Cool Hunting

Leonardo Table and Chairs
We all know that beautiful furniture can be sexy in a shiny, sleek and sinuous sort of way, but two young French designers Bertrand Clerc and Olivier Gregoire have made their furniture sexy in a physical and psychological way with their Leonardo table and chairs. What really makes furniture attractive is not just how it looks, but how we interact with it; the way...

Birsel + Seck for Herman Miller: Teneo
by Tamara Warren The classic filing cabinet has the admirable function of safely storing documents, but leaves something to be desired when it comes to form. (Think square, metal, heavy and bulky.) Addressing the problem, Herman Miller wisely brought in designers Birsel + Seck to conceive their Teneo line. The storage system recently received the Best of Competition award at Neocon for Best of...

Domison Furniture Boutique
Domison is a modern furniture boutique that opened just over a month ago in Montreal's Plateau district. The brainchild of brother and sister design team Thien and My Ta Trung, their aim is to offer well-designed aesthetically-pleasing home furnishing to design-savvy consumers. I had a chance to sit down with My recently to ask her a few questions about the store and its concept....

Duende Collective: La Part des Anges
Duende Collective, a French design studio based in Paris, was recently commissioned by La Cuisine, an alimentary arts center in Nègrepelisse near the Midi-Pyrénées region, for a forthcoming exhibition examining the early relationship between mother and child. The exhibition, which will open this coming September, will focus on the prenatal role of the placenta and the post-natal role of mother's milk, both as means...

Fogo Design
Shattering the divide between street and home, Brazilian creative agency Fogo Design playfully reinterprets household objects in forms that some would call trash. The company, made up of longtime friends Miguel Sanches and Ramses Marcal, promote good humor through each of their products, all of which ride the conceptual line. Their past work includes objects like a lamp that resembles a huge box of...

Mind Chair by Beta Tank
Originally included in MoMA's recent Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition, Beta Tank's Mind Chair has been transformed from a hacked polypropylene readymade into a working wooden prototype. The chair features an array of solenoids (electromagnetic coils) attached to the back and controlled by a video camera. The camera transmits information to the solenoid grid, which then inscribes the visual stimuli onto the user's...