent and foster innovation, companies like Google, Facebook and AoL turned to more radical interior design, eschewing the monotonous backdrop of cubicles for open interior landscapes of locally-sourced furniture and one-of-a-kind center pieces. The spatiality of the workplace has thus become a rich environment for architects and designers, who often utilize color as a simple, inexpensive means of transforming space. Here are five workplaces that use color to power their designs and inspire productivity, collaboration and innovation. Click to see them!
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