Amaridian

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South African natives Mary Slack and Fraser Conlon fill their unusual, vividly adorned gallery with art, home décor, and furniture from sub-Saharan African designers. Soothing music plays overhead and hanging lights shaped like bursting bouquets of flowers cast a warm glow across the spacious showroom. The textured grey walls are hung with the intricate, hand-sewn fabric collages of Billie Zangewa and lifelike oil paintings by Deborah Poynton. The furniture is handcrafted and uncommon, from hand-felted Merino wool seats shaped like giant pebbles to three-foot-wide cushions covered in a rainbow spectrum of hand-knotted fabric and tulle. Light fixtures exhibit elaborate detail, like a kiln-fired chandelier glittering with more than 6,000 dangling crystal beads, or radiant bursts of flowers cut from colorful recycled detergent bottles (part of Heath Nash’s collection titled “Other People’s Rubbish”). But the bulk of the stock consists of African-made decorative accents, including curvaceous, hand-painted ceramics, elegant bowls twisted from plastic-coated fine copper wire, and kaleidoscopic woven palm baskets. — Lauren Murrow