We are excited to announce that The Cool Hunter has been nominated (again!) for the Best Culture Blog Award in the annual Weblog Awards - the largest and most influential blog awards in the world. We won the
Culture category in 2007 so we are thrilled to be considered again for the 2008 awards. Thank you to all of our readers who have voted for us for already. We look forward to continuing to bring you the latest word on cool. Click here to show your appreciation (which takes less than 3 seconds of your day)
Bold use of colour has never frightened the 40-year-old, Lisbon-based
architect Pedro Gadanho. The colour extravagance of the recently
completed single-family residence in Oporto, Portugal, follows
Gadanho’s established modus operandi of using white and bright colours
as key elements of a space. The petrol-blue kitchen and sanguine
stairway draw the attention while at the same time punching up the
power of snowy white.
Colour played an important part also in the widely reviewed and admired
Orange house he designed with Nuno Grande. The private residence was
completed in 2005 in Carreço, Portugal.
Another example of
Gadanho’s use of color is the high-profile Ellipse Foundation Art
Centre in Estoril/Alcoitão, Portugal. He designed the 20,000
square-foot converted warehouse with Atelier de Santos. It was
completed in 2006.
Gadanho’s thought-provoking architecture matches his overall attempt to
provoke critical thinking about the relationship between architecture
and current culture. He is known not only as an architect but also as a
free-lance critic, curator and teacher. He’s taught architecture theory
and history at Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto and
curated the Portuguese presence at the 2004 Venice Biennale. And for
those of us who like lovely names, his full name is Pedro César Clara
do Carmo Gadanho. Tuija Seipell
TreeLife by The Cool Hunter. A public interactive outdoor exhibition of cutting edge tree houses designed by of the world’s top artists, designers and architects.
After four years of spreading the latest word on cool online, The Cool
Hunter is proud to announce the launch of its first "real world" public
event, TreeLife by The Cool Hunter which is set to land in iconic
park locations in New York, London, Sydney and other exciting cities in
Europe, New Zealand, Canada and Asia during 2009 and 2010.
TreeLife by The Cool Hunter will showcase cutting-edge eco design by the world’s best architects, designers and artists.
Tree
houses have become creative eco-statements in the design world;
structures that don’t impose themselves on the environment, but blend into it with harmony, respect and grace.
They allow people to literally live in “nature,” a place of peace and
tranquility high above the street level of life where stress dominates.
The Cool Hunter will invite the world’s most exciting established and
emerging architects, designers and artists to design a tree-house for
the event. TreeLife is a thoroughly green event, and tree houses will
be crafted from sustainable or recycled materials. The participating
designers will be briefed to design the tree houses as ‘stand alone’
structures that only appear to be suspended in the trees, so the
exhibition does not impact on the trees or the environment.
A
board of curators will work to select the participating architects,
designers and artists, both established “stars” and rising talent from
across the globe as well as the event’s home city.
TreeLife
by The Cool Hunter will be held over four weeks, and will feature a
program of cool sustainable entertainment events happening around the
exhibition.
Sponsorship Opportunities
Design: The new frontier in brand alignment
The
consumer marketing landscape is changing. A decade ago brands rushed to
align with fashion, music and celebrity but as these worlds have become
ubiquitous their value as vehicles for brand positioning is decreasing.
Consumers are moving on, looking to more exclusive, less
accessible disciplines of design such as architecture and art for
distraction and inspiration. We have entered an age where architects,
product, furniture and industrial designers and other design and visual
creatives are becoming the new pop icons.
An age where names like Zaha Hadid, Marc Newson, Karim Rashid and Philippe Starck have entered the popular culture lexicon.
Yesterday,
mass market consumers cared who designed the dress. Today and tomorrow,
they will care who designed the chair, the building and the artwork.
The challenge for brands is to learn how to engage this
increasingly design-literate consumers, who are not only spoiled for
choice, but also developing an almost inherent expectation of
innovation in everything they consume.
As evidenced by Apple, innovation -
from product development through to all facets of brand communication -
isn’t just desirable. It’s everything.
TreeLife by The Cool
Hunter offers brands an opportunity to align with a design brand
event that will reach a large audience. The event is about casting
green as innovative, cool and the only way forward for the future.
She was born in Sweden, worked in Brazil and is now settled in the Portland area. The prolific illustrator and mixed-media artist Linn Olofsdotter is a global citizen of the most interesting kind. Her own life in different locales gives her many sources of inspiration and most likely helps her flex her illustration muscle to meet the needs of a vast variety of clients.
Her work has appeared in Computer Arts and Bon Magazine; she’s created T-shirt graphics for Levi’s, wall murals for a hotel in Los Angeles, CD covers for artists and illustrations for Oilily and La Perla. Nearly all of her work has a collage-like feel, with many layers, nuances and media. The somewhat surreal and psychedelic look of some of her pieces attests to her ability and willingness to trot not just the globe but regions beyond. - Tuija Seipell
The Cool Hunter celebrates creativity in all of its modern
manifestations. We are a leading online publication and an upmarket hub
for what is the most creative, the most innovative, the newest, best
and coolest. We value global relevance, not global trends, channeling
what we find to our worldwide audience.
In a society obsessed with the shiny and new, The Cool Hunter has
become the reference point of choice for the latest in what's hot
tomorrow. Everyone wants to know what's hot, because 'hot' products and
ideas sell. Over 1 million people now read The Cool Hunter a month.
Sign up for ourfree weekly newsletter so you're always in the know! Because being in the know - makes you so much more interesting.
Cool hunting, we've discovered, has an interesting side effect. Each week we receive excited emails from the creatives, designers, architects and entrepreneurs we have featured on the site reporting massive spikes in traffic on their websites and an avalanche of international enquires from agencies, retailers and other potential customers wanting to know how they can get their hands on their work. Most report being inundated with enquiries from the international print media - major magazines and newspapers who rely on The Cool Hunter and other great blogs to find content for their pages.
It's all part of the Blog effect, lead by the Bloguls (blog mogul). The Bloguls have revolutionized the global media and the practice of journalism. Print can no longer compete, in terms of reporting information first. By the time newspapers and magazines hit the news-stands their content is already old news. Bloggers are setting media agendas and have become a crucial resource for print journalists, who rely on them to supply raw, uncensored, immediate information. We experience this first-hand every day when we receive emails from major publications asking us for high res images and more information on posts, which we see covered in their pages weeks later.
The world's most powerful mastheads, such as the Vogues, Vanity Fairs, Wallpapers and New York Times' of the world - have had to accommodate the increasingly influential Bloguls, with whom they now compete for advertising dollars as growing slices of marketing budgets are being funnelled into the blogosphere.
Google validates the Bloguls' influence. As just one example, our recent post on the new W Hotel in Hong Kong ranks as one of the top three posts on the property, just below the site Starwood Hotels that owns W. This means that when anyone in the world does a Google search on W Hong Kong, the very first review they see is ours. The bottom line is that blogs reach more people than print media.
Here at The Cool Hunter, we are happy to report that much of the benefit of our influence as an information source flows straight back to the people and brands we feature. For the past four years we've endeavoured to bring you the most inspiring stuff from across the globe and we are thrilled that the exposure we have given up-and-coming creatives and designers has helped launch careers, build media profiles or taken their businesses to a whole new global level.
We thought we'd share some of these stories with you from a selection of random posts.
Within 48 hours of being featured in this post Amsterdam-based architecture and interior design group i29 was flooded with emails from design publications around the world including Frame Mag (Netherlands), Monitor Mag (Russia) Elle Decoration (Romania) CASE da Abitare (Italy), LOFT publications (Spain) BOB magazine (Korea), GULF interiors (Dubai) De Architect (Netherlands), ONoffice (UK) Cover Magazine (Venezuela), Sisustajalehti (Finland) Vivenda (Netherlands) Maru Magazine (Korea) and plenty of other print media and numerous design blogs.
Dutch architects and interior designers Uxus recieved a "tenfold" increase in traffic to their website after we featured their project Merus Winery in California. Uxus was flooded by queries from magazines around the world, including Wallpaper (UK), Noblese Mag (Korea), Marie Claire (Brazil), GQ India, Casa Da Abitare (Italy) FX Mag (UK), Absolute Marbella (Spain), Home Journal Mag (Hong Kong), ID Mag (USA), The Shorlist (UK), Future Laboratory (UK) and many more.
"I have received tons of inquiry e-mails from all over the world with regard to my collection after your feature. Several people ordered hats. I assume the order volume would have been quite a bit higher, though, had my online shop been up already.
It has been interesting to see that the inquiries also came from very far away places – Mexico, Argentina, Australia, Korea, Israel (in addition to the US, UK, Belgium, etc.). Since I have had a lot of good press in Europe (especially the UK) and in the US and UK for instance through the publications in the respective Vogues I was quite used getting mails and orders from Europe and the US. But before your feature I had definitely fewer attention from the aforementioned other areas.
In total, the visitors on my page are up by 100-200% at the moment". Rike Feurstein
“For the month after we were written about in thecoolhunter.net, I watched the history of Europe unfold in my inbox. At the time we only had UK shipping enabled, and I was getting emails every day: he said ‘How can you ship to England but not Germany?’ and then ‘You ship to Germany but not Poland?!’ Now we’re in Luxembourg and the Czech Republic and Slovenia. We just enabled shipping to Colombia.” Andy Dunn- Bonobos Founder
"Being on The Cool Hunter has resulted in a handful of opportunities - the NYTimes being one of them. After my work was posted on the site and I was commissioned to design an image for the cover of New York Times real estate magazine. My exposure on The Cool Hunter has allowed me to quit my day job." Andy Gilmore
"It’s because thanks too The Cool Hunter I’ve been featured in over 50 magazines that can be viewed on my website under editorials on the information page. The lights even ended up in Argentinean Playboy! Along that I also have generated many jobs within Australia, many o/s enquiries and an actual job in San Francisco.
I’m about to move out of my studio in my garage into a real studio which allows me to employ staff, too as business is growing fast and I desperately need more space as well as extra hands. So I can’t begin to tell you how much I thank you for making me famous!" Volker Haug
"The opportunities that thecoolhunter.net feature has provided me are beyond what I could have ever imagined. Not only did it kick start my career as an artist, but it did so almost overnight. I’m a graphic artist for network TV as my day job and fine art was solely a hobby. The day the feature came out I literally woke up, looked at my phone and had about 100 emails asking for information about the piece. Within a couple of weeks the stats for my website showed over 300 other websites linking to me and nearly a half million visitors to my site from over 60 countries.
I was written up in a number of international publications and was offered paid corporate speaking engagements such as at Disney animation. I just completed my first solo gallery show but have also had my artwork featured at 2 additional art galleries in group exhibitions. Additionally, I am working on commissioned pieces for international buyers all of whom found me on thecoolhunter.net. Currently my art is being considered for a feature film in which it would appear in a high end home. I am also about to show some pieces in homes for sale in the 10 million dollar plus price range.
There are no words I can use to express my gratitude for the exposure that you have provided for me."Matt Bilfield, artist
"Being featured on The Coolhunter has certainly increased awareness and understanding of Aesop to a very appropriate and progressive audience. Posts have resulted in communication with Case Da Abitare, Harpers Bazaar, Virgin Blue Voyeur, Surface, DIDD (industry), GDR (industry), A4 (Poland), Attitude (Portugal), BMW Magazine (Germany). Belle (Australia), Marie Claire (Australia), Cubes (Singapore) too many to list." Indi Davis - Aesop
Magical spiritual powers are not the only talents Miami-based art collaborative FriendsWithYou can claim as theirs. They also have a special skill for creating cuddly, cute and somewhat clever toys, events, experiences and other playthings for us mere mortals. We would never imply that their Fun Houses and other entertainment are just for kids because if they were, we’d be too envious to be nice.
This past summer, the FriendsWithYou duo — Sam Borkson and Arturo “Tury” Sandoval III — participated in the Hexagone (A hex is gone) group art show in Miami curated by Jose Mertz. The FriendsWithYou playroom was filled with gigantic inflated buddies and called Wish World. Miami-born artist Bhakti Baxter created a fantastic mural for the space.
A FriendsWithYou Fun House was also part of the 944 Magazine’s Crime on Canvas surrealistic pop art show in July 2008 at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas.
Earlier this month, FriendsWithYou created another Fun House interactive exhibition for the SCOPE Miami lounge. This year’s SCOPE had nearly 90 exhibitors from more than 20 countries in a new 60,000-square-foot space in the Wynwood Art District where FriedsWithYou’s new studio is now also located.
The Fun House is a giant, anthropomorphic bounce house intended to help unleash the visitors’ inner brats and in doing so, take advantage of the healing power of fun. This is in keeping with FriendsWithYou’s mission of sharing the message of “magic, luck and friendship with the global community.” - Tuija Seipell
I worry for anyone who ever doubted Miami Horror. No really, because when Miami first appeared on the scene almost two years ago, sporting an unrestrained love of everything ‘80s and a healthy night-club tan, the people who dismissed him then had no idea of his potential for greatness. Shame on them. Since his humble beginnings, Miami Horror’s broke out of the basement beat factory to hook up with esteemed company like Fred Falke, Pnau, Gameboy/Gamegirl and Midnight Juggernauts and also polished off the extremely strong debut EP, Bravado. It’s on the EP that Miami Horror really shines, whether it’s with the Prince-esque strut of Don’t Be On With Her, the crunch of Summerfest ’86 or the shimmer and pulse of Bellevue. It’s filled with more style, vigour and thoughtfulness than your normal producer’s debut EP, but trust me, Miami Horror is far from the norm. - By Oliver Queen. Bravado is OUT NOW
ArcheToys designed by Floris Hovers
may be toys but kids do not need to get excited. Adults are going to
scoop them up, now that they are apparently available - although we are
not yet quite sure how or where we could buy them.
Hovers was
born in 1976 in Raamsdonksveer in the Netherlands and graduated from
the Eindhoven Design Academy in 2004. The first ArcheToy was an
ambulance that Hovers created for his little cousin. The simplicity of
the cars from the 1950s and 1960s charmed and intrigued Hovers and so
he began to craft a fleet of specialty vehicles. They are archetypes of
uncomplicated, recognizable form; toys for adults minus tiresome macho
undertones.
Hovers introduced ArcheToys to the world at the
November 2007 Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. His intention of
designing furniture has now been sidetracked as these little things
have taken off the way they deserve. More than 40 strong and growing,
the ArcheToys fleet includes several that we simply must have –
especially the hearse, combine and ice-cream truck. - Tuija Seipell
Much like designers, musicians are continually swinging through history, cherry-picking the best bits from long-forgotten eras and reinterpreting them with a modern slant. Recently, we’ve trudged through nostalgic New Order clones and the post-post-punk boom with bands like Interpol and Editors, but now it would seem that the much maligned genre of disco is coming back. So break out the bellbottoms because disco is about to be cool again.
FAN DEATH Fan Death are the princesses of new-disco strut. Their stunning debut single, Veronica’s Veil, sounds like it was recorded in the early hours of the morning after the Canadian duo stumbled out of an all-nighter at Studio 54, their breath gone from dancing and their heads ablaze with dreams of disco stardom. From the ever-so-perfect string sweeps, the throbbing bassline, the shimmering production courtesy of Erol Alkan (Mystery Jets, Late Of The Pier), and the hollow-eyed vocal, it is truly thrilling stuff that manages to breathe life back into disco.
SISTERS OF TRANSISTORS Not content with leading the genre’s renaissance, UK revivalists Sisters Of Transistors seem to have carved their sub-genre in the resurgence of disco, with what we’re calling mystery-disco. Not only does the group have a fondness for capes and shooting their videos in 3D, but there’s also a hint of unseen orchestration behind this twisted organ quartet. Pulling the strings is Graham Massey of 808 State fame, and the only person on this list who’s old enough to remember the heights of disco. Massey and the ‘Sisters create some brilliantly dark yet oddly danceable disco, with undeniable grooves working under the looping, hypnotic organ swirls. It’s mesmerizing and dramatic, and exactly what disco should be.
HEARTBREAK Fan Death traverses a more traditional, platform-boots and mirror-balls era of disco, but UK-by-way-of-Argentina two-piece, Heartbreak, reaches back to somewhere between Giorgio Morodor’s arrival on the scene and the eventual death of disco when the synths-‘n-eyeliner crowd of the 1980s broke out. Heartbreak is more Human League and early Depeche Mode than Chic. They’re all about waves of bubbling keyboards and the bombastic production gloss of an ABC record. But beneath this there is a clear debt to disco, from their would-be Moroder arpeggio fetish, to the group’s penchant for Bee Gees-like falsettos. It’s scarily good music. – Dave Ruby Howe
If you're fortunate enough to have a garage full of sports cars your next purchase must be a Silvestri speedboat
- what we like to call the Porsche of the sea. The devastatingly
handsome 23-foot vessel was actually created by the makers of the
Spyker sports car and it shows. It features all sorts of high tech
gadgets and stylistic points that you expect from a superior sports
car, from remote control hatched compartments to a sleek leather
interior. Oh, and a ferocious motor to be reckoned with. It's enough to
make James Bond proud. - Orlando Evans
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