PaperCity Magazine

October 2014 - Houston

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Tootsies hosts Erin Gates, author of the wildly popular design blog Elements of Style, who will sign her book, Elements of Style: Designing a Home and a Life (Simon & Schuster, $35). See her Wednesday, October 15, 6 – 8 pm, and chat her up for inspiration and ideas. At Tootsies, 2601 Westheimer, 713.629.9990, amanda.lang@simonandschuster.com. ELEMENTS, MY DEAR Erin Gates THE BIG 3-O! W hen Cantoni opened in Texas in 1984, it was the coolest — if not the only — purveyor of modern furniture from Italy. Thirty years later, the store founded by Michael Wilkov has opened a full- service design studio; designed projects from London to Shanghai to Nigeria; and added a slew of new Italian lines, including a Natuzzi studio and Bontempi Cucine kitchens. A new collection launched this fall: Malerba Red Carpet Collection inspired by the glamour of old Hollywood. To show what a good sport Wilkov is, we asked him to play off a few 30th queries. Rebecca Sherman The piece of good furniture every man should have by age 30? A great leather chair to kick back in. You have 30 minutes to get inspired. What would you do? Take a shower. I find my best ideas come to me then. You have $30 to spend anywhere in the world. What would you spend it on? There's a great restaurant in Pesaro, Italy, called L'Angolo di Mario — it's a beautiful seaside resort that overlooks the ocean. A plate of their incredible seafood pasta and a glass of my favorite pinot grigio at lunch time is simply paradise, and it's under $30. What's on your list for the next 30 years? Eighteen holes of golf with "Black Knight" Gary Player … Taking Cantoni to the next level … An Africa safari with my family with a stop in my hometown of Johannesburg … Building myself a modern beach house. 30 years ago, what was your most memorable purchase for the store? The Eros buffet from Malerba. It was an incredible statement piece. Purchasing it for our store marked the start of an enduring partnership with Malerba, the Italian design house that is among the world's leaders in exotic woods and high-gloss lacquers. It's exclusive to Cantoni in the U.S. Michael Wilkov Natuzzi Re-Vive recliner at Cantoni The Houston Design Center at 7026 Old Katy Road — home to showrooms Scalamandre, Fixtures & Fittings, Design House and Bunch & Shoemaker — has been sold to MLB Capital Partners, headed up by Fred Baca, who will act as resident managing principal for the new investment team. HDC's previous owners, Sheri and Grant Roane, will continue to manage the property and marketing program. DESIGN Buzz D allas has an art fair, Houston has two, and now Austin gets into the act with the memorably monikered Pop Austin. To organize the weekend-long convergence, co-founder/ executive director/Austin entrepreneur Matt Randall tapped Lana Carlson — an international curator/gallerist who has exhibited in more than 100 fairs worldwide, from the vaunted Art Basel Miami Beach to Foire Internationale d'Art Contemporain (aka FIAC) in Paris. As a result, Pop Austin isn't your average art fair: You won't see the traditional aisles of booths. In fact, galleries won't be in attendance at all. "If you take a gallery, a museum and an art fair and merge them into one, you would get Pop Austin," Randall says of the event billed as an international art show and presented in the newly minted 20,000-square-foot Fair Market venue, October 17 through 19. What won us over: The roster of nearly 50 talents shown in-depth and available for acquisition, heavy on the new Chinese such as the Gao Brothers and Zhang Xiaogang, exhibited alongside European classical-conceptual lensman Massimo Vitali; intriguing Russian collaborators/Basel, Switzerland headliners Galina Bleikh and Elena Serebryakova; and American all-stars including Austin's Bale Creek Allen and Jason Archer, street-wise Shepard Fairey, and the omnipresent Warhol. popaustin.com. Catherine D. Anspon POP IS TOP: The Art Show I t's not just an exhibition … "This is an event," notes Meredith Long of the showing he has curated at his eponymous art space, Meredith Long & Company for American master Kenneth Noland and his under-known yet ground-breaking paper compositions. Long and the late Noland go back a long way, to the heyday of the color-field artists in the 1960s, when Long — one of the principals in Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC — and the painter first met. (The gallery championed Noland as well as other color-field peers such as Helen Frankenthaler; Meredith Long & Company would go on to show both artists in Houston.) Long remembers the day in the late 1970s, just after Thanksgiving — he was there at legendary printmaker Tyler Graphics — when Noland plunged his hand in a bucket of cold, wet pulp and began pressing slurries together to form chevrons, circles and lines. Less works on paper than paintings made from paper, the series evokes reactions from the celestial (an understated abstracted staircase of horizontal bands) to bravura (the drama inherent in a towering stack of inverted chevrons). Noland's broadly inventive palette, varying from gentle spring tones to thundering aubergine, reinforces the moods — each creation, among the two-dozen presented, is a unique work or a single-edition monoprint. "Kenneth Noland" at Meredith Long & Company, through October 18. Catherine D. Anspon PULP (NON)FICTION HOUSTON DESIGN CENTER TAKES ON ART G ray Contemporary, The Houston Design Center, 7026 Old Katy Road, Suite 253, 713.862.4425, graycontemporary.com The most exciting art entry into fall's design court is Gray Contemporary at The Houston Design Center. Owners Elizabeth and Mel DeWees marry her background in design with his avocation as a painter, to curate a unique program that investigates national talents with an emphasis on painting, particularly abstraction. What sets the gallery apart is this Menil-inspired reductive aesthetic, which makes its 1,655 square feet a pristine place for showing talents such as Korean-born Myungwon Kim, currently living in L.A. and a master printer at Gemini Graphics. Kim's bold black-and-whites on supersized canvases are calligraphic tours de force. On tap this month is a double header pairing Massachusetts-based Mary Bucci McCoy's vaporous panels woken up by one or two sculptural dabs of pigment, with Brit-born, French-based Erin Lawlor's languorous swirls of color (through October 10). Catherine D. Anspon Ann Sacks, 2800 Kirby Dr. in West Ave, 713.522.0805, annsacks.com For those in the design know, Ann Sacks is the place to go for top-tier tile, stone and plumbing products — and is famed for innovations in the field, not to mention remarkable interior style. Here you'll find gorgeous Network tiles comprised of glossy timber panels that create textural woven patterns, as well as artist Tony Davlin's Market collection, which preserves tissue-thin layers of fruits and vegetables between layers of glass. The company was founded in 1981 in Portland, Oregon, where the namesake studio collection continues to be made. Ann Sacks is now owned by Kohler (which also owns Kallista, Baker, McGuire), and the West Ave store, run by showroom manager Tamara Smith, marks the 17th location, with more than 500 tile display boards and 60 floor pads to help you imagine how a tile will look in the home. LCD screens project your own drawings and installation photos, while a state-of-the-art lighting system provides scenarios that illustrate how Martyn Lawrence Bullard's or Robert Kuo's tiles might look in your own home. Laurann Claridge AGE STONE Malerba Red Carpet Collection The new Ann Sacks showroom Massimo Vitali's Rosignano 3 Women, 2002, at Pop Austin Kenneth Noland's Farrallons (9), 1985, at Meredith Long & Company TKTKTKTK Elizabeth and Mel DeWees

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