All the Best Art — and Design — We Saw at the 2023 Frieze Week in Los Angeles

Los Angeles is certainly not the most social town — compared to New York, where design and art events happen nightly and, as a professional, you could pretty much get by never paying for a glass of wine, LA's calendar can't really compete. Which is why things feel so much more exciting when Frieze comes to town each February, and suddenly your calendar fills up and you're running into interesting people left and right, multiple times a day. For those of us who crave creative stimulation, it's a boon, the time of year when galleries, stores, and makers sync up to showcase new works and new ideas. See (almost) everything we saw after the jump.
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The Best of Stockholm Design Week 2023, Part II: The Fair and Around Town

Some of the things I loved at this year's fair included the Frama installation inside Konstnarsbaren, a 1930s-era bar with murals lining the wall that I dubbed "the Swedish Bemelmans;" a visit to Hem's new studio, decked out in four of my favorite colors, cobalt, highlighter yellow, powder blue, and pink; a packed-house fried-chicken party at Note Design Studio; a curving emerald green chair made from 3-D printed recycled fishing nets by a collective called the Interesting Times Gang; a beautiful seating system for Offecct by the late designer Pauline Deltour; a presentation by Beckmans College of Design that paired students with Sweden's leading furniture companies; and Alvsjo Gard, the new platform for experimental design that we wrote about yesterday. Check out the rest of our favorites after the jump!
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The Best of Stockholm Design Week 2023, Part I: Alvsjo Gard

After a three-year COVID hiatus, Stockholm Design Week returned in full force last week. And while we'll be covering the fair and its happenings around town tomorrow, today we're putting the spotlight on a new exhibition that also happened to be our favorite. Called Älvsjö Gärd, it was a showcase of experimental, research-driven, and collectible design, set across 13 rooms in one of the oldest manors in Stockholm — basically Sight Unseen catnip.
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10 Things We’re Looking Forward To at This Year’s Stockholm Furniture Fair

Stockholm functions in many ways like a mini-Milan, which comes, in part, from being a city with an incredibly high baseline of appreciation for design: There's a predictably excellent emerging design showcase at the fair; there are exhibitions around town in the most wonderful and surprising locations (see this year's new experimental showcase at Älvsjö Gard, a never-before-used 16th-century manor on the fairgrounds); there are exciting launches from local talents, such as Fredrik Paulsen and Note Design Studio; and there is, if you can squeeze it in, an abundance of studio visits and sightseeing field trips you can take to round out your design education while you're there. (Let this be the year I finally make it to the Ragnar Östberg–designed City Hall!) Here are 10 of the things we're most looking forward to at Stockholm Design Week, which this year runs from February 6-12.
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A Puzzle-Piece Bed, a Ceramic Peanut, a Mosaic Table: Everything We Loved in Miami This Year

Miami in December is a fairly easy sell for those of us in the art and design industries (despite the fact that, check notes, precisely zero of Sight Unseen's editors attended this year!) Those who weren't book launch mode descended in droves for the city's annual Art Week, as it’s become known since the number of exhibitions put on around Art Basel Miami Beach and Design Miami ballooned somewhat out of control. Today we're featuring a few acts from the week's anchor fairs, but between poolside cocktail parties and trips to Twist, our reliably favorite fair is of course Design Miami, which showcased an impressively diverse — and thankfully colorful — range of collectible design during its 18th edition.
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A Paper Chaise, a Tropicana-Orange Chair: 5 Favorites From This Year’s London Design Festival

Don’t ask us how, but we suddenly find ourselves in the waning days of October, which means it was more than a month ago now that the London Design Festival celebrated its 20th anniversary. Yes, we’re late. No, we won’t blame the Queen’s death or the tumultuous upheavals at 10 Downing (and beyond) for our delay. Yes, we’re still going to share some gems that caught our attention, including a Tropicana-orange chair, a collection of furniture made from layers of paper, and an exhibition that explores the theme of moving in with a partner — and the smashing together of taste, desire, and habit that ensues.
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A Favorite French Design Festival Returns With a Crop of Fresh Talent

If you assumed earlier this year, based on a barrage of dreamy, sun-drenched Instagram posts, that all your favorite French designers — India Mahdavi, Pierre Yovanovitch, Dorothée Meilichzon  — seemed to be vacationing in the same idyllic beach town in the French Riviera, you would be almost correct. Actually, they were attending the 16th edition of Design Parade, the French design festival that has become a go-to for spotting new trends and discovering the next wave of buzzy young designers.
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Europe’s Newest Design Fair Is In a Small City With a Big Focus on Locality and Sustainability

We were meant to attend and cover the second edition of Southern Sweden Design Days in Malmö last month, but since COVID had other plans for us, we had to catch up with the fair's program from afar instead, which included projects by studios like Malmö Upcycling Service, Lab La Bla, and Andréason & Leibel. In addition to being aesthetically pleasing, many of them featured a focus on local manufacturing, local crafts, and/or locally sourced recycled materials, which not every design fair can claim.
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The Best of the 2022 Salone del Mobile — Part VI

Remember when we said that it was impossible to actually see all of the good things that launched during this month's Milan Furniture Fair? Well, apparently it's equally impossible to actually capture all of those launches in digital form, because the hits just keep coming into our inbox. So today, we're devoting an extra post to some of our favorites from a week that already seems like a lifetime ago. (Please, take us back to risotto and martinis!)
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The Best of the 2022 Salone Del Mobile – Part V

Today's post — our last from this year's Milan furniture fair — takes a tour of two of our favorite reliable destinations for up-and-coming talent: Alcova, the destination founded in 2018 by Studio Vedèt founder Valentina Ciuffi and Space Caviar's Joseph Grima, and Salone Satellite, always our first stop at the fairgrounds.
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The Best of the 2022 Salone Del Mobile — Part IV

Our fourth — and biggest — Salone del Mobile round-up of 2022 finishes up our overview of in-town presentations, with a few Rho Fiera stragglers and a whole lot of the neighborhood-based fair 5Vie, which launched in 2013 and is still going strong.
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The Best of the 2022 Salone Del Mobile — Part III

Our third Salone del Mobile round-up of 2022 picks up where yesterday's grab-bag of in-town shows left off: We're staying inside (well, and just outside) Milan's inner ring, sweeping up another round of the brand presentations, bar and restaurant pop-ins, installations, and collaborations that didn't live at the fairgrounds or at Alcova.
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