One Designer’s Take on the Perfect Silver Chain (2024)

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A Colorful New Hotel in Luang Prabang, Laos

Hotels in Luang Prabang, Laos’s temple-dotted former royal capital, have long taken their design cues from the town’s French-colonial past with teakwood floors, louvered windows and creamy stucco walls. Against that backdrop, the new Senglao Boutique Hotel, which opened earlier this month, is a brightly colored standout. Its Laotian owners hired the Bangkok-based designer Saran Yen Panya, who created interiors that channel the nostalgia of the Senglao Movie House, an erstwhile part of the owners’ family business and a fixture in Luang Prabang during the 1980s. “I looked at the quirky and whimsical side of the city’s heritage,” Saran says. For the 31 rooms, some of which open to private terraces, he sourced vintage furniture and commissioned bespoke wallpapers and neon-lit art pieces inspired by traditional textiles and local embroidery. A custom stained-glass window takes center stage in the lobby, as does a work by the British artist David Shrigley, whose tongue-in-cheek work shares similarities with the embroidery commonly found in Laos’s night markets. From $55 a night, senglaoboutiquehotel.com.

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Jewelry that Traces the Landscape of the Sierra Nevada

Playful yet understated, the jewelry line Mociun opened its first brick-and-mortar store in New York in 2012 and has taken inspiration from the city in the years since. In 2018, the brand released charms that miniaturized the city’s most famous street food, including pizza slices, pretzels and hot dogs. But the designer Caitlin Mociun traces her fascination with glittering gems and alloys to Nevada City, Calif., the former Gold Rush town in the Sierra Nevada mountain range where she grew up and where she has fond memories of seeing people pan for gold in the Yuba River. Such precious metals, and particularly silver, are at the forefront of the designer’s latest venture, a line of genderless jewelry called CRZM (her initials) that launches this week. CRZM’s debut collection features 28 different styles of rings, bracelets, earrings and necklaces that draw their sculptural, imperfect shapes from the rugged natural landscape of the Sierra Nevada. Most of the spiral-motif necklaces and puffy mariner chains are fashioned in silver, which means they are more affordable than Mociun’s primary line of gem-centric fine jewelry, but CRZM also offers select pieces in 22-karat yellow gold, one of the purest forms you can wear. “I like the idea that these metals would be touching your skin,” Mociun says, “so that the energy they hold affects you more.” From $350, mociun.com.

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A Furniture Collection That Combines Wood and Clay

When the ceramist Danny Kaplan and the woodworker Vince Patti were introduced at a Manhattan party in early 2023, a fast friendship led the way to a furniture collaboration. Kaplan, who needed a bed frame, initially approached Patti with a sketch to help bring a custom design to life. “I was inspired by a Deco-era Jean-Michel Frank sofa with a screen placed elegantly around it. I envisioned [a curved screen] as a headboard, and I wanted a tile component in it,” says Kaplan. The two designers swapped reference images like Bauhaus, Brutalist and Chinese architecture, as well as the works of Frank Lloyd Wright, Tobia Scarpa and Carlo Scarpa. Ideas for other décor emerged. The Delf collection, a partnership between Danny Kaplan Studio and Patti’s art practice, Lesser Miracle, comprises a bed, an armchair and two bedside tables. Each piece features both artists’ signature materials of clay and wood: To showcase Kaplan’s handmade tiles, Patti carved out pathways and sections in white oak that accommodate the inlay details. Patti describes the collection as “ceramic pieces encased in wood.” The final iteration of Kaplan’s dream bed frame has tiles in seven earth tones nestled in the side and top edges of the multipanel screen, which is supported by sturdy, custom-made hinges. “This collection forced both of us to push our practices forward in ways that I don’t think either of us expected,” says Patti. The Delf collection launches May 30; from $4,500, dannykaplanstudio.com.