Great New Designs For Your Home

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If you are looking to add some new furniture and decor to your home, avoid the Targets and WalMarts and buy local or online. There are hundreds of great online furniture stores that have many unique and authentic designs for your home.

Access Approved

The democratization of highend design continues with Dering Hall (deringhall.com), a virtual hub of decorating and design resources once available only "to the trade" (decorators and designers themselves). The site has, to start, 100 "storefronts" that showcase work and new products by the architect Robert A.M. Stern, designers Madeleine Stewart and Cullman and Kravis and others, with links to their businesses. A selection of featured items, for sale directly on Dering Hall's site, will become available in November. Peter Sallick, one of the principals, hopes the venture will actually expand the offerings designers themselves can provide. "One of the challenges of home furnishings is that it's expensive to launch products into the world—managing showrooms and stores," Mr. Sallick said. "The online world offers a new way of doing that."

Classics, Refreshed

Alvar Aalto is the architect who gave the modernist world three legs to stand on, with his classic 60 white-birch stackable stool, designed in 1933 for the Viipuri library in his native Finland. Now Artek, the company that Aalto founded to produce his furniture designs, is making that world a more colorful place with three new paint-lacquered models, in yellow, blue and brown. The stools are also a part of Artek's recently introduced Quick Ship program: flatpacked for convenience, and easy to assemble ($310 each; the fourlegged E60 is $365, m21.com). For those who need a bigger fix of Finnish design, Marimekko, the famous fabric folks, opened a 3,800- square-foot flagship store on Thursday at 200 Fifth Avenue in New York City. us.marimekko.com

Read more at The Wall Street Journal