The Monocle Minute
On Design

There’s a distinctly US feel to this week’s dispatch as we make the most of Miami’s balmy weather and take a stroll through the city’s Design District, where the trees are decked out with 1,000 “earrings” as part of a prize-winning installation. Then we head east to California to visit a smart lakeside cabin renovation, sit down with architect and set designer David Rockwell and roll back the years with a vintage Solari board. But first, Tomos Lewis reporting from Design Miami during the city’s art week.

Florida’s enviable December weather has inspired the theme of this year’s Design Miami, “Blue Sky” – which also reflects the optimism and clear thinking of the practitioners in attendance. One of the world’s leading collectable design fairs, the showcase, which runs until Sunday, is marking its 20th edition inside the cavernous halls of the Miami Beach Convention Center. From Formafantasma’s sleek pieces to Mathieu Lehanneur’s mercurial take on an illuminated cabinet, there’s a sense of playfulness to the works on display.

“We have an opportunity to create an immersive environment,” says Canadian designer Mary Ratcliffe (pictured on left with other Alcova designers), whose namesake Toronto-based studio is showcasing its latest collection of wooden furniture at the pastel-coloured Miami River Inn. This venue is the hub of one of the city’s newer design showcases, Alcova, which is running concurrently with Design Miami. Launched in Milan in 2018, it debuted its first international edition in Miami in 2023 as a platform for designers who haven’t previously featured in more established fairs. “You can set the mood and invite people in to experience your pieces here in a more holistic way – more than you’d be able to in a typical showroom or trade-show setting.”

That spirit is on display at Design Miami too – from the soft, lozenge-like seating by Ukrainian architect and designer Victoria Yakusha to Mercadado Moderno’s collections of mid-century and contemporary Brazilian wooden furniture. And big commercial players appear to be on the same page. In Art Basel Miami Beach’s elegant collector’s lounge, Samsung unveiled new partnerships with several galleries affiliated with Art Basel to supply its Art Store with works that can be screened on its Frame TV.

So the mood is bright at Design Miami. The fair, which held its inaugural Paris edition in October this year, will bring some of its sunshine to the US west coast in May 2025 for the second edition of its Los Angeles event. The outlook? Blue skies ahead.

Tomos Lewis is Monocle’s Toronto correspondent. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

Nicole Nomsa Moyo has been named as the winner of this year’s Annual Design Commission, an initiative curated by Design Miami in which a new public work is displayed in the city over the course of the event. The Toronto-based South African designer’s installation, “Pearl Jam”, celebrates the craft traditions of her home country’s Ndebele tribe. It comprises several large, jewel-like sculptures and more than 1,000 “earrings” made by Ndebele women, which are now hanging from trees in the Miami Design District.

The Annual Design Commission offers practitioners the opportunity to push their creative boundaries, inviting them to reimagine the district and explore different ways in which people engage with their surroundings.

Where last year’s winning concept, Slovenian designer Lara Bohinc’s “Utopia”, presented a vision of how society can integrate the human and natural worlds, Nomsa Moyo’s work encourages viewers to consider questions of tradition, scale and ways of making.
miamidesigndistrict.com

Los Angeles-based design studio Dan Brunn Architecture has transformed a derelict A-frame cabin on Lake Arrowhead in California’s San Bernardino Mountains into a thoughtful blend of old and new. Far from a simple interior renovation, the overhaul involved combining a new A-frame form with the existing structure. The two shapes converge thanks to the addition of a window wall along the building’s short axis.

The interiors of the building – named Bern Double-A – retain the original 1970s cabin look and feel, with the wooden beams and ceilings sandblasted and lightly stained to match the new wood flooring.

The furnishings draw inspiration from Scandinavian and Japanese mountain design traditions, with warm tones and natural finishes. It’s a combination that enhances the forest views that the living spaces offer.
danbrunn.com

Over his 40-year career, New York-based architect and designer David Rockwell has mastered the art of cultivating drama in any environment. He founded the Rockwell Group in 1984, taking on projects in sectors ranging from hospitality to healthcare. He has also worked extensively in theatrical set design. His musical backdrops include She Loves Me, for which he won a Tony Award in 2016, and Broadway sets for Hairspray, Kinky Boots, On the Twentieth Century and The Nap. London’s Victoria & Albert Museum recently acquired models of the latter four for its permanent collection. Here, he tells us about responding to a brief, taking risks and lessons learned.

What defines the Rockwell Group’s work?
We don’t really have a house style. For us, the style often grows out of the project – it needs to feel as though it illuminates what’s happening at the location. In restaurants, it’s the food. And with theatrical set design – which was kind of a hobby but has now turned into one of the greatest gifts in my life and practice – you have the script to respond to.

How do you ensure consistency across your portfolio?
The key to delivering a good product is being willing to take risks and refusing to be defined. The world creates boxes to put you in. So we’ve transformed ourselves by breaking into theatre and doing other kinds of projects. These require a fearlessness about stepping into new territory and you have to make sure that it’s all backed up by research.

You’re celebrating 40 years of practice. What are the key lessons that you’ve learned?
Every project that I have done, from day one, felt like a matter of life and death. I’m driven by the idea of getting things right. For my first project, I actually borrowed money from a friend of mine to finish it. You have to be obsessed, driven and committed. Another important thing is to resist the temptation to model what you do on other people’s work. There’s something to be said about spending some time figuring out what your eccentric edges are. What are your passions that seem outside of the norm? Find your eccentricity and build on it.

For more from Rockwell, tune in to ‘Monocle on Design’ on Monocle Radio.

This clock will bring a familiar sound from a bygone era of travel into your living room – the clickety-clack of the split-flap departures board. Once ubiquitous in airports and train stations across the globe, the displays were also known as Solari boards for the Udine-based company that invented them. In collaboration with architect Gino Valle, the Italian firm also produced salon-suited models such as the Dator 5, which displayed the time, weekday and date.

The split-flap mechanism is an analogue display system containing rolls of flaps behind each digit that move with the help of electric currents. It was invented by Remigio Solari in the mid-1950s as a four-digit clock and was soon expanded to function with the whole alphabet. With the emergence of digital screens, however, it gradually disappeared from public spaces, partly because of high maintenance costs. But the Dator 5 is a reminder of the technology’s natural appeal. Even in the age of laptops and smartphones, this out-of-production tabletop calendar still fetches four figures at auctions.

Finnish Design Shop is celebrating both its 20th anniversary and the coming of Christmas by launching a collection of games in collaboration with Nordic designers. Called Pelata, it consists of six products, each manufactured in Finland using woods such as ash, beech and birch. Games were a natural choice for a company whose slogan is “Nordic happiness”. “These are games that not only bring people together but are also fun to play,” the company’s CEO, Teemu Kiiski, tells The Monocle Minute on Design. “They are beautiful items and, unlike most modern games, you don’t have to hide them in the cupboard after use.”

The collection includes Sokkelo, a disc-like maze by Norwegian design duo Anderssen & Voll; Metsäpallo, an outdoor throwing game by Finnish Studio Tolvanen; and Prikka, a modern take on backgammon by the Swedish TAF Studio. “This was such a fun project for us and the designers,” says Kiiski. “The design language is very playful and we also spent a lot of time testing these games by playing them.”
finnishdesignshop.com

To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Montpellier-based photographer Mary Gaudin and writer Matthew Arnold are publishing a limited-edition run of Down the Long Driveway, You’ll See It, their book documenting New Zealand’s modernist houses built between 1950 and the 1970s. Its title comes from an email exchange: the late ceramicist Bruce Martin used the phrase when he was giving the authors directions to his home at Bridge Pa in Hawke’s Bay. Martin’s property perfectly captures the spirit of the book, which aims to showcase the buildings’ lived-in details as much as their architectural beauty. “[His home] was filled with a lifetime of pottery and highlighted the particular mix of craftsmanship and design that’s reminiscent of all the homes shown in this book,” says Gaudin.

The anthology also documents how the houses fit in with their Kiwi environs, either through the use of native timber such as rimu or matai, or creating a relationship with the surrounding nature. “All of the Wellington homes are connected to the native bush, attracting tuis, fantails and bellbirds,” says Gaudin. “The Einhorn house backs onto the Karori bird sanctuary and the residents sometimes see rare hihi [stitchbirds] feeding in the garden.” This thoughtful rerelease would make the ideal present for the Antipodean mid-century enthusiast in your life.
downthelongdriveway.com