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House of Folly – Interior Designers - We are an Interior design company, online shop for home decor & furnishings and design showroom based in Dubai / UAE.
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Accessories, Art

Tiffany Cooper

 

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TIFFANY COOPER
Born in 1985, Tiffany Cooper studied at the Strasbourg School of Decorative Arts, but chose to work as a gallery assistant and retail sales coordinator for luxury brands, rather than a risk in the unstable creative job market. Once she attained a position of responsibility, she found herself living in overpriced lodgings following a stultifying routine. She walked away from it all to travel and create an illustrated blog, The Best of All Possible Worlds, where she laughed about her jobless state, teased Karl Lagerfeld, and delved into existential questions of the highest order. Her blog attracted lots of attention and allowed her to publish her first book (The Best of All Possible Worlds- Le Meilleur des Mondes Possibles in French). She became an author/illustrator, regularly contributing to magazines (Voici, EllE, Milk, Madame Figaro) and working with the Colette concept store as well as several publishers (Delcourt, Eyrolles, Marabout…). In 2015, she was invited by Karl Lagerfeld to collaborate with his brand : an exhibition, a capsule collection, a short animated film, illustrations for the Karl Daily and a graphic novel about Karl Lagerfeld’s life (Karl’s Secrets, 2015). Her latest book Fairy Tales as seen by Tiffany Cooper came out in September 2016.

And I’m happy to tell you that her art is going to be accessible in Dubai through our online shop.

February 6, 2017by Tarek
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Accessories, Art, Interior Design

Alessandro Mendini -postmodernist with witty designs

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I’m sure everyone who has been home furnishing shopping have seen these objects, but did you ever ask who was behind it or where did it come from? It was started by an Italian man called Alessandro Mendini who is a postmodernist making witty designs which are inspired by art.

Decades before the phrase ‘design-art’ become ubiquitous, Alessandro Mendini(1931) was doing his own version of the idea. In the late 1970s and early 80s, when Milan was emerging as the new design centre of the world, he put forward a postmodernist vision that borrowed from disparate sources, such as  mass-produced pieces and historical styles.

He played an important part in the development of Italian design. He also worked, aside from his artistic career, for Casabella, Modo and Domus magazines.

His design has been characterized by his strong interest in mixing different cultures and different forms of expression; he creates graphics, furniture, interiors, paintings and architectures and wrote several articles and books; he is also renowned as an enthusiastic member of jury in architectural competition for young designers. Along with Branzi and Sottsass and with his presence in Global Tools and Radical design, he was the main force behind the renovation of Italian design in the 80’s. In the late 70’s he went back to designing and various projects and in 1979 joined the Alchimia Studio. This group of radical designers in the 80’s in Memphis had upset functionalist designers by designing objects for sheer artistic pleasure and by referring to popular culture and kitsch. This was well outside the norms of industrial production and practicality. With Alchima he created objects, furniture, environments, paintings, installations and architectural works. Among his most significant works during this period were the Groningen Museum and the reinvention of the Alessi image for whom he is meta-projectual consultant. In 1989 he opened the Atelier Mendini in Milan with his brother Francesco and continued his career as a sophisticated, pop designer. The key element is always a clever hybrid between art and design resulting in popular objects that achieve great commercial success.

February 1, 2017by Tarek
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Art, Fashion

Prism Metallic By BAO BAO Issey Miyake

October 1, 2016by Tarek
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Accessories, Art, Interior Design

Name To Know Louis Weisdorf

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Danish architect Louis Weisdorf says that he ‘specialises in versatility’ : he’s worked in almost every field of design, but it’s his lighting that we really admire. He uses moveable elements to create multifunctional pieces that always shield the eye from the glare of bare bulbs. His masterful ‘Multi-Lite’pendant lamp, recently released by Gubi, was first sketched in 1972 and consists of cylinder enclosed by two semi-spherical shade and a brass hoop.

the shades can be adjusted up and down to create four different configurations.

 

September 30, 2016by Tarek
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Accessories

It’s all about the pineapple

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What is the new thing for this season, you may ask? Well, it’s all about the pineapple design! It’s not easy to create a new product idea for interior design and the creativity needed is the same as in the fashion business. We all need to create things to entice you to buy that you don’t really need. The simple pineapple is surfacing everywhere I go, whether Zara Home, Debenhams to H&M, and even Laura Ashley, all shapes and sizes are appearing. Pineapple’s in all shades of gold, designed as a vase or a lamp or even the famous Oliver Bonas cocktail shaker. Check out pineapple jewellrey boxes and and wine corks. do I want one? My answer is,of course, I do. Check out these pictures.

 

September 25, 2016by Tarek
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Art, Fashion, Interior Design

The Dos And Donts Of Decorating According To Sue Timney

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Sue Timney formed Timney-Fowler with Grahame Fowler in 1979 after she graduated from the Royal College of Art, and together the pair went on to create some of the design world’s most enduring and evocative prints. Graphic, bold and modern with twists on neo-classical, their work flowed from the world of interiors onto catwalks and back again, as they collaborated with big names such as Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Diane von Furstenberg. The Fashion and Textile museum is celebrating the 30th anniversary of Timney-Fowler, and Sue’s career in design with a special retrospective – Sue Timney and The Design of Timney-Fowler.

So checkout our Q&A with Timney.

How would you describe your style? The most difficult question I can think of answering. Some key words would be graphic, disciplined, perhaps a sense of theatre. My influences are from so many areas of art and design history – the Renaissance, William de Morgan to Zaha Hadid as well as the street.

How do you approach a new design? With an open mind…

When you first launched Timney-Fowler, what inspired your designs? The biggest single element was travel. I was born in North Africa and travelled constantly as a child, so a lot of this experience came into the work that I did in those early days with Grahame Fowler.

And what tends to inspire them now? Everything, everyday. That’s what’s exciting, you never know where the inspiration is coming from. There is no doubt, though, that as a designer there is a huge advantage getting older as this inspiration becomes easier to translate into visuals.

What is it that makes your work so adaptable from fashion to interiors? Probably because I wasn’t originally trained as a designer – but as a fine artist, which in turn makes me probably look at things more laterally. But overwhelmingly too I’m not sure I believe in “boxes” of creative thought. One idea influences another – it’s just the way you approach it that changes.

How do you think design changed in the three decades you have been working in the industry? The biggest change for all of us in this industry has been the advance of technology without a doubt – for bad and good. It means I can network now with my team on a project, which in turn means I don’t run a huge studio (which I miss) – however it is more time efficient and it means I don’t have to be in London all the time (which I don’t miss).

What design are you most proud of? Definitely my four children, Alix, Louis, Max and Todd!

And aside from your own work, is there another design or designer you admire? I’m not sure I admire my own work, and it’s always a very hard to isolate one name as I’m daily in admiration of designers past and present. But Lucienne Day was an amazing designer and mark maker that I can relate to. Her fabrics and ceramic designs were unique and still feel contemporary. She was an independent woman who worked all her life because she believed in what she was doing.

What’s next? As well as the exhibition, I’ve also just launched a book so I’m travelling around the country and to New York to do signings. Meanwhile, I have been working with House of Fraser as it will be launching a Timney brand in the spring for home and fashion across many product areas – it’s very exciting.

What is your own home like? Well, there’s definitely black and white in it! But I am also a big collector and so I’ve got a lot of these collections from groups of ceramics to 20th century prints and boxes grouped in various places around the house. Justin [de Villeneuve], my husband’s work also has a prominent place as his past and current photography fits very well with my colours and wallpapers!

Describe your perfect room, fictional or otherwise. Somewhere I can relax and be happy with all my family – without them there is no perfect room.

 

 

 

 

September 18, 2016by Tarek
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Art, Fashion, Interior Design

The Gioconda Of The 21st Century – Fornasetti

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I’m sure you have seen her face before, but not knowing this woman, and what is her story. Is she just a pretty face? Or has she got a darker life behind her angelic face. As we go back in time lets start with the creator.

Fornasetti (10 November 1913 – 9 October 1988) was an Italian painter, sculptor, interior decorator and engraver.

He lived most of his life in Milan, attending the Brera Art Academy from 1930-32 when he was expelled for insubordination. During World War II, he went into exile in Switzerland from 1943-46. He created more than 11,000 items, many featuring the face of a woman, operatic soprano Lina Cavalieri, as a motif. Fornasetti found her face in a 19th-century magazine. “What inspired me to create more than 500 variations on the face of a woman?” asks Italian designer, Piero Fornasetti of himself. “I don’t know,” he admits, “I began to make them and I never stopped.” The “Tema e Variazioni” (theme and variation) plate series based on Cavalieri’s face numbered more than 350.

Other common features in his work include heavy use of black and white, the sun and time. His style is reminiscent of Greek and Roman architecture, by which he was heavily influenced.

Today it is most common to see Fornasetti’s style in fashion and room accessories such as scarves, ties, lamps, furniture, china plates and tables and his son, Barnaba Fornasetti, continues to design in his father’s name.

Lina Cavalieri (25 December 1874 – 7 February 1944) was an Italian operatic soprano known for her great beauty. Cavalieri, born in Viterbo, Latium, Italy, she lost her parents at the age of fifteen and became a ward of the state, sent to live in a Roman Catholic orphanage. The vivacious young girl was extremely unhappy under the strict raising of the nuns, and at the first opportunity she ran away with a touring theatrical group. Blessed with a good singing voice, a young Cavalieri made her way to Paris, France, where her stunning good looks opened doors and she obtained work as a singer at one of the city’s café-concerts. From there she performed at a variety of music halls and other such venues around Europe while still working to develop her voice for the opera. A soprano, Cavalieri took voice lessons and made her opera debut in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1900, the same year she married her first husband, the Russian Prince Bariatinsky. Eventually she followed in the footsteps of Hariclea Darclée as one of the first stars of Puccini’s Tosca. In 1904 she sang at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo then in 1905, at the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre in Paris, Cavalieri starred opposite Enrico Caruso in the Umberto Giordano opera, Fedora. From there, she and Caruso took the show to New York City, debuting with it at the Metropolitan Opera on 5 December 1906.

During her career, Cavalieri sang with other opera greats such as the Italian baritone Titta Ruffo and the French tenor Lucien Muratore, whom she married in 1913. After retiring from the stage, Cavalieri ran a cosmetic salon in Paris. In 1914, on the eve of her fortieth birthday — her beauty still spectacular — she wrote an advice column on make-up for women in Femina magazine and published a book, My Secrets of Beauty. In 1915, she returned to her native Italy to make motion pictures. When that country became involved in World War I, she went to the United States where she made four more silent films. The last three of her films were the product of her friend, the Belgian film director Edward José.

Eventually Paolo d’Arvanni, Cavalieri returned to live with her husband in Italy. Well into her sixties when World War II broke out, she nevertheless worked as a volunteer nurse. Cavalieri was killed in 1944 during an Allied bombing raid that destroyed her home in the outskirts of Florence.

La Cavalieri’s discography is slim. In 1910, for Columbia, she recorded arias from Faust, Carmen, Mefistofele, La bohème, Manon Lescaut and Tosca, as well as the song, “Maria, Marì! (Ah! Marì! Ah! Marì!).” In 1917, for Pathé, the soprano recorded “Le rêve passé,” with Muratore.

She was painted by the Italian artist Giovanni Boldini (acquired by Maurice Rothschild) and by the Swiss-born American artist Adolfo Müller-Ury (1862-1947). The latter is now the property of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, the gift of Nicholas Meredith Turner in memory of his wife the soprano Jessica Dragonette. Hers is the face that appears repeatedly, obsessively in Piero Fornasetti’s designs. Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida portrayed Cavalieri in the film The World’s Most Beautiful Woman. In 2004, a book was published authored by Paul Fryer and Olga Usova titled Lina Cavalieri -The Life of Opera’s Greatest Beauty, 1874–1944.

 

 

 

August 14, 2016by Tarek
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Interior Design

Vintage Verner

Danish architect and designer Verner Panton was one of the first designers to produce pop-inspired furniture. His iconoclastic pieces, such as the moulded plastic Panton Chair, have now become collectables. The company that produces many of Panton’s designs, Verpan, has revisited another of his most memorable pieces, the curvaceous Cloverleaf sofa, which comes in as little as a two seater to a six seat styles. Designed in 1969 for the Cologne Furniture Fair, the modular puzzle is a work of art guaranteed to have your visitors talking. I’m sure if you are a fashion victim as myself, you would definitely seen them at Prada shops in different colors.

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July 13, 2016by Tarek
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Interior Design

The Princess Leia Buns Sofa

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When I saw this Gilder sofa by Moroso, the first thing that came to mind was Princess Leia buns, combining in the sofa fun and sensuality, function and stage presence, and concentrating them in an abundant, full, bold form. Glider offsets the structural approach with an instinctive and anthropomorphic interpretation, as if it were the snapshot of an exuberant exploration of volumes, the enigmatic charm, ancestral in some respects, of roundness. A suggestion strengthened by the physical and conceptual association with movement: thanks to the rocking structure the sofa is transformed into a swing, adding to the comfort and physical presence a new experience, unexpected yet at the same time deeply intimate. The outcome is absolute, verging on the archetype, as only work performed in the territory opened up between art and industrial design, design and sculpture, can sustain.

May 26, 2016by Tarek
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Interior Design

Another Grand Maestro

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Charles Rennie Mackintosh Glasgow/Londra, 1868/1928
Charles Rennie Mackintosh was born in Glasgow in 1868 and died in London on 10th December 1928. His personality is one of those that characterize the period immediately preceding the Modern Movement.
His name is mainly connected with the design for the Glasgow School of Art: he was the animator and most authoritative exponent of the group known as the “Glasgow School” and he distinguished himself principally because he recovered the most authentic values of the Scottish idiom and of neo-Gothic taste.
The group, also named “the School of Ghosts”, became known throughout Europe – in Liege in 1895, London in 1896, Vienna in 1900, Turin in 1902, Moscow in 1903, Budapest etc.Besides the School of Art, the most interesting works are undoubtedly: the “Windyhill” house at Kilmacolm (1900), the “Hill House” at Helensburgh (1902-3), the arrangement of the Derngate house, Northampton (1916-20), and the decorative work in Miss Cranston’s Tea-Rooms in Glasgow. Among the furnishings of his decorative interiors, it is above all the chair – an object of special attention in the “Cassina I Maestri” collection – which represents the focal point for coordinated spatial action.
Within it, the controlling force of the composition is always resolved, sometimes articulated in fluent and delicate forms, at other times in severely geometric forms.

May 26, 2016by Tarek
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