Alvar Aalto at Style:Nordic
Kateha- which, according to the Style:Nordic website, references pile rugs in Arabic. A good, modern substitute for my Berber pile rugs, I think- the latter a look I’m getting rather tired of, unfortunately.
Style:Nordic is a Scandinavian concept store, selling everything from Scandinavian furniture to fashion.
There are hotels that try to evoke the same clean-line design.
Hoteliers go into residential real estate development, fashion designers venture into interior design and milliners design hotels.
Similarly companies that started out in sportswear are turning to fashion before making their latest foray into furniture.(I love the opening strains of Sex and the City).
After making their marks on hotels , fashion designers are finding it worth their while to turn to interior design. From Armani sheets to Ralph Lauren paints, exploiting the value of a brand by expanding into related fields has become this century’s new obsession(If that had been the trend in 18th c. Europe, Mozart’s profligacy would have been ‘brand-building’, not a route to bankruptcy).
The full article can be found here:
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Clothe your home in Armani |
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| Luxury Italian label Armani is opening its first standalone home furnishings store in South-east Asia here | |||
| By Tay Suan Chiang, DESIGN CORRESPONDENT | |||
IT HAD to happen: From lounging around in fashion designers’ designer clothes, you can now lounge around on fashion designers’ designer lounges. The latest designer to furnish a Singapore fashion-follower’s heart’s desire is silver-haired style legend Giorgio Armani. Armani fans here can now deck out their homes in his signature understated style, besides donning his elegant frocks. A 200 sq m store selling his home furnishings will open at the end of this month at the Raffles Hotel Arcade, the first standalone Armani/Casa store in South-east Asia. Launched in 2000, Armani/Casa (Italian for house) is also available in Asian cities such as Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taipei and Hangzhou in China. ‘Armani/Casa represents a natural evolution towards my goal: a complete lifestyle concept,’ says the 73-year-old Italian designer in an e-mail interview with Life!. Like his fashion collections, new furnishing items are rolled out each season. Pitched at the high-end crowd, the range includes furniture, ornaments, lighting and fabrics, and is priced from $4,600 for a lamp to $23,600 for a storage unit. The company showcases its pieces at the prestigious Milan Furniture Fair every year. At the 2005 fair, Armani/Casa launched Guapo, its range of modular bath accessories. Last year, it showcased Bridge, its kitchen system. This year’s fair in March saw the launch of the Amleto, its made-to-measure walk-in wardrobe. Armani says these are ‘meaningful signals that show that Armani/Casa is a complex and complete range’. The designer, who founded his fashion empire with an unlined jacket in 1975, says he supervises every Armani/Casa project with the help of an interior design team. |
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Again taking the analogy to luxury travel, the Missoni and Bulgari chain of hotels, the Alice Temperley-One&Only Collaboration in Mauritius and the Ralph Lauren-outfitted luxury cruises are a sign of brands leveraging upon their names for creative collaborations.
The people at Pomelo Home, a modernist furnishing home store with a concept like a previous incarnation of The Apartment ; a sort of participatory theatre, where the lines between ’store’ and ‘home’ are blurred, apparently share my tastes for Dutch design
-from Studio Job to Maarten Baass – the theory behind the design is so elegant and well-executed that it always leaves me breathless.
Following up on Shawn’s post:The website is up- suitably designer-ish, Flash-based, interactive site. Check out the resident artists- Xin&AnnGee, Sokkuan&Kuanth and the ongoing Le Monde est Nous exhibition.
Other blogs referencing this new gallery cum bar are: Ee Shaun’s and Pat Law’s
The name reminds me(in a very tangential way) of Francois Truffaut’s Night forDay.
Had an earlier posting about how predictable showflats have become.
While I have yet to see a showflat populated by Maarten Baas or the other kids at Moooi, this showflat at Scotts Highpark, with its North African leanings, is a decidedly interesting departure from the rest.
The rooms look rather sizeable and that promise of a feature pool or jacuzzi on that unbelievably balcony with a vantage point to the surrounding greenery and black and whites(notice the black and white bungalow in the distance- I reckon that’s real too, given the right unit and not a figment of the artist’s imagination).
It is my personal belief that the more buoyant a property market becomes, the more sophisticated showflats(and consequently unit design and concepts for development) get. The trend towards larger units is a positive side effect in a booming property market otherwise characterized by en bloc exercises in a bid to create (much) smaller units.
Luxuruious, high end city living ceases to be about tiny, overdesigned spaces but are instead being characterized by a more benign concept of living where large living spaces, surrounding greenery (whilst being conveniently, even surprisingly close to the city centre). Where large units were previously restricted to penthouses within any development, a move towards bucking that trend became increasingly recognizable, with the more egalitarian Grange Residences(units of 2500-2800sqft, curiously lacking in penthouses) and BLVD, where the smallest unit is around 2034sqft.