The Scope’s Designers
Anna karlin
On an unassuming block in New York’s Chinatown, Anna Karlin has created a world of her own. Behind a plum-lacquered entryway, the multidisciplinary designer’s curiosities live in a singular space — formerly a burn-out print shop that Karlin renovated to her bespoke standards. Within six months, Karlin was welcoming guests into her wildly creative universe. Reinvention isn’t a novel concept for the self-taught designer.
Christopher Gentner
Amid a collection of metal-heavy lighting and decorative objects, a stool more akin to an art installation breaks the mold with its distinct sense of sculptural abstraction at this year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York. Accented with red silicone tubes and a patinated brass bottom, industry insiders visiting Chicago-based designer Christopher Gentner’s booth were bewildered by the composition of his creation. “People aren’t really sure what it is,” says Gentner. “Is it a sculpture or a stool? The one question I always get asked is, ‘Can I sit on it?’”
Eny Lee Parker
Upon entering designer Eny Lee Parker’s studio in Brooklyn, sizable ceramic designs at diverse stages of production decorate the room that’s finished with her medium for creation: the potter’s wheel. While the centuries-old device is traditionally associated with the craftsmanship of small clay vessels, Parker reimagined the machine’s capabilities to build contemporary pieces of furniture and lighting.
Erickson Aesthetics
For designer Ben Erickson of Erickson Aesthetics, craftsmanship knows no boundaries. Growing up, the Brooklyn-based creative would often visit his grandparents’s turn-of-the-century mansion in Madison, New Jersey, where he was exposed to impeccable interior architecture and his grandmother Bunny Brown’s taste in art and design. “From a really young age, I began to notice quality craftsmanship and certain design details, thanks to my grandparents’s house,” Erickson says. “The grandeur of their home really struck me.”
Farrah Sit
As an industrial designer, Farrah Sit constantly finds herself questioning the functionality of her furniture. And if others inquire about the composition of one of her pieces, she feels accomplished in her role as an artist. “I want to make objects that urge you to keep looking,” Sit explains. “It’s important to push the design to another level, where people question its form.”
Katie Ridley Murphy
At the peak of Arabia Mountain in Atlanta, Georgia, designer Katie Ridley Murphy is often foraging for her next treasure — sticks that strike her artistic sensibility (sun-bleached, peculiar etchings), before replicating each one’s distinct formation in porcelain imported from Barcelona. Through a subtractive carving technique and glaze firing, Murphy slowly reveals each sculpture’s distinct character.
Konekt
In 2007, Sultan began designing handcrafted outdoor tables for her own home, with the intention to showcase the pieces to the public. However, once she finished the collection, the recession hit, putting her design dreams on hold. Eight years later, Helena resumed her furniture-making venture, launching her brand, Konekt, alongside her daughter Natasha.
Mark Pavlovits
The eccentric elegance of Pavlovits’s glass pieces is what he believes preserves the age-old craft for the next generation. “It’s challenging, because people see colorless glass and think of their grandma,” he explains. “But I accept the challenge and try to keep things edgy and take that stigma away from the material.” Highlights of Pavlovits’s collection for the modern millennial include a scalloped edge bowl inspired by a Venus flytrap, as well as a vase meant to evoke the sight of a flower frozen in time.
Materia
More than twenty years ago, designers Megan Sommerville and Matt Ensner met in a high school architecture drafting class in Asheville, North Carolina. “I remember she was the quiet astute student in the class, and I was bit louder and looser,” says Ensner, who married and created the design studio Materia with Sommerville in the late-2000s. Fast forward to present day, and the couple’s dynamic, at least when crafting their material-driven collection of furniture and lighting, has flipped.
Slash Objects
“I’m very project-oriented,” says designer Arielle Assouline-Litchen at her redbrick studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which is dotted with recycled rubber, marble remnants, and molds that are ready to be cast in concrete. “I like the idea of starting something and seeing it through, but sometimes it doesn’t always work out the way you initially intend.”