Happy New Year everyone!

We’re very excited to announce our first exhibition of 2013.

Along with a retrospective of Claesson Koivisto Rune’s furniture, design accessories, and architectural models we are debuting a small series of products inspired by The Japanese Tea Ceremony and Swedish Fika coffee culture.

The collaborative work is executed by local Toronto artisans:

Alissa Coe of Coe and Waito

Scott Eunson – sculpture artist and wood worker

and

Adian Kuzyk – wood artisan.

Please stop by to see the exhibition and meet our guests of honour:
Mårten Claesson, Eero Koivisto and Ola Rune!

Invitation design by Sali Tabacchi

I hope everyone is doing well and enjoying a nice relaxing end of the year holiday. We’ve had a busy season entertaining Christmas shoppers, moving back upstairs, unpacking into our new home, and providing the finishing arrangements for our most ambitious exhibition yet.

Although everything moved relatively smoothly for our holiday shoppers, there were a couple of parcels that didn’t make it in time for the rush. Now that they’re here, it might be for the best as it freshened up the showroom, and saved us from frantically placing new orders to re-stock our shelves.

As mentioned in the Post name, we have a new collection of goods by wood artisan Tomiyama Koichi, and ceramicist Masanobu Ando. Interestingly enough, the packages arrived together and their contents would satisfy even the pickiest coffee connoisseur.

So I present to you Mjolk’s obsessive coffee drinker collection!

Above:

Top left: Coffee trough – hand carved from a single block of chestnut wood, it is incredible to see in person ($150).

Top right: Star coffee dripper – the perfect dripper for “pour over” style coffee ($80).

Bottom right: Coffee scoop. The scoop is made from chestnut and the handle is made from aluminum that Koich-san reclaims and hammers into shape ($65).

It’s not hard to believe that we own the set already, so in case you didn’t know what a coffee trough was or a dripper here is how we use our coffee gear:

Here’s our coffee scoop which started it’s life as the pale chestnut in the above photo. The coffee stains the wood a nice walnut colour over time.

This jar was a collaboration between glass artist Kazumi Tsuji (who we represent in the store) and wood artisan Ryuji Mitani.

After the coffee beans are ground, they are transferred to the coffee trough.

This allows the grounds to be added to the dripper neatly. A little tip to keep the paper filter attached to the ends of the dripper and to prevent the paper from breaking is to wet the paper before you add the grounds. This removes the paper taste and warms your mug up for you – always remember to remove the water before making your coffee.

Beautiful.

We received a handful of these tiny beautiful milk pitchers by Mr. Ando ($50). I’m so sorry we have already sold out of the Masanobu Ando mug!

A silver glazed ceramic platter by Masanobu Ando ($140) with a specially made wood spreader by Tomiyama Koichi ($38).

Our dining table, chairs, and a nice little coffee break.

Finally a new addition is this hand tooled Japanese walnut tray made by Tomiyama Koichi ($340). The depth is created by gouging the tray with a chisel, the edges are softened but retain their square shape.

Glasses above by Tsuji Kazumi available for $85.

Please note that these works are limited and unique so they might not be added to the Mjolk web shop,  please contact us for availability.

Wowee! It’s been three years and we love Mjölk and our customers more and more every day. Thank you so much for your continued support and enthusiasm. We couldn’t do it without you.

Year three is going to be our best yet! Some things we’ve been working on:

January 23: Claesson Koivisto Rune + Mjölk
As a lead in to IDS2013, we will be having a retrospective exhibition of CKR works, as well as a launch for an exclusive Claesson Koivisto Rune + Mjölk product. Claesson Koivisto Rune will be in attendance.

May 16th: Glass artist Tsuji Kazumi
A featured artist in Mjolk volume II, and one of our favorite glass artists. She’s visiting us all the way from her studio in Kanazawa Japan!

Summer: George Nakashima exhibition
We are honoured to be transforming our showroom to feature a collection of George Nakashima’s works. Mira Nakashima will be in attendance.

Mjölk Volume II

More to come!

Holiday hours are posted here.

As always, come by today, pick up a complimentary cookie by Lindsey and say hello!

HAPPY HOLIDAYS from the Mjölk family: John, Juli, Elodie, Frank and Lauren.

This morning I opened up my computer and for some reason decided to visit Fredericia’s website. I knew they were working on it, and I’ve been checking the past few days to see if there was any progress being made. To my surprise when I visited their link I was welcomed by a fresh new homepage and an intriguing link at the top of the webpage saying “inspiration”.

It was here that I saw the first images of Børge Mogensen’s summer home, a set of photographs that I have never seen before!

As with other Mogensen designed homes there are some clear themes that resonate throughout the space. The lime plaster washed brick, the central fireplace, the natural stone floors, the Japanese garden, and of course Mogensen’s beautiful furnishings.

They concluded with this caption:

“When Børge Mogensen and his family took time off, they went to their summer cottage in sandy North Jutland, but with clear evidence, Børge never took time off… The design office is one of the largest rooms in the house.”

A beautiful central courtyard with Nyhavn wall sconces, and a special Mogensen bench.

A J39 chair and the 6284 table both of which you can see in person at Mjolk.

One sofa we wish we could incorporate in our lives. We first saw this sofa at Professor Oda’s house during our trip to Hokkaido Japan.

A grass rug sits under one half of the desk.

Leather pulls on the pantry, with a woven chair in the background.

Oak kitchen with brass hinges.

Pia Wallen Cross Blankets are hard to come by, but we’re happy to report we received a decent amount of stock recently. As well, you’ll note the grey is discontinued and has been replaced by wild cotton, which is a pale blush colour. LOVE.

Buy them here.

Pia sent Elodie a little gift – her baby slippers in the new wild cotton (blush) and polka dot style. Serious baby approves? Parents approve! Thank you Pia!

This is officially the last weekend of the summer, and we’re currently sitting on our deck after a large pancake breakfast sipping on some coffee. I’ve been asked a bunch of times how the cottage renovation has been, and when we were going to be posting some more photos.

We’ve been holding off sharing it because we let Remodelista have the exclusive to the story. Since there will inevitably be some readers who don’t follow Remodelista, or simply missed the article we wanted to do our own post about it as a nice farewell to the summer.

Of course, I have the feeling we are in store for some beautiful weather in September, we can already feel the cool breeze coming off of Georgian Bay.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but the whole inspiration for this cottage was the “Finnish summer home”. There is a large Finnish and Estonian community in Ontario, in fact we have the highest amount of Finns outside of Finland. We liked the idea of bringing back the cottage to it’s original state with natural pine floors, and simple practical furniture. We wanted the pieces we chose to furnish the cottage with to feel as if they had always been there.

Now taking a second to study this photo, you can begin to appreciate what adding a layer of plaster did for the white fireplace. When it was simply painted stone it just didn’t look right. We also added an iron hook and a Japanese palm broom and dustpan to break up all of the white.

The Swedish sconces look just like tree branches.

A pair of Aalto shelves with some Japanese iron sculptures, an old laminated wood architecture model, a milk bottle terrarium, a birch bark box to hold matches, and a brass Wirkkala-esque candle holder.

For the dining room, we settled on a table, bench, and chair set by Ilmari Tapiovaara.

We even picked up a stool for additional seating, or to be used next to the fireplace to stoke the fire.

I think it pairs really well next to the vintage Aalto bar cabinet.

Stacked rocks.

The stool in the foreground is an early 1930s/40s Aalto stool we found at Machine Age Modern in Leslieville. The sofa is a blue Hiroshima sofa by Naoto Fukasawa with beech wood legs.

The sofa choice was inspired by Aalto’s blue sofa we saw in his home in Helsinki.

Aalto also used these Zebra pillows on that blue sofa in his home, so we order a couple for ourselves directly from Artek.

All of the bedding is colourful striped sheets and pillowcases from Marimekko. In all of the bedrooms we have small Aalto luggage benches.

The second guest bedroom with wood blinds from Bamboo Bazaar.

Both of the wall lights are paper and wood lights by Miguel Mila. We’ve started to carry his lighting in our shop, I just haven’t had the time to update our website yet!

The final bedroom actually fits 2 twin beds, both with lime green striped bedding.

An Aalto bench as coffee table, and the beehive pendant light.

Finally the best room in the house. Furnished with two beautiful Alvar Aalto daybeds upholstered in Aalto’s Sienna pattern.

I can’t believe the summer is almost over, but we’re really looking forward to the fall. We’re getting a bit anxious to travel, so hopefully we can line up a trip or two before the end of the year.