Your home & your soul need art and whimsy
2024 Home Goods Spectacular: The Finale
Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane.
Our 2024 G.I.F.T.S. List, bursting with slappers for the mind, body and home, is here.
Mach 3+ intel for travel to cool places around the entire planet is here.
The haters said this day would never come, but the blowout finale of our 2024 Home Goods Recon Spectacular is here.
Yes — every year we devote a full week to a concentrated roundup of Mach 3+ intel into:
Lighting
Furniture
Ceramics
Textiles
Cushions
Tableware
Rugs
Shower curtains
And much more
This is that week. On Tuesday we sparked things off, dropping not only an abbondanza of recon into deep-cut small makers doing great work across a range of cribbo-spanning categories, but also a profound home-enswaggening concept we call “The Plinth Principle.” Under this principle, we wrote, a plinth can be “any singular thing that serves not only to accent but re-cast, rejuvenate and enswaggen the room it’s in conversation with.”
And wouldn’t you know it, after we put the finishing touches on that sletter, Jonah and I (Erin) popped into an opening at the studio of gifted and kind Oakland landscape artist David Wilson, who loves sending people physical mail, has only ever owned a flip phone, and is effectively not on the internet. He was showing two new large-scale pieces, not hung on the walls in typical (dusty and played-out??) gallery style, but rather — as you can see in the image above, where he’s showing me a beautiful new watercolor — perched upon some handsome, no-nonsense, homemade plywood plinths!!
Which only emboldened us to close things out today even HARDER.
As always, you can find our past home-slapper coverage, easily navigable by category, in our dedicated Home Goods Index.
Let’s get to it, starting with — GLASSWARE, FLATWARE & PLACEMATS:
Crinkled silk appliqué placemats from Ancán — one of our favorite sources for vibey wall hangings and textiles. These scalloped beauties are made by hand from botanical-dyed silk. Each takes 1-2 days to complete. Available for pre-order here. You don’t need to be precious with them just because they’re silk — coffee & wine stains in these threads will only testify to a Life Well Lived. But for something relatively more hard-wearing, we like the mats from Chicago’s The Weaving Mill, made from deadstock yarns, $36 for a pair here.
We recently caught a tiny exhibition of objects that Alexander Calder made for himself, his family & his friends. I was especially taken with some curly scissor handles he fashioned with pliers and wire, and thought of them when I saw this brass Calder-inspired cutlery, made by Portuguese artist Sebastião Lobo for Richmond, Virginia’s Casa Shop, here. The design, material and price tag make this more of an art/whimsy object than daily-driver flatware — but your home and your soul need art and whimsy, player!! I could see the set looking incredible on the wall or on a plinth — it’d be much less dough than trying to cop an actual Calder — and, real talk, eating at least one meal with these would be a trip. There’s also napkin rings in the same style, here.
Danish artist Alexander Kirkeby puts some swaggy topspin on his blown glass, i.e. the knobbly-based fruit plinth pictured above. He also has twisty-stemmed wineglasses and swirling crystalline plinths (a.k.a. egg cups) for your soft-boileds. All here.
Pattern-DJ your tabletop with Studio Ford’s block-printed napkins and table linens. I particularly like the combo of this quilt-like geometric pattern with these stripes, and the hypnotic block print on this fantastic tablecloth, above top right.
Murdered-out beverage sipping? I never considered it til now: Sugahara, founded in Tokyo in 1932, makes these thin & lightweight frosted black glasses, which look very cool & are apparently a true b*tch for glassblowers to produce. Here.
I picked up a set of drinking glasses by Laguna B a couple years ago in 🤌Venezia 🤌 with erratic squiggles and distorted flowers embedded in them. They were by far the coolest, weirdest patterns I found among the city’s many glass-sellers. You can order a similar version (“Goto”) through their site, along with bold stripes and other patterns that put a funky twist on traditional Murano glass. Available here.
We picked up these natural indigo-dyed placemats last year from a great home-goods shop in Oakland called Atomic Garden. They’ve since sold out, but you can order them, along with a bunch of artisan-made fabric goods, directly from their maker, Handwork Studio. They’re pieced together from cotton remnants, dyed, then shot through with sashiko-style running stitches, as you can see above. (Smattering of fresh huckleberries not included!!) Here.
Next up — CUSHIONS, BLANKETS, SHEETS & SHOWER CURTAINS: