06.21.25

Saturday Selects

Week of June 16, 2025

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a book that dives into the modernist architecture of Fire Island, wooden vases embroidered with delicate blooms, and a Wong Kar-Wai–inspired interior in LA's Silver Lake neighborhood.

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06.20.25

Sighted

Danielle Fretwell’s Veiled, Jewel-Toned Still Life Paintings Both Conceal and Reveal

In New Hampshire-based artist Danielle Fretwell’s still life paintings, what is visible is often just as important as what is obscured. Fretwell’s work first caught our eye at NADA New York last month; presented by London-based Alice Amati gallery, Fretwell’s seductive, hyperrealistic oil on canvas works featuring fruit, fish, candles, vases, and other tableware stood out among the over 120 booths at the bustling art fair. Depicting these items on what appears to be silken table linens or velvety drapery, Fretwell often includes the device of a painted veil or screen to obscure part of the composition. 

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06.14.25

Saturday Selects

Week of June 9, 2025

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Formafantasma's first US solo show, a new housewares line that pairs Greek art with Swedish craftsmanship, and two new stores in Brooklyn, one focused on vintage heirlooms and one focused on contemporary Georgian design.

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06.11.25

Travel

Two New Sight Unseen–Approved Hotels Are As Much Living Rooms For Locals As They Are Destinations for Design-Seeking Travelers

When the Ace Hotel opened in Manhattan in 2009, it established a blueprint for the idea of a hotel lobby as a living room for the city. With its Stumptown Coffee, Opening Ceremony outpost, April Bloomfield-helmed restaurant, rows of laptop-friendly desks (in an era before WeWork, no less), vintage-inspired photo booth, and a bustling events calendar, the Ace was as much a hangout for locals as it was a haven for travelers. Ace continued to imprint this model as it opened in cities around the world, and other hotels soon followed suit. As this mode of hospitality became the norm over the past decade and a half, though, it's gotten harder for new hotels to stand out, which is why design has become such an important distinguishing factor. But as I found in my travels over the last six months, there are a few properties who are really doing things right — who have taken the idea of the hotel as living room, tweaking it through both expansion and refinement, to something resembling perfect: the Stockholm Stadshotell and the Ace Hotel Kyoto.

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10.26.22

Interiors

Conjuring the Soul of Baltimore — And John Waters — At ASH’s New Hotel Ulysses

At The Ulysses, ASH’s latest hotel, newly opened in Baltimore, maximalism is having a moment — but in a surprisingly considered way, where a wealth of patterns, textures, and influences combine and cohere in a highly cinematic, vintage style. The interior nods to Baltimore’s own John Waters and his trashy-kitsch leanings, for sure, but it's matched with the refined opulence a Visconti set from the Italian cinema classic Il Gattopardo. We spoke to ASH's Will Cooper about how ASH approaches the cities they inhabit, how to be trendy without becoming dated, and how to know when over the top is just enough.

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06.10.25

Interiors

In This California Craftsman, Inspired By a Famed Copenhagen Museum, the Colors Unfold From Room to Room

Since 2021, Lisa Mayock — former co-founder of the beloved aughts fashion label Vena Cava — has been bringing her eye for shapes, proportion, pattern, and texture to interior design with Monogram. Mayock’s Altadena-based studio recently refreshed an 1890s Craftsman home in Pasadena for a family of five, and Mayock wanted the interior to reflect the “vibrant and high energy” way the family lives. While previous iterations of the space before its current residents moved in skewed more traditional — neutral palette, staid furniture arrangements — this transformation started with unexpected wall colors, inspired by Copenhagen's Thorvaldsens Museum.

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06.08.25

Saturday Selects

Week of June 2, 2025

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the best launches from Melbourne Design Week, another super-sleek USM collab — this time in pink! — plus a special edition Gaetano Pesce vase debuting at the Philip Johnson Glass House.

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06.06.25

Excerpt: Book

Heading to Copenhagen for 3 Days of Design? Take our Modernist Travel Guide With You!

If you're heading to the 3 Days of Design festival in Copenhagen soon, we're guessing your schedule is already packed with exhibition visits and design aperitivos. But there's also a good chance that, if you're anything like us, you always carve out at least a little time for mandatory design sightseeing, too? With Scandinavia being a goldmine for mid-century anything, it's definitely folly to go to a place like Copenhagen without digging for architectural gems, and this year, we're making it incredibly easy to find them with our Modernist Travel Guide. ICYMI, Adam Štěch, the architecture photographer behind the popular Instagram account @okolo_architecture, distilled two decades of his work documenting over 10,000 Modernist landmarks into a handy, pocket-sized travel guide covering 363 buildings (with addresses!) in 30 cities around the world, and luckily for all of us, Copenhagen is one of them.

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06.05.25

Excerpt: Exhibition

This Bower x Emily Mullin Showcase Was the Unexpectedly Tough — and Perfect — Exhibition New York Design Week Needed

Here is a list of things I do not particularly like: surfaces designed to look as if they were tattooed, ceramics bound by chains or ropes, almost anything with spikes. Part of the reason I don't like these things is that, as a child of the '90s, they often feel a little poser-y to me — like the designer thought that by using the signifiers of toughness that they could take a shortcut to actually being that thing. But you know what I do like? When designers use materials or processes that are often associated with something hard or edgy in an unexpected or weird or superfluous way. This includes Bower's new Woven collection of mirrors — which weave thin strips of leather through a grid of mirror-polished stainless steel, a kind of Anni Albers for the post-punk era — and Emily Mullin's raku-fired ceramics, which get their signature look from combusting in a blaze of smoke and straw.

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06.03.25

Excerpt: Exhibition

To Christen Their New Dimes Square Gallery, Love House Kept It in the Family

This past month, Love House founders Jared Heinrich and Aric Yeakey debuted a new space just off Dimes Square in New York's Lower East Side; to christen the gallery, they curated their first group show ever — 60 brand-new works from the deep bench of contemporary design talent they've spent years fostering. The exhibition was titled, appropriately, The Family Show, and each artist or designer was asked to contribute a piece that represented their own interpretation of the theme.

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06.02.25

Fair Report

The Material-Rich Hundō Was One of Most Assured Furniture Debuts of the Season

One of our favorites launches at NYCxDesign was Hundō by Emily Thurman, an interior and product designer based in Salt Lake City. Thurman’s debut collection of furniture, lighting, and sculptural objects takes its name from the proto-Italic word for “pour out” — fitting as it gestures towards the fluidity that characterizes these pieces as well as the way in which some of them were made using the art of lost wax casting. The idea and process of “pouring out” also evokes the communal, collaborative effort behind this collection: Thurman turned to both local and far-flung designers and artisans to realize this transformative series.

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05.30.25

Fair Report

13 Group Shows We Loved at New York Design Week 2025

At this year's New York design week/month, opportunities were everywhere for showing new work, from an incredibly solid debut for the new trade fair Shelter, to the Hello Human–curated showcase at Public Records, to yes, the OG mothership that is now ICFF/Wanted. We found excellent work by ex-RISD kids in a Chinatown basement, design pieces mingling with fashion at boutiques like Colbo and Knickerbocker, and, a true sign of the times, quite of bit of great work in extremely expensive new residential developments. Yesterday we featured our favorite independent designers; today, we're focusing on our favorite group exhibitions from the week-turned-month that was.

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