Friday Favorites 8/30/2013

Cheryl Katz, Contributing Editor

Every August, for over twenty years, my family and I have vacationed in Truro. One of the things that endear us to this town is its size. With only 2,000 full-time residents, even when the population grows tenfold during the summer, it’s still pretty tiny.

Given its size, save for Jams, a well-stocked but minuscule grocery store in Truro Center (don’t blink), and Mac’s Seafood Market, there are no stores to distract me (shopping being one of my favorite pastimes). And though this translates to all that’s wonderful – long walks, books, good food, and very sound sleep – there comes a moment when I need a shopping fix. You can take the girl out of the city, but you can’t take the city out of the girl.

When that moment comes, I head to Wellfleet, the next town over, and make a beeline for Farm. Besides the gallery’s wonderful roster of artists, whose work is shown in three pristine white rooms, there are beautiful ceramic pieces, clever stationery, and other, unexpected treasures.  Now that’s what I call relaxing.

Farm Project Space + Gallery, 15 Commercial Street, Wellfleet, Mass.

Paula M Bodah, Senior Editor

The Colombian Amazon may seem remote, but nowhere on Earth is immune to the scourge of plastic bottles littering the landscape. Two years ago, the Spanish industrial designer Alvaro Catalan de Ocon was working with a panel of experts to find ways to reuse the PET bottles clogging the Amazon’s waterways and marring the pristine beauty of the rainforest.  His ingenious solution: work with Colombian textile artists to turn the offending bottles into colorful lampshades, turning trash into an object of beauty and function that will last for a long time. As the designer puts it on the PET Lamp website, his idea converts “an object with a short and specific lifespan into a product enriched by the cosmogony of the local culture.”

In October, the lamps will be available for the first time in showrooms in this country. Meanwhile, you can shop for them on the website.

The lamps illuminate a courtyard at the Milan furniture fair

Kyle Hoepner, Editor-in-Chief

At an editorial meeting a few weeks ago I heard myself say, “I’ve really never much cared for alabaster chandeliers.” The moment the words were out of my mouth, I began to wonder: was that really true? Certainly, I think they have been too popular in recent years, and sometimes either badly used or used in what seem to me to be inappropriate surroundings. But surely, somewhere in the world, there must be alabaster chandeliers or pendants I can unreservedly enjoy. Right?

Other than historical examples, it turns out there isn’t a lot. But here are three:

Vaughan’s Greenwich Globe light. Photo from vaughandesigns.com

George Kovacs Alabaster Dust Glass Chandelier. Photo from lampsplus.com

And here’s one by Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann that sold at Christie’s a while back. Photo from christies.com