Founded in New York City in 2019 by Alix Freireich and David Lê, Maiden Name is an online concept store with an in-house women’s wear line. Each season, then, the pair curate a collection of stylish, sustainably minded objects from around the world. “So much in design right now is just mindless consumerism using really expensive materials,” says Lê. By contrast, he and Freireich recently released a series of zero-waste metal objects for the home. There’s an end table and a bowl, both largely consisting of a single curved, laser-cut piece of steel supported by its own tension, by the artist Paul Coenen, who is based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and into these curved pieces he’s inserted smaller, flat sheets resembling fins. Tim Teven, who shares a studio with Coenen, has created a vase made of chrome with a molten, folded base, along with a gracefully curved metal table with indentations that make its surface look quilted. And then there are gleaming and hefty ashtrays made from cans of beer that were drunk and melted down by Christoph Meier, Ute Müller, Robert Schwarz and Lucas Stopczynski, a collective of European artists who displayed the ashtrays inside a vending machine in “Relax,” a recent exhibition at the MAK Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna. But wouldn’t it be nice to put one to use in your home, where, unlike the museum, you can actually smoke? From $ 200, maiden-name.com.
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