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Stockholm design agency Afteroom has created a coat hook, lounge chair and bar stool for Danish design brand Menu‘s Autumn Winter 2014 collection.

Afteroom has designed new objects as well as versions of existing pieces in its range for Menu.

The Afteroom Barstool is adapted from the agency’s Afteroom Chair, which was launched as the first seat in the Danish brand’s collection in 2012 and updated in April.

Its four tubular steel legs are longer than the original design’s three, but the original wood backrest that reaches out from beneath the seat remains the same.

The Afteroom Lounge Chair features steel arms that curve around to form a continuous backrest and leather upholstery.

The design merges elements of two iconic pieces of modernist design: the Thonet bent-wood armchair and the Spanish chair by Børge Mogensen.

“We really love Bauhaus and Scandinavian modernism,” the designers told Dezeen. “Modernism influences and inspires us the most, especially Scandinavia designers, like Alvar Aalto, Arne Jacobsen, Hans Wegner, llmari Tapiovaara and Greta Grossman. We are learning a lot from their works and thoughts.”

Afteroom has also designed a coat hanger, which comprises a horizontal powder-coated aluminium bar with two large dot-shaped coat hooks on either end.

The central element is intersected by two vertical bars in the same style at different heights.

Wall fixings are hidden inside the frame to maintain the clean lines and the hanger is available in black or white.

The Afteroom Chair has also been created with a padded seat covered by Kvadrat fabric.

“We follow traditional production methods to choose materials and to try to do something nice,” the designers said. “The collection has been made mostly by steel bending, die casting and welding, which were commonly used in Bauhaus modernism.”

Menu will launch the collection at the Maison & Objet trade fair in Paris, which runs from 5 to 9 September. Images are courtesy of Menu A/S.

The post “Bauhaus modernism” inspires Afteroom’s
furniture and home accessories for Menu appeared first on Dezeen.

Animal Planet calls Anthony Archer-Willis “the best in the world for what he does—designing and delivering the ultimate swimming experience.” That’s why they gave Archer-Willis, a British landscape architect with a specialization in swimming pool and water garden design, his own show. In “The Poolmaster,” he designs dream swimming pools for a handful of lucky clients.

While the TV show will reveal Archer-Willis’ own creations, in the following video he shows you his appreciation for another pool designer’s work. An unnamed family in Utah commissioned this absolutely insane, mammoth $2-million-dollar swimming pool, which was designed to look all-natural. With five waterfalls, a grotto, a waterslide, hidden passageways, an integrated indoor kitchen/bathroom/showering facility, a scuba diving practice area and more, this is not the average swimming pool that most of us Americans will be hitting up this holiday weekend. Watch and be amazed:

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“Genuine science-fiction art performs a social function for a tight-knit, ninety-year-old community. It exists to enable its viewers to achieve and maintain their highly valued otherworldly state of let’s pretend. Sci-fi art is a form of realist genre painting, like aviation art, like natural-history painting. Its cousins are comics and game design and set design, disciplines that prefer certain conventions to be respected: Comics fans require the canon, gamers like to enter the game world and play, theatergoers need set design as the backdrop of performance. Art that is too heavily freighted breaks the suspension of disbelief and leaves the sci-fi fan with the awkward realization that Martians have better taste than he does. [Omni publisher Bob] Guccione‘s effort to class-up sci-fi art was like trying to break-dance in a Vegas tuxedo, but he never saw the solecism there. Although he had a few veteran sci-fi illustrators within his mag—Michael Whelan, Frank Fazetta, Tim White, and glitzy-robot maestro Hajime Sorayama—it’s clear that these accomplished sci-fi professionals caught Guccione’s roving eye almost by accident.”

–Bruce Sterling on The Mind’s Eye: The Art of Omni (powerHouse Books) in the September issue of Artforum

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