What’s Happening: Launched by architect Carlos Torre Hütt in an idyllic Oaxacan surfing community, the recently wrapped Mexico Design Fair spotlights under-the-radar talents both local and global—and offers a satisfying escape from corporatized design weeks. Our contributor Jesse Dorris scoped it out.

The Download: It’s easy (appropriate, even) to feel disdain for the design fair circuit: too many fairs, too bloated in budget, too meager in individuality. To escape my cynicism, I accepted an invitation to get lost—during New York’s biggest art fair weekend, no less. Of course, Puerto Escondido, the idyllic surfing community and home of Bosco Sodi’s Casa Wabi art foundation on Oaxaca’s Pacific Coast, is hardly some hinterland. But it’s also home to the Mexico Design Fair launched in 2021 by architect Carlos Torre Hütt and sited in two locations that couldn’t be further from the usual corporate event spaces, including those, like Zona Maco, which have led to Mexico City’s increasing prominence in the design community.

After a car ride down a long series of meandering dirt roads, I arrived at a thoughtful set of oceanfront houses comprising BAAQ architects’ Casa Naila, each discreetly transformed into cozy showcases for select objects by both local and global designers. Mexico City’s Leonardo Garza showed his Ambient Modular System, four stainless steel side tables both hulking and vaporous. Beneath them, Brazilian tattoo artist Aka Pasqual’s Tangled Up rug elevated the hearts and snakes found on biceps worldwide into a captivating floor piece.

Brooklyn’s Prime Projects debuted their Tress chair, designed exclusively for the fair; its leather cushion sags temptingly atop a rigorous frame of engineered plywood and Italian laminate. Outside again, a Rainfall console by Miami’s Studio Line Between, with its massive, reflective top, intriguingly mirrored BAAQ’s structures, within which I also found satisfyingly restrained chairs by Mexico City–based sustainability researcher Daniel Romero Valencia.

Later, I met Hütt on the beach. We sat within a kaleidoscopic three-story tower, just big enough for two integrated chairs secreted behind festive curtains striped in pink and purple. León-based Casa Blanca designed the installation, called Shade, in collaboration with the significant Fábrica de San Pedro in Uruapan. Hütt says showcasing work made outside Mexico City is a big part of his plan. “Mexico is a big country, with heritages and cultures,” he says. “It’s sad when all you see is the scene of Roma, Condesa, and Polanco.”

Mexico Design Fair seeks to broaden understanding of the country’s regions. Fittingly, it starts in Oaxaca. On a pedestal at the end of a live-edge plank bridging a wading pool between the houses, Liliana Ovalle and Colectivo 1050°’s Mitades collection of clay pieces glow in the golden-hour sun.

Ovalle worked with Mujeres de la Tierra, a Tlapazola artisan family, to riff on Oaxacan ceramics, firing them twice to imbue a haunting, blackened patina. It’s not unlike the delectable crackling surface of the roasted pineapple tacos we’re eating as the sun goes down, their heat complimented by a few too many mezcals mixed with Jarritos. After dark, incendiary devices delight our group courtesy of a bright fireworks performance by artist Brendan Fernandes, in which geometric forms blaze in the sky like queer magic.

I experienced a quieter smolder Saturday, as conceptual artist Kimsooja Kimsooja lit a small ceremonial fire to activate Puerto Escondido’s new Meridiano gallery, designed with massed elegance by Tatsuro Miki and Axel Vervoordt. A short, scorching walk then took our troupe of designers, collectors, and journalists to Casa Malandra, architect Alberto Calleja’s string of interior modules connected by open-air pools, where the fair named a very deserving Valencia its Designer of the Year.

In Their Own Words: Down the beach, the Hotel Escondido arranged a magical seated dinner. This, the most bustling moment of the entire fair, was a chance to talk at length to designers—the kind of connection impossible at larger fairs. Hütt described his vision for MDF: “A better opportunity for the individuals who are part of the discipline,” he said. “We’re interested in selling pieces, but also in changing its perception for the next generation.” It’s a global project, accomplished locally one-on-one. “Perhaps I’m too romantic,” he laughed. But as another design fair season drags on, we need more of this romance.

Surface Says: During the dinner, a turtle arrived to lay eggs in the sand under the watchful protection of the hotel staff. Maybe it was the mezcal again, but it did feel like the birth of something new.

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Opening Shot is a column that peeks inside new hotels, restaurants, bars, and shops with interiors to drool over.

Name: Vogue Hotel Montreal Downtown, Curio Collection by Hilton

Location: Montreal

Designer: Sid Lee Architecture

On Offer: When Sid Lee Architecture set about to rethink the common spaces of Montreal’s five-story Vogue Hotel, founders Jean Pelland and Martin Leblanc wanted to integrate the heritage of the hotel’s new Turkish owners with the heart of its location, the buzzy Golden Square Mile. The best way to do this, the pair figured, was to blur the lines between inside and out: first, they flipped the lobby’s axis horizontally, installed a floor-to-ceiling glass façade by Lemay Michaud, and tucked reception into a hall to serve as a portal to the private areas.

A front desk of Turkish travertine seems to rise out of floors of the same material; deeper still, guests encounter the Cabinet of Curiosities, a library beneath an oculus that offers books and art objects curated by ImageMotion art director Priyanka Jhamb. Near the street, banquettes and curved sofas in cinnamon Ultrasuede offer open reading and social spaces, illuminated by Lambert & Fils’ Sainte sculptural lighting and a free-floating, mirrored bronze fireplace.

In 2016, a group of international designers debuted a collection of objects inspired by the deceptively simple materiality of Shaker makers and artisans. The show, “Furnishing Utopia,” became a collective of the same name. This year, it returns to NYCxDesign with a new exhibition, “Public Access,” curated by Ladies & Gentlemen Studio’s co-founder Jean Lee. From now through June 3, the show takes over Brooklyn’s Head Hi and, in its own debut as an exhibition space, the nearby Brooklyn Greenway Initiative’s Naval Cemetery Landscape, a 200-year-old public park.

“Public Access” showcases work by 37 designers who center sharing over commodification. Many seek to counter the dehumanizing effects of the built environment by championing users who are not human: Monterrey, Mexico’s Jorge Diego-Etienne offers an elegant pyramidal structure as an Opossum Shelter, while Copenhagen’s Space10 x Tanita Klein builds a charmingly boxy Bee Home. Others, like Brooklyn’s own Allan Wexler, encourage a gentler human nature: his Picket Fence Furniture creates gathering spots for good neighbors. And to further seed generosity, every project will be published digitally, with open-source construction plans.

Ben Willett approaches furniture with a spatial perspective—a natural extension of years spent working as a creative director designing spaces, experiences, and events for Nike and The North Face. So when the pandemic provoked a move from New York to Los Angeles, he found designing pieces for his own home wasn’t so difficult. His debut collection for his new venture Willettspace, a series of warm wooden furnishings imbued with gentle curves and personal touches, proves his “furniture for spaces, spaces for furniture” mindset can transform the feeling of a room—and is one that designers would be wise to heed.

In “Wisdoms for Neknel,” a new AI-governed gaming experience created by Chanel Prize–winning artist collective Keiken, knowledge is currency. The collective, created by Tanya Cruz, Hana Omori, and Isabel Ramos, used a series of talks—dubbed Wisdom Seeds—between themselves and the likes of Serpentine Gallery’s Blockchain Lab and Yale’s resident art critic to train the AI that governs the fictional world of Neknel.

There, players can mint NFTs, made by the AI to create an in-universe $wisdom currency, which can be exchanged for NFTs, in-universe artist collabs, and more. “Wisdoms for Neknel” inspires players to imagine a world in which the dissemination of knowledge is in everyone’s best interest—whether that’s the acquisition of (virtual) art, or just a way to pass time in the metaverse.

Each year, the Spanish luxury house’s foundation looks beyond the silo of fashion to celebrate the enduring impact of art, design, and culture in the form of the Loewe Craft Prize. Conceived with the intention to honor under-recognized makers, the prize unearths new talent and accentuates the importance of craft in contemporary culture. Previous winners run the gamut from a giant, cloud-like textile sculpture to a bulbous lacquered object that resembles a bag of oranges.

This year’s winner, sculptor Eriko Inazaki, was selected from a roster of more than 2,700 working artists by a star-studded jury comprising Loewe creative director Jonathan Anderson, Louvre director Olivier Gabet, Naoto Fukasawa, Enrique Loewe, and Patricia Urqiola. Her contribution, a ceramic sculpture whose crystallized surface evokes an extraterrestrial floral bloom, was described by the jury as virtuosic and lauded for its “spellbinding presence.” The highest praise came for her originality of ornamentation, which was described by jurors as unlike anything they had ever seen before.

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Surface Says: Sommelier-guided wine tastings aren’t inhibited by a little thing like geography thanks to this upstart platform ushering the interactive vineyard experience into the digital age.

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