Hannah Martin's Notes From Design Miami: A Frenzy-Free Field Trip

View in your browser | Update your preferences

This year in Miami I made a rule for myself: no “dinatoires.” You know what I'm talking about: The invitation says dinner, but it isn’t really. If you’re lucky, you might score enough small bites to constitute a meal, but only at the cost of balancing your plate on top of your wine glass. Art Basel Week in Miami felt noticeably quieter this year. Chalk it up to the popularity of its new Paris location, market uncertainty, or general fair fatigue. The upside? There was time to sit down. Keep reading for the highlights of my week in The Magic City.

–Hannah Martin, Senior Design Editor, AD

A More Meditative Miami

As it turns out, all that extra time for sitting rendered more meaningful conversations and connections. At a breakfast I hosted with Kohler (pictured below) to celebrate their new Remedy Place cold plunge, I chatted with design friends old and new about this wellness must-have (all their clients suddenly need one) that demands we literally chill out. I felt like a wisened old matchmaker as I sat back and watched a group of people who had just met plan a field trip to the brand headquarters in Wisconsin. Later that night at Joe’s Stone Crab (it was my first time!) I planned my own field trip: to Schloss Hollenegg, a castle in Austria where my friend Alice Stori Liechtenstein hosts a design residency and annual showcase.

And at Nina Johnson Gallery on Saturday, a conversation about site-specific art and design pieces got AD PRO Directory members talking about what they might commission for their next project. Nina, who had just penned an an op-ed in Artnet about her disillusionment with the art world, told me that she felt a pendulum swing. She, too, had witnessed a slowing down—a greater intentionality behind buying and selling; a refocus on community.

Around the fairs, I found the works that resonated with me most also had a sense of quietude and connection to place. Christopher Baker's light sculptures (pictured top) at Dobrinka Salzman, produced in a barn in pastoral Maine, were a Design Miami standout; their sculptural brass forms are delicately wrapped in pineapple silk fiber from the Philippines and Uda-gami paper, made with clay. At Blunk Space—the gallery project run by the estate of Northern California artist JB Blunk—Alana Burns’s strange, metal-and-shell serving utensils and Rio Kobayashi’s salvaged redwood shelves (pictured above), matching a suite of rare redwood stools by Blunk himself, felt like portals to forest or sea. Meanwhile, at Anna Karlin's booth, the New York–based designer’s ceramic-clad bar cabinet and cloth-wrapped light fixtures emitted a similarly serene quality.

Over at Alcova, I fell for a new suite of furnishings by Studio Haos, where industrial metal mesh was coated in Japanese paper, fiberglass, and resin⁠, giving the tough material an uncanny softness, only enhanced when set in a grasscloth-wrapped room. Unlike the dime-a-dozen oatmeal-hued neutral forms that have bored us to tears in recent years, these pieces prove that something can be unusual and thought-provoking without being in-your-face cuckoo. I didn’t make it to every single fair or event this year, and that was just fine. Ditching the frenzied, see-it-all approach, I came home with a list of good ideas—and a full stomach.