From significant business changes to noteworthy product launches, there’s always something new happening in the world of design. In this biweekly roundup, AD PRO has everything you need to know.
Product
Nordic Knots sets sights on custom window treatments
Light plays a pivotal role in Scandinavia. In the summer there is an abundance of it; in the winter it disappears rapidly. It was this duality that compelled Fabian Berglund and Liza Laserow, the husband-and-wife founders of Nordic Knots, to venture into curtains. Rugs have been the company’s raison d’être since the Stockholm atelier was established in 2016, but come September 12, Berglund and Laserow will roll out high quality yet reasonably priced curtains.
Like Nordic Knot rugs, these window treatments are designed to buoy spaces with warmth and tranquility, not to play a starring role. Woven from Australian wool, they are at once insulating and airy, grounding rooms with flowing pleat-adorned, double-width panels as they amplify soft light. Outfitted with a multifunctional band that can adapt to hooks, rails, and rods, the made-to-measure curtains are available in plenty fabric lengths. Just as the rugs do, the inaugural three muted colorways— Perfect White, Pale Sand, and Soft Gray—pull from the Scandinavian landscape.
Projects
A peek inside Soane Britain’s new Madison Avenue showroom
The elegant world of Soane Britain will get the New York limelight on September 12, when its first showroom in the city opens in a late-19th-century Neo-Georgian building on the corner of Madison Avenue and 65th Street. Organized as a sequence of rooms brimming with Soane designs and antiques, the experience begins on the fourth-floor lobby that combines a high gloss yellow ceiling with textured, woven walls. In the drawing room, Soane’s Bascule desk and Quiver Klismos chair mingle with Nureyev drink trolleys, while a 19th-century Mason’s Ironstone dinner service commands attention in the dining area. After ogling the kitchen’s custom Tambour cabinets and the bedroom’s four-poster bed—done up in hangings with Adam Bray’s new geometric print— designers will hightail it to the fabric-and-wallpaper room to soak up inspiration for their upcoming projects.
In the News
Robert A.M. Stern Architects names new CEO
For more than 50 years, New York firm Robert A.M. Stern Architects (RAMSA) has lent its architecture, urban planning, landscape, and interior design savvy to countless projects around the world. To help build upon that legacy, the practice has appointed Lisa Matkovic as its first chief executive officer. Matkovic, who joined RAMSA in 2011 as director of human resources, most recently served as chief operating officer of the company for a decade. In her promotion to this newly created role, she will focus on strategic growth while cultivating a collaborative work culture, responding to ever-shifting client needs and acting as a conduit between design leadership and various departments.
Architecture & Design Film Festival announces 2023/24 season
The annual Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF) kicks off in New York (October 12–14) before heading to Toronto, Vancouver, Chicago, and Mumbai. Unfolding at the Village East by Angelika theater for the first time, the New York edition’s lineup of 18 documentaries delves into the lives of late, memorable talents such as the Indian modernist architect B.V. Doshi, corporate America design pioneer Eliot Noyes, and Louis Kahn, whose son Nathaniel will present a digitally mastered version of his film My Architect, now celebrating its 20th anniversary. Bold projects—including Chandigarh, the utopian Indian city imagined by Le Corbusier, as well as Roger Zmekhol’s São Paulo skyscraper turned homeless refuge—will also be explored. Screenings will be followed with a slew of panels, conversations, and Q&As.
Design Happenings
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Gallery FUMI celebrates 15 years with Growth + Form
Brazen collectible objects have been a hallmark of London’s Gallery FUMI, the vision of Sam Pratt and Valerio Capo, for the last 15 years. In honor of this milestone, design historian Libby Sellers was tapped to curate “Growth + Form,” a group show (on view September 7–30) that probes the connections between science and art with new pieces that spotlight natural materials and organic forms.
Take Danish artist Stine Bidstrup’s sculptural chandelier composed of handblown glass clusters or London studio Study O Portable’s seating installations that reference Sol LeWitt. Wood also features prominently, from British designer Max Lamb’s furniture crafted from a single piece of timber to New Jersey woodworker Casey McCafferty’s screen fashioned out of scrap wood.
Kasmin presents Bosco Sodi exhibition
“Solo Para Revivir,” contemporary Mexican artist Bosco Sodi’s third solo exhibition at gallery Kasmin (on view September 6–October 21), meditates on four colors: black, purple, red, and green. Drawing from nature, his large-scale mixed-media works showcase saturated hues that consider these pigments through cultural and historic lenses. They are bolstered by an oil painting rendered on a canvas of 12 intertwined burlap sacks and a trifecta of spiritual, spherical sculptures fired from Oaxacan clay. The earthy creations—one of them raw and imperfect, another glazed in gold, and the last brandishing a single seed of corn—are made solely with local, time-honored techniques.
