At the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House Gala, the tablescapes shined
On May 2, hundreds of Lenox Hill Neighborhood House supporters gathered at Cipriani 42nd Street for Flights of Fancy, the historic nonprofit organization’s annual spring gala. The event, spearheaded by honorary design chair and board member Christopher Spitzmiller and design chairs Lindsey Coral Harper and Harry Heissmann, brought together more than 40 designers—including AD PRO Directory members Alexandra Howard Inc., Eric Lysdahl Interiors, Foley & Cox Interiors, Samantha Ware Designs, and New York School of Interior Design students—who created elaborate tablescapes. Funds raised from this black-tie evening will help some 15,000 New Yorkers in need through Lenox Hill Neighborhood House’s housing, education, and wellness programs.
AD PRO Hears…
…for The Met’s spring exhibition, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” the museum tapped Christopher and Dominic Leong of Leong Leong to design this year’s Costume Institute spaces. Pulling from the exhibit’s thematics, which include those of nature—a metaphor for the ephemerality of fashion—and scientific preservation, the gallery presents the objects on view as “specimens” to be examined. After today’s anticipated Met Gala, museum-goers can peruse the sequence of self-contained galleries, which are organized into three sections focused around earth, air, and water.
Openings
Colony settles into a new Tribeca home
After 10 years tucked away on Canal Street, Colony, the Tribeca design gallery and studio founded by Jean Lin, has moved some 10 minutes away to a prominent street-level location on West Broadway that radiates cool inside a former industrial garage. Beyond the glass façade and custom panel system from textile designer Hiroko Takeda and bespoke curtain maker Erik Bruce, the space is dotted with steel beams and columns, embracing white painted brick and exposed ceilings. It teems with collectibles from independent designers, such as Scheibe Design’s Roebuck dresser embellished with extruded round pulls, SSS Atelier’s brass-detailed Kamp dining chair, and Grain’s checkerboard pattern Off-Grid Cabinet. Mingling with these contemporary finds are vintage objects curated by Lin, Colony’s first homegrown retail endeavor.
Raisonné showcases rare Ettore Sottsass pieces
Ettore Sottsass, the radical Italian architect whose comprehensive practice included buildings, glass, ceramics, even a cherry red typewriter, is the subject of an expansive show opening at New York’s Raisonné gallery on May 9. “Ettore Sottsass Shapes, Colors, and Symbols” (through June 30) will showcase over 100 pieces, from Sottsass’s early experiments in ceramic to the glass works inspired by Native American Hopi katsina dolls; The latter were made a mere few years before his death in 2007. Show highlights include rare ceramic totems—like a bespoke triptych version made in 1966—and a range of private furniture commissions created for a collector in Los Angeles. These lesser-known rarities mix in with Sottsass hallmarks like the Carlton Room Divider, a 1980s Memphis Group icon, and the Ultrafragola mirror, designed for Poltronova in 1970. A sizzling current of lightness and humor pervades the work, which Sottsass liked to say should act “like an aspirin for a headache.”
AD PRO Hears…
…Atelier Vime has teamed up with auction house Thierry de Maigret on the European Ceramics, Islamic Art and Archaeology sale taking place May 17 at Hôtel Drouot in Paris. Ninety of the lots, curated by the Provence studio and home decor brand known for its wicker and rattan creations, are 18th- and 19th-century ceramics that once filled a rambling hôtel particulier in the region, including an undulating blue-and-white oblong platter from Montpellier fringed in a lace motif, a set of scalloped Joseph Hannong plates from Strasbourg decorated with soft blooms, and plenty of glazed, slender-necked Turkish Demoiselle d’Avignon jugs.
Exhibitions
Casey McCafferty makes his UK debut at Gallery Fumi
New Jersey–based artist Casey McCafferty’s Shaker-inspired explorations in wood and stone get the limelight in “Head Hand Foot,” opening May 9 at Gallery Fumi in London’s Mayfair district. His first major solo exhibition (on view through June 29) in the city comprises intricate hand-carved furniture designs: the sandblasted ash Gaeta Cabinet High, the fantastical oiled walnut Sculptural Bed Side Table, and Hag Stones, a floating totem uniting fragments of wood from previous projects, like butternut, white oak, and red and gray elm.