Round Mirror Boca Do Lobo

A passion for breaking boundaries and challenging the status quo is what sets Portuguese furniture brand Boca do Lobo apart from its contemporaries. Founded in 2005, the company’s artisans draw on traditional craftsmanship as well as contemporary furniture-making techniques to produce edgy, eye-catching dining tables, case pieces, sofas and more.

Boca do Lobo launched with a bang. The manufacturer’s first collection, Soho, is irreverent and playful, featuring multicolored sideboards as well as consoles and low-profile coffee tables made with a range of materials such as rosewood, brass, fabric and more. Each piece boasts a variety of ornamental flourishes. The Soho sideboard, for example, remains one of the series’ most popular and iconic pieces and features decorative brass drawer pulls, drawer fronts finished with gold leaf or black glass with etched detailing and other stylish touches.

The Pixel collection, which is named for the multitude of picture elements that comprise a digital image, is also hard to ignore, with striking cabinets made of more than 1,000 textured wooden triangles in varying woods and finishes such as African walnut veneer, gold leaf and black lacquer mounted on an elegant polished brass base. As part of the Pixel collection, Boca do Lobo collaborated with renowned porcelain manufacturer Vista Alegre to create a delicate, limited-edition hand-painted cabinet named “Once Upon a Time.”

With one foot in past movements such as mid-century modernism and the other firmly in the present, Boca do Lobo combines sleek, streamlined forms with Baroque-inspired ornament and exuberant colors and materials. This flair for the unexpected makes their furnishings popular in high-end residential projects as well as luxury hospitality and retail spaces like Harrods in London, the Fairmont Hotel chain in the United States and elsewhere. Boca do Lobo’s contemporary classics are putting Portuguese craftsmanship on the global stage.

Find a collection of Boca do Lobo furniture on 1stDibs.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw sweeping social change and major scientific advances — both of which contributed to a new aesthetic: modernism. Rejecting the rigidity of Victorian artistic conventions, modernists sought a new means of expression. References to the natural world and ornate classical embellishments gave way to the sleek simplicity of the Machine Age. Architect Philip Johnson characterized the hallmarks of modernism as “machine-like simplicity, smoothness or surface [and] avoidance of ornament.”

Early practitioners of modernist design include the De Stijl (“The Style”) group, founded in the Netherlands in 1917, and the Bauhaus School, founded two years later in Germany.

Followers of both groups produced sleek, spare designs — many of which became icons of daily life in the 20th century. The modernists rejected both natural and historical references and relied primarily on industrial materials such as metal, glass, plywood, and, later, plastics. While Bauhaus principals Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created furniture from mass-produced, chrome-plated steel, American visionaries like Charles and Ray Eames worked in materials as novel as molded plywood and fiberglass. Today, Breuer’s Wassily chair, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair — crafted with his romantic partner, designer Lilly Reich — and the Eames lounge chair are emblems of progressive design and vintage originals are prized cornerstones of collections.

It’s difficult to overstate the influence that modernism continues to wield over designers and architects — and equally difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was when it first appeared a century ago. But because modernist furniture designs are so simple, they can blend in seamlessly with just about any type of décor. Don’t overlook them.

Vintage and antique wall mirrors add depth and openness to a space — they can help create the illusion that a narrow hallway isn’t so narrow. But you don’t need hundreds of enormous arched French or Italian mirrors framed in gilded bronze to dress up your home (maybe just a few).

A few well-placed large wall mirrors and other types of mirrors can amplify lighting and help showcase the decorative and architectural features of your home. For the Palace of Versailles during the 17th century, French King Louis XIV ordered the construction of the Hall of Mirrors after spending millions of dollars importing expensive Venetian mirrors from the revered glass-blowing factories on the island of Murano. A mirror-manufacturing rivalry between Paris and Venice took shape, and soon, across from 17 large windows that open out over the adjacent Palace Gardens on one side of the Hall, more than 350 mirrors — large mirrors made of groupings of small panes — were installed, effectively bringing the radiant colors of the outdoors into the opulent corridor.

Wall mirrors for your living room can work miracles — pull your landscaping’s colors and textures indoors, Louis XIV–style, by covering the length of an interior wall across from your living-room windows with wall mirrors.

For a similar effect, surrounding your mid-century modern wall mirror with leafy air plants and fern floor plants can amplify the sense of serenity that greenery offers in your home. Choose wall mirror frame styles to match your home’s decor, or shop for a frameless, organically shaped mirror that’s cut or beveled for a clean yet distinctive showpiece. For a free-spirited Bohemian feel, create a cluster of mismatched antique wall mirrors — an arrangement of circular Art Deco wall mirrors, Rococo-style silver leaf mirrors and decorative oval Victorian mirrors could add spice to an otherwise unadorned dining-room wall.

Elsewhere, there’s nothing vain about buying a full-length mirror for your bedroom, bathroom or walk-in closet to help you perfect your look for the day. Another may be needed in your entryway for a last-minute ensemble inspection. In fact, a shimmering 18th-century hall of mirrors awaits visitors behind the steel door of Stephen Cavallo’s atelier in Manhattan.

“We like to see the look on people’s faces when they walk in,” says Cavallo.

Decorating your home and office with wall mirrors is an art form in and of itself — get started today with the variety of antique and vintage wall mirrors on 1stDibs.