Category: <span>Places</span>

SimonPearceFactory.jpgEveryone is so excited for the start of summer but I am already missing winter. This weekend, 10 friends and I sadly shut down our winter ski house in Killington, Vermont. It was a six-month rental, which should have left us ample time to explore the surrounding area, but as life goes, we crammed all our touristy adventures into our final day of the season: a Vermont cheese farm tour, maple syrup tasting, a brewery visit, and my new favorite, the Simon Pearce Glass and Pottery Mill.

SPearceKiln_0.jpgSimon Pearce has been a major national retail business for over 20 years but once you get to their historic river-powered mill in the small town of Quechee, you feel like you’ve discovered an artists commune. Glass blowers move through the facility with the precision and intention of a bee colony–dipping, trimming, and shaping the glass around the heat of the kiln. In the potters room, one ceramist mixes glazes for the latest bisqueware while another is kneading clay. A shelf of glazed vases and dishes sit perfectly on the shelf, reminding me that I am in also in a retail store. I head up the stairs to the shop which feels more like a living room than a showroom.

SPearceLamp.jpgWhen I asked the salesperson what was new, she showed me the new Lyra Lamp from the Simon Pearce Signature collection. The teardrop shape, each and every air bubble, the seaglass translucence . . . . I love everything about this lamp.

SPearcelogo.jpgThere is an organic quality and an honesty that I really adore in Simon Pearce. They’re a big business but they have kept production handmade, in-house, and powered by their local and natural resources. For an great example of true artistry in retail, I recommend a visit to the Mill at Quechee, VT .

Places

Campaign furniture has been steadily sneaking its way back into mainstream design but these new Anthropologie chairs prove it’s modern again. Anthropologie worked with South African furniture makers, Melville and Moon, to recreate the classic foldable, adaptable hardwood Roorkhee chair but then had the local Pretoria textile company, Design Team, upholster it in a punchy pink African cameo pattern for a truly fresh look. This is an example of Anthropologie’s recent efforts to support South African artists and their creative community. Select Anthropologie stores around the U.S. will be carrying handmade products from the country and the gallery at the Rockefeller Plaza store in NYC will be displaying the majority of the South African collection through February 7th.

For Anthropolgies near you visit Anthropologie’s store locator and ask them if they carry the Cameo Campaign Chair and other South African products.

AntrhoDog.jpg

Only four of these Moonlight and Magic light dogs will be arriving to the U.S., likely to be in the LA or New York stores.

Anthrocabbage-garden-vase-s.jpgBut there are plenty of these fun Cabbage Garden vase sets available online now.

Finds Places

I was doing some after-Christmas shopping at the Bryant Park Holiday Shops yesterday and came across these literal book shelves at the Parable Ink clothing stall. How wonderfully obvious–books are speared with metal poles and secured with hex nuts for a very cheeky set of shelves. With open sides, they wouldn’t be a sensible place to store literature, but quite clever for a display cabinet. With a closet cleaning and $2 at the hardware store, these would be fairly easy to make, but if DIY is not your thing, they are also available for purchase. On January 1st the shelves are being auctioned for charity with proceeds going to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. To place your bid email the owners from their site at, parableink.com/contact.

ParableInk2.jpg
A close-up of the simple pole, nut and book construction

ParableInk2.jpg
The patina of old leather books would make for great shelving in an office.

Finds Places

IngoMaurerClose.jpg

I have been excited about the Ingo Maurer lighting exhibit since it hit the Cooper-Hewitts calendar. It is a retrospective of four decades of Maurer’s work (and the man is not even retired yet!). The show includes all of his major works, unseen prototypes, one-off pieces, his commercial line, and videos and photographs documenting his creative process. A quote of his (from a display video) that really struck me went roughly like this: Most lighting designers spend their time trying to come up with ways to cover the light bulb; I am looking for ways to reveal it. Rarely do lamps make it into museum exhibits, but Maurer’s work can hang with the paintings.

Provoking Magic: Lighting of Ingo Maurer on view September 14, 2007-January 27, 2008

Here is a sneak peak from the show:

IngoMred.jpg
This piece hung in the main stairwell of the Cooper Hewitt, leading toward the Provoking Magic Exhibit.

IngoMaurerPlates.jpg
Porca Miseria is made of shattered dinner plates

IngoMaurerTableLamps.jpg

Above are various table lamps from a paper series Maurer produced with Dagmar Mambach. Many of the pieces are still in production and available at unicahome.com

Finds Places