Hasta La Ideas

A former horse stables on the grounds of Tuscan art retreat Villa Lena has been renovated by architecture studio Hesselbrand to accommodate a series of rustic guest suites.

Villa Lena is situated in the heart of Tuscany on a sprawling, 500-hectare wooded estate dotted with vineyards and olive groves.

During the 19th and early 20th-century it was the home of an aristocratic Italian family, but in 2013 it re-opened as a hotel and non-profit art foundation that offers an artist-in-residence scheme.

The hotel’s guest suites and amenities – which include a farm-to-table restaurant and film-screening room – are housed across the site’s disused stables, outbuildings and hunting lodges.

One of the old stables, named Fattoria, has recently been transformed by London and Oslo-based studio Hesselbrand to host an extra 13 guest rooms that reflect “the playful meeting of the traditional and contemporary”.

“Fattoria has served so many varied uses throughout the years, so we are excited to use our design to finally open up the site, create new spaces and allow everyone to experience this rich and characterful building,” explained Magnus Casselbrant and Jesper Henriksson of Hesselbrand, two of the three co-founders of the studio.

“A carefully curated palette of organic materials and forms have been combined in a way which enhances and amplifies this unique juxtaposition between old and new in both the guest rooms and surrounding social spaces.”

The stable’s entrance has been expanded to form a grandiose hallway, which still features the original vaulted ceiling and cobbled stone floors.

A double staircase leads up to the white-painted bedroom suites, where surfaces are panelled with grooved timber.

In the bathrooms, pale grey and rich brown Carrara marble tiles have been arranged in a square pattern across the walls, floor and shower cubicle. The traditional material palette here is offset with stainless steel tap faucets and vanity units.

Some of the standalone bathtubs have been placed underneath shuttered windows so that guests can overlook the surrounding verdant landscape.

Decor in the rooms is kept simple with antique ottomans and a selection of ceramic ornaments. Touches of warmth are provided by ochre-yellow curtains, pink scatter cushions or large woven rugs.

The intervention also saw Hesselbrand form a small art library within the building, which displays a rotation of works by residents past and present, and convert an adjacent farmhouse into a honeymoon hideaway for couples.

An outdoor yoga studio and open-air pavilion where guests can engage in “quiet contemplation” has additionally been created by the studio.

This year the Monteverdi Hotel also opened in Tuscany, which occupies a handful of crumbling buildings in the hamlet of Val d’Orcia.

As well as a series of rooms decked out with handmade furnishings by local artisans, it boasts a Roman-inspired underground pool that looks through to a nearby valley.

Photography is by Henrik Lundell.

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As a self-respecting tea drinker myself, I understand the lengths people go to to get their daily beverage fix. I’m incredibly fickle about my cup of cardamom tea everyday, and an insipid cup of tea could completely destroy my spirit. True-blue coffee drinkers are equally fickle about their coffee. They don’t experiment with their brew too much, and have a meditative routine which they follow to the T, resulting in that cup of coffee tailored to their exact specifications. Mess with that practice, with the ingredients, and you’re messing with the balance of the universe.

The Pakt was designed for those coffee aficionados, that prefer having control over their brew no matter what. They love traveling, but they hate the idea of instant coffee, or pre-made coffee decoctions. Pakt allows you to carry your brewing apparatus anywhere you go. The size of a thermos, it packs every aspect of the brewing process into its compact, cylindrical form. Nesting multiple elements into one another like Matryoshka dolls, Pakt comes with an electric kettle to heat water, a pour-over unit to collect your brew, and a coffee canister to carry your favorite blend of coffee along with you. When traveling, the units nest within each other, creating an all-in-one compact cylinder that’s easy to carry around. Minimal tolerances ensure a perfect fit, so that components don’t rattle around, or get damaged while you’re traveling.

Ultimately, Pakt lets you brew coffee the traditional way, but in a portable format. Designed to be taken on trips and holidays, Pakt gives you the same level of control your at-home brewing kit does. An electric kettle heats the water, a funnel-piece lets you create your pour-over using a filter and your favorite coffee, that you carry with you in the canister.

Designed for travel and made to last, Pakt uses as little plastic as possible, and relies on a combination of stainless steel and BPA-free silicone to provide the best brewing experience while remaining completely handheld. In its compact avatar, the entire kit fits into any bag, and is designed to be airline friendly, so you can carry your entire coffee-brewing ritual along with you wherever you go… Because a sub-standard cup of coffee isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.!

Designers: Malcolm Fontier & Impel Studio

Click Here to Buy Now: $125 $189 (34% off). Hurry, only 142/250 left!

Pakt Coffee Kit – The Complete Brewing System for Travel

Everything you need to make barista-quality coffee. All the components of a classic pour-over brewing method is brought to you in one sleek package.  Electric kettle included!

Make your cuppa coffee on the go, and never drink a bad cup while traveling – ever again!

Patent Pending

Built to Withstand the Knocks of Travel

Most other kits have a high probability of breaking due to the fragility of the components. Like nesting Russian dolls, each component of our kit fits inside the next larger one. The nesting design means your kit travels securely and silently – no rattling or broken parts in transit.

Carry the Pakt Coffee Kit on the Plane

There are many coffee-making kits designed for adventure travel, but the gas canisters typically used for making coffee while camping can’t fly at all. We designed the Pakt Coffee Kit to be airline friendly so it can easily go wherever you go. Check it or carry it on – the choice is yours.

Streamlined, Handheld Electric Kettle for a Perfect Pour Over

The handheld, compact design of our electric kettle gives you even more control than the standard gooseneck kettles typically used to make pour over coffee. And it takes up a fraction of the space.

How to brew pour over coffee with The Pakt Coffee Kit.

Minimize Waste While Traveling

Every coffee you make in your room means one less disposable cup for the landfill. The Kit’s coffee container holds enough coffee to brew about five cups — that adds up to a lot of disposable cups saved!

At a hotel.

Use anywhere you have access to water and electricity.

Airbnb

At the office

Below: Details of The Pakt Coffee Kit

The Team

Pakt were founded in 2018 to make refined, responsibly-sourced travel goods designed to #keeptravelsimple. As design freaks who are also environmentally-conscious, they take incredible care to only create products that they believe are useful, beautiful, and necessary. Their first product, a cult favorite travel bag called The Pakt One, raised more than $2 million via crowdfunding and is now available on their website. The Pakt Coffee Kit is their second product.

Coffee for Clean Oceans

The Design Team believe that the only truly “sustainable” product development is none at all. But since that option isn’t compatible with the lives we lead and the world we live in, they are going with the next best thing: producing products as responsibly as possible, building them to last, and designing them to be versatile so that the buyer can minimize the number of products they need.

Their Environmental Commitment:

– The Pakt Coffee Kit is designed to have a 10-20 year lifespan or longer, kind of like the toaster your grandparents received as a wedding gift and are still using.
– One of the key ways we’ve ensured a long lifespan for The Kit is by making it serviceable – so if something goes wrong, we can fix it or replace any broken parts so you don’t have to throw it out.
– The team has used premium, durable materials throughout production to ensure your coffee’s flavor isn’t affected by any cheap materials and that your kit lasts a very long time.
– The kettle, mug, and grounds container are made largely of high grade stainless steel and silicone, and they have made minimal use of plastic except for a few lids and things that never touch your beverage.
– Because the Pakt Coffee Kit is a very compact product, they have kept the packaging accordingly minimal.
– This gives the ability to fit more kits into fewer shipping containers to keep the carbon footprint as low as possible when transporting and storing kits.

Click Here to Buy Now: $125 $189 (34% off). Hurry, only 142/250 left!

A colourful geometric wall provides a strong contrast to this otherwise stark sake bar and brewery in Brooklyn’s Industry City, designed by local studio Carpenter + Mason.

Brooklyn Kura is the brainchild of Brian Polen and Brandon Doughan, and marks New York’s first bar and brewery for sake –  the traditional Japanese alcoholic beverage made from fermented rice.

Polen and  Doughan enlisted local studios Carpenter + Mason for the interior design and LMNOP Creative for the branding design of their outpost in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighbourhood. Both studios had previously worked together on another Japanese eatery in the city.

Carpenter + Mason designed Brooklyn Kura to make the most of its industrial concrete structure, which is nestled among many still-function factory facilities in Industry City. This industrial aesthetic informs the interior design and is fused with Japanese details.

“In designing a sake bar within the industrial context of Industry City, our approach was influenced by the overlap between Japanese and industrial design elements – which share more of a vocabulary than you might initially think,” Carpenter + Mason co-founder Sara Carpenter told Dezeen.

The functionality of a Japanese brewery, and features a facility located in its rear and a public drinking hall in its front portion, led much the layout. The project is modelled similarly with a rectangular, open-plan taproom at its front, and measures 2,500 square feet (232 square metres).

The bar’s front facade is made with small cubes of rippled glass topped with a glazed section. This facade filters is used to filter natural light into the otherwise dark space and create a soft warm glow inside.

“The aluminium frame and glass block storefront, which blends the notions of a grid system – used traditionally to organize space in Japanese architecture – with the industrial use of glass blocks,” Carpenter said.

Inside, concrete floors and weathered walls featuring layers of chipping paint offer reminders of the space’s previous uses.

The bar is designed to form a cosy spot for enjoying a glass of sake with a modern, clean aesthetic.

Communal concrete tables, wood benches and steel chairs are offset by round, cloth-like lanterns overhead for softness. Additional seating is built across the front glazing as a bar.

At the rear of the bar is a wall clad in unfinished cedar, which is a traditional wall cladding in sake production rooms. Here, dozens of different types of sake are on tap, produced in-house with Brooklyn water, American-grown rice, koji and yeast.

Another feature wall references the branding of Brooklyn Kura’s bottles, which is informed by clean and rounded lines. This style is reinterpreted with a geometric painting in peach, sage, cobalt and emerald green.

Brooklyn Kura is joined by a host of other eateries, offices and studios in Brooklyn’s Industry City – a shipping, warehousing and manufacturing complex built in the 1890s.

Many local design studios have also located their production facilities there, including Lindsey Adelman, Egg Collection and Rich Brilliant Willing.

Other brewery designs include a greyscale outpost in New Hampshire by Richard Lindvall, a sake bar in Japan by yHA and a Copenhagen alehouse with wood and copper accents by To Øl.

Photography is by Char-co unless stated otherwise.

The post Carpenter + Mason fuses Japanese and industrial elements for Brooklyn Kura sake bar appeared first on Dezeen.

Surréelles, organiques et délicatement fascinantes, les images de Brooke DiDonato ne nous laissent pas de marbre. La photographe originaire de l’Ohio et résidant à New York aime capter des instants mystérieux au sein de décors un brin kitsch, dans une esthétique de banlieue ou encore en plein désert. Dans tous les cas, les corps jouent dans les oeuvres de l’artiste. Derrière son objectif, elle fait fusionner les sujets et leurs environnements avec simplicité et une petite dose d’humour pour un résultat étonnant et satisfaisant. Rencontre.

Bonjour Brooke! Avant de vous lancer en photographie d’art, vous avez étudié le journalisme et ainsi découvert que vous aimiez raconter des histoires de manière visuelle. Parlez-nous de votre parcours.

Je voulais vraiment juste être un artiste. J’ai commencé à dessiner et à peindre au début de mon adolescence, puis je suis passé aux techniques mixtes vers mes 17 ans environ, en expérimentant avec des images que je prenais avec un appareil photo compact. Quand je suis arrivée à l’université, j’ai commencé mes études à l’école de design. Puis un jour, j’ai entendu parler d’une majeure en photojournalisme et je me suis dit que c’était bien plus intéressant que de dessiner des carrés toute la journée. J’ai donc abandonné toutes mes classes de design et j’ai changé de direction. C’est la version courte de l’histoire.

Les scènes surréalistes que vous créez se déploient souvent à travers des couleurs pâles, elles sont aussi à la fois rétro et minimalistes. Comment décririez-vous votre univers artistique en quelques mots?

Une familiarité étrange.

Les spectateurs de vos oeuvres doivent remplir certains «blancs», car nous pouvons à peine déceler les visages des modèles la plupart du temps. Dites-nous en plus sur les thèmes que vous explorez et pourquoi vous gardez quelques détails énigmatiques.

J’ai toujours aimé la photographie en tant que médium, car elle préserve le mystère d’un moment. Le spectateur ne peut pas vraiment déchiffrer ce qui s’est passé avant ou après et j’apprécie ce suspense.

Enlever les visages est en partie dû à l’improvisation. Au début, je travaillais presque exclusivement avec l’autoportrait et je n’aimais vraiment pas me voir! Puis, au fil du temps, il a semblé naturel de travailler de cette façon… Afin de construire de grands personnages plutôt que des individus.

Quel est le meilleur conseil que vous ayez reçu à propos de l’art et de la photographie?

Ce n’est pas spécifiquement à propos de l’art, mais j’ai récemment visionné beaucoup d’interviews de joueurs de la NBA, et l’un d’eux, Michael Jordan, a déclaré: «l’éthique du travail élimine la peur». J’aime ça.

Quel serait votre projet de rêve?

J’aurai besoin d’un autre café pour répondre à cette question!

Suivez le travail de Brookes DiDonato sur Instagram.

This week on Dezeen, we published the longlists for the 2019 Dezeen Awards, revealing the best architecture and interior projects, studios, and products.

In total there were more than 4,500 architecture projects entered from 87 countries. These have been whittled down to 267 architecture projects for the judges to mull over. As well as architecture, the longlists for interiors and design were announced, with a pink vegan pizza parlous and bacteria lamps in the running.

Finally, the studios longlist sees both established and emerging practices from Vietnam to Brazil to Georgia compete for titles.

Elsewhere in the architecture world, Zaha Hadid Architects principal Patrik Schumacher took to Facebook to decry the current state of architecture education with a 13 point thesis.

According to Schumacher, architecture education is detached from the profession, and from social realities. Students leave institutions after five years without a single design that meet the standard of a competition entry, he said. The teachers, he claimed, are following their own “largely isolated pursuits”.

In the US, Kanye firmed up his plans for Yeezy Home, revealing that the prefabricated affordable housing he is working on takes cues from the domed units on the desert planet of Tatooine, the home of the Skywalkers in the Star Wars series.

An architect with a few more projects under his belt – Frank Lloyd Wright – further cemented his status as one the 20th century most influential architects when eight of his buildings were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List.

It was a good week for artists with an interest in climate change, as two major shows opened. Dutch artist and designer Daan Roosegaarde’s solo show at the Groninger Museum in his native country is called Presence. It includes a series of exhibits that encourage viewers to interact and leave an impression.

An Olafur Eliasson retrospective opened at London’s Tate Modern, showing three decades of the Danish-Icelandic artist’s work including pieces such an 11-metre-high waterfall that were created specially for the show.

Meanwhile, the architecture and design world lost two titans this week. American architect Philip Freelon, described as “a trailblazer”, “a great mentor” and “a role model for many”, passed away at age 66.

Freelon worked with Adjaye Associates on the National Museum of African American History, as well as Atlanta’s National Center for Civil and Human Rights, with multi-toned cladding that represents different skin colours.

Former ÉCAL director Pierre Keller died following a lauded career as a graphic designer as well as an educator. He was instrumental in delivering the school’s new building, and in raising its profile.

Restaurants took centre stage in the interiors sphere, with an Asian-inspired, moody London eatery called Lucky Cat, a sunny Brisbane pavilion housing two restaurants with rattan-lined ceilings and pastel touches.

A newly opened terrace at Soho House’s outpost in Dumbo, Brooklyn, offers a space for members to eat al fresco surrounded by Mexican-style interiors.

Other popular projects on Dezeen this week are a roundup of remote hotels, for those currently without summer plans, and a weathered beach house in Australia by Woods Bagot that has been two decades in the making.

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