BEAUTY: Interior Design--Lolita Eipprova Café & Patisserie

Andrej Mercina, director of the Slovenian architectural firm TRIIIJE has created an arresting, immersive project in the town of Ljubljana. In collaboration with visual artist Jaša Mrevlje-Pollak, Lolita Eipprova Café & Patisserie is a hymn to age, texture, recycled materials, and a sense of the hand-drawn and handmade. The team left exposed the masonry walls full of cracks, stains, peeling plastering and chipped corners and added original tiles that were found in the basement of the building along with extra parquet flooring on the walls and mirrors sourced from other construction sites. The team even shopped at flea markets and thrift stores to find vintage plates and tea cups. Dead stock textiles were used for drapery panels and upholstery on minimal banquettes. And vintage bentwood Thonet chairs were sourced in a variety of stains. I really love the heavily plastered and striated walls in the hallway to the cave-like restrooms. But the most beautiful element in the entire project is the wall treatment, looking as if an artist sketched all over with pastels and charcoal, doodling florals, plants, and meaningful phrases in a beautiful natural color palette. The result is like sitting inside a life-sized version of an artist's sketchbook. Just lovely.

https://www.kaval-group.si/lolita-eipprova
https://www.triiije.com/
http://www.jasha.org/

BEAUTY: Furniture--Bel & Bel Vespa Scooter Chair

A Spanish company, Bel & Bel has made good use of old Vespa parts--they have turned them into one-of-a-kind, limited edition chairs!

Their website says:
"Bel & Bel Chair is made from original parts of the legendary Italian scooter from the 80’s. Re-using the chassis we have created an original and unique model of swivel chair. Our Scooter Chair is manufactured, customized and handmade in full by Bel & Bel. It is a numbered series what makes each piece unique. All come with a Bel & Bel certificate of authenticity. The chair has a reclining feature, a reinforced internal structure and a base with hydraulic piston to regulate and adjust to the most convenient height. It is a very comfortable ergonomic chair, imitation leather upholstered and soft tread silent wheels."

It also comes with actual working tail lights!

http://belybel.com/eng/

BEAUTY: Sculpture--Guy Laramee

Canadian artist Guy Laramee has created The Great Wall, a highly conceptual piece of art using books. He carves them into Chinese landscapes that he weaves into a narrative about the future of American-Chinese relations:

"The Great Wall

Having recently overthrown the American Empire in the 23rd century, the Chinese Empire set out to chronicle the history of the Great Panics during the 21st and 22nd centuries.

This Herculean undertaking resulted in a historiographical masterwork entitled, The Great Wall. Comprising 100 volumes, this encyclopaedia derives its name from The Great Wall of America, a monumental project to build an impregnable wall around the United States of America so as to protect this land from barbarian invasions. 150 years in the making, this wall ultimately isolated Americans from the rest of the world while sapping the country’s remaining cultural and natural resources. It also undermined the American people’s confidence in systematized hedonism, thus hastening the fall of the American Empire. As we now know this paved the way for China to invade American territory.

The Chinese Empire later ordered a group of scribes to write The Great Wall series. In the course of their duties they familiarized themselves with the libraries of the former USA. Through a strange twist of fate they thereby discovered the ancient sources of their own civilization which the new Middle Kingdom had long ago removed from its libraries. In the end this contact, primarily with Taoism and Chan (Zen) Buddhism, sowed the seeds of the Chinese Empire."


http://www.guylaramee.com/