DESIGN SPOT
DUBAI, WHICH BOASTS the world’s tallest
structure, the extraordinarily elegant Khalifa
tower, also hosts an annual design festival called
Dubai Design Week. Its glittering third iteration last November was held again within the
Dubai Design District popularly known as D3.
Brimming with global designers, art and design
galleries and retailers specializing in design,
DDW included a massive Global Grad Show
curated by Brendan McGetrick, showcasing innovative life-changing designs by graduates from
around the world including a wearable robotic
(third) arm called Project Shiva, by Stanford’s
Peter Lowe and Kenneth Salisbury. Among
other DDW standouts were art installations by
Svarovski and Lasvit and a curated presentation
by Svenm of a new jewelry-like pendant lamp by
Michael Ansatassiades for Flos called Arrangements: each minimal tubular light in the collection — circular, linear, squared, triangular and
drop-shaped — can be relinked to form custom
chandeliers. Arrangements will be available at
Dzine in San Francisco. dubaidesigndistrict.com;
usa.flos.com/arrangements; dzineliving.com
THE BAY AREA, already linked in a sense
to France through wine production now has
another bond: a chair design derived from
a milking stool, originally produced by the
Artisans of Marolles, a midcentury French co-operative founded and led by Jean Touret until 1964. Ariel and Ed Clay, a father-daughter
team at Carneros Studios in Napa Valley,
have revived the three-legged chair and also
created a four-legged version and counter
and barstools, all made of American white
oak and forged steel, newly branded as
Furniture Marolles, with permission from
the Touret family. Prices start at $875 for the
three-legged chair. furnituremarolles.com
THE SAN FRANCISCO ART INSTITUTE,
home to Diebenkorn and other Bay
Area painters and sculptors who formed
its illustrious faculty, has a brand new
67,000-square-foot adjunct home at a Fort
Mason pier with a view of the Golden Gate
Bridge. Designed by Leddy Maytum Stacey
architects who also designed the CCA campus
in a former Greyhound bus repair station, the
SFAI campus sports 160 art studios and 4,300
square feet of new public exhibition space that
will be open free to the public. Its galleries
join SFMOMA’s Artists Gallery, bookshops,
Greens restaurant, which has a J.B. Blunk
sculpture (see Focus, page 43), cafes, and
an art supply store, all within blocks of the
SFAI Chestnut Street campus, making this a
thrilling arts destination. sfai.edu STUDIO BECKER, a cabinetry and archi-
tectural millwork source in San Francisco,
recently gathered 16 teams of Bay Area
designers to create artful bicycles to be
auctioned off to raise money for New
Door Ventures, a nonprofit headed by Tess
Reynolds, that hopes to break the cycle of
poverty for disadvantaged youth in the Bay
Area. Among the entries that garnered more
than $50,000 in its first auction was a work
(shown) by San Francisco-based artist Ana
Maria Delgado. newdoor.org
PARIS-BASED DESIGNER Eugeni Quitllet, a
protégé of Philippe Starck, recently unveiled a
concept boat called Dun’e that has an elegant
silhouette with gold accents and a hollowed
dune-like center within its wood form. The
six-cabin 196-foot craft is an efficient hybrid
between a sailboat and a motorboat, engineered for the high seas. eugenidesign.com
