Sky Planter

Frontera 96 store in Mexico City

Frontera 96 is a Mexico City retail and art space run by a design collective in the always hip Roma neighborhood. They sell t-shirts inspired by Mexico City indie rock bands, like Hello Seahorse! and Los Rebel Cats, with a revolving slate of groups coming in to sign autographs from time to time. The store is only open Friday through Sunday. Read more

Toronto’s FRANK restaurant

Designed by — and named after – the iconic architect Frank Gehry, Toronto’s FRANK is a tasty complement to the Art Gallery of Ontario, located, as it is, within the building’s beautiful surrounds. The interior design is stunning: modern, chic, and urbane, it’s a work of art in its own right, featuring modern Danish furnishings and an installation of Frank Stella’s work. And the restaurant itself benefits from the oversight of executive chef Anne Yarymowich, who has created a small but delightful menu, showcasing local wines and seasonal ingredients. Read more

Barcelona’s Hotel Omm

There’s something to be said for staying in a hotel room that’s bigger than your Brooklyn apartment. Yup, it happens so rarely that when you come across it, you kinda want to hang inside, bask in the space, and imagine that this really is your life. 365 days a year. Ah ha, then you wake up. Anyway, I stayed recently at the beautifully designed Hotel Omm in the Eixample district of Barcelona, surrounded by the glitzy, sparkling shops that dot the landscape and by the disarmingly original Gaudi buildings that tower spectacularly above the skyline. It’s quite a sight. [photo by Alison Zavos] Read more

Plumen

The tightly-wound compact fluorescent light bulbs we’ve welcomed into our homes have a little sister. Plumen is low-energy, yet she’s trendy, twisted and a designer’s dream. Not yet in production, you can see Plumen hanging alone in MOMA.

Jan Vormann

A brick of any other kind would look as sweet, believes artist Jan Vormann. She began filling crumbling walls with multi-coloured Lego bricks in Bocchignano, a little village close to Rome, and was then invited to continue her rainbow reparations in Tel Aviv and Yaffo. Beautiful appropriation or ugly sacrilege?

The Pileus internet umbrella

From the what will they think of next box comes [drum roll please] Pileus — an umbrella connected to the Internet, ‘to make walking in rainy days fun’. Pileus has a large screen on the top, a built-in camera, a motion sensor, GPS, and a digital compass. And it provides two main functions: social photo-sharing and a 3D map navigation. Yes, indeed, rainy days will never quite seem the same again.