Demakersvan: Lace Fence

 

The Dutch design studio Demakersvan recently launched a new website for 'Lace Fence'.  The product, "combines the ancient craft of lace making with the industrial chainlink fence."  Beautiful new patterns and examples of their custom work here.

Aldo Bakker

One of my favorite products of last year came from Aldo Bakker, the Dutch designer who created this beautiful collection of porcelain tableware.  What makes these pieces so fascinating is that when you first see them, you might not know what they are used for - the function only becomes evident when you hold the object in your hands.  As Bakker describes it's, "a new language of form in a field where everything has been done and shown many times over."

Rémi Bouhaniche

The 'Etirement' lamp by French designer Rémi Bouhaniche turns on/off and dims by pulling the the base of the shade.

Lauren Barjhoux

Lauren Barjhoux, a student at the Ecole Supérieure d'Art et de Design - Reims, recently showcased her 'Stretchy Console' table at Designhuis during DDW.  The piece, which was inspired by a carpenter's ruler, can contract and expand to create a table of any length.  What's more impressive is that it is made out of solid wood with no screws. (Image on left © DR)

Space Making: 7 Living Room Storage Furniture Layouts

Furniture taken out of context can be misleading – sure, it looks great in the pictures but what will it do for (or to) an actual living space in a real room of your home? These sizable shelving units are as much about making space as they are about storing books and other odds and ends. Most importantly, they are shown in creative interior design contexts rathre than posed against blank white backgrounds.

Set along a wall in a modern home, these designer storage objects by Alf De Fre begin to blur the boundaries between architecture, interior and furniture design. Spatially, they seem as much like extensions of the surrounding walls or art placed against them as they do places to put things. They are more than just bookcases or shelving units.

Hanging wall and flush floor units are more physically connected to wall surfaces, but the shelving and cabinets set in the center of a room are arguably even more architectural. These serve as spatial dividers and room separators, semi-permeable barriers that act like partition walls as well as storage areas.

carpet design

The John Deere rugs offers a snapshot of life in rural Scandinavia. Heavy machinery has long since replaced the labor of farm animals, leaving its trademark tracks in the grass and mud. The John Deere, on the other hand, imitates trampled turf (in green) or mud (in a brownish-grey). Made of New Zealand wool, the 5′ round rugs come from Norwegian designers Permafrost. These simple ideas are inspired by the Scandinavian winter, and are awesome for any contemporary interior. What's your favorite ?

Uniquely Unlucky: Custom-Cracked Decorative Wall Mirrors

If shattering a single mirror brings seven years of bad luck, this artist is in for a rough decade or so. Definitely not made to fit in a frame, these wall-mounted works are each one-of-a-kind creations best viewed when back-lit to show the mosaic of imperfections within their rectangular form.

Anyone who has seen the broken screen of a cell phone or cracks in a window knows there is a kind of art within the chaos and destruction. By selectively chipping and cracking away at a solid piece of mirrored glass, Hye-Yeon Kim creates unique objects of artisan decor.

The results are something between controlled craft and abstract artwork – there is no way to completely control the cracks the propagate through the surface, but they can be guided to creates shapes recognizable as fish, flowers, leaves and other natural objects.