Hasta La Ideas

Architecture studio Bornstein Lyckefors has designed a series of restaurants in Sweden and Denmark that centre around a terrain for playing pétanque.

Gothenburg-based Bornstein Lyckefors has created the interiors for six Boulebar venues, in the cities of Stockholm, Gothenburg, Örebro and Copenhagen.

Each one has its own design character, but they all contain a large gravel area where diners can play pétanque – the French game where players try to throw balls as close as possible to a target ball.

“The founder of Boulebar, Henrik Kruse, is a pétanque player himself,” explained Johan Olsson, an architect at Bornstein Lyckefors.

“He fell in love with the sport during an inter-rail trip he made with some friends in Europe in the 1980s,” he told Dezeen.

“When they came home, they opened a pétanque bar in Stockholm that they built themselves, without any permissions from the municipality. The idea grew, and from an underground pétanque bar, they became more and more professional.”

The design for each venue starts with the idea of an indoor park.

Regular features include trees in large tubular pots and bench-style seats, painted in a colour the architects call Boulebar green. There is also a bespoke pendant light in all the venues, called Bend.

Elements are then added that fit this theme but also relate to the specific characteristics of the surrounding neighbourhood.

The new Copenhagen venue, for instance, features a range of playful details, including a bar that looks like an ice cream stand, a dining table shelter beneath a stripy awning and a set of red swings.

Another recently completed venue, in Stockholm’s Rådhuset, is located beside the subway, so it has a more underground style with industrial finishes and graffiti-style murals by various street artists.

“The overall concept of objects in a room that you can move around – like objects in a park – has been part of the design all the way,” said Olsson.

Areas are divided up into different spaces for dining, enjoying a coffee or having a cocktail, but the vibe is still very relaxed, to encourage diners to move around and socialise.

“Boulebar is operated by pétanque nerds and from the beginning the idea was not about creating success, it was more about the love of the sport,” added Olsson.

“Today, it fits well within a larger trend of the hospitality industry where people tend to combine food and drink with activities such as bowling, table tennis and shuffle board.”

Other recent examples of this trend include a board game cafe in New Delhi and a restaurant and video arcade in LA.

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Australian studio Universal Favourite has designed the packaging for contact lens subscription service Dimple, which makes use of boldly patterned circles that correspond with prescriptions.

Dimple is a direct-to-consumer service that targets the millennial market. As such, the company needed branding that would stand out on social media and attract new customers — without losing the serious appearance of a medical service.

For this reason, Universal Favourite based their design on a series of complementary circle graphics, each one denoting a particular contact-lens prescription.

Since most people need different levels of correction in each eye, their Dimple lenses will usually have different packaging for the left and right eye — and the difference is bold enough that the user can see it without their lenses in.

With power numbers ranging from -12.00 to +6.00 for Dimple prescriptions, Universal Favourite created 60 different circle graphics in a palette of blues, pinks, oranges, olive greens, teals and black.

The studio said that the advent of direct-to-consumer contact lenses had created the opportunity to completely rethink the product’s packaging design.

“In Australia, four manufacturers control 97 per cent of the contact-lens market,” said the studio.

“With this monopoly, there has been little to no effort required to brand their products. Packaging has always been designed with the optometrist in mind — storable, stackable — leaving a sea of white, clinical branding that lacks any connection with its consumers.”

Instead, Dimple’s mix of usefulness and visual appeal is meant to put the consumer first.

“We wanted to create a youth-focused brand selling a lifestyle as much as a product,” said Universal Favourite. “But being a medical product, it was crucial to also convey a sense of trust.”

To complement the packaging design, the studio co-ordinated fun campaign imagery, shot by photographer Jonathan May, that was about celebrating Dimple wearers’ “individual quirks”.

The studio also designed the digital experience for customers, incorporating an “innovative and interactive” purchasing method that again puts the focus on users choosing their individual lens prescriptions.

Universal Favourite’s work for Dimple has been longlisted for a Dezeen Award in the graphic design category.

Dimple launched in February 2019, and Universal Favourite reports the brand has already seen a higher than average conversion from trial to monthly subscriptions, with customer numbers growing daily.

Universal Favourite work at the intersection of design, brand strategy and digital products.

Dimple contains echoes of a previous colourful project of theirs, the Complements chocolates, which could also be mix-and-matched into pairs and were given as Christmas gifts for their clients.

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A geometric pattern of glass reinforced concrete slats covers the exterior of this housing block in Málaga, which has been designed by Muñoz Miranda Architects.

Named the The New Brick Tectonic, the block designed by Spanish practice Muñoz Miranda Architects has been longlisted in the 2019 Dezeen Awards.

One of a series of buildings created to rejuvenate a post-industrial seaside strip on the Mediterranean coast in Málaga it contains 73 apartments.

The architecture studio used a 20th century smokestack on the site – the only remnant of its industrial heritage – as the starting point for their design.

The facade is made from panels of glass reinforced concrete (GRC) that are designed to appear as if they have been pushed and pulled “as though sculpted from clay”.

“The project had the challenge of combining trendiness, tradition and respect for the nearby heritage of the industrial chimney,” explained the studio.

“It proposes a materiality in dialogue with [the smokestack], but using bricks with a different technique, assuming a new contemporaneity and forming an abstract and massive facade in lightened prefacticated concrete”.

The apartments have been stacked around two large atriums that cut through the entire height of the building.

“The material massiveness is organised as stacked elements, as if they were containers made of corrugated metal sheets like those of Málaga’s port,” said the studio.

Lined with white corrugated PVC sheets, each atrium is surrounded by an open corridor providing access to the apartments at each level.

At the building’s perimeter, the blocks of the apartments protrude to create balconies and terraces, giving views out to sea as well as of the nearby town and the adjacent smokestack.

In the apartments’ bathrooms and kitchens, the slats of the facade’s outer skin act as ventilation grilles, allowing air to circulate through the apartment and out in to the atriums.

Underneath the block is a parking area accessed via a ramp that sits behind one of the facade’s panels, with a darker materiality of concrete, black granite and corrugated metal.

Granda-based Muños Miranda Architects was founded by Alejandro Muñoz Miranda. Previous projects include an educational centre in El Chapparal with a facade animated by multicoloured openings.

Photography is by Javier Callejas.

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Classy and space-conscious, Volto is a dual-container spicer that takes inspiration from an hourglass. With a glass diaphragm separating the two volumes, the Volto’s transparent body clearly lets you see your condiments as you shake them over your food, so you’re never doing a test-shake to see whether you’ve got the salt shaker or the pepper shaker. The transparent body is also a great way to remind yourself to refill the containers when they’re running empty.

The containers come with their own cork-stops with an angular cut along the base that allows you to ‘open or close’ the containers. Just rotate the cork to expose or cover the shaker’s holes and you’re good to go! Volto’s flip-to-season shaker works with everything from the classic salt and pepper to more diverse spices like nutmeg, paprika, cumin, or even dried herbs, giving you the best of all worlds in a neat, minimal product.

Designer: Mireia Rius

Portuguese architect, curator and co-founder of The Decorators Mariana Pestana has been revealed as the curator of the Istanbul Design Biennial in 2020.

Pestana is the curator of Eco-Visionaries: Art and Architecture after the Anthropocene, an exhibition running until 8 October 2019 examining how designers are responding to the damage humans are doing to the environment. The exhibition is simultaneously on display at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) in Lisbon and galleries in Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

Eco Visionaries response to the anthropocene will be coming to the Royal Academy in London from 23 November 2019 to 23 February 2020.

She has curated shows at the V&A Museum, including The Future Starts Here show, and ArkDes – the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design. She is currently curating the Young Curators Lab for the Porto Design Biennale 2019.

Pestana is also a co-founder of London studio The Decorators, which she runs with Suzanne O’Connell, Xavi Llarch Font and Carolina Caicedo.

The studio focuses on designing public spaces and exhibitions with a social dimension. Examples of past projects include turning an abandoned car showroom into a co-working space and building a temporary community events space on top of a multi-story car park.

“Mariana Pestana’s passionate approach will be beneficial to the biennial in many ways, and her critical reflections on contemporary issues and inquiries into fictional futures are quite intriguing,” said the board of the Istanbul Design Biennial.

“We believe that she will put all her soul into turning this edition into a memorable one, and relish the opportunity to extend the collaborative approach of the Istanbul Design Biennial.”

The concept for the fifth Istanbul Design Biennial, which will run from 26 September to 8 November 2020, will be announced shortly.

Last year, under the curation of Belgian design critic and teacher Jan Boelen, the event was titled A School of Schools. Six pop-up schools to explored how informal groups of collaborators could tackle issues within and with design.

One of the projects on display proved how bioplastics made form algae could offer an alternative to petroleum-based plastics. At the exhibition Boelen told Dezeen that designers using recycled plastic is “bullshit”.

“It’s easy, it relieves our guilt,” said Boelen. “We’ve set up crazy systems to collect it and reuse it and these systems now need to be made viable,” he added. Instead, he argued, designers should use alternative – and more sustainable – materials.

Boelen is on the board for the 2020 biennial, along with ArkDes senior curator Carlos Mínguez Carrasco, Selva Gürdoğan, partner at SUPERPOOL – International Multidisciplinary Design Studio, the V&A East curator Catherine Ince and curator and writer Amelie Klein.

Main image is courtesy of the Istanbul Design Biennial.

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