12.30.16

Sight Unseen Presents

10 Insiders on the Best Design Moments of 2016

We come here every day to tell you about our favorite things — so for our last round-up of 2016, it seemed only fair that we spread the love. We asked 10 of our favorite design insiders to reflect on their best design moments of the past year — an experience they had, an exhibition they saw, a discovery they made, an interior they fell in love with — as well as the one thing they’re most looking forward to in the new year. Enjoy, and see you back here in 2017!

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12.29.16

Sight Unseen Presents

Our 10 Most Popular Instagrams of 2016

This week, we're reflecting back on some of the year's highlights, from the stories you loved, to the images you helped turn viral on Pinterest, to the Instagrams that sent our likes skyrocketing. We've excerpted 10 of your favorites after the jump.

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12.23.16

Excerpt: Book

A New Book’s Palm Springs Still-Lifes — And Aging Female Models — Are the Epitome of Chic

The holidays may be coming up this weekend, but for our money, the best gift this season won't be available until after Christmas — that's when pre-orders start shipping for DUNES, a 96-page journal that serves as both a nostalgic love letter for and a thrift and vintage guide to Palm Springs, California. DUNES was conceived by photographer Lauren Coleman — who spent her childhood in an iconic Palm Springs house — and produced as a collaboration between Coleman, graphic designer Sarah Kissell, and stylist Tiff Horn.

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12.21.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

Colored Sand, Kool-Aid, and the Potential of Materials

Group exhibitions, which ask a cohort of designers to all respond to the same brief, are far too rare in the American design scene, which often favors solo presentations. That's perhaps why Chamber Gallery's exhibition model, in which an outside curator puts together a few different installments over the course of a year, feels so refreshing. Now on view at Chamber is This Is Today, Matylda Krzykowski's second installment built around the theme of collage.

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12.17.16

Saturday Selects

Week of December 12, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: two group shows by a collection of design all-stars, three new serious talents to watch, and a glimpse inside your favorite interior of 2016 — this time with furniture!

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12.13.16

Sighted

An Under-the-Radar Postmodern Architect Finally Gets His Due

In the age of Instagram, does the most colorful architect win? We've seen a massive uptick lately in people posting — and designers citing as influences — architects such as Luis Barragan, Ricardo Bofill, and Ricardo Legorreta. Sometimes forgotten in all this, however, is the Maltese architect Richard England, who studied under Gio Ponti and designed much of the colorful, Postmodern architecture that dots the Mediterranean archipelago.

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12.12.16

Eye Candy

A Belgian Textile and Fashion Designer By Way of Marrakech

With an aesthetic that's part Proenza, part Aelfie, LRNCE is the textiles and accessories label you get when a trained Belgian fashion designer moves to Marrakech. Founded in 2013 by Laurence Leenaert and inspired by tribal rituals, the line includes super modern, thickly embroidered rugs; sandals that mix materials like raffia, rope, and suede; graphic-printed kimonos; plus bags, ceramics, and other objects. In other words, traditional Moroccan handcrafts as distilled through the lens of contemporary graphics and design.

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12.02.16

Sighted

A New Graphic Rug Collection — And the Posters That Inspired It

Though Alex Proba is ready to finish her four-year-long A Poster a Day project and move on to something else, she had so many amazing graphics — in so many interiors-friendly colors — that she realized she ought to think of a way for the posters to live on. This week, Proba is launching a series of eight rugs, their patterns culled from her vast poster archive, and that's just the start of it.

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12.02.16

Gift Guides

The Best Gifts for Design Lovers, $250 and up

For our last holiday gift guide, we're letting loose. On our most extravagant list? A leather-topped turntable, an ombré wall mirror, and an epic pink armchair — among others — that will make you want to blow your rent check and never look back.

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11.30.16

Q+A

Herman Miller’s New York Flagship is a Design Store for the Way We Live Now

Five years in the making, the new Herman Miller flagship opened on Park Avenue South in New York just before Thanksgiving, at the same address where George Nelson once had his offices. The new store nods towards Herman Miller's storied place in American design but more often than not, it also looks forward, both re-contextualizing vintage items and archival Herman Miller pieces in a fresh, more modern context and incorporating some of our current favorite independent designers and brands,

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11.23.16

Up and Coming

Two Former Architects on Finding Common Ground (In the Middle of Manhattan)

Some of Pelle's work belies their background in architecture — their Klemens mirror, for instance, stretches a thin mesh fabric over a structure that looks like scaffolding. More often than not, their work is organic and even whimsical, with their two best-known projects being a chandelier that daisy-chains bubble-like glass globes and their Soap Stones, for which they hand-carve dyed and fragranced glycerin soap into a gemlike shape. But all of their work speaks to the idea of finding common ground despite their differences.

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11.19.16

Saturday Selects

Week of November 14, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week we're putting the focus on some of the coolest women in design and art: an exhibition of hard-edged abstract paintings by the late Californian Helen Lundeberg, a sleek black lacquered furniture collection by up-and-comer Ania Jaworska, and the best vase in the archive of the late Finnish glass artist Helena Tynell.

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