Friday Favorites 10/11/2013

Paula M. Bodah, Senior Editor

Andrea Valentini first made her cool Origami Pillow Cover for the W boutique hotel in Seoul, South Korea. Lucky for those of us who don’t get to South Korea too often, the pillows are now available on the Providence, Rhode Island, designer’s website. The pillow cover is manufactured in Providence of Valenti’s signature Bump fabric, a foam-based fabric she created that has a soft, fleecy feel.  Use the four zippers to remove the square goose-feather-filled pillow form, then re-zip the case to cover a rectangular or roll-shaped form.

The cover, in bright red and cobalt blue with other colors on the drawing board, comes with a 16-inch square form. The other forms, the 24-inch by 12-inch rectangle and the 24-inch by 8-inch bolster, are available to buy.

Kyle Hoepner, Editor-in-Chief

If ever I find myself celebrating a really significant birthday or some particularly special achievement or rite of passage—a knighthood? a MacArthur Prize?—and have by then accumulated a friend or two willing and able to seriously indulge me, I’ll probably ask for a subsidized trip to Andrew Spindler’s shop in Essex, Mass. There’s something about his eye that seems perfectly attuned to a major sweet spot in my own range of sensibilities, and the artistic care with which he matches pieces on the sales floor promises thoughtful delights every time you walk in. A troll through his website on any given week can also yield pleasant returns: here’s a sampling of items online right now that I’d be more than happy to take home.

A vintage industrial swing lamp with polished tin shade, American, circa 1910–20

Studio Architettonico, a Futurist pencil drawing on printed paper by Italian artist and film production designer Virgilio Marchi, circa 1919

A pair of hand-carved, unpolished marble balusters from a Baroque church, Italian, circa 1730s

A rare, hand-carved, kou-wood poi bowl in the form of a calabash, Hawaiian Islands, circa 1790–1840