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Few people understand design for children better than Lora Appleton, the founder of kinder MODERN, a contemporary and vintage design gallery and design studio that makes and showcases work for children. In turn, few people understand Appleton better than her son, whom she credits as her primary muse. In this week’s Milkshake, we asked her how he’s taught her new ways of looking at design: “A few years in, when my son was able to walk around and look at things and notice material, I was really fascinated by how much the built environment was an influence on him,” she says. “If he went into a new place, where he’d never seen a type of material on the wall, he would directly go right for it – and there was this real sense of curiosity that seems obvious with kids, but it was really pointed, their thinking. And then years later, he was able to recall that material, notice that it was made into a chair by one of my designers, and make that correlation. And I thought that was really fascinating – the memory, the tactileness of thinking, all of that really connects with kids in a way that before being a mom, I didn’t really understand.”
Also in this Milkshake: Lora shares why she thinks the 1950s might qualify as the golden age for children’s design: “The early 1950s to 1960s was such an incredibly robust period for design for children,” she says. “The things that were right – correct, good choices – very much focused on materiality. A lot of work from that period was very simple materials: birch ply, not a lot of paint glazes or things that could be harmful to children. They really understood how to boil things down to the most simplistic forms to give children options of curiosity, but not to give them the whole answer.” She also offers a quick show-and-tell featuring her favorite-ever design for kids: Hans Brockhage und Erwin Andrä’s rocking chair: “It was this incredible piece of furniture – a play item, if you will – that operated as a pedal car, so the child would sit in here,” she says. “It was made of birch ply, [with] a very simple metal armature for the wheels – and then when flipped, it was a rocking chair. This, to me, really signified a turning point for where play was headed in the 1950s, encouraging children to really get into what they were playing with in terms of furniture.”
For more from Lora – including her tribute to Mira Nakashima, one of the industry’s many (many) under-heralded, female-identifying designers – tune in!
Diana Ostrom, who has written for Wallpaper, Interior Design, ID, The Wall Street Journal, and other outlets, is also the author of Faraway Places, a newsletter about travel.
Milkshake, DMTV (Design Milk TV)’s first regular series, shakes up the traditional interview format by asking designers, creatives, educators and industry professionals to select interview questions at random from their favorite bowl or vessel. During their candid discussions, you’ll not only gain a peek into their personal homeware collections, but also valuable insights into their work, life and passions.
A truly beautiful piece of lighting can transform a room – and often costs more than we might think at first (well-lit) glance. Ian Yang, CEO and founder of Gantri, understands that push (toward great lighting) and pull (away from $1800 lamps). But Yang has long investigated the space between impulses: His education took him to the London School of Economics, but also revered art school Central Saint Martins. As a kid in China, he toured factories with his parents, who has a global logistics firm – and when he moved to San Francisco, he joined TechShop, a maker space fueled by a community fluent in the next-wave manufacturing processes like 3D printing. The result of all those influences is Gantri: “At Gantri, we’re rethinking how lighting is designed, made, and sold using 3D printing,” he says, in this week’s Milkshake. “We’re supporting independent designers and studios – and making great lighting designs more accessible and more sustainable.”
Gantri partners with designers around the world – like Oakland’s Prowl Studio, Felix Pöttinger in Munich, Heitor Lobo Campos in Brasilia, and former Milkshake star Bradley L. Bowers in New Orleans – to create their work at a reasonable cost. Here, Ian shows off the Kobble task light by none other than Karim Rashid: “It’s typical Karim – really blobby, really beautiful – and the entire product is actually made from two different types of plant-based materials that we call Gantri, plant polymers,” Ian says. “They’re both derived from sugarcane, which is a really amazing material.” Each part is 3D printed, then QC’d multiple times before it’s hand assembled. (We loved this collection – which includes task lights, wall lights, and floor lights – so much that we covered it when it debuted last year, saying that “while each piece of the lighting series can easily work alone, the group together has the ability to make a space feel extra balanced.”)
Also in this Milkshake: Ian shares how digital-centric manufacturing processes alter a product’s look and feel – including layer lines and subtle textures – and tees up the brand’s latest Independent Creative Release, which included the Hula Collection by Pöttinger, the Gallery Collection by Andrew Ferrier, the Noah Collection by Filippo Mambretti, and more. “It’s a way for us to really support independent desires and studios who wouldn’t otherwise be able to launch products to market with a lot of visibility,” Ian says. “So we thought by creating this platform – where we launch a bunch of designs from a whole collection of designers – we can really maximize their voice and amplify the effect of the product launch. Last year, we launched more than 20 designs as part of this initiative, and this year we’ll continue to do that with even more designers.” To see more of what Gantri has in store, tune in!
Diana Ostrom, who has written for Wallpaper, Interior Design, ID, The Wall Street Journal, and other outlets, is also the author of Faraway Places, a newsletter about travel.
Milkshake, DMTV (Design Milk TV)’s first regular series, shakes up the traditional interview format by asking designers, creatives, educators and industry professionals to select interview questions at random from their favorite bowl or vessel. During their candid discussions, you’ll not only gain a peek into their personal homeware collections, but also valuable insights into their work, life and passions.
Timothy Goodman is a busy man: When not donating murals to non-profit organizations in New York or designing Nikes for basketball star Kevin Durant, prepping for a new gallery show, or collabing with big-name brands, he somehow managed the time to move to Paris – and then, several years later, publish a book about that experience. The full title is: I Always Think It’s Forever: A Love Story Set in Paris, Told by an Unreliable but Earnest Narrator.
Goodman’s story just hit bookstores a couple weeks ago, and in this episode of Milkshake, he takes us through the project: part memoir, part travel story, part art book. Interviews punctuate a deeply emotional recounting of how Goodman extended a stay to Paris after meeting someone. “That’s just the only way I know how to tell a story,” he says. “There’s this continuous through-line of the love story, but then you turn the page and suddenly wherever you’re at in that love story, I’m talking, I’m wrapping myself in the context of today’s dating culture. If I’m in a chapter where I’m talking about the heartbreak of my love story, suddenly you turn the page and then it’s, like, here’s 25 non-cheesy breakup songs, or here’s all these funny dating app bios I came across on Hinge or Tinder. What’s personal is always universal.”
While it takes place in his incredibly dynamic studio, this Milkshake is also part reading – a testament, he says, to an ambition to add spoken-word artist to his repertoire. “I’ve been doing events with my friends, with jazz guys, where I do spoken word poetry over them playing piano and saxophone,” he says. “I’ve been very heavily inspired by Jack Kerouac – he used to do these albums in the 50s where he would read his poems, his readings, over piano. I want to cut an album.”
Also in this Milkshake, we ask Goodman whether this was a love story about a woman or about Paris itself. Neither, he says: “This is a love story about me more than anything – you know what I mean?” he says. “This book is really about how I was able to finally stop the cycle in heartbreak, in breakups, that I always go through and show up for myself through therapy, through intense evaluation, about being kinder to myself, being okay with not being okay, accepting my vulnerability as a man, accepting that it’s okay again to be masculine and cry or go to therapy or whatever.” Tune in for more!
Diana Ostrom, who has written for Wallpaper, Interior Design, ID, The Wall Street Journal, and other outlets, is also the author of Faraway Places, a newsletter about travel.
Milkshake, DMTV (Design Milk TV)’s first regular series, shakes up the traditional interview format by asking designers, creatives, educators and industry professionals to select interview questions at random from their favorite bowl or vessel. During their candid discussions, you’ll not only gain a peek into their personal homeware collections, but also valuable insights into their work, life and passions.
In this week’s Milkshake, ceramicist Helen Levi welcomes us to her studio in Queens, New York. This is where she creates her highly regarded work: mugs and cups, plates and bowls, and – our favorite – her colorful tiles. Her work is distinguished by highly graphic vibes (like these incredible Color Field tiles) and a determined sense of whimsy – like her Artist’s espresso mugs, with a rainbow splatter pattern covered in a clear glaze or her Snow Drift mugs, with a textural, and very snowy, white glaze. In addition to their sense of welcome and warmth, her pieces exude a sense of easy style.
Here, she sails through a few of our questions: Was her big break – which came courtesy of famed retailer Steven Alan – a product of fate or chance? Levi had been working in pottery since childhood, even teaching the discipline to kids – but until she met Alan in 2013, she hadn’t sold it to the public. “I was at a pop-up in one of his stores, and I went with a friend who had been working on the store,” Levi says. “I saw he had some handmade pottery out, and I thought, ‘Why is a clothing store selling handmade pottery?’” The answer was straightforward: Alan planned to open a home goods store. “I had been completely unaware of the community of functional potters that existed – obviously they had been doing their thing and I just didn’t know about it, but it was so exciting for me to think about these small studios,” she says. “Since I had been making pottery for a very long time as a hobby, it kind of lit a little light bulb in me that maybe this was a path that existed.” Alan asked her to share pictures of her work, and when she did, he placed an order. “That was my first experience selling wholesale,” she says. “My first experience getting my work out there – and it was also my first experience making work not for myself or as a gift. So, a huge learning curve there – I think I remade that order three times.”
Also in this Milkshake, Levi shares how she splits her artistic identity between potter and photographer (settling on the “pot-ographer” of her Instagram bio) and a technical challenge she’s faced. For the latter, she has a (very large) piece to share – one that was so big, it didn’t fit in her kiln. “And so it remains here, half-finished five years later,” she says. Tune in for more!
Diana Ostrom, who has written for Wallpaper, Interior Design, ID, The Wall Street Journal, and other outlets, is also the author of Faraway Places, a newsletter about travel.
Milkshake, DMTV (Design Milk TV)’s first regular series, shakes up the traditional interview format by asking designers, creatives, educators and industry professionals to select interview questions at random from their favorite bowl or vessel. During their candid discussions, you’ll not only gain a peek into their personal homeware collections, but also valuable insights into their work, life and passions.
Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus of The Minimalists have built their careers on helping people live better with less stuff, via their best-selling books, films, live events, and The Minimalists Podcast, co-hosted by T.K. Coleman. On this episode of Milkshake, we speak with all three, as they trade off questions about minimalism, maximalism, and how to consider the objects in our lives.
For those who find this lifestyle philosophy convincing, the key might be easing into it: “There’s no need to get rid of your grandmother’s doily collection right away,” says Fields Millburn, noting that “people tend to struggle with sentimental items.” There are probably other places to look: “Start with the things that are easy to give you the momentum: Have you been in your closet lately? Have you noticed that most of the clothes you own you don’t actually wear? It’s okay to let go of anything you haven’t worn in the last year. We have a rule called the 90-90 rule – we also refer to it as the seasonality rule. If you’re holding onto something that you haven’t worn in the last 90 days, and you know you’re not gonna wear it in the next 90 days, you can give yourself permission to let it go.”
We asked how minimalists give gifts: “The best gift that I can give is the opportunity to help another human being feel, seen, heard, appreciated, validated in a way that matters to them,” says Coleman. “That’s what really matters. You can impress people with things. You can make them jealous of you. But you can’t ‘money’ your way into love. So when you’re trying to get a gift for someone [and] you pay a lot of money but your heart’s not in it, they’re gonna see right through it. But if your heart is in it, they’re gonna see what really matters.”
Also in this Milkshake, we ask how the pandemic changed minimalism, how to determine what’s junk and what’s essential, and where the hosts might permit a little bit of maximalism into their lives. Tune in for the answers!
Diana Ostrom, who has written for Wallpaper, Interior Design, ID, The Wall Street Journal, and other outlets, is also the author of Faraway Places, a newsletter about travel.
Milkshake, DMTV (Design Milk TV)’s first regular series, shakes up the traditional interview format by asking designers, creatives, educators and industry professionals to select interview questions at random from their favorite bowl or vessel. During their candid discussions, you’ll not only gain a peek into their personal homeware collections, but also valuable insights into their work, life and passions.
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