PRETTY BIRD

When you assign the name Flamingo to something, you’re bound to raise expectations–and Italian designer Marco Guazzini delivers on that promise. His Flamingo is a pastel-hued console table defined by drawers that slide open in traditional fashion, but also move along its length, allowing for a variety of configurations and surface areas. Guazzini looked to Miami’s Art Deco-informed color palette for inspiration, but reduces the tones down to a level as sublime as the table’s reductive profile.  Alas, Flamingo, which debuted at the recently-concluded Milan Design Week, remains a prototype only, but fingers are crossed that it flies its way to market (and into our lives).

SHOW BOAT

 

It should be called Ark, but this boat-shaped bench (or table, I’d think) is called Arc, and whilst everything about it–from its reductive beauty to its pale wood (oak), to the sheepskin rug–says it’s Scandinavian, it’s the masterwork of the Dutch furniture designer Bertjan Pot.

HIP GLOSS

 

If you must own a turquoise piece of furniture, let it at least be the lustrous indoor/outdoor Ball Chair.

FINNISHED

Alvar Aalto’s iconic, 3-legged stool turns 80 this year, and to mark the occasion, Artek, the stool’s Finnish manufacturer, has invited artists and designers to put their individual marks on limited edition versions of the original design. Here, one in a series of hand-painted color combinations by the German art director, Mike Meiré.

AMERICAN0

At Germany’s Vitra Design Museum, the current exhibition entitled Pop Art Design brings together some of the most familiar images of that art movement, along with some less familiar objects–like this Leonardo sofa, designed in 1969 by Francesco Audrito and Athena Sampaniotou of the Italian architectural firm Studio 65.

SEEING DOUBLE

 

There are ho-hum sofas, and then there’s this: Q-Couch by the Dutch industrial design company Feek, comprised of a series of modules that can be lengthened or shortened, mixed and matched into a work of Op Art.

GREEN AND YELLOW

 

Who says recycling is all drudgery? This bright collection of taxi-yellow chairs lay discarded on the streets of New York City before being rescued, repaired and repainted by the Brooklyn-based architectural firm Bade Stageberg Cox, for a projected entitled Street Seats. Each piece is stamped with the date and location of its rescue–and can be purchased through the firm’s website.

SITTING PRETTY

The alliance between Emeco (the American manufacturer of chairs that, quite literally, can last forever) and Coca Cola (whose sugary, plastic encased product is both a health and environmental hazard) could not have been an easy one. But this “up-cycled” 111 Navy Chair, made from 111 plastic Coke bottles (and a few other, not incidental, materials) looks effortless enough.

CLEAN AND CLEAR

More line drawing than furniture, Ron Gilad’s jewel of a coffee table, constructed from enameled brass and ultra clear glass.

SPOT ON

Turning 80 this year is Alvar Aalto’s famously perfect, three-legged Stool 60. For the occasion, the fashion designer Rei Kawakubo, teamed up with Artek, the stool’s Finnish manufacturer, to swathe the stool in officially sanctioned black and white polka dots. I like it.