Hasta La Ideas

Fashion brand Off-White‘s first store in Milan uses natural materials to add warmth to a paired-back store that has white walls broken by Patagonia granite cabinets.

Located on Via Verri in Milan, the 400-square-metre Off-White store opened in September and will sell menswear, womenswear and homeware. According to the brand, which is led by fashion designer Virgil Abloh, the boutique “embraces earthy yet elegant minimalism”.

Organic materials were used across the store, with a “fallen” tree log placed near the store’s entrance and granite cabinets used to display products.

The theme is carried through into the second ground floor room, where wooden plinths were used to create an installation to showcase Off-White accessories and shoes.

Throughout the ground floor womenswear section, travertine flooring is partly covered by rose-coloured rugs featuring the brand’s logo.

Display cases were kept simple and modernist in polished steel and glass, but the brand chose wall niches clad in Patagonia granite to add interest to the clean walls and underline the organic feel of the space.

The upstairs floor houses the menswear section, which has a different colour palette to differentiate it from the womenswear section.

Floor rugs are evergreen instead of rose and a pale green hue is picked up in the wall niches.

Wooden and marble blocks and granite plinths show off the brand’s accessories, while the men’s ready-to-wear is displayed on steel racks.

The final room in the store, which houses Off-White’s homeware collection, features silk wallpaper and travertine flooring as well as wooden display stands and wall niches.

Though this is the brand’s first store in the city, Off-White’s design studio is already based in Milan.

“With a design studio based in Milan, Italy, the label harnesses the history and craftsmanship within the country yet offers a global perspective in terms of design and trends,” said the brand.

Off-White also recently unveiled its first Miami store, a flexible flagship that “can host a runway show”.  In addition, Off-White opened the doors to its first stand-alone store in London in September.

Abloh, who was a judge for the 2019 Dezeen Awards, works on numerous projects outside Off-White and recently teamed up with Mercedes Benz to create a conceptual version of the Mercedes‑Benz G‑Class car.

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As the weather gets colder and harsher, many people begin the search for hydrating skin- and hair-care.  A leave-in treatment that nourishes your hair, evo’s Happy Campers can be sprayed throughout your tresses or pumped into one’s hands first to create a creme effect that’s even more concentrated. Either way, the formula hydrates and smooths, while protecting from heat and UV rays without leaving hair feeling greasy or heavy. Vegan and cruelty free, Happy Campers is made without sulfates, parabens or gluten, and smells subtly fresh with light floral notes.

Ortraum Architects has built an asymmetric studio called 12 in the garden of a house in Helsinki, Finland, to provide its owners with space to compose music and make ceramics.

The structure was commissioned by a couple who wanted an external space to work from home, beside their existing 1960s home in the Jollas neighbourhood.

It features two contrasting storeys that Ortraum Architects has set askew, giving rise to a sculptural form and two individual workspaces inside for the couple.

The 12 studio, which has been shortlisted in the Dezeen Awards in the small workspace interior category, measures 72-square-metres and is complete with a kitchen and bathroom.

While providing individual studio space for the couple, it is designed to be easily adapted into a guest house or even become a home for the client’s children in the future.

“The client couple needed two main spaces, a ceramics workshop and a music-composing studio,” said the studio. “The massing is visually divided into two levels, reflecting the two different building functions,” it continued.

“The plan also needed to be flexible enough to function additionally as a guest house and future home for one of the two children in the family, so bathroom and kitchen spaces were included.”

The material palette of 12 is deliberately pared-back, with its cross-laminated-timber (CLT) structure left exposed internally and externally. On the exterior, this will turn grey with time to help the structure blend in with its surroundings.

Its entrance is marked by large glass doors that face the existing home, sheltered by a small cantilevered corner of the second floor.

This entrance opens into the ceramics studio on the ground floor, which is complete with a small bathroom.

A black wooden staircase that leads to the first floor is concealed behind a wall and features treads that double as storage units.

Above, the first floor contains the music studio. Its angular form was developed to help enhance the acoustics of the space and make it suitable for recording music.

This space is complete with two large windows that open towards a neighbouring forest, alongside a small balcony and gallery level for use as an extra lounge area.

Ortraum Studio’s goal for 12 was for it to “be a best practice example for environmentally friendly construction and infill projects in a suburban context”.

For this reason, its size was dictated by an existing concrete foundation from an old garage, avoiding the need for new and obtrusive groundwork, while its structure was prefabricated using CLT to avoid waste and speed up construction time.

It has also been developed to facilitate natural ventilation and is powered by solar panels and heated using a ground source heat pump of the main home.

As part of the project, Ortraum Architects also built a small playhouse for the client’s children, which is also made of CLT and is tied to a pine tree in the garden.

Named the Birdhouse, it features heart-shaped windows and is modelled on pictures that the children drew of their “dream house”.

Ortraum architects is a small Finnish design studio headed up by architect Martin Lukasczyk. In 2017, it completed a family home in Finland that has a number of child-friendly features including a trapeze, a climbing wall and a hammock.

Photography is by Marc Goodwin.

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A collection of conceptual aluminium furniture by designers Orson Oxo Van Beek and Quinten Mestdagh straddles “the boundary between aesthetic and function” through its excessive decoration.

Designed by Antwerp-based spatial designer Orson Oxo Van Beek in collaboration with fashion designer Quinten Mestdagh, the collection is currently being exhibited at the Everyday Gallery in Antwerp.

Entitled Ornamentum, the collection comprises a chair, a table and a lamp made from pieces of aluminium with sharp and pointy edges, making them appear dangerous to touch or use.

“We wanted to make the pieces so overly decorated, to a point where the actual furniture becomes functionless; an ornament in itself,” Van Beek told Dezeen.

“The danger adds to the aesthetic and, most importantly, to the non-function of the object,” he added.

Looking to the ornamental styles of rococo, baroque and renaissance furniture, the structure of each piece is made up of the decorative emblems and graphic symbols found on furniture from these periods.

Van Beek and Mestdagh designed the structures of the pieces around these emblems and symbols in order to create conceptual pieces that sit somewhere between form and function.

“This collection aimed to create a collection of unfamiliar decorative furniture that touches the boundary between aesthetics and functionality,” Van Beek said.

“We were fascinated with ornamental and decorative furniture and questioned why there is an absence of decoration within contemporary design.”

“Ornamentum is a study and a reflection on how ornamental furniture has evolved over time, how it can be reinvented and how it can find a place again in contemporary furniture design.”

The collection is made from six millimetre-thin aluminium pieces that were laser cut and later welded together to create the structure of each piece.

The aluminium was sanded down in order to give the surface of the metal a rough, contrasting look and texture.

Van Beek is a Design Academy Eindhoven alum, based in Antwerp.

He has previously designed conceptual furniture projects including a reinterpretation of Le Corbusier’s LC2 chair which imagined the chair as an inflatable object. The project was exhibited at the Dutch design fair Object Rotterdam earlier this year.

Mestdagh is a Paris-based fashion designer working for Balenciaga Haute Couture. He graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 2019.

Many young designers are looking to aluminium to create experimental furniture design, due to its price and abundance.

London-based Studio Furthermore recently created a collection of aluminium furniture designed to resemble a rock-like material mined in outer space.

South Korean designer Yeon Jinyeoung  released a collection of chairs that have been formed by hitting, folding, welding and crumbling aluminium pipes, earlier this year.

The Ornamentum collection is on view at the Everyday Gallery until 4 October 2020.

Images are courtesy of Seppe Elewaut.

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Launching on September 24, the first edition of Photoworks Festival – an evolution of the Brighton Photo Biennial – is centred on the theme of Propositions for Alternative Narratives. With the festival running amid the pandemic, which has upended the traditional format of the vast majority of events due to social distancing requirements and travel restrictions, Photoworks Festival will unfold in three ways.

The work will be exhibited in an outdoor billboard space around Brighton and Hove, which will have an online counterpart in the form of a digital festival hub. The final element is the ‘festival in a box’ comprising printed versions of the works, which will be delivered by post to people who sign up to be a Photoworks Friend community member. Various institutions around the world will also be ‘hosting’ the box version for visitors to see, with more detail to follow on social media about where to find them.

The box format draws on surrealist Marcel Duchamp’s La Boite-en-valise – a small suitcase ‘museum’ containing reproductions of his work – as well as artist Dayanita Singh’s mobile museums, a concept designed to challenge the formal limitations of exhibitions.

Eleven international artists are featuring in the festival, including London-based photographer Ronan Mckenzie – one of the 21 judges in the CR Photography Annual 2020 – whose work will be exploring the colour brown. The festival includes works by UAE-born, New York-based photographer and musician Farah Al Qasimi, and Chicago-based photographer Guanyu Xu, who caught the attention of the photography world with his series exploring sexuality and heteronormativity in relation to his upbringing in China.

Also featuring in the festival is Ivar Grāvlejs’ photographs of supermarket checkout lines, Pixy Liao’s works exploring cross-cultural relationships, Roger Eberhard’s images of past border sites, Alix Marie’s photographic examination of the role of the body in provoking emotions, and Poulomi Basu’s take on the war between the government and the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army, a Maoist insurgent group in India.

The range of channels lends itself to artists whose practice is cross-disciplinary, such as Alberta Whittle, with her interactive installations inspired by Afrofuturism, and Sethembile Msezane, who works across film, sculpture, photography and drawing in her interrogation of spirituality, myth-making, politics and African knowledge systems. Lotte Andersen, who works across video, collage, performance and beyond, has created a collaged piece for the outdoor and ‘in a box’ format, which will serve as an invitation to an online work running in October.

Alongside the festival’s central display of work will be an archival project by LGBTQ+ youth group Queer History Now, as well as a young photographers showcase of work exploring heritage, with a focus on the untold stories left out of history books.

The festival ties into the Alternative Narratives theme running throughout 2020 across Photoworks, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. The Brighton-based charity, led by director Shoair Mavlian, is using the festival to reexamine cultural hierarchies and histories.

“Our inaugural Photoworks Festival rethinks both the form and content of traditional festivals and attempts to disrupt the well known histories of photography, breaking them apart to include new perspectives,” Mavlian said. “Our festival acknowledges that the idea of a distinct history of photography is problematic and aims to highlight propositions for alternative histories alongside contemporary work that sets out to show a new or alternative perspective on a subject or topic.”

Photoworks Festival takes place from September 24 to October 25; photoworks.org.uk

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