The Mah Jong Sofa Heads Outside, Kips Bay Decorator Show House Announces New York Location, and More News

Project Spotlight

At the Kips Bay Decorator Show House Palm Beach, AD PRO Directory designers’ interiors dazzle

At the seventh-annual Kips Bay Decorator Show House Palm Beach, 23 architects and designers reimagined an airy abode in West Palm Beach’s SoSo neighborhood. This year’s impressive designer roster includes five AD PRO Directory design studios—Ariel Okin Interiors, Donna Mondi Interior Design, Nadia Watts Interior Design, Redmond Aldrich Design, and Sara Story Design—each of whom took distinctively imaginative approaches. The show house, which benefits the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club and Boys & Girls Clubs of Palm Beach County, is open through March 17.

Taking cues from Luis Barragán, Story’s lounge stars a Reynold Rodriguez bar cabinet from Charles Burnand Gallery that is rounded out with a Vladimir Kagan sofa, a horsehair lamp from the Future Perfect, bronze French coffee tables, and Martin Eisler and Percival Lafer chairs. Nickolas Sargent

AD PRO Hears…

…the Kips Bay Decorator Show House New York has announced its return to the Upper East Side, taking up residence in a neo-Georgian-style red brick town house at 125 East 65th Street for the event’s 49th edition. Designed by architect Charles Platt in 1904, the four-story home—crowned with 12-foot ceilings, 6 fireplaces, and a garden—will be a quintessential New York canvas for more than 20 interior designers. The show house, which marks the top fundraiser for the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club, will open to the public on May 2.

Openings

Zak+Fox’s commodious New York showroom boasts a custom rug gallery

Having outgrown its first two New York City homes in SoHo and Madison Square Park, textile company Zak+Fox has upgraded to a 6,000-square-foot space two years in the making on Park Avenue South. Reminiscent of a polished library, the trade-only showroom—double the size of its previous iteration—is lined with oak display cases designed by founder and creative director Zak Profera and dotted with gorgeous pieces of vintage and antique furniture. After perusing the fabrics and wall coverings (Harvest, a meditation on the shifting seasons, is the newest collection), designers can now wander into the gallery of bespoke rugs, a program rolled out at Paris Déco Off.

A new lighting studio for the Luddites

Studio Luddite founder Lex Zee Photography courtesy Studio Luddite

Integrity is generally reserved for the intangible—observed through moral principle and ethics. But at Studio Luddite, the lighting practice recently founded by industrial designer Lex Zee, integrity is found in the physical, from the natural material selection to the hand-crafted designs meant to endure. The New York–based studio’s inaugural collection, composed of 12 narrative-driven lamps, pendants, sconces, and ceiling mounts, is an ode to the former. Natural variances, from the rich veining of a Verde Alpi or Rosso Levanto stone to the organic imperfections of a leather hide, become cause for distinction in the reductive designs.

Product Spotlight

Roche Bobois takes the Mah Jong sofa outside

German designer Hans Hopfer conceived the Mah Jong sofa for Roche Bobois back in 1971, and the sprawling modular seating system continues to entice with its myriad configurations. Now it can enliven alfresco hangouts too, with a perforated metal base version, complete with trays ripe for towels and glassware, wrapped in hardy outdoor-proof Missoni fabrics that reimagine the Italian fashion house’s bold zigzags. Other Roche Bobois S/S24 launches of note? A new platform-raised indoor option swathed in Jean Paul Gaultier’s glamorous fishnet, stripe, and floral patterns.

AD PRO Hears…

…it’s the 100th anniversary of the Department of Furniture Design at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and to commemorate the centennial, Fredericia is relaunching the historic English countryside-inspired Klint chair, named for the school’s cofounder Kaare Klint. Klint, deemed the father of Danish modernism, dreamed up what was then called the Church chair (it graced Grundtvig’s Church in Copenhagen, designed by his father) in 1936, and its simple fusion of oak and paper cord is just as alluring today.

Exhibitions

Contemporary Ukrainian Design exhibition is all the buzz at Collectible

Ukrainian-born architect, designer, and artist Victoria Yakusha opened her eponymous gallery in Antwerp in 2021 as a platform for talents from her homeland, and against the backdrop of war, her mission is even more poignant. At Collectible in Brussels last weekend, Yakusha assembled an array of designs that capture the vibrant, resilient Ukrainian spirit through the notions of vitality, naivete, and wildness. Consider Aleksandr Bosenko’s imposing sculptural table crafted from marble, or the illuminated twisting forms conjured by Yulia and Yevgen Melnychenko of Yalanzhi Objects. Otherworldly chairs with deeply scooped backs and sharp edges by Zemna’s Tetiana Krasutska and Andrii Mykhailiak and shimmering shelving from Furn Object’s Anna and Sergii Baierzdorf also pull from nature.

Valentina Cameranesi-Sgroi mounts an intimate exhibition at Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery in New York

Valentina Cameranesi-Sgroi, best known for her strange, otherworldly vessels made from hand-formed borosilicate glass, explores new material territory in I Racconti (The Tales), her first solo exhibition with Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery (through April 13). In the dreamy showcase, the Milan-based designer’s new enameled copper vessels, crafted in Venice, and wooden boxes, made in Florence and sporting exuberant silk tassels, sit with a range of early American furnishings from Olde Hope Antiques. A scalloped-edged, enameled copper dish, for example, sits poetically next to an early-19th-century Lady’s Dressing Box, which sports a similar motif.

Meanwhile, Cameranesi-Sgroi’s painted birch and maple boxes act as modern foils to the two 19th-century decorated wood blanket chests on display. New endeavors in glass—blown freeform, this time, with artisans in the Czech Republic—make an appearance as well. With spiraling coils of glass and pearlescent sheen, their flamboyant forms feel like mysterious sea creatures, or perhaps a new riff on the historic nautilus cup.

Loro Piana Interiors updating Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s Chandigarh series is the collab dreams are made of

At Nomad St. Moritz last month, London collector and curator Rajan Bijlani unveiled the 41-piece collection he amassed from Chandigarh, the modernist north Indian metropolis famed for its monumental furniture range designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret between 1954 and 1966. Along with rarities like a rosewood desk and teak library table, there is plenty of seating to see—the geometric Cross office chair and sleek High Court sofa among them—all spruced up with fabrics from Milan’s Loro Piana Interiors. Cowhide, a peculiar choice of material to embrace in a country that reveres the cow, was removed to make way for more suitable alpaca, baby camel hair, and raw cashmere—a nod to the Himalayas in the distance—in such soft, earthy shades as ginger and dark brown.

AD PRO Hears…

…Invisible Collection kicked off its year-long LA residency at Phillips during Frieze by curating French furniture for the Fully Bloomed exhibition (on view through March 14). For the rest of 2024, the online design gallery will showcase a rotating lineup of bespoke goods from European studios in the private client room at Phillips.

Awards

The Institute of Classical Architecture & Art names top annual honors

The Institute of Classical Architecture & Art (ICAA) has announced the recipients of the 2024 Arthur Ross Awards for Excellence in the Classical Tradition. Recognized for his aesthetic range and sophisticated yet personable combinations, AD100 interior designer Markham Roberts takes home the award in the Interior Design category. Fellow honorees include Abdel-Wahed El-Wakil for Architecture; Thomas Wells Schaller for Fine Arts; Féau Boiseries for Artisanship & Craftsmanship; Julia Watson for Education; and Stephen A. Schwarzman for Patronage. The ICAA will celebrate the recipients at a dinner on May 13 at the University Club of New York.

Design Happenings

Of course We Are Ona makes dinner in a garage look chic

Roving culinary collective We Are Ona, the vision of Noma alum Luca Pronzato, recently landed in Los Angeles for Frieze, where it orchestrated a series of eight-course dinners in collaboration with the multidisciplinary studio Sized. The feasts, prepared by French chef Valentin Raffali of the restaurant Livingston in Marseille, were heightened not only by Pronzato’s wine pairings, but the mesmerizing industrial setting at the former Howard Hughes headquarters. Here, patrons dined in the company of 22 black automobiles. The dining table, a custom design by Willo Perron and brought to life by USM Modular Furniture and Damon Jones, was set with Christofle cutlery. We Are Ona will pop up in Milan with more memorable repasts during Salone del Mobile.