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People Products Profiles

Collaboration Nation

Three brands forge new design partnerships

 

ARTISTIC TILE

Two new collaborations from Artistic Tile speak to the company’s passion for design and innovation. Textile designer Lori Weitzner’s fabrics and wallcoverings can be found in the homes of A-list celebs and are frequently used in movie sets. To design her tile collections, River and Forest, Lori called on techniques like origami, pleating, and voided velvet, and the craftsmen translated that into stone tile. “Fabric roots are infused into a hard-stone surface and the juxtaposition of that is beautiful, and really resonates,” says Weitzner.

Lori Weitzner and her inspiration board.

Interior designer Alison Rose melds history and modernity in her personal style, and she translated that into a new mosaic tile collection named after, and inspired by the father of geometry, Euclid. Rose says, “This collection was inspired by studying historic tapestries under a microscope. I interpreted the sequence of the fibers into a geometric format. The Euclid collection is basically my alphabet—set units designed to work together in an in nite number of ways to tell your story.”

Shaker is part of the West/East line by Ricardo Bello Dias.

ORNARE

Art director Ricardo Bello Dias searched for inspiration for his new lines in distant lands. The West/East collection includes Ikigai, Shaker, and In nite. Shaker (ABOVE) is a reinterpretation of the traditional kitchen. The framed doors stand out as the main design element, with metal accents making them modern and sophisticated with endless opportunity to customize to a wide range of aesthetics, from classic to contemporary. The line also incorporates elements like the bar system which is inspired by the Shaker community’s way of hanging everyday items like chairs on the wall. The system can function in any room in the house, and can serve as a bar, storage unit, or a place to display objects and art.

SMEG

The Italian brand continues their relationship with designers Dolce & Gabbana to follow up their line of hand-painted, wildly colorful refrigerators, with a line of small appliances like toasters, mixers, juicers, and co ee machines painted with brightly-colored traditional Sicilian folklore motifs such as lemons, flowers, prickly pears, and cherries bordered in triangular motifs called crocchi. The line, called “Sicily My Love,” is based on the childhood memories of Stefano Gabbana and Domenico Dolce, which the duo says are mostly based around good food.