Hotel Zenden

The Hotel and Sport School Zenden was built by Wiel Arets Architects and is located within three monumental town houses near the river Maas in Maastricht, the Netherlands. The hotel includes nine rooms, a pool, a lounge, and a patio. The concept of the project was to transform a once-disparate assortment of guest rooms and athletic spaces – formerly known as the Hotel and Sport School Zenden – into one cohesive hotel.


Wiel Arets opened up the ground floor completely to make it feel like one continuous space. A sleek white palette, including white polyurethane floors, and minimalist, box-like rooms with Corian inlays and night-stands integrated into the walls, washing tables placed on floating shelves, TV’s hidden behind reflecting glass and bathroom doors serving as mirrors blend the interior and the three houses together.


Photography by Jan Bitter.

Nomu

Designed by Lee West, Nomu is a cork and ceramic teapot that has no handle but instead has a removable cork sleeve to stop you burning your hands.

The pot, and the accompanying ceramic cups are called Nomu, meaning to drink in Japanese and are produced by Eno Studio.

Yabané

The Yabané dresser by French-Japanese design duo Aki and Arnaud Cooren is an example of high craftsmanship and simplicity. It is also a celebration of the material. Handmade of ash wood by French woodworking firm Walnutsgroove, the piece shows off natural grain lines and knots. Designers claim that their work is often inspired by Sori Yanagi designs, which is clearly pronounced in this piece.

The name Yabané is referring to a traditional graphic pattern (the word means ‘arrow’ in Japanese). One of the main features of the dresser is its construction, allowing it to open on both sides. Thus, it can be placed in the middle of a room as an elegant and functional room divider.

R.I.P. Steve Jobs

X / I / I

German creative studio Deutsche & Japaner, based in Mannheim, specialise in a variety of disciplines, such as graphic design, product design, interior design, illustration and scenography as well as conceptual creation and strategic brand escort.

Earlier this year, the studio designed a limited edition book titled X / I / I. The minimal designed book (particularly the cloth cover) is the first in the series from TENWORDSANDONESHOT, presenting the featured artists from the blog in a printed publication.

The blog and the book share the same rules in the sense that there are only ten words written by the artists to outline their personality and just one studio image to offer an impression. Each entry has been designed in a completely different style using various sizes and typeface for both imagery and comments.

Orime Mouse

The most recent product by Nendo is Orime.

Orime, created for Elecom, is a wireless laser mouse that has some parallels with a Nighthawk Stealth Fighter aircraft. Rather than the usual curved mouse this one is formed entirely from flat surfaces.

Photography by Hiroshi Iwasaki.

Ora Lattea

The minimal design of Denis Guidone‘s Ora Lattea watch, created for Nava Design is abstinent. The piece plays with our expectations of what a traditional timepiece should be. Instead of hands there are two moving dots circling around the third one in the middle. The bigger dot represents the hour while the smaller dot represents the minute; the central dot remains fixed.

The Boat Series

Danish born and Copenhagen based designer Ditte Fischer specialises in hand-crafted ceramics. Some of Fischer’s work, such as the Boat Serieshave made its mark as a modern design classic.

Spaces, Etc.

These sculptural objects by New York based designer Ron Gilad, together called Spaces, Etc., are minimal three-dimensional outlines of various familiar shapes. Gilad is known for his experiments with architectural forms, which were triggered by an infamous New York moment. In 2008 his entire building was evicted due to a fire code violation. Living without a permanent place for three months, the designer started exploring the idea of spaces and homes, trying to define what a home really is.

The visual tension between the lines is so strong, the objects show the signs of optical illusions, stretching the frontier between transparent and tangible, functional and abstract.

The KM Table

The KM Table, designed by french architect Jean Nouvel is a narrow 85cm wooden table, made to measure, with a minimum length of 4m. The example exhibited here measures 6m 35, according to the dimensions of the gallery.

The proportions of the table are determined by a constructive principle whereby its span is miraculously supported within the thickness of the material itself, which is a lamination of oak and hornbeam. With this building technique, any length of table is imaginable, even one kilometre…The table is produced in Italy by Unifor.