The Design Crack Guide to Brown
Circumflex Accent Chair by Zoe Mowat
Zoe Mowat has come up with something I find quite special. Her Circumflex accent chair is a perfect triumvirate of steel, cast plastic, and walnut which creates something that is forward thinking and yet retains an old-world richness. Usually, when I see chairs like this they’re either too clumsy or look like a robot made [...]
Mixko: A World of Undiscoverd Similarities
Mixko, as their namesake indicates, is a company that mixes multiple unlike things together to come up with completely new meanings. They look at an object like a whistle, for instance, and say, “Hey, if the scale of that whistle were multiplied in size by, like four hundred times, then that whistle would make a [...]
BKLYN Designs: UM
I wanted to get this post out quickly because the BKLYN Designs Expo has just past, and yet I have not talked about the most prolific and possibly the most fun design collective: UM. Their work is just so damn clever. As my cop out, I’ll let them speak for themselves:
At the core we are [...]
BKLYN Designs: uhuru
uhuru, to me, may have been the most impressive furniture designers I saw at BKLYN Designs in terms of their creative reuse of industrial products. For example: the Stave Bench and the Bilge Lounge reuse whiskey barrels from the finest white oak. These barells are charred and used only once in the barreling process then [...]
1 Year Ago at Design Crack: Riddled by Steven Holl
From time to time, I like to pull out pieces from the archives that I’ve found particularly beautiful. This is one of my favorites from December 2006. Enjoy!
Horm is unlike any furniture company I know of. This company has hired a gaggle of famous architects as their designers. One piece I love is Steven Holl’s [...]
The Flatpack Rug by Big-Game: Functional Furniture for the Transient Fashionista
Flatpack is a tufted wool rug by Big-Game, a Swiss and Belgian design house. The rug concept was born from the idea of taking a simple cardboard box and flattening it out so that each tab of the box spreads to make a rug. I like this simply because it exploit an already interesting form [...]
The Magnum Dining Table by Team 7 Astounds with its Magical Thinness
One of our readers has pointed me towards the Magnum Dining Table by Team 7 Available at Wharfside, and I immediately fell in love with this table. What’s so cool about it?
First, let’s begin with the material choices and the details. The table comes in a number of hardwoods, but the oak and walnut finishes [...]
Balancing Bowls from Royal VKB: Stupidly Simple Measuring Device
I am in love with this product! These are the unbelievably simple measuring devices by Royal VKB called Balancing Bowls. Royal VKB, by the way, is a young Dutch kitchenware firm with a vast stable of talented designers. Their work really creates new rules for how you can eat serve and make food. It’s quite [...]
Emilio Pucci Wood Clutch Purse: Modern Art as Fashion Accessory
Now that another fashion week in New York has passed, all my future fashion posts for the next several weeks are going to be old news. So, if you really want to stay on top of the latest fashion trends, then this may be the wrong blog. If, however, you are simply in the mood [...]
Nature V2.0: A Chair for the Twisted Nature Lover
Last week, I reported on a piece of furniture that was an update on the log. The update, by Draw Me a Sheep, made the log into a square shape which is quite a convenient shape. But what if trees grew vertically in a boomerang shape? Damn, that would make a sweet lounge chair! Any [...]
What shape would a tree be if man controlled nature?
This is a sweet little piece of design crack in which the London design duo, Draw Me a Sheep, takes an elemental piece of nature such as a tree trunk and asks, “Is nature really that good?”. In Bo-Young Jung and Emmanuel Wolf’s series, called Nature V2.01, they explore the forms of nature and whether [...]
Samsonite Black Label Vintage Collection
I sometimes cover luggage. I’m just attracted to the architectural quality I guess. Ever since I covered a $20,000 suitcase designed by Frog Design as one of my very first posts, I’ve been on the hunt for the next ultimate case. This is not it. However, for $600 it is a darn good alternative. The [...]
Cortiça Chaise Lounge by Daniel Michalik
Daniel Michalik is a Brooklyn based designer who explores the boundaries of unconventional materials. His focus is cork, though. Cork, as you probably know, is the bark that comes from a particular type of oak tree. The bark replaces itself every year and therefore can be sustainably harvested for use as stoppers in wine bottles, [...]
Gola: My New Favorite Sneaker
I have no idea why I love this shoe. I just do. It has a bit of that franken-shoe look which has infected so many top brand design shops. This one takes on the two forms: The back of the shoe is late 90s Italian gigalo / amateur football player. The back of the shoe [...]
Laaka Chair by lapalma
I’ve always been a big fan of bent plywood furniture. Like everyone who has my disease, I own an Eames Lounge Chair (knock off). Actually, I got the Eames chair on Craigslist for a hundred bucks. I hope that’s made all of you sufficiently jealous, so on to the Laaka Chair by La Palma! Now, [...]
Hogan Men’s Shoes 2007
Hogan Shoes are one of the few shoe designs that seem to have bridged the gap between sporty walking shoe and semi-formalish work shoe. OK, maybe they fall a bit more on the sporty tip, but if you must, drop a line to your boss that your Hogans probably cost as much as his stuffy [...]
