furniture

Five of the best design installations at London Design Festival

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By Penny Craswell

As a fan of multi-disciplinary design as well as experimental projects, I was pleased to see so many design installations at this year’s London Design Festival. I have already covered three of the best installations in this blog: Heartbeat, an installation of 100,000 white balloons by French photographer Charles Pétillon, and two Faye Toogood installations (The Cloakroom and The Drawing Room) incorporating fashion, curatorship, making and sculpture. Here are five more and why they are interesting.

1) Curiosity Cloud by Viennese studio Mischer’Traxler at the V&A Museum

Curiosity Cloud by Mischler Traxler. Photo: Penny Craswell
Curiosity Cloud by Mischler Traxler. Photo: Penny Craswell
Curiosity Cloud by Mischler Traxler. Photo: PC
Curiosity Cloud by Mischler Traxler. Photo: PC

You enter an ornate room of the V&A filled with 264 suspended blown-glass bulbs hanging from the ceiling. In each bulb, a small insect hand-made out of transparent foil flutters against the side of the glass when it senses your movement. Katharina Mischer (1982) and Thomas Traxler (1981) met while studying at the Design Academy Eindhoven and started their practice in Vienna in 2009. Curiosity Cloud is part of their ongoing collaboration with champagne brand Perrier-Jouët exploring “small discoveries.” Read more →

Review: Faye Toogood installations at London Design Festival

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By Penny Craswell

The London Design Festival is a museum-focused design event, rather than a commercial fair, and this is evident in the number of installations, talks and object exhibitions included. Two of the most amazing installations this year were by London-based designer Faye Toogood: The Cloakroom at the V&A Museum and The Drawing Room at Somerset House.

Coats are made of Kvadrat fabric at The Cloakroom by Faye Toogood. Photo: supplied
Coats are made of Kvadrat fabric at The Cloakroom by Faye Toogood. Photo: supplied
I first met Faye when she visited Sydney for The Blocks, a multi-sensory installation she created for Penfolds Wine at Sydney’s Walsh Bay in 2012 (read my article here). At The Blocks, Faye reinterpreted five flavours of wine grapes using the sommelier’s notes, working with sculptors, perfumiers and artists to create the installation inspired by the description of the scent. This is typical of her approach, which is not only focused on making objects, but also includes a conceptual and curatorial element. Read more →

Irish Design at Tent London

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By Penny Craswell

At Tent London during the London Design Festival, I was impressed to see the high quality of Irish design at a government-funded exhibition organised by the Design & Crafts Council of Ireland. Called ‘Ó’, meaning ‘from’ in Gaelic, the exhibition’s focus was on design informed by decades-old craft techniques, remote locations and local materials. And they didn’t just show the finished works, but also presented live demonstrations of the crafts practitioners at work.

Atlantic Herringbone Throw by Foxford Woollen Mills, Fox & Rabbit and Bellevue Folly puzzle by Saturday Workshop, Multi purpose oak board by Tony Farrell. Photo: supplied
Atlantic Herringbone Throw by Foxford Woollen Mills, Fox & Rabbit and Bellevue Folly puzzle by Saturday Workshop, Multi purpose oak board by Tony Farrell. Photo: supplied

I saw ceramicist Adam Frew throw a beautiful bowl on the wheel and everyone around was mesmerised – with very few watching through their phones (rare in this day and age!). He prefers to work by throwing pots, using white porcelain, because it allows him to be fast and spontaneous in his making: “It is important to maintain a flow in the production while constantly developing the work. It is an on-going journey with every new piece inspired by the previous form,” says Adam (ref: Give Irish Craft). Read more →

Objects reborn from demolished house in Christchurch

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By Penny Craswell

What would happen if you took all the waste from one demolished house and used it to create new objects? This question is the foundation of a new exhibition, book and auction called “Whole House Reuse” in Christchurch, New Zealand. An initiative of social enterprise Rekindle, the project highlights the huge amount of landfill created by the construction industry each year, particularly in Christchurch which is still demolishing and rebuilding after the Christchurch Earthquake in 2011.

Reading station by David Trubridge Design Studio (David Trubridge, Marion Courtille, Mathilde Polmard, Mat Stott)
Reading station by David Trubridge Design Studio (David Trubridge, Marion Courtille, Mathilde Polmard, Mat Stott)


It took seven days for a professional salvage crew and team of volunteers to fully deconstruct the single storey house in the Christchurch suburb of New Brighton, leaving behind only the concrete ring foundation.

Read more →

Stash desk: Furniture design by Blu Dot

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By Penny Craswell

I discovered Blu Dot while searching for a new desk for my home office. Using that most basic of tools – Google shopping search – I found many ugly pieces of furniture and many prohibitively expensive pieces of furniture. But I also some beautiful and more affordable options around – and the best for my room size and aesthetic was Blu Dot.

Stash desk by Blu Dot
Stash desk by Blu Dot


Designed in Minnesota, the brand was founded in 1997 by John Christakos, Maurice Blanks, and Charlie Lazor in response to their own need for affordable design furniture (read more of their origin story here). Perhaps because they were designing for a practical need, that’s what they created – practical furniture; while it looks great, I get the feeling that the aesthetics are secondary to the function, which is as it should be. What’s also interesting about their furniture is the small scale of it – it suits inner city living. Read more →

Video: Round-up of Ventura Lambrate at Milan Design Week

Video: Round-up of Ventura Lambrate at Milan Design Week

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While everyone goes to Milan for the Salone del Mobile, it has become apparent in recent years that the best design, the cutting-edge work, the really innovative stuff, is not happening at the fairgrounds, but in town, at precincts like Brera, Zona Tortona and Ventura Lambrate.

Although Ventura Lambrate is the furthest away, and can often be hit and miss, there is a huge amount of design talent shown each year. This year more than 900 designers from around the world showed their work. Check out this great video summary of the event by the organisers.

View here.

Alexander Lotersztain shows QTZ chair in Milan

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Argentinian-born, Brisbane-based designer Alexander Lotersztain of Derlot is exhibiting the QTZ chair at Ventura Lambrate as part of the Milan Furniture Fair this week. With a focus on product design, as well as branding, interior design and art direction, Lotersztain is perhaps best known for high profile projects such as the Limes Hotel in Brisbane, creating work that is personal, branded and translates well internationally, following in the footsteps of designers such as Marc Newson. The QTZ chair is a limited edition collection inspired by the form and materiality of quartz.

QTZ by Derlot. Photography: Florian Groehn
QTZ by Derlot. Photography: Florian Groehn

“This limited edition collection of seating elements reflects the prismatic beauty and semi-precious qualities of what is amongst the Earth’s most abundant minerals,” says Lotersztain. Each QTZ element is available in a range of finishes and is manufactured in stainless steel. Read more →

Infographic: Multi-functional furniture design

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The design team at Chicago-based Ghergich & Co (which produces visual content such as this great infographic), has teamed up with CustomMade (which teams customers who want one-of-a-kind creations with makers of those goods) to create an article on multi-functional furniture design. The post is written by J.H. Fearless, a blogger and writer whose work explores the intersection of art, nature and culture.

Multifunction furniture article, graphics by
Multifunction furniture article, graphics by Ghergich & Co.

“When is a chair not a chair? When it’s a bookshelf, or a table, or a wall panel, or a phone charger! The multifunctional furniture renaissance is here, and it brings seemingly endless ways to reimagine not only furniture’s function, but its form as well. Read more →

Design writings: Christopher Boots studio visit

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“We visit Boots in his Fitzroy studio. The streets lined by large oaks and restored facades are a far cry from the suburb’s working working-class roots, when Boots’ studio would have been home to one of many factories that formed the beating heart of the area’s industrial past.

via Broadsheet

“From an outsider’s perspective, Boots is living the dream: a studio in a fashionable suburb—which also doubles as his house—and luxury brand Hermes calling to design the Christmas lights in their New York store.

“Inside, Boots’s studio is a flurry of activity flanked by the fixtures that have brought him acclaim the world over. By one wall, there are iterations of Boots’ signature crystal fixtures, the Prometheus series: handmade chandeliers embellished with quartz around a ring of bronze.”

Alan Weedon visits Christopher Boots in his studio for Broadsheet, a well written article that gives in insight into this hard-working, talented designer.

Read the full article here.

 

 

Top 5: Australia’s love affair with Nordic design

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By Penny Craswell

In 1981, a radical new design collective Memphis, headed by Italian designer Ettore Sottsass, released its first collection in the “new international style”. Since then, globalisation of brands and products has led to a consistent aesthetic across national boundaries in contemporary design, to the extent that discussion of national design styles has become increasingly irrelevant.

funkis-christmas-banner


On the other hand, it is hard to argue with the fact that some countries do design really well (Denmark, Japan, Italy to name just a few) and some not so well (overbearing dark wood furniture and kitchens in some parts of the US or over-the-top glitz in Russia or China, for example). Read more →