If you're wondering where
Jonathan Adler got his inspiration for his
Utopia series, or where
Tord Boontje got his taste for saturated colors and fanciful flora, look no further than Danish artist and designer Bjørn Wiinblad. This midcentury ceramic artist set up his own studio in 1952, and continued to reproduce his designs through the 1990s.
Much of his work is inspired by the fairy tales of fellow Dane Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote such well-known stories as The Little Mermaid and The Princess and the Pea.
Billing himself as "your 24-hour pot dealer,"
Jonathan Adler gets cheeky with his new collection of pottery,
Druggist ($24-$55). Billed as "An Apothecary of Emotion" his collection features translucent porcelain pieces that are first thrown on the wheel. Afterwards, the trompe-l'oeil chains and names of the emotions are added.
When
Ikea tapped
Hella Jongerius to design a line of
socially conscious vases in 2006, many of us were thinking, "Hella who?" But design junkies know that Jongerius's influence reaches far beyond the blue-and-yellow confines of Ikea. With her cutting-edge combination of industrial design and traditional craft methods, the Dutch designer's reputation has spread from Amsterdam's
Droog Design Collective to the European design cognoscenti.
But I like Jongerius's stuff for even more basic reasons: It is beautiful and very much unlike the other beautiful things I admire each day. The ways in which she combines folksy tradition with sleek aesthetics always impress me.
