Recanto do Alto Jardins

by Phuong-Cac Nguyen

When Ana Strumpf moved her store Garimpo and Fuxique to Jardins, a cosmopolitan São Paulo shopping district just blocks away from the busier, pricier and more famous Rua Oscar Freire, she eyed the lot of empty stores around the corner from hers and had an idea. Bringing in designers to fill those spots had the potential to create a new commercial area. She got on the phone and spread the word to friends in fashion who eventually negotiated deals separately with the building's owner.

So goes the story behind Recanto do Alto Jardins, located at Alameda Franca and Rua Bela Cintra, a freshly reinvigorated area in which Brazil's most promising up-and-coming designers have been calling their new digs home since December. These include Marcelo Sommer's wonderful label Do Estilista, Fabia Bercsek's eponymous women's wear line, Le Sac's well-constructed bags and D'Arouche's and Ha Uma Santa's sophisticated collections. There's still one open spot still available and the new neighbors are hankering for something different, such as a cafe or floral shop, just to round things out.

Strumpf says there was no chance for deserving young designers to make their mark among shoppers on Rua Oscar Freire because of the high rents. But besides adding fresh blood into Jardins, the addition of these shops brings along something invaluable to the prestigious area: edge.

Recanto do Alto Jardins
Rua Bela Cintra and Alameda Franca
Jardins, São Paulo
Brazil map

Polly van der Glas Jewelry

by Fiona Killackey

Plenty are on the "let's recycle and reuse" bandwagon these days but few have looked at really reusing what we have quite like Melbourne-based jewelry designer Polly van der Glas. Sourcing her materials from friends and family who have been kind enough to offer (actual) parts of themselves, van der Glas created a stunningly innovative debut collection which features human hair and teeth. Already turning heads (and no doubt some very weak stomachs) van der Glas pieces are set for cult status. For your own piece of, well, someone else contact Polly at pollypollypollypolly [at] hotmail [dot] com.

Check out more images after the jump.

The Best of CES

by Josh Rubin

The annual Consumer Electronics Show took the breath out of Vegas last week. While there was an endless slew of things to see, we found a few stand-outs worth reporting on.

Iqua 603 SUN, Solar Powered Bluetooth Headset
This compact Bluetooth headset from Iqua offers all the same features as the big brands, but stands out with the innovative integration of a solar cell. Sunlight will extend the charge on this device, which has a Lithium Polymer battery that can also be charged via USB or a power plug.

Sennheiser MXW1 Wireless Earbuds Don’t Sound Wireless
Through a partnership with Kleer, the MXW1 wireless earbuds deliver rich, full, uncompressed audio over a 2.4GHz wireless frequency. While they look like Bluetooth headsets, they’re not—there’s no mic. These little guys are fully optimized for tangle free music enjoyment.

Hillcrest Labs Redefines Remote Controls
Hillcrest isn’t a consumer brand, they develop technology that makes media easier to access. Freespace, their motion based control technology, recently surfaced in Logitech’s MX Air mouse. HoME, their latest innovation, is a panning and zooming interface for home media that is best navigated with a Freespace device. Using the two technologies together it’s incredibly easy to navigate through large volumes of visual information.

Sharp Aquos D64 Series, Now in Smaller Sizes
Introduced at CES last year, the D64 line of Sharp’s Aquos Televisions offers incredible contrast and refresh rates in an attractive, simple casing. While the CES buzz is often about the biggest (Sharp showed a 105” LCD TV and Panasonic a 150” Plasma), we at CH can neither fit nor afford mega-televisions. Being small-space dwellers, we’re excited that the line-up has grown with the addition of two new smaller sizes (32” and 37”).

Ceiva
We take digital photos and share them all over the web, but some of family and friends aren’t always savvy enough to be able to see them. With Cevia networked digital photo frames and their online photo management service there is now a way to push photos in front of your grandmother without her having to do a thing. Available in an 8” desktop frame and soon to be a 19” wall-mounted version.

BUG

Bug Labs has developed a gadget prototyping system that lets the creative geek mock up both software and hardware to prototype any idea. The BUGbase is a small Linux box with connectors to snap-on BUGmodules like a camera, touch screen, motion detector or GPS. Software applications are build with the BUG SDK and shared with the development community on BUG’s community site.

iRiver Unit2 vs. Mickey Themed Mplayer
While the Unit2 all-in-one home entertainment and networking device (above) was an impressive piece of hardware with a modern-minimalist design, the Mickey Mouse themed Mplayer MP3 player was the winner in my book. Taking cute and making it functional, one ear controls volume and the other skips forward and back. The headset jack is right between the ears so that the 1GB can be worn as a pendant hanging from your earphones.

Papabubble

by Lost At E Minor

We recently came across the Papabubble range of sweetened goodies and who would've thought that lollies—and hard ones at that—could be made to look so creative. And delicious.

It's the twists on conventional lolly types that make the Barcelona-based company so worth checking out. We spoke to founder Tommy Tang about the rise of Papabubble from Australian upstarts to international favorites, "Crick, my delicious partner and I started Papabubble in Barcelona in June 2003. I did, however, begin to get my hands dirty in 1997 in Melbourne where I opened my first store, called Suga. After expanding through Melbourne, we set up Sticky in Sydney with my delicious partner's brother. And then fled the country to begin the Papabubble in Spain, where we still live and still burn our fingers."

Photo courtesy of Roboppy.