Ohio Design

Over the last year there’s been a whole lot of hard work going on next door, our neighbors Southern Pacific have been building a brewery (how pleased are we). We’ve seen them digging out floors, putting on roofs and building walls as they’ve converted the old Mission factory unit into brewery, restaurant, bar and beer mecca. We were very pleased to be involved in designing and producing the seating, all told 110 seats (stools and chairs) for you to choose from as you seat hop around the 11,000 sq ft space

They openend their doors last Friday and we’ve been there ever since, if you’d like to join us Friday late afternoon is a good time for us.

620 Treat Avenue, San Francisco
Sunday-Wednesday 11am-Midnight
Thursday, Friday, Saturday 11am-2am

More images of the space and some of us making the pieces in the workshop

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Photo by Paul Dyer

Bi-Rite’s 18 Reasons is gaining momentum and grabbing the attention of both the food and art communities alike.  18 Reasons may be the newest member of Bi-Rite’s Family of Business, but their ideas are stead fast and have been encouraging wholesome  collaboration for some time.  Opening in their new location on 18th Street in San Francisco’s Mission District in mid-2011, 18 Reasons seamlessly blends into community space, event venue and gallery, and sustainable workspace .  This non-profit is nothing short of inspiring, and their message continues to grow along with its recent interior additions.  Read on after the jump.

Every now and then I wander in to a dollar store and look for something inspiring – which usually unearths a treasure or two. Sam Hecht the designer and co-founder of Industrial Facility based in London —the company behind some wonderful products and last years winner of the London Design Museums Furniture of the Year Award for his Branca chair (I’ll post more on that later)— has been doing the dollar store inspiration for some time now and in a more earnest and curatorial way than I. His book showcasing a recent exhibition of finds, shows off over 150 everyday and not so everyday objects that he’s amassed on his travels. The book entitled Usefulness in Small Things Items from the Under a Fiver Collection gives us a moment of reflection on those everyday mass produced items that so often get overlooked.

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I’m not so sure that the title “Cabin Porn” quite works for me but the content put together by Zach Klein of Vimeo surely makes up for the name. If there’s a tremor in your heart when you think of those Swedes with their summer homes or when you remember the tree houses of your childhood, then this site is going to have you packing up the car with your chainsaw and framing hammer to venture off to some secluded part of the world and set yourself up with an idyll of your own. Of course if you’re not the building kind you can go rent something or qualify for the generous support of such people as the Fogo Island Arts Corporation.

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Yuya Ushida and his XXXX_Sofa 2011 is up for the Design Of The Year, it’s a variation and update of the 2010 version and is constructed from stick and ring linkages, enabling variation in scale and form,  this video is worth the look, also more information at yuya vs design

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The Randall Museum in San Francisco has had a facelift with the installation of Charles Sowers Windswept. A facade of wind directional arrows (borrowed from the world of nautical navigation) allowing the  facade to visually represent the forces of the wind. The project is a perfect example of Charles’s work, as the physical representation of elemental forces are Charles Sowers speciality. Anyone who has visited the San Francisco Exploratorium over the past fifteen years will have come across Charles’s work and hopefully, like me, been delighted and sent back to some child like reverie as I watch a basic force of physics explained to me via an interactive contraption or two. It’s as if Olafur Eliason came from a mechanical backgroun

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Here is a parsons table that we made…

Stefan Diez’s stackable Wilkhahn chair which launched last year winning the Red Dot best of the best award in 2011. A thing of beauty, it’s attention to detail and subtlety of form is reminiscent of the Bourellec brothers in fact a kind of Jasper Morrison Bourellec mashup of simplicity and beauty. As always the form making and raw framework is as interesting as the final product, there’s some lovely development images over at Daily Tonic

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Showcasing at Maison & Objet this month in Paris, Arik Levy‘s new Cage and In & Out lighting products for Forestier. The mashup of chinese paper lantern and the appropriated form of the storm lanterns frame works really well as the visual language is so familiar to us.

There have been several explorations into the lantern of late, some purely object orientated yet exquisitely beautiful such as Barber Osgerby’s Lanterne Marine featuring hand blown Murano glass vessels encompassed by wire framing being one of my favourite and others more functional yet still very precious Lantern Suspended by our friend Stephen Burks for MatterMade

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