What’s Happening: After years of quietly building market momentum, a new generation of sleek air conditioners is convincing consumers en masse to pay at least twice as much for a window unit that you could find in the Style section.

The Download: Most city dwellers need only look up in actively gentrifying neighborhoods to see a July, Midea, or Windmill air conditioner perched in a window. Unlike their hardware store predecessors, these brands burst onto the market during quarantine in 2020 with the promise of making consumers’ homes colder and cooler with non-eyesore ACs. And while you can scoop any old-fashioned window unit on Amazon for around $150, the low profiles, rounded corners, and “freedom” (really) these ones promise will cost at least double.

To their credit, all three brands have something by way of innovation to offer for their sticker shock: Energy efficiency and wi-fi connectivity are the new non-negotiables. July designs its units for both standard and horizontal windows, and purports to have a wall unit option coming soon. The brand also sells direct to consumer, with a white-glove installation add-on for the Taskrabbit-avoidant among us. Midea, which makes that eyebrow-raising freedom claim, was the first to widely popularize both a super-quiet inverter and U-shaped footprint—the latter of which allows users to open their windows and seize a cross-breeze on temperate days.

Of the three, Windmill seems to be the most polarizing. While appliance reviews and editorial endorsements rave about it, customer testimonies are more mixed. They earn near-unanimous kudos for being nice to look at, but some seem to feel it falls woefully short when it comes to dependably cooling down a room.

In Their Own Words: Perhaps Dan Medley, a handyman who has firsthand experience with these brands, summed it up best: “These types of things, you’re paying for the aesthetic.”

Surface Says: The most important feature of all, according to these editors: staying up.

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As the stoic torchbearers of luxurious basics and color wheels that rarely venture beyond creamy cashmere, The Row intentionally makes little noise. Even connoisseurs of the label founded in 2006 by Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen may have missed the announcement of its fourth bricks-and-mortar outpost, in Amagansett, which officially opened over Memorial Day to greet in-the-know weekenders and the summer crowd. While the label’s boutiques in Los Angeles, New York City, and London have a reputation for intimidating even the most deep-pocketed clients, the new store is much more warm and breezy.

It takes over a storybook 19th-century cottage on Main Street that once housed artisanal homewares stronghold Tiina the Store, trading in James Turrell lightworks and slick limestone staircases for screen doors, woven carpets, and denim patchwork curtains. Catering to its coastal locale, the ready-to-wear on offer also skews beachy: bike shorts, denim shirts, ribbed tank tops. Furniture by Olivier Mourgue Bouloum and Robert Mallet-Stevens, much of it sourced by Magen H Gallery, is available for purchase, as is a curation of artisanal jewelry, homewares, and snacks that offer new entry points into a label known for extreme prices. If it’s hard to justify dropping four figures on those leather Almond Pumps, a jar of raw almonds might just do the trick.

New & Notable is a cultural catchall that highlights interesting new products and projects from our brilliantly creative members of The List. With new releases, events, and goings-on, these moments indicate their power to move the needle in architecture, design, fashion, and art.

Ethimo: One of the Italian furniture purveyor’s most evocative muses is Porto Rafael: an “eccentric nobleman’s” archipelagic village in Sardinia. Porto Rafael has seen the genesis of many furniture collections and a collaboration with Paola Navone in the form of a home filled with site-specific furnishings created by the designer. Ethimo’s cocoon-like Rafael collection, which features fabrics designed by Navone, is the latest launch to be informed by this corner of Mediterranean paradise.

Caran D’Ache: The artist-favorite Swiss purveyor of writing and drawing instruments celebrated the fifth edition of its Claim Your Style collection of aluminum pens, 10-ply cedar pencils, and a coloring pad filled with drawings by Ambre Verschaeve. This year’s release centers around nature and introduces four new ballpoint pens in the colors of Ocean Violet, Green Arctic, Sunstone Pink, and Stormy Blue, along with two-tone pencils and Verschaeve’s botanical-themed illustrations.

Thomas Cooper Studio: The lighting design studio founded by Sally Thomas Cooper and Jason Kai Cooper debuted their spring collection at ICFF in May. Alabaster was a recurring material throughout the collection’s three models, including their Cento pendant; Faro, a totemic rubbed bronze floor lamp; and Prima, a sculptural wall fixture in which a ribbon of bronze encircles an illuminated half-moon of the marbled stone.

Ethan Streicher spent a decade working in corporate graphic design before falling in love with clay—its process, texture, and all the challenges it brings—and eventually launching Streicher Goods, his namesake brand of ceramic objects and luminaires. With the simple goal of imbuing whimsy and personality into everyday objects while untethering himself from the digital world, the Brooklyn-based talent has an open-ended mindset that leaves room to play and experiment. That approach has yielded Deep Reflections, a collection of moody, rough-hewn lights inspired by the geodes he had fun cracking open as a child, and more collaborations afoot involving wood and translucent porcelain.

When: Until Aug. 3

Where: Marta, Los Angeles

What: This dual show reveals the interplay between artist Klas Ernflo and designer Marc Morro, combining the former’s folky tapestry-like paintings of sentient figures in a fantastical world and the latter’s solid wood furniture marked by intricate joinery and similar motifs carved and painted on with finesse.

Since 1872, Fritz Hansen has been crafting extraordinary design. Fritz Hansen’s highly distinguished Classic Collection comprises a number of the most iconic pieces of furniture from renowned Danish designers, including Arne Jacobsen’s Egg, Swan, and Series 7 chairs, and Poul Kjærholm’s PK22 chair and PK80 daybed. The Contemporary Collection features new furniture and accessories from some of today’s most globally recognized designers like Piero Lissoni and Cecilie Manz.

Surface Says: One of Denmark’s oldest and most revered furniture producers, Fritz Hansen is known for its Arne Jacobsen and Poul Kjærholm designs. In recent years, the brand’s smartly appointed pieces designed by Jaime Hayon have kept things exciting.

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