What We Are Reading: September 2025
A curated list of interesting articles from September 2025, covering topics like design for anxiety, craft beer trends, Black Sabbath’s album typography, backyard luxury saunas, BMW’s Neue Klasse i3, and the submerged village of Fabbriche di Careggine in Tuscany.
Furniture for the Anxious Age
Architect Tanuvi Hegde’s Reflect Chair is built to be fidgeted with, a cherrywood-and-leather sling seat with a chrome ball that rolls along the frame, inviting touch, sound, and motion. The idea: turn restless habits into a meditative ritual, transforming sitting into an active state of reflection.
The bigger signal is design starting to treat anxiety as a user need, not a stigma. For a generation often described as the most anxious, that’s an opening. Products that acknowledge restlessness and build in grounding mechanisms could shift from niche experiments to mainstream expectations.
Would you want more objects in your life designed with your inner state in mind?
Here is the link to read more:
https://www.dezeen.com/2025/09/07/tanuvi-hegde-reflect-chair-encourages-fidgeting/
Costco Is Coming for Craft Beer
Craft beer used to mean lining up outside a brewery for the latest double dry-hopped release. Now it might mean tossing a Kirkland lager into your Costco cart next to the 48-pack of paper towels.
Grocery chains are using private label to shift craft beer from premium niche to everyday purchase, especially for younger drinkers who don’t care if it’s an IPA or a Modelo. Beer is beer. (Unless it’s a sour. That’s still its own thing.)
Costco’s move taps the same brand trust that sells giant liquor bottles and applies it to craft-style beer. The vibe isn’t connoisseurship anymore, it’s convenience with credibility.
So what’s next, a Kirkland hazy in a can the size of an old-school 3-liter soda bottle?
Punch
The Arcane Alphabets of Black Sabbath
Fonts In Use just mapped the type DNA behind Sabbath’s first four albums, from Harper Rimmed–style initials on the debut to the hulking Lodwick Kabel vibe on Master of Reality, and Gadget’s geometric heft on Vol 4. It’s a reminder that Ozzy Osbourne’s band didn’t have “a logo.” They had eras.
The rules of logos are different for bands because an album is both art and statement, not a SKU. Each record is its own world, so the lettering becomes part of the music, a typographic mood board for that moment. In a phototype/dry-transfer age, mining obscure alphabets wasn’t a stunt; it was craft.
Which Black Sabbath cover type is your fav, Black Sabbath, Paranoid, Master of Reality, or Vol 4?
Nick Sherman
Backyard Luxury in a Barrel
Field Mag’s guide makes the case for the barrel sauna as an at-home wellness upgrade: cedar kits, panoramic glass, wood or electric heat, weekend assembly. Looks good in nature, heats fast, and turns recovery into a repeatable ritual.
It’s the next logical step now that she-sheds, micro-homes, and backyard writing huts have become acceptable, take “spa culture” out of the spa and into the yard. Sell a scene (steam + cedar + view), bundle it as a kit, and position it as accessible luxury: part health tool, part outdoor furniture, fully Instagrammable.
Would you go wood stove for the vibe, or electric for the convenience?
Here is the link to the guide: https://www.fieldmag.com/articles/barrel-sauna-guide
Wrapped in Mystery: BMW’s Neue Klasse i3
Car makers give the impression they’re disguising prototypes with wild geometric wraps to hide design details. But BMW’s Neue Klasse i3, shown here in a showroom image, proves the real goal is the opposite: the “camouflage” draws more eyes, more photos, more headlines, more “first looks.”
By making the car unmistakable in traffic, manufacturers like BMW are intentionally leaking the car to spark coverage and speculation. It’s controlled exposure literally dressed up as secrecy. Prototype wraps aren’t about hiding, they’re about staging a slow-burn reveal.
If you saw one in person, would you notice the car, or wonder what the wrapping was about?
Here is an example of how this move gets coverage:
The Village That Sleeps Beneath the Lake
Under Tuscany’s Lago di Vagli rests Fabbriche di Careggine, a medieval village drowned in 1953 to make way for a dam. Thirty homes, a church, and centuries of history are still intact below the waterline. The town has resurfaced only four times, whenever the lake is drained.
If this were pitched like a brand, it wouldn’t be about tourism brochures or bridges. It would be about anticipation, a story you can only witness once in a generation. The lake isn’t just water storage. It’s a vault of memory, a place where heritage literally comes up for air.
Would you travel to see a ghost town rise from the water?
Here’s a link to this unique place:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/lago-di-vagli
