What’s Happening: As new parents face mounting pressure to share their lifestyles on social media, garish mass-market children’s furniture often doesn’t fit the bill. Fortunately, a fresh crop of designers and brands are introducing sophisticated cribs and haute high chairs that check all the safety boxes.

The Download: The principles of neuroarchitecture suggest everything a child encounters in their first few years can impact early brain development and how they perceive the world. The architect Peter Zumthor can attest: he recalls childhood memories as “the reservoirs of the architectural atmospheres and images” he explores in his work. Most furniture designed for children, however, is unsightly: bulky plastic objects in offensive shades, often emblazoned with animals and cartoons.

“Kids’ stuff is always very colorful,” Lora Appleton, the founder of Kinder Modern, a Manhattan gallery and studio specializing in children’s furniture, told the New York Times. “While it seems fun to move that into the main area of the home, you’re like, ‘Do I really want this primary-colored thing next to my gorgeous tufted couch?’”

Parents often have no choice—a consequence of children’s furniture giants like Fisher Price and Graco capitalizing on creating cheap plastic essentials in the 1950s. Because nursery furniture must abide by the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s rigorous federal guidelines, the number of major players within the $31 billion industry remains relatively small. High guardrails mean new brands often shy away from the market. Mattel, for example, which owns Fisher Price, has a team of 450 employees dedicated to product safety.

Recently, though, some upstarts have made promising forays into baby furniture that’s not only safe, but that parents can actually bear to look at. When Greg Davidson left Artsy to co-found Lalo, he convened a council of 60 parents to inform the design of new high chairs and bathtubs. He learned that modern parents face immense pressure to document and share their homes on social media, and mass-market nursery essentials often don’t cut it aesthetically. “They don’t want to sacrifice their personal style just because they have a baby,” he told Fast Company.

Lalo soon devised a sleek, Scandinavian-inspired high chair with muted tones and beechwood legs that can be converted into a play chair when kids grow up. It quickly sold out upon launching in 2019 after earning endorsements from famous moms like Blake Lively and Chrissy Teigen. Davidson plans to bring the winning formula to toddler kitchen play sets and a line of bath products.

Some argue that parents should forgo aesthetic choices in favor of furniture that stimulates children’s early brain development the most. While experts say infants indeed develop a sophisticated perception of color within six months, evidence suggests babies respond to more colors than hyper-saturated ones. Susie Stubbs kept this in mind for Totter and Tumble, a purveyor of stylish play mats. Her team tracks interior design trends to create mats befitting magazine-ready residences by sourcing patterns from British design house Morris and Co.

Visuals were also key for Michaele Simmering and Johann Pauwen, co-founders of the Los Angeles furniture studio Kalon, who were dissatisfied with the nursery furniture market when they were expecting. The couple eventually designed the IO Crib, an artful piece that forgoes humdrum wooden bars for ornate geometric cutouts evocative of Moroccan wood screens and Frank Lloyd Wright’s stained glass panels. When light shines on the crib, a compelling shadow play stimulates the baby’s imagination.

Other innovators are bringing technology into the fold, most notably the Snoo Smart Sleeper endorsed in Surface’s 2020 gift guide. The brainchild of Dr. Harvey Karp, who collaborated with MIT Media Lab and designer Yves Béhar, the “robotic caregiver” features motorized swaddle settings and calming white noise from built-in speakers to create spa-like womb rhythms. Besides affording temperamental newborns one to two more hours of sleep, the bassinet has made major breakthroughs in reducing sudden infant death syndrome.

In Their Own Words: “Babies are most drawn to contrast as they first begin to take in the world around them,” Simmering and Pauwen told Surface. “We very much believe that sustainable design, high design, and kids’ design need not be mutually exclusive.”

Surface Says: Now that designers and art-world insiders have come for ugly baby furniture, we’d love to see fitness equipment get the same treatment and not be comically unusable.

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Architecture and jewelry design often wrestle with similar principles—proportions, dimensions, and materials—yet at vastly different scales. The two fields share a logical convergence according to Robert D’Loren, who studied at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture before becoming the chairman and CEO of Xcel Brands, which owns the label Judith Ripka. For the jeweler’s latest collaboration, he sought out the discerning eye of architecture firm WorkAC’s co-founder Amale Andraos, who happens to be the former dean of his alma mater.

Andraos had never tried her hand at jewelry but jumped at the chance to realize experimental ideas on a smaller scale—and trusted Judith Ripka’s eye after the brand collaborated with fellow female architects Elena Manferdini and Rossana Hu. The resulting Ayah Collection of sterling silver and white sapphire rings, necklaces, earrings, and bracelets, which debuted this past Friday, pays homage to how Art Deco manifested in Beirut, her hometown.

“It celebrates design’s ability to hold different elements together, to hybridize influences, and to tell new stories,” Andraos tells WWD. “I would hope it feels a little unexpected and fresh.” Indeed—though she’s known for her asymmetrical buildings such as the Miami Design District’s whimsical Museum Garage, her jewelry retains a sense of balance and depth. And she’s already contemplating her next move: “It’s really fun to think about. I can already see things I would do differently.”

If Miami Art Week 2021 was Web3’s coming out party, this year is when creators and attendees plunged deeper into the real-world applications of blockchain and the merging of the physical and digital worlds, a coalescence the industry is calling “phygital.”

Surface and Polygon joined forces to transform a bungalow at the W South Beach into an experiential platform for salon-style conversations surrounding Web3’s potential in sustainability, fashion, art, and community-driven fields. Designed by local artist MokiBaby, installations by panelists and other partners were showcased against her disco-fied lightwave aesthetic, including contributions from OffLimits, Spatial Labs, LNQ, Prism Collective, Recur, WORTHLESSSTUDIOS, and more.

In celebration of our partnership with Polygon, we also launched a collection of limited-edition digital Surface magazine covers. Members of the Surface community can mint one of three 3D Surface NFTs featuring Daniel Humm, Solange Knowles, and the Guerrilla Girls.

This past spring, the art world suffered a letdown when it was reported that the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s rooftop garden would weather its first year since 2013 without an installation. Lauren Halsey’s site-specific creation, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I), had been slated for the highly anticipated commission and set to open in May 2022. The previous month, the prominent Los Angeles–based artist and self-described maximalist announced she and the museum would postpone the opening by one year “to do this project in the fullest way possible,” citing logistical issues.

That’s when Jacob Koo, the owner of The Sleep Spa by Hästens, the brand’s largest international dealer, and an active figure in L.A.’s contemporary art scene, was motivated to help bring Halsey’s vision to life. Upon learning about the roadblocks Halsey faced with her Met exhibition, Koo explored ways the art world’s favorite heritage bedmaker could support its own community. The Hästens Art Support Fund was born and Halsey’s installation was afforded the necessary resources to meet its new opening date.

In an interview with Surface, Koo breaks down how Hästens, museums from New York to L.A., and the Art Support Fund’s roster aren’t such strange bedfellows.

In 2010, while Jesse Krimes was serving six years on drug-related charges at the Fairton Federal Correctional Institution in South New Jersey, he was hard at work making his magnum opus. The Pennsylvania native teamed up with prison mates and fellow artists Gilberto Rivera and Jared Owens to form a secret collective, sharing camaraderie and art supplies to help each other create through tough times. All Krimes needed to make art were prison bed sheets that he collaged with newspaper images using hair gel and a spoon to transfer the printed ink onto his canvases. He smuggled the sheets out piecemeal over three years until they culminated in his most ambitious work to date.

That work, a monumental 15-by-40-foot mural titled Apokaluptein: 16389067 after the Greek word for “apocalypse” coupled with his inmate number, would soon galvanize greater visibility for formerly incarcerated artists. Hailed as both a “carceral magnum opus” and a “Hieronymus Bosch–like allegory of heaven, earth, and hell,” it formed the centerpiece of a landmark MoMA PS1 exhibition organized by MacArthur award-winning historian Nicole Fleetwood about that cross-section of marginalized artists in 2020. It became a highlight of “Art & Krimes by Krimes,” a disarming film by MTV Documentary Films streaming on Paramount+.

thehighkey is a design studio that creates rare objects and environments. The name refers to a condition in which people are elevated. It’s from this vantage point that thehighkey operates, leveraging digital technology to produce concepts that go beyond the norm. thehighkey’s work is a mix of forms and materials from the past, present, and future. In a world saturated with fast fashion, thehighkey defies standards to create designs made to last.

Surface Says: Founder John Vieweg applies an artistic lens to the industrial, bringing humanity into manufacturing and leveraging digital technologies to produce the extraordinary.

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