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Debut: Ken Fulk’s new collection for The Rug Company has many tales to tell—including your own
For AD100 mainstay Ken Fulk, every great design starts with a compelling narrative. “I instinctively built a business around storytelling. Whether I’m designing a house that stands for generations, a hotel for thousands of guests, or a party that lasts only a few hours, it’s all about creating a genuinely transportive environment and experience,” says the free-spirited conjurer. Predictably, Fulk’s new five-piece collection for The Rug Company, titled Divine Inspiration, is positively brimming with history, fantasy, and delightfully idiosyncratic interpretations of old-world forms and iconography. Consider Saint Joe’s Dome, a loosely illustrated rendition of the soaring ceiling of the deconsecrated Romanesque Revival church in San Francisco that houses Fulk’s Saint Joseph’s Arts Society. Or Surrealist Garden, a trippy dreamscape that nods to the folkloric and allegorical imagery of pictorial tribal rugs. Sonic Wave and Sonic Spruce, the most abstract offerings in the line, pay homage to the power of music and sound, while Zellige puts a snappy contemporary twist on traditional Moroccan tile work and colors. The narrative theme takes its most literal form in the pattern A Life Reflected, Fulk’s hat-tip to historic delft tiles, which allows clients to create a completely bespoke carpet based on their own personal lives and loves.
“You can pick and choose individual panels that reflect your hobbies or passions or anything that has meaning to you. Artists in our studio can even do portraits of you and your kids and your pets. You’re literally weaving your own story into the design,” he explains. “And that’s the joy of working with The Rug Company. They weren’t afraid of letting us do what we do best and try something a little strange and magical.” therugcompany.com
Landscape Architecture: In Houston, Thomas Woltz revitalizes and reunites public green space in need
Houston’s Memorial Park was meant to honor those who sacrificed their lives in World War I. But as the project approached its 2024 centennial it had become a memorial to its own landscape. Underfunded maintenance and prolonged drought had thousands of trees to die. The decimated 1,500-acre park wasn’t much to look at, as Houstonians learned from Memorial Drive, the highway that has divided it, unceremoniously, since the 1950s.
Thomas Woltz and his firm, Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, were hired to reimagine the park, a process that began a decade ago and may take another decade to finish. But this year Houstonians rejoiced in the progress Woltz and his team have already made. Their latest big achievement was burying two stretches of the highway, together almost 1,000 feet long, below massive land bridges that reunite the two halves of the park. Also completed is a 100-acre gathering place called the Clay Family Eastern Glades.
At its heart is a five-acre lake that, like all of Woltz’s interventions, is as practical as it is beautiful, in this case capturing and filtering rainwater for irrigation. The glades are ringed by an elliptical path, which serves as an orienting device. “If you’re on the ellipse and the path is curving slightly,” Woltz says, “you know you’re on one of the long sides. If the curve is quite sharp, you know you’re at one of the ends. I think,” Woltz adds, “that when you know where you are, your spirit can open up to the natural setting more readily.”
Houstonians aren’t the only ones returning to this once forlorn swath of greenery. “The park is so alive with insects and birds calling out at night,” says Woltz, “that friends are sending me recordings.” memorialparkconservancy.org
One to Watch: Designer Kim Mupangilaï unearths her roots in a bold foray into furniture
“They’re meant to look like they’re dancing,” says Kim Mupangilaï, reflecting on the eight works in her inaugural solo show at Manhattan’s Superhouse gallery this past summer. Unveiled in a vitrine-like space on the second floor of a Chinatown mall, her furnishings do have an uncanny, anthropomorphic energy. A sinuous bench wears a swingy, banana-fiber skirt; an armoire seems to stomp its heeled foot; and a groovy floor lamp sports a shade modeled after a precolonial Congolese hairstyle. Their surreal silhouettes might recall the work of Antoni Gaudí, Philippe Hiquily, or Joan Miró, made at a time when many creatives mined colonial Africa for inspiration. But Mupangilaï’s pieces, which she describes as “cross-cultural self-portraits,” chart new territory, mixing the visual references handed down from her Congolese father with the woodworking techniques she learned from her Belgian maternal grandfather.
Mupangilaï’s parents themselves met salsa dancing in Antwerp, where they later raised their daughter. Mupangilaï studied design and interior architecture in Belgium before moving to New York in 2018, where she got her start designing private residences and hospitality hot spots like Ponyboy bar in Brooklyn. During the pandemic, as she took a deeper look at her biracial heritage, she turned her attention to conceptualizing furniture. Paging through African history books, she became fixated on the sculptural shapes of currency tokens—objects like bracelets, cooking utensils, or weapons that were used for trade or to commemorate life events. Versions of them soon filled her sketchbooks. “I felt like I was creating a new language,” she says of the forms, which she twisted, morphed, and merged, like building blocks, into furnishings. The swooping profile of a daybed, for instance, mimics a throwing knife. The armoire was inspired by a warrior’s shield.
“Growing up in Belgium, my natural instinct was to blend in,” explains Mupangilaï, who now translates that experience through the unique interplay of materials in her work, which she produces in close collaboration with Indonesian artisans. Sumptuous teak merges with volcanic stone via puzzle joints or balls and sockets—no metal fasteners are used—while woven-banana-fiber accents might seamlessly integrate into carved wood. “It really shows the yin and yang of my heritage,” explains Mupangilaï, who is bringing this approach to forthcoming projects like a residence in Hudson, New York, and new furniture concepts. “I hope it urges viewers to look inward and explore their own cultural landscapes.” instagram.com/pangilai
Restaurant: At Frou Frou in Lisbon, Jean-Philippe Demeyer crafts a mind-bending mash-up of cultural reference points
Belgian designer Jean-Philippe Demeyer isn’t a fan of unreconstructed design clichés. “I need a twist, a feeling out of the ordinary,” insists the AD100 talent. And there are twists aplenty at Frou Frou, a fearlessly inventive Chinese-themed restaurant that is affiliated with JNcQUOI, a private members club in Lisbon, Portugal. (The restaurant is open to the public.) Demeyer’s vision for the lavish eatery draws inspiration from a dizzying array of sources: the 1980s architecture of the building that houses the club; the outré style of ABBA; and the centuries-old influence of Asian art and design on European aesthetics. The blue-lacquered ceiling, for example, nods to the preferred eye shadow of the ABBA sirens, while the proliferation of dragon, cloud, and lotus motifs—including the elaborate embroidery on the bespoke, imperial-yellow sofa upholstery—embraces the auspicious symbols so central to Chinese culture. The cloud imagery is also a sly wink at the work of surrealist René Magritte, Demeyer’s countryman. Cascades of fringe, which line the walls of the restaurant, add an extra layer of froufrou finery.
If all of this sounds like design by free association, that’s simply part of Demeyer’s madcap charm. “This is my take on East meets West,” he says, “something that feels new and full of wonder.” jncquoi.com
Exhibitions: Burkinabe artist Hamed Ouattara upcycles an unlikely material to spotlight vernacular traditions
In landlocked Burkina Faso, where there is no domestic fossil fuel production, oil arrives by the truckload, leaving a wake of emptied steel barrels. Many people reuse those containers as trash cans or water storage. But Hamed Ouattara takes a different approach, transforming the industrial waste into fantastical functional sculptures. “This material reflects the economic dependency of the country and its relationship with the rest of the world,” explains the Burkinabe artist. “By integrating it into my creations, I can elevate it, give it a more noble life.”
With the help of his 15-person team, Ouattara deconstructs the colorful barrels—harvesting their sheet metal to then carve, bend, hammer, or rivet using traditional metal-forging techniques. The resulting Afrofuturist forms reference local Sudano-Sahelian architecture, both real and imagined. “I draw inspiration from the great medieval buildings of Africa, the stories of heroes associated with mythical cities, and the grand mosques and palaces,” he explains.
Intricately constructed and often richly textured, his latest body of work is now on view at Los Angeles’s Friedman Benda gallery in “Bolibana,” the artist’s first American solo show. (The title references the Bamana word for the end of a journey or transformation.) The pieces look simultaneously like rough-hewn spacecrafts and architectural follies, with references to West African vernacular wet-mud construction techniques. The riveted bodies of the Bobodioulasso (Burkina Faso Town) and Tombouctou II (Timbuktu II) cabinets, for example, mimic the pattern of wood stakes that stud the exterior of those structures. Meanwhile, the conical antennae on the acorn-shaped Boulonda (Ancestors hut) nod to earthen forms often found atop mosques.
“I hope to demonstrate that indigenous skills are still relevant and important,” says Ouattara, who would like to introduce young people to these traditions by establishing a design education program in Burkina Faso, where pipelines to the field are limited. Simply put: “My purpose is to share my expertise and contribute to the development of this creative industry in my country.” friedmanbenda.com
