Not Your Grandmother’s Quilts

For the textile artist Adam Pogue, necessity has always bred invention. “I didn’t have money, and I wanted to decorate my place,” he says, so Pogue, 41, began crafting things for his Los Angeles apartment, upholstering a sofa in a Japanese boro-style hodgepodge of thrifted denim, knotting a rag rug for the floor and making curtains to use as room dividers. By 2015, Pogue, who in college studied architecture and sculpture, was wondering if he might make something more of his sewing projects. On nights and weekends, he had begun piecing together a quilt, what he describes as a “Bauhaus-y” composition in bright colors like magenta, yellow and blue. When he shared the project on Instagram, the response prompted him to quit his day job. Quilts, he recognized, are “universal, something that I could put my aesthetic into, that other people could love and use.”

He also showed the piece to Roman Alonso, the co-founder of the Los Angeles design firm Commune. “It was obvious that Adam is an artist,” says Alonso, who commissioned Pogue to create curtains for the dining room of his Los Feliz home, requesting that they resemble stained glass. Pogue immediately thought of the Korean tradition of bojagi — patchworked squares of cloth joined with hand-sewn sealed seams. A quilt is typically layers of fabric with batting in between, but bojagi can be a single, translucent sheet, finished on both sides; hold it up to the light and the seams echo the lines created when panels of stained glass are soldered together. After learning to replicate the technique on a machine, Pogue delivered three panels comprising a Tetris matrix of shapes and erratic pops of color — bojagi by way of Frank Lloyd Wright, with a little of Kazimir Malevich to boot.

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These days, Pogue sells patchworked quilts, ottomans and pillows through Commune, sometimes incorporating vintage textiles that Alonso finds on his travels. Pogue also has a hand in several of the firm’s projects — making curtains for the restaurant of a forthcoming museum in Los Angeles; creating window panels for the Ace Hotel in Kyoto, scheduled to open next year; and appliquéing a giant wraparound sectional in Japanese indigos for a client’s San Francisco residence. He still works out of his home, a loft in downtown Los Angeles filled with furniture he’s made, including a Donald Judd-inspired plywood daybed. And he remains thrifty, upcycling old kimonos donated by a neighbor or using an old mailbag procured from an Army Navy surplus store. When he does buy fabric, he’ll dye it with saved onion skins.

“I like to touch every part of them,” he says of his works, which balance intricacy with playfulness. Take the embroidered cloth cover he made for his turntable, or the ottoman he upholstered that looks to be wearing a patchwork Dickensian sleeping cap. Like those of the renowned African-American quilters of Gee’s Bend, Ala., (“another huge influence,” he says), Pogue’s compositions are painterly and abstract, free-form and intuitive. “He just has this instinct for it,” says Alonso. Pogue thinks of it a bit differently. “Too much math,” he replies, when asked if he might eventually expand into making clothing. “I’m more of a cook than a baker. I’m throwing things in the pot to see how they taste.” — JULIA FELSENTHAL

Bums in Seats

Though the furniture designer Brett Miller handcrafts chunky oak stools and walnut coffee tables in a ramshackle barn in Catskill, N.Y., he resists what he terms the “macho upstate woodworker thing”: that stereotype of a flannel-clad carpenter who makes unfeeling, hypermasculine work. Instead, his ergonomic pieces, at least 12 of which will be on display later this month at the Los Angeles home goods store Lawson-Fenning, are the result of an intuitive, tactile approach that prioritizes warmth and softness over clean edges. Take, for example, his anthropomorphic Butt Stool, a low, kidney-shaped seat with four stocky whitewashed wooden legs that resemble elongated Tic Tacs stood upright. The outline of the stool’s red oak top, originally inspired by a commission from a friend to create an aesthetically pleasing take on a Squatty Potty, is based on the designer’s own seated form. (Taller versions of the piece now line the bar at Relationships, a minimalist coffee shop and design showroom in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.) Miller, 30, has only been making work on his own since 2017, following a year spent assisting in the studio of the Hudson, N.Y.-based furniture company Fern, and remains mostly self-taught: Until he moved to Catskill from his native San Diego in 2015, he was a semiprofessional baseball player. “Because I never had any formal training, the idea of precision and straight lines never got beaten into me,” he says. “I just go with what I feel.” — ALICE NEWELL-HANSON

All-Weather Shoes

Rubberized high-tops, brogues and boots for rain or shine.

Top row from left: Burberry shoes, $790, us.burberry.com. Salvatore Ferragamo shoes, $1,150, ferragamo.com. Jacquemus shoes, $550, jacquemus.com. Prada shoes, price on request, prada.com. Stella McCartney shoes, $455, (212) 320-8350.

Bottom row from left: Hermès shoes, $1,100, hermes.com. Tod’s shoes, $675, tods.com. Pierre Hardy shoes, $745, pierrehardy.com. Jil Sander shoes, $1,190, jilsander.com. Dries Van Noten shoes, $740, bergdorfgoodman.com.

A New German Getaway With a Vintage Touch

“I don’t like to do hotels,” says the 72-year-old Belgian designer Axel Vervoordt, whose career began half a century ago with his reimagining of several dilapidated 15th- and 16th-century houses in Antwerp’s medieval center. “It’s 35 of the same thing.” He’s made a few exceptions, conceiving of a presidential suite for the Greenwich Hotel in Manhattan in 2014 and a new wing for the Bayerischer Hof in Munich last year. But the newly opened Purs — set in a 17th-century, gable-roofed former chancellery building in the western German river town of Andernach — is the first hotel whose interiors were designed entirely by Vervoordt and his team. “It was a small project, but the historically protected building proved convincing,” says Purs’s owner, Rolf Doetsch, who, like Vervoordt, was delighted when, during the renovation, workers dug up old Roman coins and jewelry, as well as a 2,000-year-old miniature bronze statue of Minerva.

Inside, Vervoordt and his project manager, Erik Van der Pas, adhered to a version of wabi-sabi, privileging rough-hewn and period-appropriate materials, including Flemish stone tiles from a historic house in Belgium and a vintage French pharmacy counter (now the reception desk), over those with perfect polish. They also came up with a different scheme for each of the 11 suites: One has rich red walls and Vervoordt’s signature earth-tone linen-covered couches and chairs, while another features a muted blue entrance that leads to an airy bedroom. Elsewhere, there is art by the 20th-century European artist group Zero and its Japanese counterpart, Gutai: Several of Yuko Nasaka’s panels of concentric circles hang in the hotel restaurant, which, thanks to the chef Christian Eckhardt, has already won two Michelin stars. — GISELA WILLIAMS

Distinctive Timepieces

Known as the Vault, the new high fine jewelry and watch floor at Saks Fifth Avenue’s flagship includes a wide array of men’s (or unisex) timepieces, many of them one-of-a-kind or limited edition.

A Lamp Like a Kite

After Hermès asked the 45-year-old Spanish industrial designer Tomás Alonso to create a small line of lamps, he visited the Paris house’s famed private museum. Located above the flagship store on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the space holds more than 20,000 non-Hermès objects, amassed over nearly 150 years, which have inspired the company’s clothing and accessories. Amid antique saddlery dating back to the Mongol invasion, Alonso, whose studio is in the London borough of Hackney, discovered a set of collapsible Victorian paper dioramas and some folding lamps from the early days of electric light. “I realized that packability, or at least the illusion of that, is at the heart of Hermès,” he says. “The idea that beautiful things can travel the world with you.” The lamps he conceptualized don’t actually fold, but they nonetheless are kitelike and airy, hovering between the ephemeral and the substantial. Crafted from handmade Japanese paper and bamboo in three colorways, each with a different configuration, including a T-shape and a single panel, the collection is named for coulisses — painted pieces of scenery that give a stage set its dimension. Lit by an LED light source on a pivoting copper-coated hoop to add geometric complexity, the fixtures stand as minimalist sculptures, aflame from within. Coulisse Z-shaped table lamp, $7,150, hermes.com. — NANCY HASS

A Fashion Executive’s Vintage Jewelry Collection

Alison Loehnis, the president of the luxury division of Yoox Net-a-Porter Group, was captivated by vintage jewelry at a young age. “My mother had amazing style and often wore an armful of gold bracelets from the 1930s and ’40s. She gave me one 20 years ago, and from there, I began collecting my own pieces,” says the New York-bred, London-based mother of two. Loehnis’s collection of earrings, cuffs, pendants and rings dates from the 19th century onward and has been sourced everywhere from the design site 1stdibs to the Jewel Gallery, a London online retailer that specializes in Art Deco and Belle Époque pieces. The 48-year-old joined Net-a-Porter in 2007 as vice president of sales and marketing and became its president in 2011 — a perch from which she oversees the men’s and women’s sites along with the brand’s editorial arms. This summer, Loehnis launched EIP Privé on Net-a-Porter, an invitation-only, online shop-in-shop that sells high jewelry and watches from brands including Piaget, Boghossian and Boehmer et Bassenge. — JOHN WOGAN

Gut-Renovating a Classic Watch

Turquoise is not uniquely American — there are deposits in Asia, South America and the Middle East — but Arizona has long been considered the premier worldwide source of the bewitching opaque blue-green mineral. The phosphate of copper and aluminum takes its modern name from the Old French word for “Turkish” (it was brought to Europe from mines in Persia during the Middle Ages). In pre-Columbian times, Native Americans unearthed unusually vibrant veins in colors from jade to baby blue, and many still regard the stone as sacred. Rolex, the Geneva-based watch company, made its first turquoise-faced watch in 1983; its designers have occasionally redeployed the earthy yet dramatic mineral over the years. This version of the classic Day-Date 36, in gold, sports the first such dial in nearly a decade. Fashioned from a wafer-thin slice of polished Arizona turquoise, its numerals and bezel are studded with more than 100 brilliant-cut diamonds. The effect? An azure patch of late afternoon sky above the mesas, just as the stars begin to emerge. Rolex Day-Date 36, $56,500, rolex.com. — NANCY HASS