Daniella On Design

The pursuit of taste and developing eye and judgment for aesthetics is a life-long journey. I believe that taste can be acquired, that beauty is objective, and that one can develop a refined taste even if not growing up in a refined environment. In my program Collecting Design, I seek to show objets d’art through […]

Congratulating my dearest friend Brian McCarthy for receiving the prestigious Albert Hadley Lifetime Achievement Award tonight in the annual gala of the New York School of Interior Design. In a wonderful and chic evening,  at the University Club, McCarthy was cemented as a leading figure in the world of interior design. I was fortunate to be

Who is the ultimate connoisseur? With the opening of the remarkable retrospective “Eileen Gray” at the Bard Graduate Center last week, the name of the visionary modernist has re-entered the public consciousness, and surfaced in exhibition reviews and in conversations within the design community. Gray’s works have long been considered blue chip, and when her

When leaving the new exhibition ‘Eileen Gray,’ opened to the public today at the museum of my alma mater, the Bard Graduate Center, I felt exactly the way I love feeling when exiting a remarkable show. That design can take your breath away; that scholarship has the power to expand the experience beyond what we

How to turn historical decorative arts into a blockbuster showcase, making them fresh, intriguing, and relevant to the 21st century viewer? Go to the newly-installed British Galleries at the Met, which were unveiled today, following six-years of renovation by Roman and Williams. You will find the answer in the ambitious project, which comes to celebrate

If you ask architects today whether they prefer Mies van der Rohe’s modernist slogan ‘Less is More,’ or Robert Venturi’s counter postmodernist phrase ‘Less is a Bore,’ you would probably get the first one as the premier answer. If contemporary architecture is much about complexity, expressiveness, dogma-free, narrative, and experience, why do we still dislike

‘Radical Italian Design,’ also known as ‘Anti-Design,’ was a Movement flourished in between the late 60s and the mid-80s. It was a complicated, sophisticated, Utopian movement, which did not produce objects just for everyone, but rather perceived design as a means to express narratives, political and social statements, critical against commercialism, expression of conceptualism, democracy,

Think about a world where every single house is furnished the same. Scary? This is what I had in mind when recently searching the web for furniture by Pierre Jeanneret. You can find it all: originals, knockoffs, re-editions, reproductions, fakes; made in India, Italy, the US; crafted and mass produced. The market is flooded. Authorship, authenticity,

\There are only handful luxurious houses built by the founders of the Modern Movement before WWII. Masterpieces commissioned by daring patrons, designed by those pioneers who changed the face of the history of architecture, which came to express the promise of 20th-century design in the ultimate way. While some of these houses – Maison de