Category Archives: Design

John Derian

Makers & Rooms — Essay II The Man Who Saved the Image John Derian didn’t invent decoupage. He did something harder: he convinced the world that beauty could come from what had already been beautiful once, that the archive was inexhaustible, and that a shop on a quiet street in downtown Manhattan could function asContinue reading “John Derian”

Fernando Caruncho

The Gardener Who Thought in Light Fernando Caruncho, who died on 23 August 2026 at the age of sixty-eight, called himself a gardener rather than a designer. The distinction was not false modesty. It was a philosophical position — one he had held since he first understood that the garden was not a space toContinue reading “Fernando Caruncho”

Poul Henningsen

Makers & Rooms — Essay I The Light He Couldn’t Stop Arguing About Poul Henningsen designed the most beloved lamp in the world. He also wrote cabaret songs, picked fights with the bourgeoisie, and fled to Sweden ahead of the Gestapo. The lamp was almost the least interesting thing about him. By Bergotte There isContinue reading “Poul Henningsen”

The Eameses: Designers of the American Century

In the light-filled hills above the Pacific, a glass-and-steel house stands as a manifesto. Inside, shelves of books and folk art mingle with modernist chairs in plywood and fiberglass. It is not simply a home, but a vision: how design could be democratic, playful, rigorous, and alive. This is the world of Charles and RayContinue reading “The Eameses: Designers of the American Century”

The Geometry of Roughness

How Benoit Mandelbrot’s outsider mathematics turned the broken, the jagged, and the cracked into a theory of the world A bug on a line printer The image, when it first appeared in the spring of 1980, looked like an accident. A staff researcher at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York,Continue reading “The Geometry of Roughness”

Living in Silence

Makers & Rooms Ivan Van Mossevelde built a house of raw concrete in the Flemish countryside in 1972 for an art collector who filled it with Judd and Sol LeWitt. Decades later, a young architect spotted it through the trees during a walk, was refused entry, and spent years waiting for it to come toContinue reading “Living in Silence”

Les Lalanne: Where Surrealism Meets Design

In the half-century arc of 20th-century design, few names shimmer with such eccentric magnetism as Les Lalanne. François-Xavier (1927–2008) and Claude (1924–2019) Lalanne were not just artists, not just designers—they were dreamers who translated the surreal into functional form. Their creations—sheep that double as stools, a cabbage sprouting chicken legs, gilded apples, and fantastical brassContinue reading “Les Lalanne: Where Surrealism Meets Design”

Verner Panton: The Prophet of Color and the Future of Design

Few designers have altered the visual vocabulary of the 20th century as radically as Verner Panton. A Dane with a restless imagination, Panton defied the restrained minimalism of Scandinavian design by embracing vibrant color, plastic as a noble material, and interiors that felt more like hallucinations than homes. He was not simply a furniture makerContinue reading “Verner Panton: The Prophet of Color and the Future of Design”

Elvis Presley and His Cadillacs: Chrome, Dreams, and the King of the Open Road

Elvis Presley’s rise from Tupelo poverty to international superstardom is a story often told in gold records and rhinestone jumpsuits. But just as iconic as his taste in tat were the cars he drove—most famously, the Cadillacs that came to symbolize his success, generosity, and flair for style. In the 1950s and 1960s, Cadillac wasContinue reading “Elvis Presley and His Cadillacs: Chrome, Dreams, and the King of the Open Road”