international correspondent

Sunday, May 03, 2009

More from Milan! – Felicity Splatt’s Design Week Diary

Hey hey! Today the Milan Design Week coverage continues with this fantastic wrap-up by Melbourne ex-pat Felicity Splatt. Felicity is currently living in Austria, but makes the trip to Milan every year for design week… and this year offered to send me her highlights!

Along with her favourite design finds, Felicity shares some shots of the super-trendy Milanese locals, her pick for the best Pizza in town… and she even includes a visit to the Lago apartment (soooo jealous!). I feel so lucky to have so much fantastic first-hand news and photos to share with you all..! It’s gotta be the next best thing to being there!

Felicity Splatt’s Milan Design Week diary

To Milan for Design Week. In addition to the Salone Internazionale del Mobile (Furniture Fair) out at the showgrounds, the city hosts literally hundreds of events over this week.

One of the first stops was Established & Sons at the wonderful space La Pelota. La Pelota used to be a court for playing Jai alai, but these days is a multipurpose space used for a variety of events. Established and Sons constructed wooden warrens in which their wares were exhibited. I particularly liked the couch and the (somewhat frightening) clown lamps:

Across the road the nice Dutch designer Edwin Vlassenroot was exhibiting the latest iterations of his chandeliers. Constructed from postcard holders, these ones had hand-painted glass postcards forming the shade. Previous versions had wooden or copper cards. Edwin also had some small lamps on display. It’s nice to see his work again, only a pity that this year he isn’t exhibiting in his gorgeous apartment, because it’s great for a sticky-beak (there are some peeks on his website though!)

Chandeliers by Dutch designer Edwin Vlassenroot

At the Seoul Design Festival, some refreshing works… even if their security guard might not have been watching me closely enough (don’t worry, I didn’t touch anything!).

Pieces from the Seoul Design Festival

Then to the M’afrique exhibition with works by Stephen Burks:

In the amazing Palazzo Crivelli an interesting installation on the ground floor (below left), and a retrospective of Ettore Sottsass’s work by the Galleria Clio Calvi Rudi Volpi upstairs (below right).

From left to right: a great lamp, and the roast meat dome for Secondome and Bosa Ceramiche:

Back out onto the busy via Pontacchio, some Milanese youth:

I was exhausted from all the travelling that day, so stopped for some pizza and to try to figure out how I could possibly see so many events on foot in about a day and a half. Amazing pizza (of course) in the tiny Sibilla:

Later that night, wandered into the wonderful Spazio Rossana Orlandi where LOTS was happening. People in the courtyard/garden area enjoying apertivo (drinks + copious delicious snacks for €8 – smelled amazing and everyone was really enjoying their food) and fantastic exhibitions upstairs, downstairs, everywhere! Design Academy Eindhoven, Nacho Carbonell, Baccarat, Designhuis, Weltevree, among others.

Shots from the Spazio Rossana Orlandi garden – top photos by Felicity Splatt, bottom image Megan Morton.

Weltevrees work was really nice, particularly the Floris Schoonderbeek’s Axechair. The legs are made of axe handles, and the body of the chair of a nice solid metal. I liked the quirky work of these young designers, maybe even more so when a handsome and talented trio of them offered me some prosecco…!

Floris Schoonderbeek’s Axechair – top righ image by Felicity Splatt, the others are from the Weltevree website.

The Revolving Chandelier by Bertjan Pot was bigger than I had imagined, and impressive. The heat of the light globes warms the air and causes the transparent and reflective shades to rotate:

Next day, headed down to the crazy Zona Tortona. Always full of people and so much design down here. Hit the Superstudio Piu pretty early, overwhelmed as usual by the masses on display. Gorgeous metallic Tom Dixon lamps:

This very interesting screen made up of lots of little (slide-sized) displays. A small camera mounted in the very centre (invisible from this side) tracks movement and projects the image to the screens, in shades of grey. That’s a person off to the right. When I was there, the other visitors and I were quite bewildered by the whole thing. Very nifty in action!

Down in some basement area, the Cloud Chair by Richard Hutten, and ceramic lamps by Chung Ji Hyun.

Up on the via Tortona, the Design Virus lamps by Pieke Bergemans, draped over tables, chairs and filing cabinets:

I really liked the cup chandelier (I’m sorry, I don’t know who this is by), in one of the Superstudios:

Visited the Lago apartment, intimidating guard at the front of the building, but he encouraged me to go in (other visitors weren’t so brave!). Apparently I was quite early as one poor resident was sitting on her bed putting on some moisturizer, while another started washing a mountain of dishes. The chair on the left pulls apart to become a mattress.

Walking around a city for days is really tough, even in comfy shoes, so I don’t know how these women did it:

I grabbed some snacks in the great Taste Lounge exhibition by Richard Ginora / Paola Navone. Lots of ceramics all around, including a giant wall of plates (left), and a super comfortable leather couch area with lots of reading material (right). Perfect for a nap!

(I had to add these additional shots from the Taste Lounge website! It is too fabulous! – Lucy)

…More from the Taste Lounge website

At Sander Mulder, the Woofers (left) and U-Tube (right):

On Sunday, out to the Salone, specifically to the Satellite where young designers present their work. Great ceramic lamps with golden insides from Apparatu / Mashallah Design.

Liked the Flower Pods by Maruja Fuentes:

Three gorgeous and unusual pieces the Echoes collection of Pour Les Alpes:

Nice, very well produced pieces from Brikolör, especially the pattern-stained storage/cabinet in ash veneer.

Sciocola, a chocolate bar seat (whose tablets depress when you sit down) from Adele Rotella:

And three interesting chairs from trimodestudio:

A door which does much more! The Ping Pong Door from Tobias Fränzel:

And to finish, something I wasn’t expecting, a concrete gravestone! Designed by Ákos Maurer Klimes and Péter Kucsera and produced by Ivanka.

A huge HUGE thankyou to Felicity for all her fantastic news and images from Milan… I am completely convinced I have to be there myself next year!

Posted by Lucy at 9:00 pm
Categories - Event Design, Festivals, International Design, Lighting, furniture design, international correspondent, international places Comments Off

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Megan Morton from Milan

Extreme excitement alert! I can’t contain myself… Today the fabulous Megan Morton shares her photos and highlights from Milan Design Week! After her whirlwind trip to Milan, Megan offered to do a little write up for The Design Files.

I feel a little overwhelmed. It is too amazing.

Megan Morton‘s photos from Milan last week!

Throngs of fair visitors… and Pantone bikes!

Ceramics ceramics and more ceramics… These shots are from the Paola Navone Taste Lounge in Via Tortona… a Marije Vogelzang-esque food/design space which looks seriously AMAZING. More incredible shots here. Check out that amazing wall of colourful painted plates… and the hanging teacups!? Stunning. All photos – MM.

More from the spectacular Taste Lounge… Megan explained that you tick what you want to eat / drink on this circular placemat and hand that in to recieve your order. Love it! Photos – MM (that’s Megan, bottom right!)

Design magazines hanging at the Taste Lounge. Photos – MM.

More ceramics. I don’t know whose these are. Sorry. But they’re gorgeous. Love the two-tiered display in the top there! Both shots by MM.

I can’t remember what Megan said about this place… It all got a bit too exciting and I have forgotten the details. Something about old ladies making delicious pies and tarts, and the tables are decorated with Peonies. That’s all I can remember.

New New York – from James Conway

The New Museum, NYC, designed by Japanese architecture firm SANAA

Today we’re lucky to have another dose of international design news from Aus ex-pat James Conway! James’ travels recently took him to the Big Apple, where he found himself pondering the ‘New’ in New York… Enjoy! – Lucy

What’s new? It was a question going through my mind when a project recently took me to New York, a trip which would happily coincide with the US presidential election and the dawn of the new era it recklessly promised. It got me to thinking in that idle, jet-lagged way about the lure of the new, an idea I decided to pursue in a completely literal way by visiting two contrasting museums which, like the city itself, proclaim their newness in their very names.

Neue Galerie exterior. photo – James Conway

Viennese Decorative Arts Gallery, Neue Galerie, New York . Image provided Courtesy of Neue Galerie New York

The Neue Galerie was established in 2001 by billionaire investor Ronald Lauder to raise the profile of 20th century German and Austrian art and design in the US, and is housed in a magnificent 5th Avenue mansion straight out of a Henry James novel. The gallery hit the headlines in 2006 when Lauder purchased Gustav Klimt’s sumptuous, golden Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I for a reported US$135 million, the highest amount ever paid for a painting.

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I by Gustav Klimt

While it’s difficult to compete with Klimt’s bling blowout, the Neue’s permanent collection also boasts an important selection of Viennese design circa 1900, when the Wiener Werkstätte reasoned that a new century needs new forms. If the streamlined cutlery and boxy chairs on display here look familiar, it’s because we’ve been using variations of them ever since. Their work doesn’t represent a total break with the past – geometric designs prove there was still an urge to adorn, and their expensive products were hardly accessible to the masses – but they were nonetheless enormously influential. The restless upending of received ideas in everything from jewellery to furniture, the move away from superfluous decoration, the collectivist spirit, the belief that good design could change society – all of it would inspire the Bauhaus movement and just about every other design group since.

Top image – Josef Hoffman (1870 – 1956), five pieces from the ‘Flat Model’ flatware service, 1904 – 1908, Silver. Bottom image – Jutta Sika, (1877 – 1964), tea and coffee service, 1901 – 1902, porcelain with stenciled design in red
Images provided Courtesy of Neue Galerie New York

Kolomon Moser, Armchair, Vienna ca. 1903, Beech painted white, woven raffia-string painted black and white. Image provided Courtesy of Neue Galerie New York

Josef Hoffman (1870 – 1956), cupboard from Biach bedroom, 1902 – 1903, painted pined with maple veneer and inlays of black-stained wood, metal mounts. Image provided Courtesy of Neue Galerie New York

Otto Wagner, (1841, 1918), Buffet for the apartment of Otto Wagner, 1898 – 99, solid walnut and walnut veneer, mother of pearl inlays, marble (replaced). Image provided Courtesy of Neue Galerie New York

Keep following this minimalist route and you arrive at something like the New Museum, amazingly the first dedicated contemporary art museum ever built in downtown Manhattan. It looms brightly over The Bowery, a street which was long a byword for urban squalor but which is now yielding to gentrification. The tipping point in that process came with the 2006 closure of iconic punk venue CBGB’s, a couple of blocks away; the opening of this big shiny museum a year later was mere confirmation.

The New Museum exterior, featuring wiss artist Ugo Rondinone ‘s installation – Hell Yes!, 2001

The building, designed by Japanese firm SANAA, makes a virtue of its limited footprint by heading upwards in dramatic fashion. Half a dozen white boxes, wreathed in mesh, are placed on top of each other at awkward angles, as if each floor was delivered as a pre-fab unit and carelessly stacked – you can imagine someone across the road yelling “left, no YOUR left…OK that’ll do.” As with MOMA, extensive street-level glass windows avoid the intimidating air of older art institutions, while also subliminally inferring that art appreciation is something to fit into an afternoon’s shopping. Inside, colour is almost completely absent (though deployed to blinding effect in the elevators). The ground floor shop, which has a great selection of cutting-edge books and artist multiples, is enclosed in a curving mesh which echoes the building’s façade.

The New Museum gift shop. Top image by Dean Kaufman – (s0 sorry can’t remember where I found this image…). Bottom image by James Conway.

New Museum exterior mesh – photo by James Conway

Oh, and there’s some art as well. Both exhibitions I caught there were retrospectives, and didn’t seem to quite live up to the museum’s pithy, self-proclaimed mission of “new art, new ideas”. The punchy, block-colour abstractions of New York-based artist Mary Heilmann, for example, are easy on the eye but hardly life-changing. The titles at least reference her love of music; in interviews she emphasises her passion for punk, and she claims, incongruously, to identify with the short, shambolic career of Sid Vicious.

Mary Heilmann, Surfing on Acid, 2005. Oil on canvas, 152.4 x 122 cm by Mary Heilmann

Mary Heilmann, Lovejoy Jr., 2004, Oil on canvas, 102 x 81.3 cm by Mary Heilmann

The Sex Pistols star is just one of the icons who appear in Elizabeth Peyton’s heavily publicised show, which occupies the third and fourth floors. All her subjects (predominantly rock stars) are rendered as rosy-lipped androgynes in big obvious strokes on small canvasses, framed like snapshots. There seems to be as much animosity as acclaim for Peyton in the art world; the gist of the criticism seems to be “why her?”, i.e. that plenty of artists fresh out of school are doing more exciting figurative work with much less recognition, and moreover that her stock of cultural references hasn’t been refreshed since the 90s. For me the modestly-sized pieces had real charm on their own but made little impact en masse, and considering this was a major show by a hot artist, the wow factor was disappointingly absent.

Left – Sidney, 1995, charcoal on paper, 33 x 27.9 cm, Right – Sid and his Mum (John and Anne Beverley), 1995, oil on board, 43.2 x 30.5 cm – Both by Elizabeth Peyton

Brett and Rob, 1999, oil on board, 35.6 x 42.5 cm by Elizabeth Peyton

Piotr on couch, 1996, oil on board, 22.9 x 30.5 cm by Elizabeth Peyton

On balance, the artists featured in the New were looking less “new” than the bunch of long-dead Austrians uptown. But the museum itself, the shell at least, lives up to its name – it feels radiantly and self-confidently of the moment. On leaving the building, look up and you’ll see a sign by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone which reads simply “HELL, YES!”. While the fat font and rainbow colours suggest a retro hipster appreciation of the 70s style which punk supposedly did away with, in the “yes we can” era the message looks slightly less ironic.

Hell Yes!, 2001, by Ugo Rondinone, found here on Flickr.

And in the event, yes they did. Watching the election results in a packed Brooklyn bar, there was no New York cool disdain on display; when Obama appeared on screen to claim victory the place went utterly, unironically berserk. Not surprisingly his acceptance speech was full of new stuff: new dawn, new energy, new schools, even a new puppy. But just as new and unprecedented was the way people listened, as if meaningfully engaged by politics for the first time.

Facing the next day with a fuzzy head I briefly wondered if it had all been a bourbon-related delusion. Others were similarly disbelieving: hundreds queued round the block to snap up the day’s edition of the New York Times, eager for black and white proof that Obama really was their next president (you can’t frame a website, so new media doesn’t cut it as a keepsake). And on the very same day, Elizabeth Peyton topped up her show with a portrait of Michelle Obama and daughter Sasha, a deft gesture which not only brought her show instantly up to date, but was also probably the first work by a major artist to mark the historic moment.

At last, something new!

Michelle and Sasha Obama Listening to Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention August 2008 by Elizabeth Peyton

Thanks so much James!

Posted by Lucy at 8:00 pm
Categories - Fine Art, International Design, furniture design, international correspondent, international people, international places Comments (1)

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

London East End design round up

Ryantown is Rob Ryan‘s new(ish) retail shop in Colombia rd in London’s East End. There are times when internet coverage is simply not enough… I have to visit! – Lucy :)

More international news today from globe-trotting Australian ex-pat James Conway… here James goes in search of affordable design innovation in London’s East End. I am so jealous! What a fantastic round-up… London never looked so appealing!

Enjoy! – Lucy x

Going to London and moaning about the prices is a bit like jumping in a river and then complaining that you’re wet. Still, even when you know what awaits you, the speed with which pounds seem to evaporate here is breathtaking. The next Olympic city remains a podium fixture in the cost of living competition (gold or bronze, depending who you believe), but what’s especially dismaying is that so many of the shopping options seem to be either the same as you could get anywhere in the world, or else beyond the reach of anyone without an oil well to their name.

There are pockets of affordable innovation, but they’re under attack. You can find one of the frontlines at the edge of the City of London, the all-consuming financial powerhouse straining at the boundaries that inspire its nickname of The Square Mile, now continuing its assault on the East End.

The once vibrant Spitalfields Market, which stands a little too close to enemy territory, is a sad spectacle these days. You can still find a range of small-run design wares, but as well as losing some of its floor space to cookie cutter shops and offices to house the City’s overspill, the market seems to have lost its bohemian allure. And so there is even less room for young creative types and their potential customers to find each other.

But the further you get away from the City the more interesting things get. Managing – just – to retain their glorious Georgian architecture, the few blocks east of the market still bear the traces of successive waves of migration, from French Huguenots in the 17th century to Irish weavers, East European Jews and more recently Bangladeshis. The 18th century building which hosts the Brick Lane Mosque has previously served as a French Protestant church, a Methodist chapel and a synagogue. The fascinating cultural layers here still attract writers and artists, though they tend to be less of the young and struggling variety, and more like Gilbert & George, Tracey Emin and Jeanette Winterson.

Brick Lane is the destination of choice for a moderately priced post-pub curry, and the street continues to host an endearingly shabby market of new and used stock of a Sunday morning. The bizarre mix of merchandise is impossible to summarise; suffice it to say that if your shopping list reads “second-hand bicycle/5-pack of cotton-rich socks/‘60s picture frames/catering-sized can of creamed corn/rusty pliers”, you’re really in luck. A few blocks away they might be nutting out byzantine billion-dollar deals, but the vigorous, earthy capitalism practised here is a lot more appealing.

The old Truman Brewery site which straddles the street is home to a constantly changing roster of creative enterprises and events (including an upcoming Eco Design Christmas Fair), as well as the regular Sunday UpMarket, which is taking over where Spitalfields left off, and the ever-popular DJ bar Café 1001.

Cheshire st – an eclectic mix of colourful shopfronts amongst the grey building facades and London puddles.

Just off Brick Lane you’ll find Cheshire Street, a small holdout of wilful individuality among the homogeneity of London’s retail scene. First stop is MAR MAR Co, whose range includes simple devices which allow you to turn old plastic bags and bottles into, respectively, garbage bins and bird feeders. Innovative, simple, cheap. A couple of doors down, the storefront of interior designers Richard Laurence oozes morbid glamour, and they’re happy to sell selected original and vintage pieces to the public.

MAR MAR Co exterior (top), Richard Laurence details (below)

More vintage gems await you at Russell Roberts, which specialises in 20th century furniture, while at Shelf they’ve captured the trend for retro printing techniques with Portuguese notebooks. You could always whip out your Faber-Castells and design your own costume for the unpainted Russian dolls also on offer. The globe-trotting continues at Labour and Wait where they scour the world for, well, scourers among other things, as well as enamel-coated pots and other utilitarian household items. Now you might be turned off by this fetishising of tools from an age when hard toil was a burdensome necessity rather than a lifestyle option, or you might just appreciate quality products built to last. In any case their store and mail order service are booming.

Shelf exterior on Cheshire st

Shelf products

Labour and Wait products

If that seems a bit precious, maturity and sophistication are unlikely to trouble you at F-Art. The range here includes space-age toys, old girlie mags and original art prints whose scatological humour lives up to the store’s name. At the other end of the street, past a stall selling £5 plimsolls, you’ll find Beyond Retro, second-hand outfitters to the stars. Well, to the Mighty Boosh anyway.

The people wear $5.00 Plimsolls on Cheshire st!

Leaving Cheshire Street (and passing Les Trois Garcons restaurant and adjacent bar Lounge Lover, both style mag regulars) you come upon Unto This Last, a workshop selling its clever, clean-lined plywood furniture direct to the public, at (for London) surprisingly sane prices. Nearby Squint deals in second-hand furniture reconditioned with loud fabric scraps. The results, while impressive, don’t come cheap, but you can always have a look around for makeover inspiration.

Unto This Last furniture workshop

Colourful creations at Squint

Our last stop on this tour is Columbia Road Flower Market, a Sunday morning institution with shouty stallholders and a lively assortment of cafes and shops, including Ryantown, with its range of delicate paper cut motifs and Nelly Duff, which specialises in high-impact limited edition prints by Banksy and other contemporary artists. Even midwinter doesn’t deter the crowds from sprawling over the cobbles and nursing their hangovers with some of the best coffee in town, and if you time your visit for the early afternoon you can get a drastically discounted pot plant or bouquet.

Colombia st Flower market details

Ryantown interior (exterior shot at the top of this post)

Its nice to be nice print by Hazel Nicholls, Rob Ryan‘s faithful assistant! (available online here.)

…and I had to throw in this extra shot of Rob Ryan’s own work which I found here – Lucy

Or you can just soak up the atmosphere, which will cost you exactly zero British pounds.

Thanks so much James!

Posted by Lucy at 8:00 pm
Categories - International Design, contributors, international correspondent, international people, international places, window shopping Comments (3)

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Gothenburg Highlights

Gothenburg, Sweden

Just to shake up this week’s Sydney-centric focus, here is another article from international contributor James Conway, who recently visited Gothenburg in Sweden (aka “the Melbourne of Sweden”). Must say, his lyrical and very entertaining writing style puts me to shame! Please enjoy, and I’m sure James would appreciate any feedback if you enjoy his article! – Lucy :)

Sweden’s second city is number one for design – James Conway points out some Gothenburg highlights.

Look, I generally know my geography. My nerdy childhood habit of poring over maps and atlases means I’m usually good for a blue wedge in Trivial Pursuits. But it was only after my friend Sheryl suggested a trip to Gothenburg that I discovered a) it’s on the west coast of Sweden, not somewhere in Germany as I’d always thought, and b) that it’s the same place as Göteborg (as the locals call it, pronouncing it something like “yerteborry”).

Not that they tend to make a big deal about themselves; Gothenburg’s half a million inhabitants go about their business with minimal fuss, pausing from their cheerful industriousness every now and then to give us Volvos, Hasselblad cameras and Björn from Abba. And behind many of the Swedish design classics we admire today there’s a good chance you’ll find a graduate of the city’s world-renowned HDK School of Design & Craft.

Among Swedes themselves the city has a reputation for being friendlier and more progressive than Stockholm. Consider this alongside the significant migrant population, enviably high quality of living and a few trams, and you’re basically looking at the Melbourne of Sweden.

Our visit coincided with what Swedes traditionally refer as “the rotting month”, the tail end of summer when – back in the day – food tended to go bad in the heat. Modern refrigeration aside, the autumnal temperatures and persistent rain which marked most of our week there made the idea of climate-related spoilage seem a little fanciful.

We started our explorations on Avenyn, the main shopping street, but it was dominated by the kind of shops you could find anywhere in Western Europe. More promising is the local branch of Swedish chain Lagerhaus, with its chic, affordable tableware, and decorative bits which allow you to outfit the rest of the home in various degrees of tastefulness, from bland beige to Bangalore brothel. Some of the trashy novelty items on display make you suspect that their typical customer is buying a leaving gift for a colleague they don’t particularly care for. But tear yourself away, if you can, from the Hello Kitty soap dispenser; the real treat in this store is when you look up to discover you’re actually in a converted Art Deco theatre.

Older still is Haga, a handsome neighbourhood of pedestrianised streets lined with grand 19th century timbered houses. Here you’ll find cafes, bookshops, antique stores and independent galleries like Sintra, which has a rotating programme of contemporary crafts and design, with an emphasis on ceramics.

To put all of this into context, head for the Röhsska Museum, the country’s only museum dedicated to design. The collection traces the evolution of the Swedish aesthetic over the centuries but really comes alive for two key eras: late 18th century Gustavian style, which took French interiors, dropped a lot of the frills and lightened up the colour scheme to make the most of the wan Nordic light, and post-war pieces of the kind which dominate international auction sales these days. Across town, the light-filled blond-wood expanse of the Museum of World Culture, designed by London firm Brisac Gonzalez, was opened in 2004, and its goal of intercultural dialogue is a legacy of the city’s outward-looking maritime history.

Top – Museum of World Culture, bottom – sculpture by Korean artist Suh Do-Ho at the MWC

Installation outside the Museum of World Culture

Röhsska Museum

But for me the real gem of Gothenburg’s institutions is also its smallest – the Kortedala Museum, a completely preserved example of ’50s and ’60s interiors in a modestly proportioned apartment in the most non-descript building imaginable. It’s like being on a movie set; everything, from the bric-a-brac on the occasional tables to the toiletries in the bathroom, is authentic to the era.

The Kortedala

Kortedala was home to a forward-thinking housing project which reasoned that a social democracy had an obligation to provide quality accommodation to all. The teak table in the apartment, for instance, came from Denmark, as it was then acknowledged as a world leader in design. The lovely couple who welcome visitors to the apartment had themselves moved into the development in 1957, and proudly displayed the television with peek-a-boo wooden screen which was introduced in the early 60s, and the then-radical inbuilt refrigerator.

The Kortedala

A little hunting in the city’s fleamarkets can turn up your own time-travel souvenir; our expedition yielded a hand-held cake mixer with in-built egg separator. OK so I’m not much good in a kitchen but according to Sheryl, who knows more about baking than I ever will, this is apparently a stroke of design genius.

ingenious cake mixer

Heading north out of the city, pausing briefly to goggle at the Bräckbod factory, which sells imperfect biscuits at drastically reduced prices to coachloads of tourists (I am not making this up), we were soon in a shampoo ad wonderland. Around every bend there were breathtaking vistas of rolling pine-covered hills, wild rocky outcrops, serene bays and lush green fields grazed by happy cows.

shampoo ad wonderland

You could spend weeks exploring the little fishing villages up and down the coast, with the islands and inlets along the way offering endless visual variety. Water is key to everything here – the frequent downpours, the fish-heavy diet, even the art; the Nordic Watercolour Museum, designed by Danish architects Niels Bruun and Henrik Corfitsen, has a dramatic setting in the town of Skärhamn. Its oxblood façade echoes the traditional farmhouses which dot the landscape in this region. The museum has thoughtfully erected live-in studios for visiting artists, in the form of wooden cubes weathered to match the rocks they perch upon.

Nordic Watercolour Museum

Gazing out over the bay through the soaring windows in the gallery’s restaurant, we agreed that we would wholeheartedly recommend Gothenburg and the surrounding area for anyone who wants a crash course in Scandinavian design, some spectacular scenery, or just to pick up some less-than-perfect biscuits at knockdown prices.

Nordic Watercolour Museum restaurant

Posted by Lucy at 9:00 pm
Categories - International Design, contributors, interiors, international correspondent, international people, international places Comments (4)

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Nina’s New York Photo Gallery

The lovely Duane Street (near Hudson Street)

My good friend Nina just returned from a trip to The Big Apple… ahhh lucky thing. I’m still hoping to get there next year but until then, living vicariously will have to suffice :)

I’m paraphrasing… but here is what Nina had to say on return from her trip, still high on the buzz of the big city:

Ah Lucy, NEW YORK. When I was flying into the States I was thinking, ‘everyone has talked up this place. it better be as bloody good as they all say’.

Yes, it is.

There is a lot to like about New York. I kinda get why people have written so many powerful songs about it. It is sassy and vibrant. I flew in to JFK airport in the early afternoon, in the summertime, and from the air it just looks prosperous. The city is orderly, but the sense of spontaneity is genuine.

The thing I like the most is MORE. There is more of everything here. It truly is a global city, with lots of diverse people, so many global retail brands and lots of forward thinking (pardon the cliche). All squished into what we forget is a little island. For an Aussie, it is a reminder of just how remote we are and what we miss out on by living in this beautiful country.

Wow. Great words and great photos by Ms Nina Rozenbes. Enjoy! -

Incredible pom pom window installation at The Modern restaurant at MOMA (9 West 53rd Street).

Nina’s favourite shot! – close up of the pom poms at The Modern.

Louis Vuitton’s stunning fluorescent tube window display lights up Fifth Avenue after dark. Nice little article about LV’s homage to artist Dan Flavin here.