Architecture & Design

Game Boy cartridges usually wait in a drawer until you feel like playing something again. But sometimes it’s the music you miss, not the game. Retro Song Bird gives those little plastic rectangles a different job: slot one into the top of a tabletop player, and it finds the soundtrack for you. No screen, no level to beat, just the tunes you remember. The idea works because the cartridge remains the thing you choose. Instead of scrolling through a library of files, you pull a favorite from

On a scale from Eighth Avenue to Studio 8H, where does Saturday Night Live cast member Ben Marshall fit? This is NYQ, a series in which we find out how “New York” notab... More »

A sofa usually hides its structure beneath cushions, leaving you to think about it only when something creaks. Haesi’s Gyeolgu one-seater brings that structure into the conversation, borrowing the logic of traditional Korean hanok construction for an upholstered chair. Its seat, backrest, and arms meet as distinct volumes, so the furniture feels assembled rather than molded into one anonymous cushion. The connection to architecture isn’t about putting a miniature house in your living room. Hanok

Sometimes, there’s no better escapism than a romantic comedy. In the genre’s idealized version of Manhattan, characters know how to work hard and play hard, moving from a busy 9-to-5 to last call at a stylish cocktail bar. This year’s edition of NYCxDesign captured that cosmopolitan spirit perfectly. For one thing, Afternoon Light, a well-curated fair back for its sophomore edition after a buzzy debut last year, set up shop in the WSA building, a Financial District office tower with rare creativ

Buying for the man who already owns the good version of everything is its own kind of design challenge. He has the watch, the pen, the television, the card holder. What he doesn’t have is the version nobody else thought to make, the object that solves a problem he didn’t know he had or simply looks better doing the job than anything currently on his desk. That’s the gap this list lives in. What follows isn’t a pile of gadgets picked for novelty. It’s titanium that&#

Listen, it’s not as though getting an apartment in New York has ever been easy. But one could probably argue it has never been harder than it is right now. The most god-awful studios are regularly renting for thousands and thousands of dollars with lines of interested tenants out the door. He... More »

Furniture can be bad at keeping up with us. A side table works until you move to the couch; a desk setup feels permanent until the living room has to become somewhere to eat, read, or host friends. Handy, a mobile furniture design by Taiwanese industrial designer Hsinhung Chou, takes aim at that mismatch. Rather than asking a room to accommodate another fixed object, it suggests that the useful object should move with the person who needs it. That’s a more compelling proposition than it might so

We are interested in ordinary buildings and forgotten ways of building. Much of the intelligence that developed around their construction developed slowly as people made do with what they had. The post D’Arcy Jones explores the intelligence of historic ordinary buildings appeared first on The Architect’s Newspaper.

Pray tell what is this, you ask. A Saturn V on a skateboard, that’s what. It’s called the Nichols N1A. It’s a handsomely raw British-built giant killer that looks like it’s been cooked up in a shed in the 1960s. Behind the cockpit sits a stentorian 7.0 naturally-aspirated pushrod Chevy V8. This produces 705bhp, while the whole car weighs just 900kg thanks to a bonded extruded aluminium and carbon-fibre chassis. 783bhp per tonne; that’s more than Ferrari’s latest hybrid hypercar, the F80. The N1A

Most alarm clocks do one thing well, then leave your phone to handle everything else. That means checking the screen before bed and finding yourself scrolling minutes later. IKEA’s STENGRÖNSKA gives the bedside clock a few more jobs: it tracks room temperature and humidity, charges your phone, and handles three alarms without asking you to open another app. It might very well change your nighttime routine. Rather than standing upright like a traditional clock, this one sits low and wide, like a

Retro handhelds have a habit of hiding modern electronics inside shells that pretend time stopped decades ago. ModRetro’s transparent Chromatic does the opposite and pays homage to a specific past era, letting the circuitry show through while you slide in an actual Game Boy cartridge. The familiar shape and chunky buttons are still there, but Smoke, Purple, Green, and Red shells turn the hardware underneath into part of the attraction. Although the majority of electronics of the past did h

It’s yours for £5.75 million The post Move into the London recording studio used by the Pet Shop Boys appeared first on The Spaces.

At the end of Anthony Vaccarello’s latest runway show for Saint Laurent, held as part of Paris Fashion Week earlier this month, the Belgian designer handed a set of keys to his son Luca after his finale bow. The gesture all but confirmed the rumours that had been swirling for some time among fashion insiders, that Vaccarello was leaving the Parisian house after a transformative ten-year tenure.This morning, after previously having denied the rumour, Saint Laurent has confirmed that Vaccarello ha

Chris D’Sylva has been taking over Notting Hill, one food business at a time, since 2019: first with Smart Grocers, the Fish + Meat Shop and Supermarket of Dreams, then with Dorian Bistro and Eel Sushi. At Nakimushi, he’s stuck to Japanese but dropped the sushi and entrusted the £2m townhouse conversion to the two chefs running the place. Robin Kosuge and Yuji Shimokawa Kelly made a name for themselves with the Robin’s Ramen and Urchin residencies respectively and now share a permanent home at N