The only rug that matters

It costs less than $300. Plus, Noguchi in Maine

In focus: fiber underfoot

Covered recently by The Strategist as a new phenomenon (not quite) and Architectural Digest as something that’s been in use by humans for a millennium (more accurate), then posed to me in the form of this question by Schmatta’s Leonora Epstein:

Do you happen to know what this rug is that Knoll used so often in their showroom and catalog circa 1950s?

That, my friends, is a good old fashioned seagrass mat made of 12 inch-by-12 inch squares that you can resize yourself. Franks Supply is one of several lo-fi websites that sell the mats for cheap, cheap, cheap: $255 for a 9x12. The beauty of these is that they arrive huge, and you can reconfigure the dimensions by cutting and (re)sewing the squares to your desired size.

Left: Seagrass in action in the midcentury—which you’ll see a lot, if you are in the habit of looking at houses in temperate climates that were built between 1945 and 1965. Ahem. Middle: A snapshot of seagrass squares used as floor covering in a Knoll showroom (and the basis of Leonora’s query). Right: Charles de Lisle’s exceptional interior, with seagrass mat flooring for a Marmol Radziner house in Pacific Heights, San Francisco, via AD. CdL is the maestro of humble materials deployed expertly, in concert with precious art and furniture.

If you prefer a packaged, marketed, and digitized product, that is your right. Rush House’s modular seagrass rug is the same idea, and the price won’t gouge your eyeballs. I do draw the line at linking the one “designed by” an influencer for a mass market brand that’s retailing for $1,248.

Blowing up

Kosta Boda, a Swedish glassblowing outfit, has been operating for roughly 300 years, and like most legacy brands, their new stuff can be hit or miss. (For classics, you’ll want the Mambo goblet—scour Etsy and eBay for them.) I am very into their work with Hanna Hansdotter, however, who makes these Brutalist-Baroque candlesticks in outrageous finishes: matte amber, translucent blood, black polished chrome, a glossy shade of slime green called “cryptonite.”

And Jonah Takagi doesn’t read newsletters, but I’d be remiss to not mention his glass series Brut Vessels made at CIRVA in Marseille. Check with dear-gallery-to-me Marta in LA to see which pieces are still available from Jonah’s show there last year, or Hem, which has the stacked “Brute” vase stocked in confetti and (s)lime green.

Hanna Hansdotter Rocky Baroque vase and candlesticks for Kosta Boda. Jonah Takagi Brut vessels (top right at Marta and middle bottom at Hem).

Piping hot

I won’t malign this as a trend, since it’s essentially a finishing technique, but exquisitely sharp piping is here and I am enamored. It’s as if you drew the simplest curtain or duvet and then traced the border with a fine-point Sharpie. I wouldn’t necessarily style the examples below as sparely as they’re shown here—it’s fun to imagine them as a graphic counterpoint to a patterned interior chockablock with antiques.

Left: Ana Kraš worked with &DRAPE in Copenhagen to produce her Frame curtains, at left. Note how these are installed on a track, and therefore retain their rectilinear shaped once mounted. Top right: I found some good-looking edged curtains in sheer slubbed cotton at Simons, a Canadian department store David tells me is “like Macy’s.” Bottom right: Sutram’s percale has my number. Great colors across the board, although this piped duvet is splendid, no? Not pictured: CB2 black-edged shower curtain.

Odds and ends

• Japanese label Undercover styled its runway collection during Paris Fashion Week with Brigitte Tanaka organza bags styled as shopping sacks. Time to accept that the humble plastic bag is a subversively APPEALING typology!

brigittetanaka

A post shared by @brigittetanaka

• A new residential conversation with 253 low-income apartments a short walk from the Musée d’Orsay is just one example of how Paris implements affordable housing to achieve mixité sociale.

• If an architecture prize falls in the woods and no one’s around to hear it… Seriously, though, everyone in architecture—and perhaps I mean architecture media—used to be obsessed with the annual Pritzker announcements. Now, not so much. What happened? Did we finally kill the starchitect?

• Call it what you will—#officecore, “Corporate Fetish”—the aesthetic fanaticism for vintage workplace interiors is seemingly everywhere. (I credit PIN-UP, the architecture magazine, for doing this early and often.) My theory is perhaps an obvious one: “commuting-to-a-9-to-5 while wearing career separates” is a foreign concept to young tastemakers who will never experience it. Some might call it anemoia.

• Related, but less fraught: This recent episode of the New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast dives into the substance of the office drama.

• Design measured by the dollar: the gaming strategy behind hideous carpet in Vegas casinos, in Cabinet magazine

• Cottage-core but make it fashion (campaign), via Dwell

• Ummmm, did you know Noguchi designed a house in Maine? You can see the original in the February 1948 issue of House & Garden (pages 51-55), including a rather fantastic floor plan. Here’s what it looks like now.

William A. M. Burden House Furniture and interior, 1947-48, via Noguchi Museum

• What am I compulsively consuming when not writing this newsletter? Why is this interesting? published my media diet here.

Last but not least! For everyone wondering, my breakfast table—used here to show the scale of the Brobdingnagian calla lilies in our front yard—is made by Wiggle Room. What I have is not being restocked, but the bistro table and coffee table are just as cute and practical.

Readers, get 10% off sitewide at Wiggle Room with the code groundcondition.