Floral Arragements, by Tableu
Best of the bunch
It’s been a big year for Danish floral design specialist Tableau, which has blossomed from a budding studio to a fully bloomed label. Lauded by Phaidon in Blooms: Contemporary Floral Design as one of the most impressive florists around, the Copenhagen-based design, art and flower atelier has created large-scale ‘flower clouds’ for the likes of Christian Louboutin and Gubi. To show off their skills, founder Julius Iversen installed this brooding landscape in Tableau’s David Thulstrup-designed boutique. Made of asparagus fern sprayed purple, the installation is inspired by the country’s dark winter months.
Floral installation (and bench designed in collaboration with Wonderland Agency), by Tableau, tableau-cph.com. Photography: Kasper Palsnov
Two arrated design that leave us all pumped up
Best puff love
With its opulent, high-shine metallic finish, Herno’s jacket has really expanded our outerwear inclinations. Part of the Italian performance wear expert’s Laminar collection, the down-filled protective piece is water-repellent, windproof and incredibly lightweight. We suggest you admire your perfectly puffred reflection in Moustache’s sausage-like ‘Zodiac’ mirror. Designed by Jean-Baptiste Fastrez, its bulbous, enamelled ceramic frame evokes the contours of an inflatable boat hanging on a wall.
’Zodiac’ mirrors, from €600 each, by Jean-Baptiste Fastrez, for Moustache, moustache.fr. Puffer jacket, £630, by Herno, herno.it. Photography: Phillipe Lacombe
D/N1 lift cabin, by David/Nicolas, for Mitsulift
Best vertical travel
This modular lift cabin wouldn’t look out of place in a Wes Anderson production. Created by Lebanese design studio David/Nicolas for local manufacturer Mitsulift, the D/N1 features diffused top lighting, a striated upper section in natural oak, a laminate lower section, available in four statement colours (night blue, grenadine red, pepper grey or basil green), and travertine flooring. A round, steel-framed mirror and oak handrail lend geometric contrast and heighten the design’s cinematic qualities. The pleasing combination of unconventional design and ne craftsmanship means that, rather than being an interstitial space, the lift cabin can become a statement piece within a domestic interior.
davidandnicolas.com; mitsulift.com Render: Carl Gerges
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Lobby furniture, by Max Lamb, for Acne Studios
Best rock stars
When Acne Studios’ Jonny Johansson was looking for inspiration to furnish the entrance of his new brutalist HQ, a 1970s former embassy building in Stockholm, he looked to the capital’s City Hall: ‘It is a mix between Viking fort and Italian piazza, and it inspired me to ask Max Lamb to create a Viking graveyard,’ he says. The British designer, who first started working with the brand on its retail projects in 2015, sourced hunks of granite from quarries in Småland, southern Sweden, and transformed them into crooked tombstone-like chairs, stools and tables with polished seats and tops. ‘The pieces bring a little of the outdoors into the space, and break up the monotony of the grid-like architecture,’ explains Lamb.
‘These designs are about telling the story of sweden through materials,’ says Lamb of the Lobby Furniture, seen in situ at Acne Studios’ Stockholm HQ, in red ivo, grey bjarlov and black diabase granite. ‘They appear as pieces that were here before the building, as if its façade was built around the furniture’.
acnestudios.com; maxlamb.org. Photography: Anders Kylberg
Magrethe Odgaard
Best use of colour
Since founding her studio in 2013, Danish designer Margrethe Odgaard has been championing a holistic approach to colour theory that has struck a chord in design circles. Instead of talking about the topic in terms of trends and numbers, Odgaard talks of colour as a sensory experience that engages both the mind and body. Her research into colour and light has led to collaborations with Scandinavian giants such as Hay and Ikea, for which she develops palettes and products, and Muuto, for which she created bobbly rugs designed to feel like pebbles. Her latest works include ‘Atlas’, a woollen upholstery fabric for Kvadrat that possesses an exceptional colour intensity, as well as a colour palette for Montana rooted in a body-mind philosophy with hues that awaken all of the senses.
margretheodgaard.com. Photography: Kasper Palsnov
‘Mercury’ earrings, by Bina Goenka
Best small planet
When Bina Goenka bade farewell to her career as a lawyer, her mastery of forensic detail remained gloriously intact. The Mumbai high jeweller’s 2019 ‘Mercury’ earrings are a shining celebration of intricacy: ‘My craftsmen and I went back and forth over how to make the earlobe and earring-post invisible, something that was not just design, but geometry, too.’ Two years in the making, the hinged ‘Mercury’ earrings have two halves – one with a post, the other with a tube into which the post enters, through the lobe. Their exterior imagines Mercury as a cold, sparse landscape of glinting rose-cut diamonds, while the planet’s valleys and glaciers are rendered in the undulating gold edges that t together to form the globe. Inside are 4,564 Japanese keshi pearls, each under 0.5mm, matched in colour, size and shape.
’Mercury’ earrings, price on request, by Bina Goenka. binagoenka.com. Photography: Oskar Proctor
