2018 Sight Unseen gift guide

Iridescent Earrings and Ombré Bath Mats: The 2018 Sight Unseen Gift Guide, Part I

Welcome to the annual Sight Unseen gift guide! Today and tomorrow, we’ll be sharing our most covetable home, fashion, and beauty finds from around the web, from iridescent straws to ombré bath mats to the coziest shearling handbag we could find (it's like carrying a tiny Muppet). First up is Jill, who’s got you covered on last-minute gifts, from horsehair mirrors to Hawaiian-inspired fragrances.
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The 2023 American Design Hot List, Part IV

This week we announced our 11th annual American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s editorial award for the names to know now in American design. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the second group of Hot List designers here (including Frances Merrill of Reath Design, whose midcentury Altadena project is pictured above).
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Piscina

New York, piscinapiscina.com Piscina is the wide-ranging project of Natalie Shook, a Cuban-American artist who originally came to New York to study painting but soon discovered her love for carpentry and furniture-making. Shook runs a studio and storefront out of Red Hook in Brooklyn, where she works alongside and showcases the talents of her wood-working, ceramic-firing, and metal-smithing friends. At last year’s ICFF, she won Best New Designer and Best in Show on the merits of a ceramic side table and a modular shelving unit built around a grooved spine. But to our mind, her most interesting work to date is a collection of ceramic and wood sconces, whose decorative wood tenons can be daisy-chained to form an endlessly inventive wall-mounted unit.  What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? Thinking about what defines the American design community — and specifically our practice — the word accessibility comes to mind. In our outer orbit, there’s all of NYC, which gives us access to some of the greatest art, design, and talent in the world. Focusing in, I consider what it means to have our studio in Brooklyn, where we have access to almost any material or service, at almost any time, delivered to our doorstep. Piscina occupies half of a 10,000 sq.ft. building, and my husband runs his architecture practice, Camber Studio, out of the other half. I share Piscina’s studio with quite a few other artists and designers, so we’re fortunate to have access to a community of exceptionally talented individuals who I also happen to love working alongside. We built a caretaker apartment in the back where we live with our two kids and easily transition between studio life and home life. To me, the duality of this experience feels a little wild west and very uniquely American, with accessibility as a strong defining quality. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year? We have a small showroom directly around the corner from our studio, and I’ve been working on curating a few shows for this coming spring. I’m looking forward to working closely with the artists on those exhibitions and working on some collaborations for Piscina as well. We’ll be getting our e-commerce site up and running in the early part of next year, so my work and the work of the 20 or so other artists we work with will … Continue reading Piscina
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Week of September 11, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Gallery Fumi’s biology-inspired 15th anniversary exhibition, furniture made from giant toothpicks, and the juiciest tiled interior we've seen to date.
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EDITORS’ LIST

Jill and Monica share their June picks, including a pink slime toilet seat, an under-the-radar Canadian ceramicist, glass shirts, leather mirrors, and more.
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This Textured, Minimalist Jewelry Showroom Was Once a London Pub

Over the past decade — in case you missed it — minimalist interior design has drastically shifted gears. Once a cold, sterile, and frankly boring style, it’s gradually warmed up and become imbued with all sorts of textures and depth. The latest convert to this pared-back but incredibly rich style is London interior designer Hollie Bowden, who recently designed the new showroom for British jewelry and ceramics brand ​​Completedworks.
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The 2022 American Design Hot List, Part V

This week we announced our 10th annual American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s editorial award for the names to know now in American design. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the fifth and final group of Hot List designers here (including Tiffany Howell of Night Palm, and her Lana Del Rey–inspired Miami project, above).
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Sarah Burns

New York, sarah-burns.com We first discovered the work of Sarah Burns through her hardware designs, and then through Old Jewelry, the store she both runs and designs for that’s right next door to Superhouse gallery in Chinatown. She also creates furniture, objects, interiors, and murals — all with the same downtown-cool aesthetic. We love a multi-talented creative working across mediums, and have no doubt that when Burns drops her first official furniture collection, by way of a solo show at Marta in L.A. this spring, we’re going to covet every piece. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? I guess I’m not sure what American design is today, or I don’t really think about what it is, at least. Everything is intersecting now. In general things are less regional and more global, and the arts reflect that, making the question a difficult one. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year?  I’ll be completing my first solid-silver jewelry collection for Old Jewelry (which will be released and available at the Old Jewelry Store in Chinatown, NYC). The collection includes two rings, a pin, a pair of earrings, a bracelet, and a necklace. I also have a solo exhibition at Marta in L.A. in the spring. It will be my first design exhibition, as I’ve mainly contributed to group shows and done custom work for private clients. Marta is one of my favorite galleries, and I’ve really enjoyed working with them. I feel very lucky. What inspires or informs your work in general?  I like art and historical design, and I’m inspired by my peers working now. But I’m also inspired by the more understated qualities of vernacular furniture and architecture, the different kinds of ambition. The beauty of these more everyday objects feels like the byproduct of the maker’s personal interests as well as their limitations, whether financial or material, skill or time. The furniture I design isn’t meant to be broadly impressive, but to function specifically and earnestly.  It often ends up blending in with its surroundings, intentionally, and hopefully there’s a gesture or two in each piece that elicits something more emotional. I try to employ a light touch and work with what Fischli & Weiss would call a ‘casual precision.’
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Latke Candles and LP Stands: The 2022 Gift Guide, Part I

If you asked us what our absolute top gift recommendation would be for 2022, you probably already know by now what we'd answer: our new book, How to Live With Objects. But in case you need a few other ideas, don't worry, we've also compiled 100 best-gift-of-2022 runners-up, starting with Monica's 50 picks, including a colorful under-$200 drinks cart, a rhinestone-encrusted hand sanitizer pouch, and a pair of hand-shaped wooden salad servers.
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For One Night Only at Superhouse, We Paired Works and Personal Mementoes by 16 Designers

To celebrate the upcoming launch of our book, How to Live With Objects, we put on a one-night-only exhibition last week at Superhouse Gallery in Chinatown with a *very* fun concept. To showcase How to Live With Objects' new approach to interiors — simply surrounding yourself with objects you love — we invited 16 designers, eight from our book, and eight from our exhibition partner, Areaware, to display two objects each: one they had made, and one that was meaningful to them. Each pair was displayed on a Duo Object Stand, a new, two-object pedestal designed by Sight Unseen and produced by Bestcase.
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EDITORS’ LIST

Jill and Monica share their September picks, including disturbingly realistic fake cakes, hilariously on-point fake merch, vintage plastic housewares by Guzzini, and two chunky goblets with a serious lean.
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EDITORS’ LIST

Jill and Monica share their August picks, including a squeeze-bottle olive oil, a geometric rug, an early work by Gaetano Pesce, and the Amsterdam home of a Game of Thrones star. 
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