If those Marcel Wanders wallpaper designs we showed you earlier this week are a little too William Morris-goes-to-Eindhoven for your tastes, how about the new line by Geoff McFetridge? The "graphic design auteur" and his wife, Sarah diVincentis, are behind Pottok Prints, a line of wallpapers named after a rare breed of pony that frolics about the Pyrenees. Among the image-based patterns are those featuring playful graphics of apples, dead trees, whales, and blobby monsters dubbed "shadows of the paranormal."

Paper magazine caught up with McFetridge for its May design issue and asked him about his path to Pottok. "A few different things happened that tipped the balance for me," he told writer Sarah Cohen. "I started working with a new manufacturer that runs a really clean non-toxic operation, and does great work. Also my wife runs the company so I know things are being done right. Better than if I was doing it. I'm really happy to have people have the paper, and that they are getting it directly from me. We see every roll, sample, and print that leaves the studio." While Pottok currently sells only McFetridge's designs, the company will soon expand to collaborate with other designers and artists.

Among the buzzed-about launches at this year's Milan Furniture Fair was designer Marcel Wanders' wallpaper designs for Graham & Brown, the British wallcovering company that has put the likes of Umbra and fashion designer Julien MacDonald on a roll. Wanders' "Couture" line (pictured above) includes eight designs in a range of colors, and there's something for everyone. "Suzanne" (above, at right) uses a floral motif that looks ripped from Herr Rorschach's brocade analysis couch, while "Henry" (at left) is a fresh, variegated stripe. "Audrey," at first glance a staid tartan, doesn't look so much like wallpaper as a pattern whispered onto the wall by a troupe of softspoken Scottish interior design sprites, and "Stella" employs a giant honeycomb pattern, so probably best to leave its hanging to professionals. And if Wanders' wall patterns makes your eyes tired, don't worry. We hear the designer is following Fabien Baron into the world of eyewear design with an imminent line of specs for MODO. More images of women defying gravity in the presence of Wanders' wallpaper after the jump.

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Some have plumbed Ian Parker's new New Yorker profile of George Clooney for its reference to the megastar's use of a spritzable salad dressing called "Balsamic Breeze," but what caught our eye was the discussion of Clooney's Hollywood Hills home, which last year was "largely remodelled" by his longtime friend Rande Gerber, who Parker describes as "the owner and operator of many fancy bars, and the husband of Cindy Crawford, the model." What does chez Clooney look like?

The result is not extravagant, but it carries the hint of a hotel steakhouse under bold new management: dark wood, beige curtains, a chandelier. According to both men, Gerber made all the decisions, without a word of consultation: everything from the size of the swimming pool to the framed photograph of Steve McQueen in the living room. In Clooney's screening room, behind DVDs of Once and All the President's Men, I saw a row of tall glass jars containing packaged candies, which I took to be a personal quirk until I read that Rande Gerber keeps packaged candies in tall glass jars in his offices in New York and Malibu.

Not to mention a monthly online one. Potter-turned-lifestyle brand Jonathan Adler has done more for tchotchkes than The Antiques Roadshow, and now he's entered the blogosphere. For his freshman effort at a "Monthly Musing," the avuncular Adler ponders the "grandiosity of Neoclassical design," inspired by the dearth of grand, historicalesque gestures observed during his recent weekend HGTV marathon. He offers a candy-colored list of suggestions for infusing a bit of neo-neo-classicism into your life, ranging from Rent Caligula ("Be patient -- the first episode is a bit dreary but it quickly heats up and you'll soon be unable to leave your house until you watch the whole thing") to Greek Key is the Key to our favorite, Fornasetti ("Always, always, always").

Of course, there's also a bit of product pushing, but it's subtle and relevant. Adler expounds on the thinking behind his Grand Tour porcelain pieces. "I took classical busts and turned them into silhouettes," he writes. "Because these busts are objects rather than flat wall art or pictures, they needed dimension so I took the silhouette and sort of extruded it, which makes it look totally modern and suprising." We've got our fingers crossed that April sees Adler muse on Alexander Girard, Palm Beach style, and/or psychoactive drugs (three tastes that taste great together)!

We've got the perfect excuse for you to spend a couple days in the dazzling new Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons the New School for Design: AfterTaste 2, a two-day symposium on Friday, April 4 and Saturday, April 5 that will take a critical look at contemporary issues in the field of interior design. In the course of three panels that promise to tackle everything from "the intellectual history of taste" to "the narrative life of things," more than a dozen illustrious designers, scholars, and artists will explore how interior design has come to be a curious blend of environmental psychology, fashion design, product design, architecture, material science, and cultivated taste (hmm, sounds like a certain blog we know). Among the speakers are artist James Casebere, known for his photographs of modeled built environments; the amazing Quay Brothers; Columbia dean Mark Wigley; and I.D. editor in chief Julie Lasky.

The fun begins on April 4 in Parsons' new Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Auditorium. "The auditorium's perforated bamboo side walls slow down the speed of sound as it travels back," architect Lyn Rice told us when we toured the new Parsons building last month. Come for the design discussion, stay for the defying of physical laws!

The cover of the March-April issue of Luxury SpaFinder magazine (alas, not online) has a real Elle Decor vibe, featuring Shannon Greer's shot of a fuschia-walled sitting room with Louis XVI-style chairs upholstered in Warholian camouflage atop a hypnotic hand-woven carpet that would make even Bridget Riley go cross-eyed. It is the "Pink Salon" of the g hotel, so named for its improbable location: Galway, Ireland. The hotel's design director is Galway native Philip Treacy, who apparently wears many hats in addition to his primary one, as the world's best-known milliner.

Luxury SpaFinder is focused on the, well, luxury-spa angle (the hot stone Balinese massage doesn't skimp on the oil; they serve house-made lavender fondant candies) but also does an admirable job of sizing up the surroundings, designed by Treacy in collaboration with Irish architects and designers Douglas Wallace:

Treacy assembled an impressive collection of vintage fashion photography that includes Irving Penn's image of Jean Patchett, a Cecil Beaton shot of Marilyn Monroe, and a Patrick Demarchelier photo of supermodel Linda Evangelista. The art also helps deflect attention from the location. While the g, technically speaking, overlooks Lough Atlalia, it's separated from the placid lake by a busy highway, and the view from the dining room is of a Statoil filling station. But the hotel triumphs over its less-than-stellar location (15 minutes from downtown) by turning all attention inward.

And we'd challenge any guest to turn away from the Tom Dixon lighting installation that resembles a bouquet of silver Christmas ornaments or the mirrors shaped to resemble the chapeau Treacy designed for Camilla Parker Bowles to wear at her wedding to Prince Charles. Our favorite surprise is revealed on Treacy's website: the distinctive swirls (pictured above, at right) that translate suprisingly well from headwear to door handles.

UPDATE (6:30pm): So there's a good reason that the March-April issue of Luxury SpaFinder is not online. The print publication is folding, FishbowlNY reported this evening. Was it something we said?

The New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects has announced the winners of its 2008 Design Awards, which are given out in the categories of interiors, architecture, and projects (unbuilt). The awards were judged by juries that included architect David Adjaye, interior designer Pamela Babey, and critic Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi. Among the winners chosen from 400 submissions from architects worldwide are Steven Holl Architects for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, FXFowle Architects for The New York Times Building, and Polshek Partnership Architects for the renovation of the Yale University Art Gallery's Kahn Building. And among those taking home honors in the project category was New York-based Leeser Architecture, for its design (above) for an imminent tourist mecca: the World Mammoth and Permafrost Museum, which will be located in (where else?) Siberia.

An exhibition of the winning work opens May 1 at New York's Center for Architecture. After the jump, the full list of winners by category.

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Last week, designer Philippe Starck got a glimpse of the new Royalton hotel lobby (above), the $17.5 million Roman and Williams redesign of his beloved original, according to The New York Daily News. He was not impressed. According to NYDN's Ben Widdicombe:

Thursday night, after checking in under his own name, the designer and a pal did a 360-degree loop around the restaurant Brasserie 44. And he was visibly upset, says an eyewitness.

"He pointed various things out and gestured his dislike that they had changed," says our snitch. "He was like, 'Look what they did to my baby!'"

We can't say it any better than Alice Rawsthorn already did, when she wrote that the Morgans Hotel Group "has committed the woefully common corporate design crime of replacing something wonderful - the show-stopping lobby dreamt up in 1988 by the then enfant terrible of French post-modernism, Philippe Starck - with something that isn't."

Design junkies currently attending the Sundance Film Festival have a movie that's made specifically for their style-stashing nature, The Guitar, a film that premiered over the weekend:

"One morning, "mouse-burger" Melody "Mel" Wilder (Saffron Burrows) is diagnosed with a terminal illness, fired from her thankless job and abandoned by her boyfriend. With nothing left to lose, given two months to live, she spends her entire life's savings renting an empty palatial loft in the Village. Thinking she'll never have to pay the piper, she lives off her credit cards, fills the loft with the fanciest products..."

That's a still from the movie above, one of many tables in this 6,000 square-foot loft seen overflowing with the entire contents of the latest Design Within Reach catalog.

An article in last week's New York Times describes the purchases even better: "one-of-a-kind rugs from Carini Lang; chandeliers that sell for $2,500 a pop; and, finally, the creatively fulfilling guitar of the title. It's kind of a shopaholic's version of "The Bucket List," with Jonathan Adler designing the Bucket." Writer Joyce Wadler visits the home of director Amy Redford (yes, that Redford) to discuss the possession of well-crafted objects and how they could provide comfort to the terminally ill, something we're sure no one reading this blog could possibly argue with.

Speaking of whimsical Brazilians, the January/February issue of Elle Decor takes us into the Brooklyn loft of Vik Muniz and his wife (and fellow artist) Janaina Tschape. Their dwelling is a 6,000-square-foot former garage in Clinton Hill that underwent serial renovations--first by Brenda Bello of Basil Walter Architects and then by Matthias Neumann--to transform it into a swoonworthy light-filled live/work space. Alas, the story is not online, so get thee to a newsstand for a taste of the Munizian mix of Tiepolo, Courbet, Man Ray, Warhol, Chinese scholar's rocks, a stunner of a Ron Arad chair, and masses of empty burgundy bottles (for a project with Daniel Boulud, assures Muniz).

Other highlights of this issue include Rob Brinkley's excellent traveler's rundown of the starchitectural hotbed that is Dallas (in various stages of completion there are works by Koolhaas, Foster, Piano, Pei, and Calatrava) and a feature on the Bay Area home of hotel designer Roger Thomas. In a standout passage on chez Thomas, discussion turns to the time when the designer tried to explain to his decorative painters the precise greeny-brown he wanted them to paint the walls:

As Thomas delightedly recalls, the artisans suggested that the color their client was laboring to explain sounded like the same one the 19th century artist Jacques-Louis David used in the backgrounds of his midcareer portraits of French nobles. "We hate two two-world colors," the designer says. "We love paragraph colors."

All of that good stuff makes up for the fact that the piece on fashion designer Monique Lhuillier's Bel Air home cruelly teases us with mention of a "Twombly-esque" painting by Ralph Rucci that is not pictured. For shame!