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 [...]

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MKD Outdoor appeals to the anyone who grew up playing with an erector set. Their furniture is made up of dozens of parts and pieces and fit together elegantly into a perfect symphony. The furniture is quite elegant, but it certainly appeals to anyone who might have more of a fetish for industrial [...]

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Back in Early 2007, Council Design came out with a fabulous new collection they called “Optimism“. At that time, they were just prototyping the periodic table which they showed on their website for a while. But Derek Chen, owner of Council Design, had not yet perfected the table which he had commissioned from design [...]

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The bench, part of the Hover Collection, brings me back to a memory I had experienced nearly twenty years ago when I was traveling in Guatemala. In this country, the streets are filled with music that come from hand made instruments  that resemble over-sized xylophones not unlike the bench you see above. This bench somehow [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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I’ve been thinking about how to create a fresh approach in my own kitchen recently, so it’s no surprise that I was extremely excited to see the work of Produce to get some inspiration of what my kitchen could be. Their work, as shown in their pot and knife rack, wall bins, and wine rack [...]

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Another great find from BKLYN Design: Takeshi Miyakawa. Why is this guy not a superstar designer? Good question. His pieces are clever, refined, simple, and extremely desireable. And maybe most important of all (at least for design stardom), Miyakawa’s work is iconic. His fractal 23 shelving just has this timeless feeling about it. And this cabinetry is [...]

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This Sunday, I attended BKLYN Designs in the Dumbo Neighborhood of Brooklyn and was impressed with the level of craft by the offerings. Over the next few days, I hope to feature a few of the most exciting small companies I observed. Today, I’d like to mention Vexell. Vexell’s furniture, as was the case of many [...]

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I’ve made it a point to cover big, chunky fantastically fashionable brands over the next few weeks, and today is one of my favorites: Armani Casa. Armani Casa is like the stage set for a highly stylized 1940s noir film with a good budget. Each piece evokes one of two feelings in me. Armani [...]

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Liseuse by Take Care is a night stand with a light built within the drawer. The drawer allows you to control the intensity of the light, so if the drawer is open all the way you can read by the light and if the drawer is closed then you can get the warm [...]

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