Week of May 21, 2018

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: fresh renderings from Barcelona’s OFFF Festival, a gallery exhibition of a design-world darling, and the 80’s-inspired HQ Of a cute candle company.
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Inspired by Crop Circles, Grain’s Lands Rug is Early American Settler Chic

To create their textile pieces, the Seattle-based studio Grain used to travel all the way to Guatemala, working with artisans in the country where founders James and Chelsea Minola first met and fell in love. But over the past few years, the designers have begun sourcing producers a bit closer to home: Their Lands Rug, a custom version of which debuted at The Primary Essentials in Manhattan last week, is woven by a 30-year-old textile mill near their alma mater, RISD.
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SAIC x Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Five Talents to Watch from SAIC’s Ceramics Exhibition at Sight Unseen OFFSITE

This year, two recently famous American designers themselves — Pete Oyler of Assembly Design and Jonah Takagi of Atelier Takagi — launched an intensive studio class in the SAIC Designed Objects program, aimed at taking students on a holistic journey from concept to exhibition, with the ultimate goal being a showcase of ceramic drinkware; the results were on view at this weekend’s Sight Unseen OFFSITE.
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The Principals’ Epic, Prismatic Plant Installation at Saturdays NYC

In the backyard of the Soho surf shop Saturdays NYC, Brooklyn design studio The Principals are exploring the border between the physical and sacred worlds. For an installation called Golden Arch, they’ve installed an 8-foot-tall triangular wave structure made from the studio’s modular, stackable Prism Planters. Spanning the garden from north to south, it symbolizes the emergence of the sun, moon, and stars from what Australian aboriginal cultures call “dreamtime” — the period during which the universe was created — into the physical world.
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Five New Styling Pieces From a Favorite Brooklyn Housewares Brand

We once described the small-goods Brooklyn brand Areaware as straddling the line between Jeff Koons and Dieter Rams — which in practice meant that for every gold-foiled pig or pug-printed pillow, there was a hydroformed stainless steel flask, or a bottle opener with a built-in magnet. Their new fall collection falls along that same continuum, with carefully considered items that telegraph a sense of fun through either a color palette or an extremely clever concept.
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Studio Sayso’s Colorful, Affordable, Goes-With-Everything New Furniture Collection

For Sight Unseen OFFSITE, Sophie Lou Jacobsen and Sarita Posada are launching Studio Sayso, which unites Jacobsen’s product design practice with Posada’s expertise in interiors. The studio’s Collection 01, which is currently on view at Creatures of Comfort, features colorful tables, chairs, and lamps inspired in part by Posada’s hometown outside Jerico, Colombia, where each house is painted a different vibrant hue.
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We Asked 13 Designers and 13 High-Profile Creatives to Collaborate for Charity, and the Results Will Surprise You

Since we started Sight Unseen nine years ago, we’ve found ourselves writing again and again about the fertile ground between creative fields. So it wasn’t much of a leap from there to Field Studies, for which we paired 13 furniture and interior designers with 13 creatives in food, fashion, film, art, and music and invited them to create a collaborative object together — all 13 of which are now available to purchase on 1stdibs, with proceeds going to a charity of each pair's choosing.
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Kim Markel's Glossier furniture

Candy-Colored Furniture Made From Recycled Glossier Packaging

Kim Markel's new series of translucent, candy-colored colored furniture pieces in reclaimed plastic is composed partly of Glossier’s pink-hued packaging empties, which the brand asked its employees to collect for months. The collection includes a cabinet, chairs, side tables, and mirrors, as well as a vanity table made from spun stone dust, a new material Markel developed using a by-product of the quarrying process.
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Minimalist, Shaker-Inspired Cleaning Tools That’ll Make You Want To Do Chores

When the exhibition Furnishing Utopia debuted at Sight Unseen OFFSITE two years ago, it followed a relatively strict set of parameters: 11 international designers would spend a week at two Shaker sites in New York and Massachusetts, engaging in an intensive workshop yielding new furniture and objects directly inspired by artifacts from those sites. But this year's exhibition examines the impact of the Shakers on contemporary design in a much more conceptual way: Called Hands to Work, it features objects by more than 25 studios, each meditating on contemporary attitudes towards everyday chores.
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Vonnegut/Kraft and Mary Ping Team Up to Showcase a New Custom Textile-Design Service

When a textile has a pattern woven into it rather than just printed onto its surface, it gains a unique property: It’s equally visually interesting on both sides. That was the first element fashion designer Mary Ping and furniture studio Vonnegut/Kraft seized upon when they teamed up to work with the new textile start-up Weft — which offers users the ability to design jacquard fabrics online and order them on demand — and it inspired their collaboration in more ways than one.
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A Conceptual Hotel Suite Inspired by Op-Art and ’80s Design

For this year’s Sight Unseen OFFSITE, husband-and-wife Steven Bukowski and Hannah Bigeleisen have teamed up with the support of HotelTonight — the app that offers booking deals on some of the world’s best design and boutique properties — to envision the ideal hotel suite, which they’ve brought to life in a 100-square-foot space inside the show at 201 Mulberry.
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The New, Architecturally-Inspired Wallpaper You Need For Your Home

Today marks the launch of Ratio, Twyla’s first-ever, limited-edition line of luxury wallpaper, with the first four patterns curated by Sight Unseen. Aiming to highlight Twyla’s ability to capture minute texture and detail, we asked four of our favorite architectural photographers to lend us a single image, and then invited four artists to create paintings loosely inspired by their use of shadow, color, line, or shape.
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