This Italian Furniture Brand Made a Clever Trompe L’Oeil Table, Then Shot It in a Carlo Mollino Masterpiece
January saw the introduction of an interesting new expression of trompe l'oeil, in the form of Saba Italia’s Teatro Magico table by 967 Arch, a dining table whose sinuous polyurethane base echoes the form of theater curtains and can part like them, too. The brand coincided the launch with the reopening, after a two-year renovation, of Turin’s Teatro Regio, whose Carlo Mollino–designed interior contains its own multitude of visual illusions.

A Young, Milan-Based Designer Inspired by the Brutalist Architecture of Eastern Europe
There are two distinct threads that run through the work of Milan-based, Macedonia-born designer Daniel Nikolovski. The first is a penchant for storytelling. His objects and furniture all seem to point to an obscure reference or emerge from a well-thought-out backstory; the forms that make up his EYE Lamps, for example, were inspired by Yugoslavian monuments, like the Brutalist buildings Kenzo Tange constructed in Nikolovski’s hometown of Skopje following an earthquake that decimated the city in 1963. The other major tenet of his work is craftsmanship, which is actually the reason he ended up in Italy at all.

Week of February 21, 2022
A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a Nathalie du Pasquier subway art installation in Italy, a color-blocked collection of rugs by Ethan Cook for Hay, and a new PR headquarters in London that's both deaf-friendly and vegan.

A Whimsical Parisian Shoe Store By One of France’s Biggest Up-and-Coming Talents
Sophie Dries's design for the Michel Vivien store is relatively simple, in that it centers around a 50-foot-long undulating walnut wood wall pierced with glass and wooden floating shelves. But it is the art and objects — abstract, totem-like sculptures, stools by Pierre Chapo used as pediments for displaying shoes, plush velvet seating, and lighting by Jacques Biny and Charlotte Perriand — and the way she artfully arranges them that make the space so interesting.