09.16.23

Saturday Selects

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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09.14.23

Sight Unseen Collection

Farrah Sit’s Work — Including Her Best-Selling Serpentine Sconce — Feels Both Effortlessly Current and Like a Prehistoric Artifact

Equilibrium and harmony: They’re difficult to achieve in life and maybe only slightly easier in design. But the search for balance, especially a desire for balance with nature, has lately been driving New York designer Farrah Sit — in a stylistic sense, but also in the way she produces the lighting and furniture for her eponymous line. Sit makes pieces that embody substantial and even existential concerns but wear their heaviness lightly; they’d look really great in your living room but they’re also meant to do more than that. “Part of what we’re trying to do as designers,” she says, “is create awareness between you and your environment.” Her aesthetic has largely hewn to neutral colors and natural materials and a dedication to elegant, mysterious forms ­— like Sit's best-selling Serpentine sconce, which debuted as part of Sight Unseen Offsite in 2020 and is now part of the Sight Unseen Collection. A ceramic wall sconce, Serpentine seems both effortlessly current and like an unearthed artifact — a relatively simple form that wordlessly conveys a whole world of feeling.
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09.13.23

Interiors

Vintage Starck, Burl Wood Veneer, and Collectible Furniture From the Current London Scene Define This Modern Cottage in Rural England

You’re probably most familiar with the work of designer and gallerist Max Radford through his Instagram. Mostly, the account acts as an archive of design research, where he posts projects he comes across in vintage books, as well as the work of the contemporary designers he shows with The Radford Gallery, the roving exhibition platform that pops up in London locales and European design fairs a few times a year. (Radford's most recent show, a dual exhibition by Amelia Stevens and Matthew Verdon, featured stainless-steel furniture from the former and lamps in hemp and translucent fabric from the latter). But behind the scenes, Radford is also an interior designer and architect, and his first project — a contemporary cottage in rural England — ties together all of the threads he’s amassed such a following for online.
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09.12.23

Travel

A New Design Hotel in Porto for Everyone Going to Portugal Right Now

Situated on the Douro river, The Rebello hotel in Porto features 103 rooms, a full-service restaurant, two bars, and a luxurious yet unfussy spa. But it’s the design, of course, that we’re most taken with. Outside, local architecture firm Metrourbe transformed a disused, 19th-century factory for kitchen utensils into four thoroughly modernized yet character-rich buildings, two of which were newly constructed to connect the original stone structures. Inside, Spanish designer and founder of Lisbon’s Quiet Studios Daniela Francheschini has woven together four central elements that reference Porto: water, wine, wood, and industry.
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09.09.23

Saturday Selects

Week of September 4, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: A sexy dentist's office in France, a swoony neon interior in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and a reconsideration of the piano as a vehicle for design.
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10.05.20

Editor's Note

Guest Editor Fiorella Valdesolo on Mushrooms and the Interconnectedness of All Things

Today, meet Fiorella Valdesolo, a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, and consultant who is probably best known for her role as co-founder and editor-in-chief of the food magazine Gather Journal (whose erstwhile print issues we still hoard). All of the stories we’ll be posting between now and Friday have been either written or chosen by Fiorella; they center around the interconnectedness of all things — and, in a way, why we need each other now more than ever.
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09.08.23

Interiors

This Australian Renovation is Giving Off Major “Historical House Museum Outside of Milan” Vibes

If I were moving to Australia and I wanted my house to look like an Italian villa, I would probably hire YSG Studio on the basis of these images of their three-story renovation in Sydney that the studio has nicknamed Black Diamond. YSG's Sydney-based client wanted their new home to evoke a boutique hotel, but to our mind, there's more "historical house museum outside Milan" here, what with the glass bricks, port windows, ceiling plaster, travertine, banana bark, zellige tiles, raffia, smoked bronze glass, and limestone.
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09.07.23

Shopping

We Turned a Palm Springs Architectural Marvel Into a Sun-Drenched Lightology Dream Home

When the team at Lightology approached Sight Unseen hoping to collaborate, we proposed curating a selection of our favorite pieces from the lighting and furniture retailer and installing them into a stunning architectural home in the Palm Springs desert. The now-sold 4,000 square-foot property has floor-to-ceiling windows and double-sided glass breezeways that make it the epitome of indoor/outdoor living — and the perfect sun-drenched backdrop for our vision of a Lightology dream home.
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09.06.23

Sight Unseen Collection

Objects & Ideas Are Making Sculptural, Relational Objects in the Canadian Wilderness

Since we last checked in with Di Tao and Bob Dodd of Toronto’s Objects & Ideas, their furniture designs have moved increasingly towards functional sculpture. “We’ve always thought that every piece we make needs to have a strong character and a strong expression — that has never changed. But the way we express our ideas has evolved,” says Tao. The latest pieces are visually alluring objects that have a use, of course: The enveloping Beaver Tail chair offers a seat, the curving Ascend floor lamp provides illumination. But these works also — and just as importantly — are relational, changing the space that they, and you, occupy.
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08.16.23

Sight Unseen Collection

These Three Studios are Redefining Cool Outdoor Furniture for a New Generation

Until the middle of last century, most outdoor furniture was serving Period Piece, “with stamped-out metal, bunches of flowers and leaves,” as the late designer Richard Schultz wrote in an essay reprinted in his 2019 book, Form Follows Technique: A Design Manifesto. But lately, we’ve been clocking a growing number of contemporary designers taking up the torch of inventive outdoor furniture design. It tracks alongside the growing collective awareness that nature is precious and that cultivating our feelings of belonging within nature is more important than ever. We caught up with three exciting talents on the scene.
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08.11.23

Sighted

The New Gallery Making It Easier to Acquire South African Design in the States

New York City is close to 8,000 miles from Cape Town, where Fiona Mackay grew up. Now based in Brooklyn as an art adviser and entrepreneur, she wondered why more of the great design she saw in South Africa on her trips home wasn't available in the US; it turns out, for independent designers, shipping an object those 8,000 miles can easily double its price. “I wanted to create a platform that would not only introduce Americans to the nuanced beauty and unique POV of South African design, but also create an opportunity for South African designers to sell their work in the United States,” Mackay says. By launching Kombi, a new design gallery in New York, Mackay is bringing contemporary collectible Southern African design to the States with a co-ordinated solution: to consolidate orders through one platform to be shipped together every few months.
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08.07.23

Sighted

These Woven Outdoor Chairs Are Built to Withstand the Test of Time — As Well As the Elements

By now, we’ve become accustomed to the reissues of classic furniture designs for interiors — so much so that it can sometimes be hard to keep track. But the same can’t be said for outdoor furniture, so when the relaunch of an iconic product for exterior use does come along, we sit up and take notice. Case in point: Spanish manufacturer Expormim’s Lapala collection of chairs, typified by their woven seats and backrests, which turns 25 this year. Highly chameleonic and adaptable to almost any plein-air setting — from garden patio to urban balcony — the design has proven its longevity through a variety of only the subtlest tweaks over the years. 
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