Working Stiff Films

Production company, operating out of Baltimore, Maryland specialising in producing bold, cinematic commercials and branded content—with a strong emphasis on memorable storytelling

"Modern has to be a mindset, not an aesthetic" say designers at Design Within Reach talk

Promotion: a panel of experts discussed the qualities of enduring design at a talk hosted by US brand Design Within Reach and Dezeen at Chicago Fulton Market.

Hosted by Dezeen contributing editor Dan Howarth, the talk titled What makes modern timeless? brought together British industrial designer Matthew Hilton, Design Within Reach (DWR) brand creative director Omar Nobil and Mobile Makers founder Maya Bird-Murphy to discuss the values of long-lasting design.

The talk coincided with an exhibition showcasing DWR's designs with Case Furniture from the past 20 years, including the Matthew Hilton-designed Kelston...

Shingled Canadian house blends forms into fluid composition

Canadian studios Oyama and Julia Manaćas Architecte have designed Waterhouse, a woodland house clad in wood shingles that blends into a natural clearing in Sutton, Quebec.

The 260-square-metre (2,800-square-foot) residence sits in a forest opening, surrounded by a pond, ferns, boulders, wildflowers and rolling hills that rise to the Green Mountains in the distance.

Oyama and Julia Manaças Architecte, which are both based in Montreal and collaborate as An architecture capsule, designed the multi-form house as a series of monuments that alternate between closed interiors and open spaces.

"The project is an...

Tiny Art Show Repurposes a Disused Stairwell into a 1:6-Scale Gallery

In 2016, while artist McKay Lenker Bayer was still an undergraduate, her professor assigned the class the task of exhibiting their work. Unsure about presenting her work to the public, she downsized, quite literally, showing miniature paintings with teensy-tiny labels. And the idea for a minuscule exhibition space was born.

In 2018, Lenker Bayer established Tiny Art Show, a community art project that utilizes unique and unexpected spaces around Provo, Utah, to show original work by numerous artists. Until this year, the project was largely nomadic, but Tiny Art Show now has its own dedicated space.

Installed at 1:6 scale, the storefront-style...

Dezeen Debate features a "well-conceived, long-range plan for the investment"

The latest edition of our Dezeen Debate newsletter features the 2026 Winter Olympics Athletes' Village in Milan. Subscribe to Dezeen Debate now.

Architecture studio SOM completed the 2026 Winter Olympics Athletes' Village, which features six mass-timber residential buildings that will be converted into student housing after the games.

Readers were divided on the project. One described it as "boring, tasteless, contextless, basically a prison", while another disagreed called it a "fine reclamation of the land" and a "well-conceived, long-range plan for the investment".

Other stories in this week's newsletter that sparked debate include Zaha Hadid Architects'...

Archisonic Mycelium wall tiles by Impact Acoustic

Dezeen Showroom: Swiss brand Impact Acoustic has launched a sound-absorbing wall tile made from mycelium that is cultivated rather than manufactured.

The Archisonic Mycelium wall tile is Impact Acoustic's first product to be made from mycelium, an all-natural and biodegradable living material that is increasingly being used in design.

Consisting of a fungal root structure that grows on a substrate of organic waste such as paper or sawdust, mycelium naturally delivers a high degree of sound-absorption, particularly across the critical speech and working frequencies.

It is free of VOCs and synthetic binders as well...

Sinister Skies Set the Scene for Derelict Buildings in Lee Madgwick’s Surreal Paintings

Beneath ominous skies and set within flat, green parkland, Lee Madgwick’s folly-like buildings strike an unsettling note. His surreal paintings feature dilapidated facades and uncanny shrubbery against cloudy, deep gray skies—usually with something just a little strange going on.

In “Drift,” for example, bricks dislodge from the top of a boxy structure and float into the sky one by one, and “Fracture” defies gravity altogether with a hovering apartment tower that crumbles from below. Madgwick’s rural scenes nod to landscapes and developments that are often overlooked, imbuing them with what he describes as “an undercurrent of mischievous menace.”

Madgwick’s paintings aren’t...

A Camera Grip That Can Charge your iPhone

Belkin's PowerGrip is for those who shoot lots of video with their iPhone. It solves two problems at once: It provides all the juice you need for a long shoot, and it provides a comfortable camera-like grip.

It attaches magnetically, and can be used in either portrait or landscape orientations. There's also a physical shutter button, which works via Bluetooth.

The 15W battery has enough capacity to charge your phone "up to 1.6x," the company says. It also features a retractable USB-C cable and a second USB-C port, if you want...

The Digital Watch Started Out as a Sci-Fi Movie Prop

We don't think of Stanley Kubrick as the father of the digital watch, but he had more than a little to do with it. In the 1960s, while Kubrick was developing "2001: A Space Odyssey," he envisioned a futuristic watch that the astronauts would wear. He brought his concept to the Hamilton Watch Company and asked if they could create it as a prop for the film.

This was the resultant prop (which, ironically, is never once focused upon in the finished film):

For those of you who are younger, prior to this there was...

Charming Flights of Fancy Fill Vanessa Gillings’ Imaginative Illustrations

For fans of cozy cottages, sipping tea with a good book, exploring misty woodlands, and relishing timeless folk- and fairytales, the illustrations of Vanessa Gillings tap into a sense of comfort and wonder. Her protagonists, often donning witchy or wizard-like hats, appear to be on marvelous and mysterious journeys, sometimes accompanied by ravens, foxes, or butterflies as they explore forests, pen stories, or attempt to cast spells.

The works shown here formed part of the artist’s recent solo exhibition, Into the Woods, with Gallery Nucleus. See more on Gillings’ website and Instagram.