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 Casa is the ultimate in off the shelf luxury hotel dressings, or Armani Casa makes me want to wear expensive suits and lose 40 pounds so I can have my picture take with this furniture in a respectable manner.

I’ve included three pieces by Armani Casa that I love: the Omega Bed, the Essen Vase, and the Talvin 1 Desk Set. Each piece has it’s own individual character, but together exude extreme brand clarity and synchronicity. All three pieces, as the hundreds of others, just seem to work well with each other. Each piece also has this modernist yet hand hewn historicist quality creating one of the most consistent collections of products I know of. Job well done.

This has to be one of the most useful pieces of furniture I’ve seen in a long while. It’s called the Doc System, and it folds from a sofa into a bunk bed. I’m, of course, being heavily biased because of the recent arrival of my first child. Here’s the deal, my wife and I own a one bedroom apartment in San Francisco. Space is at a premium here, so I’ve been search for just such a piece. Now would I really use a convertible modern piece of furniture like this? It depends upon how lazy you are. I’m lazy, so in the end, this piece would just stay a sofa or a bunk bed ninety-nine percent of the time.

If you are considering opening a small design company then I highly suggest checking out Muuto’s stratospheric launch from two guys with an idea just two years ago to an internationally recognized brand. They did this with laser focus on modern Nordic design.

Their goal for Muuto was to seize the position as the only design-based company exclusively based on new Nordic design. Muuto was to represent the best up–and–coming young designers from Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. With the slogan ‘New Nordic’ they dedicated their brand to the common Scandinavian quality. This was a business idea that was absent from the market, as most companies represented a mix of older and newer design products.

DDC - Danish Design Centre > Erhverv > design:CASE > Case: From business idea to successful enterprise with creative capital

I’ve falen in love with these rugs. They accomplish two things that I hold sacred in well designed housewares: First, their designs are abstract to the point of challenging the owner but not so obtuse as to detract from the other furniture in the room. Second, these rugs are made with honest, hard work by extremely talented craftspeople. You may need to take out a loan to buy one, though.
the nought collective