Flamingo Estate Brings a Holiday-Ready Gaetano Pesce Design To Life

Crafted by London artisans out of ebonized oak, with bronze legs and aluminum shelves, the piece stars in the show “Design Miami 2.0,” curated by Glenn Adamson to mark the fair’s 20th anniversary. “It’s a perfect example of the way Mehdi combines the ancient and the futuristic into a unified sensibility,” Adamson says, reflecting on Dakhli’s larger emerging practice. Whether in a table or a daybed, the designer interrogates the relationship between European aesthetics and North African traditions, hoping to put the latter more prominently on the map.

It was while collaborating on site-specific commissions for a compound of Gstaad chalets (AD, January 2025) that Dakhli, who studied law before pivoting into art/design advising, got an itch to create furniture all his own. The first, a 2024 three-legged chair titled Sidi Bou after the town Sidi Bou Said, in northern Tunisia, takes inspiration from Wassily Kandinsky’s Loses im Rot, painted after the artist’s 1905 trip there. “I wanted to abstract something from his abstraction. That’s how I arrived at the spine,” Mehdi notes of the seat’s skeletal aluminum back rest.

In Miami, he’ll also present a riff on that piece, this time called Muravey (Ant) and realized in pink ivory, a rare wood from Mozambique. Continuing to connect the cultural dots, his next project—a cabinet for the Design Doha biennial in February—invokes architect Ricardo Bofill’s famous pink apartment complex La Muralla Roja in Spain. “Everyone knows about this building,” he says. “But not everyone knows that it was inspired by the North African casbah.” —H.M.

Final Touch

Flamingo Estate Unveils a Glass Olive Oil Decanter Designed with Gaetano Pesce

A new olive-oil decanter, realized post-humously by Flamingo Estate according to Gaetano Pesce’s design, has been cast in glass using a mold of olives.Photo: Maxime Poiblanc, Styling by Gözde Eker, Produced by Madeline O’Malley

Italian iconoclast Gaetano Pesce often compared his process to cooking, his confections resembling food. Swirls of spaghetti-like resin became vases. Bowls appeared to melt, as if gelato. And now, a new olive-oil decanter, realized post-humously by Flamingo Estate according to Pesce’s design, has been cast in glass using a mold of plump juicy olives. Produced in a limited edition of 200, the piece comes with a tin of the brand’s 2025 extra-virgin harvest. Drizzle away. —H.M.

These stories appear in AD’s December issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.