Innehållsförteckning för Issue 36 från Design Anthology, Asia Pacific Edition

Welcome to the first edition of a refreshed Design Anthology. What better time to bring something fresh to the table than the new year, and the Year of the Rabbit no less, the Chinese zodiac sign symbolising elegance and beauty, as well as peace and prosperity. You’ll notice a few changes, not all cosmetic. Aside from subtle updates to the design and layout of the magazine, we’ve brought Australia and New Zealand back into the editorial fold to create an Asia Pacific edition, which we intend to be even more impactful and maximise our reach. After a two-year hiatus from physical events, we have big plans to meet and interact with you, our audience, in 2023. We’re hosting the third edition of the Design Anthology Awards this year, with a…

01 B&B Italia × Monica Armani In this outdoor iteration of her Allure O’ table for B&B Italia, Monica Armani reinterprets the table’s graceful form for al fresco settings. The base frame uses the same moulded grey cement, but the top is made from a lightened grey concrete and glossy, glazed stoneware, a nostalgic material that harks back to traditional kitchens and is also robust and resistant to corrosive agents and stains. The surface material is manually glazed by airbrush, creating a unique depth and variety in colour. The table is available with a square or rectangular top and in two heights, and comes in ocean blue, clay or dove grey. bebitalia.com monica-armani.com 02 DeMuro Das Brian DeMuro and Puru Das, the founders of New Delhi- and New York-based design…

Despite the rain and unlike the damp streets outside, Kamaro’an’s Taipei studio feels airy. The space is tucked away on a discreet lane behind a park just south of the city centre. From the entrance there’s a line of sight through three spacious rooms that open into each other, all the way to the back garden. Large windows allow a delicate interplay of light and shadow, while the raw cement floors and walls offset arrangements of tanned leather pouches, ceramic vases, jagged chunks of marble and rattan weavings placed around the studio. For Yun Fan Chang and Shane Liu, a couple and design duo from Taipei, this space serves as a studio and showroom. After meeting at university in 2008, they collaborated on a research project that led to the…

If Asia’s annual 50 Best Bars list is an indicator of a city’s cool factor, Tainan is a curious case. Unlike the fast-paced urban hubs of chart-toppers like Tokyo, Bangkok and even Taipei (a two-hour bullet train ride to the north), low-slung and slow-placed Tainan in Taiwan’s tropical south isn’t exactly known for its dazzling nightlife. Yet, for a city this small, it has birthed an impressive number of award-winning bars and noteworthy contenders since the list’s inauguration in 2016. TCRC, set in a former warehouse on a narrow alley in the centre of town, put Tainan’s cocktail scene on the map when it made the list in 2016 and 2018 with expertly crafted classics that incorporate local ingredients such as pineapple and oolong tea. A few blocks away, mid-century…

There comes a point in most people’s lives when they feel the urge to explore and draw closer to their roots. This was true for Seoul-born Rosa Park, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Cereal magazine and founder and director of Francis Gallery, which found a permanent home in Bath in 2019. That urge, however, didn’t lead her back to her country of origin. After several years spent living in Bath, Park and her family — photographer and Cereal co-founder Rich Stapleton and their young son — made the move to California. ‘The initial pull to Los Angeles was for personal reasons. The decision to open a second location of the gallery followed,’ she says. ‘Many of our clients are in LA and there’s an infectious, vibrant energy for the arts here.’…

The town of Hillsborough, California, sits on the peninsula separating the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco Bay. Travel 20 minutes west and you’ll reach a rocky coastline studded with windswept dunes and sculptural Monterey cypress trees; head the same distance east and you’ll find the more placid, marsh-lined bay. It’s these majestic, ever-changing coastal textures that informed the transformation of a 1947 home in Hillsborough for a young family. Led by San Francisco- and New Haven-based architecture firm Atelier Cho Thompson, the renovation blends organic surfaces in calming, lustrous tones with seamless interior-exterior transitions that, according to cofounder Christina Cho Yoo, ‘reflect being outdoors as much as possible’. At more than 75 years old, the home has seen its surroundings change in step with the area’s tech boom (Hillsborough sits…

WEBSITE Updated throughout the week, our website is an inspiring resource for the best new interiors, architecture, design, travel and art stories design-anthology.com EMAIL The Dispatch is a collection of original stories from our globetrotting team delivered straight to your inbox each month design-anthology.com/dispatch PODCAST Take an international tour with The Design Dialogues as we meet some of the biggest names in design, architecture and interiors design-anthology.com/podcast AWARDS The awards for Asia Pacific’s design community, celebrating high-calibre work by emerging and established designers design-anthology.com/awards EVENTS We bring thought leaders together to explore the future of design and inspire the people making it happen design-anthology.com/events UK EDITION Get to know Europe’s creative community with Design Anthology UK, edited out of London and published by Astrid Media designanthologyuk.com SUBSCRIBE Receive two issues,…

BACKGROUND, FRAME, PLATFORM by Nazmi Anuar SUBURBIA PROJECTS Malaysian imprint Suburbia Projects’ first book is a call by architect and educator Nazmi Anuar to rethink architecture. ‘Why is good architecture synonymous to “foreground” buildings when architecture aims to create a dignified background of our lives?’ asks imprint founder and fellow architect Naadiya Hani in her introduction. The work is thus a manifesto of sorts. As the author describes the title, ‘The core idea… is that what is enabled by architecture — events, sets of relations, everyday life — is always more intriguing than the architectural object itself.’ The ideas are explicated through seven peripatetic illustrated chapters and an appropriately sardonic postscript on the author’s experience with architecture competitions. Though compact, the book covers informal urban adaptation, the importance of the…

MORNING ‘I live out of a suitcase — my days vary tremendously depending on where I am,’ says Filipino designer Rita Nazareno, whose schedule revolves around art, creative inspiration and ZACARIAS 1925, her brand of handwoven bags and home accessories. ‘For a year during the pandemic, I lived and worked in Hawaii and it was glorious,’ she says. ‘I’d have coffee in the mornings overlooking the Pacific while listening to an Eddie Suzuki vinyl from the seventies. I’d head to Monsarrat Avenue, get an açai bowl and watch the surfers or watch the water flowing over the lava rocks.’ Mornings in her current base of Manila may be less romantic but involve important work done remotely with collaborators in LA. ‘My time in Hawaii has shown me just how much…

Jane Yang-D’Haene hasn’t always had an interest in ceramics. ‘I thought it was a messy material and didn’t think it was the right medium for me,’ she says. But on the suggestion of a friend and as an attempt to help her get through some difficult times, she decided to give it a try. ‘I found myself heading to the studio every day. I became obsessed with this simple yet challenging material,’ she recalls. Born in South Korea, Yang-D’Haene grew up surrounded by art. Her grandfather was a composer, her father a painter and her mother a singer. Yang-D’Haene and her family emigrated to the United States when she was 16 years old. While the transition was challenging at first, she was determined to find her place in her adopted…

Paradise can be a double-edged sword — a concept of which James Davidson was acutely aware when he was hired to design the ultimate beach shack on Lizard Island, the northernmost island resort on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. The accommodation had to be suitable for heads of state, celebrities and other well-heeled guests regularly drawn to one of Australia’s premier resorts. It had to frame the spectacular setting within the Great Barrier Reef, a World Heritage-listed natural wonder. And it had to withstand the fierce tropical cyclones that occasionally batter the region. To that end, Davidson appears to have succeeded, having created a singular residence that stands apart literally and figuratively from the other suites and villas at the resort. Simply named The House, the three-bedroom concrete dwelling is flanked…

On the leafy beachfront of Casuarina in Kingscliff, northern New South Wales, sits Otsu House, a handcrafted family home alive to the elements. The owners, Rachel and Josh Ooi of Base Building Concepts, purchased the property with an existing development approval in place. This proposed plan provided a basic starting point, imaginatively remapped by Story Design Collective in close collaboration with its new inhabitants. Structured around a suspended industrial concrete slab, the home’s long rectilinear form projects from the street frontage towards the rear beach access, establishing a sense of momentum. ‘Nature played a huge role in the way the home works and how we created spaces,’ says Sam Ray, senior building designer at Story Design Collective. ‘Being on a long, narrow block running towards the beach, everything needed to…

Amelia Fagence’s workshop setting couldn’t be more idyllic, or more quintessentially coastal, creative Aotearoa New Zealand. In the small township of Wakapuaka near Whakat? Nelson, at the top of the South Island, the studio looks onto bush and beach, and further to the Tasman Sea. The salty breeze helps clear the mind for the creative endeavours at hand, not that the designer and maker needs much in the way of external inspiration — she’s been surrounded by creativity since childhood. Growing up with full-time artist parents, her early outlets were sculpting and painting. Following a Master’s of Architecture at RMIT in Melbourne, Fagence worked in residential architecture for two years before becoming a professional model maker. Drawn to creating with her hands — and back to her homeland of Aotearoa…

According to United Nations research on the environmental impact of the fashion industry, making a single pair of jeans takes around 7,500 litres of water, the same amount of water the average person drinks in seven years. The thirstiness of cotton and the host of chemicals involved in modern denim production make jeans a particularly resource-intensive garment, not to mention the complicated emotional relationship many people have with the wardrobe staple. Enter Unspun, the Hong Kong- and California-based denim brand that has turned the process of finding the perfect pair of jeans into an inclusive, bespoke and low-impact experience. Unspun was founded in 2017 by Hongkonger Walden Lam, who cut his teeth in the strategy team at Lululemon; fashion design and fibre science graduate Beth Esponnette; and mechanical engineer Kevin…

When designer Roy Hong was approached to fit out a newly built apartment in Taipei, he embraced the no-frills ethos of his client. ‘He lives a very simple life on his own, and he wanted his home to reflect that,’ Hong says. During the building’s construction, the designer asked that the sixth-floor penthouse be left bare, eschewing the standard plaster walls and tiled floors common in new builds in Taiwan. This was somewhat unusual and the developer was initially wary of handing over what they regarded as an unfinished home, but his request was eventually granted. Aptly named Radical Brutalism, the project is an ode to raw materiality. Upper walls and ceilings of roughly poured concrete show nail indentations and wood grain from construction moulds. Pockmarks plugged with darker concrete…

One of the first things I was told when we moved to Houston, Texas, in 2018, is that this is not a pedestrian city. The fourth-largest metropolis in the US is a driver’s paradise: a fun park for the vehicularly inclined, a polluted symphony of oversized pickup trucks, sports cars and minivans. Even so, as a lifelong city slicker whose licence needed renewing, I was determined to continue walking, not just to get from place to place, but also as a pastime, a way to get to know a place and a way to get to know oneself. I was intent on finding a home where I could pop out for a coffee or push a stroller around the block, and so we landed on a red brick townhouse in…