Indeed, everything is going to be just fine, at least in the world of Sight Unseen, and hopefully yours as well. We’re closing up shop here for the next two weeks as we take off for parts near and far, but when we return on January 6, we’ll begin furiously preparing to bring you, our dear readers, the following new year’s goodies: 1) First and foremost, the Sight Unseen book — a limited-edition collectible item, which will be designed by the marvelously talented Studio Lin and packed full of wonderful and (almost all!) new stories. You’re going to want to buy this. 2) New designs and new designers in our online jewelry shop, which we should remind you remains open and ready for orders even as the editorial site goes on a short holiday hiatus. 3) Pop-up shops in New York and beyond. 4) Collaborations and exhibitions with some of your favorite up-and-coming designers. And, as always, 5) loads of new content peeking at the homes, studios, and working methods of creatives around the world.

In the interim, we leave you with the five most-viewed stories on Sight Unseen this year. If you haven’t read them yet, what are you waiting for? See you next year!

1. Studio Visit: Baggu
“Always listen to your mother” isn’t exactly the kind of central tenet they teach you at Harvard Business School. But for Emily Sugihara, the California-raised, Brooklyn-based designer behind the reusable bag lineBaggu, it’s a piece of advice that’s been invaluable to the brand’s runaway success since its founding in 2007. (read more)

2. Excerpt: Magazine: David Lynch’s Workshop in The Chronicle #2
For over a century, the Parisian studio Idem has enabled renowned artists such as Picasso, Matisse and Chagall to dive into their creativity in a limitless sphere where only tranquility and inspiration rule. Today David Lynch has found his way to Idem where he explores his latest creative expression: the lithography. Lynch and his friend, studio director and owner Patrice Forest, took The Chronicle for a visit behind the scenes to zoom in on the artist’s work desk. (read more)
3. At Home With: Renny Ramakers
First-time travelers to Amsterdam — perceptive ones, anyway — need only to spend a day navigating its cobbled streets to notice what makes the experience so singular. The buildings are old and narrow, and many seem perilously cockeyed. With their decorative facades and fanciful gables, they resemble oversized gingerbread houses. And when you walk by them, you witness a sight even more peculiar than all of the above: an unobstructed view straight into the living rooms and kitchens of the people who live inside, who refrain from hanging curtains even at ground level. As a locally based friend explained to me on a recent visit, the Dutch may value privacy just as much as the rest of us, but they also take a certain pride in proving they have nothing to hide. This was the thought running through my mind the day that Renny Ramakers, co-founder and director of the influential Dutch design laboratory Droog, let me wander around inside her home unsupervised, snapping hundreds of voyeuristic photos of her possessions while she worked calmly away at her dining table. (read more)
4. Studio Visit: Doshi Levien, Product and Furniture Designers
If you’d expect anyone to spend their days working amidst a snowdrift’s worth of process and ephemera, it’s London designers Doshi Levien. What you see piled atop the shelves and pinned to the walls of the couple’s Shoreditch studio, after all, is the product of two very different yet equally prolific minds working through their own approaches to the same tasks — Nipa Doshi being the Bombay-born lover of handicraft who collages, paints, and draws her way towards ideas from the ground up, and her Scottish husband Jonathan Levien, who spent his childhood in his parents’ toy factory and developed the more exacting methods of an industrial designer, prototyping proclivities and all. (read more)
5. At Home With: Kiel Mead, Product Designer, and Sarah Boatright, Artist
On a shelf in the home office designer Kiel Mead shares with his girlfriend, the performance artist Sarah Boatright, sits a set of drawers stuffed with backstock of his Forget Me Not rings, little string bows cast in precious metals. Mead’s breakout design when he was still studying furniture at Pratt, the rings were the genesis of the 27-year-old’s fascination with casting objects into wearable reminders — of childhood, of holidays, of lost loves, of an old car he once drove. (read more)