Eat. Drink. Design.
Founded in 2007
Opened late last year, Standard Equipment is a Toronto based product/furniture company that produces simplistic decor for your home. Primarily fabricated from steel, SE has a wide range of bold products like sofas, incense holders, and ceramic mugs, which have this beautiful steel ring around them, it’s such a cool detail. Everything they create has a timeless feeling to it, there’s nothing trendy or fad-ish about them. Just a great series of iconic pieces that should last the test of time.
Tim Teven is a Dutch designer who graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven in 2018. He has a technical and material-driven approach to design, and he uses unconventional methods to create functional yet interesting objects. The one that caught my attention, though I’d say all of his work is quite remarkable, are the Pressure Vases he creates.
He’s created an array of these vessels, in a myriad number of sizes and shapes, as well as materials, including stainless steel, chrome, and zinc. It’s fantastic that he’s able to take such mundane materials and give them such an interesting twist. In some cases the forms look almost cartoon-ish, like Wile E. Coyote after a run in with an Acme product gone wrong. Yet an elegance still remains in these pieces, and I can quite clearly imagine how many of these would look with a lovely bouquet of flowers in them.
A quick one hour car ride from San Sebastián and you’re in Bilbao, home to the Frank Gehry designed Guggenheim museum. Opened in 1997, the museum features contemporary art from around the world, as well as featuring the work of prominent Basque artists from the area. As you approach the museum, I walked up via the Nervión River side, it looks rather massive. The undulating shapes and forms are quite remarkable, and how the light hits the structure from so many unique angles. Living in Los Angeles, I’ve seen Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall dozens of times, and yet the Guggenheim does feel like it’s own unique creature.
I joked when we got to Barcelona that there wasn’t an Aesop, and what the hell was I going to moisturize my face with? Cut to like, six months later and a beautifully designed Aesop shop was opened. Located right off of Passeig de Gràcia, in perhaps quite the center of the city, is a beautifully minimalist, perhaps even brutalist, interpretation of the Aesop brand. It’s quite a departure, in my opinion, if you’re familiar with what their other shops tend to look.
The space was designed by Barozzi Veiga, local Barcelona architects, who have done quite a lot with quite a petite space. In their own words:
The store is made up of a few elements, expressive and precise in their position, and with three materials: stucco on the walls and ceilings, terrazzo on the floor, and burnished steel on the columns, the counter, and the display case. It is a simple and complex space at the same time, which aspires to be sophisticated and close, and in a certain way intimate and monumental.
The space does indeed feel monumental. The height of the ceilings are remarkable, it feels almost like a cathedral. I’m really fond of their use of steel, which gives such a Donald Judd energy. I’m seeing steel used like this in so many interior design projects and I’m a huge fan, especially with the way light bounces off the surfaces. Such an exquisite space to experience.
