Guest Contribution by Doya Karolini

On the one hand, we have Wallpaper*, the Bible of design, launched in 1996 by Canadian journalist Tyler Brûlé and Austrian journalist Alexander Geringer, CEO of aheadmedia, in London (though 2007 saw the appointment of the new Editor in Chief, Tony Chambers). And on the other, we have La Rinascente, Milan’s one and only “Grande Magazzino”, as Italians would say.  Behind this fantastic department store is Vittorio Radice, known for turning Selfridge’s around a few years back.  While orchestrating Rinascente’s own renaissance, signor Radice invited three years ago the fantastic duo of Claudio Silvestrin & Giuliana Salmaso to redesign Rinascente’s basement and curate Wallpaper*’s very own retail store, Wallspace.

It is true, the Wallpaper* Team and the magazine’s foreign legion of international correspondents, already used to the wonderful and demanding pressure of scouting and hitting the world’s top fairs, design studios and insider secret tips, is now going the extra mile (actually, beyond) to uncover what has been found.

Perfectly choreographed to the original wish of Tony Chambers, Wallspace opens this month with an edit of domestic design, giving design addicts/consumers the opportunity to find several design objects of different backgrounds and use gathered together under one roof. From Konstantin Grcic’s “Accento” cutlery for Serafino Zan to Naoto Fukasawa’s “Plus Minus Zero” brand and D.lab’s “Pencil Block” from Singapore’s Design Incubation Centre, the visitor can rest assure Wallpaper has once again sniffed out the very best and is now elegantly allowing us to gain access to them through Wallspace.

We couldn’t imagine of a better way for us to touch perfection, or at least what seems to be the closest to it.

Below, you can get a taste of some items carefully selected by the Wallpaper team for the Wallspace. //