At Zona Maco, Agnes’s First Solo Exhibition is Bestrewn With Symbols of Luck

When the Guatemala City-based duo Agnes first burst onto the scene in 2017, they did so in a decidedly iconic fashion: Their debut collection was immediately embraced by the international design community, with splashy press clips, interesting placements, and influential commissions (AGO Projects founders Rodman Primack and Rudy Weissenberg asked the two to create a rug for their own CDMX home, which was later featured in our book, How to Live With Objects). Now AGO is spotlighting Agnes’s sophomore collection at their Mexico City–based gallery as part of the designers’ first solo exhibition, which opened during last month’s Zona Maco festivities. 
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Punk and Playfulness Co-Exist in Nice Condo’s Monumental Furniture

Combining influences from Brutalism and Memphis with traditional wood craft, Nice Condo’s Chris Held and Sara Graham create monumental designs that — while often statement-making in some way, from the off-kilter color palette of a dining table to a cabinet with sawtooth hardware — are each intended to anchor a space and fit with a variety of interior styles. "Challenging the expectations of a client in formal ways quickly veers into sculpture, and I'm not interested in making sculpture," Held says. "I'm interested in making things people put in their homes and spill drinks on — live life on and around."
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A Deft Mix of Materials Earned This Swedish Studio Sight Unseen’s Best in Show Award at Greenhouse, the Exhibition for Emerging Design at Stockholm’s Furniture Fair

Adrian Bursell and Siri Svedborg were students at Konstfack back in 2018 when they made the tables that would become the initial studies for their Burn & Turn collection, which debuted at the Stockholm Furniture Fair earlier this month, and which earned them Sight Unseen's Best in Show award at Greenhouse, the fair's up-and-coming designer showcase. At the time, they were studying the Arts & Crafts movement in a degree program for Interior Architecture and Furniture Design, and they agreed to explore a table that might reflect the movement's values — one that could be functional yet decorative, using a kind of stripped-down ornamentalism inspired by the Swedish folk tradition.
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18 New Talents We Scouted at Greenhouse, Stockholm’s Showcase for Emerging Design

As an editor, each time I attend a design fair, I'm making snap judgements in my head: Does this designer's collection stand together as a whole? Is there a compelling narrative behind it? Does it use materials in a profound or creative way? Is it formally inventive? Is it pretty? If I had another suitcase, would I want to take a piece home with me? But before last week, I had never in my life had to choose my number one, absolute, hands-down favorite. And yet, at the Stockholm Furniture Fair's Greenhouse exhibition of emerging design, I did just that: For Sight Unseen's inaugural Best in Show award, I chose the Swedish duo Bursell/Svedborg — whose wonderful series of mixed-material pedestals we'll be diving into more in-depth next week — from a pool of 30 international design studios, who had been juried into the fair by a committee of six Stockholm-based designers. Today, though, I'm highlighting *all* of my favorite up-and-coming designers from the week.
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Born in Philly and Based in London, Andrew Pierce Scott Has a Knack for Turning Discards Into Drama

Metamorphosis is at the heart of what Andrew Pierce Scott does. The London-based American designer has a talent for taking leftovers and discards and turning them into sculptural metal furniture and objects or an evocative textile still-life. In Scott’s hands, recycled sheet steel becomes a lamp with a darkened yet almost iridescent finish; fabric scraps become a plate of oysters and glasses of wine that make you immediately wish for the pleasures of good company and a good meal.
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Frederik Fialin on His New Tubular Metal Collection: “We All Like to be Comfortable, But Other Things Are Often More Important to Me”

Danish designer Frederik Fialin understands the idea that you have to know the rules before you can break them. He’s certain something is working not only when it’s functional and beautiful, but when it makes him laugh. It’s a way of taking the work seriously, without taking yourself too seriously, and it may have something to do with how Fialin got started, with a classic cabinetry apprenticeship. “I didn’t particularly enjoy it at the time, but now I see why everything has to be done in a certain way. I consider this, now, to be possibly the greatest foundation of my professional life that I could ever have asked for — especially because I can use, remix, and warp this never-ending chase for perfection that dominates the environment. There’s reason in the madness.”
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This Graphic Designer–Turned–Cabinetmaker’s Dyed-Wood Furniture is, Well, To Die For

Paris-based designer Jonathan Cohen has been working in wood for only a couple of years. Initially trained as a graphic designer, his eye for flat compositions naturally transferred into the three-dimensional world of furniture, with his creations quickly catching the eye of top architects and designers and local galleries. “When you have knowledge of good proportion, shape, and balance, you can design a letter or furniture,” Cohen says. “For me, it’s almost the same.” What lends the designer's work a certain je ne sais quoi, however, is the unique dye treatment he uses, applied in various techniques to bring out the grain and texture of the wood — forming patterns reminiscent of those created by Memphis artist Nathalie du Pasquier. 
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Yowie, the Best Design Boutique in Philly, Has Opened an Equally Cool Hotel

We've long been obsessed with the always-just-under-the-radar design scene in Philadelphia, but a decade ago — when we devoted a whole week of coverage to Philly — something like Yowie, the design store founded and curated by creative director Shannon Maldonado, simply didn't exist. That all changed when Yowie opened its doors in 2016, introducing a variety of Danish and American furniture brands and a refreshingly playful color palette to Philadelphia. Today, Yowie offers clothing, lighting, furniture, homeware, gifts, books (including our own!) and more, deservedly it earning the title of coolest boutique in Philly. And thanks to this success over the past seven years, Yowie is now not only expanding its retail footprint, but opening an entire hotel upstairs.
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Sarah Burns’s Collection for Marta is Dreamy But Humble — In Other Words, a Little Midwestern

As a designer, New York–based Sarah Burns has a remarkable fluidity when it comes to scale. She can go small and intricate, like the jewelry she creates as co-owner of the Chinatown shop Old Jewelry. But she’s also adept at working with larger, place-defining forms, as with the furniture collection in her first solo show, Prairie’s Edge, now running at Marta in LA through June 10.
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New York Design Week, Did You Miss Us? We’re Back, With a Show of Work by 23 Designers

Predictably, the question we always get around this time of year is: Are you bringing back Offsite?! Alas, our much-loved New York design week show, which ran in some form or another from 2010-2020, is on indefinite hiatus. But this year we'll be bringing a piece of its spirit back to life: From May 18-24, Sight Unseen will host an exhibition featuring the newest additions to the Sight Unseen Collection, which comprises furniture, lighting, and objects from a stable of emerging and mid-career designers from around the world, all orderable directly through Sight Unseen. The exhibition — taking place at Voltz Clarke gallery on the Lower East Side — will feature new work by 23 designers and studios, displayed alongside the paintings of France-based artist Heather Chontos.
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A Barbie Pink Living Room, A Patchwork Metal Cabinet: Everything We Loved From the 2023 Collectible Fair in Brussels

Consistently one of our favorite fairs on the design circuit, the sixth edition of Collectible opened last week in a new venue in Brussels, and even from afar we were struck by the fair's continued push towards experimentation. In a new section called Dialogue, galleries were invited to show works from the '80s and '90s in conversation with more contemporary pieces (probably our favorite exhibition trope, tbh); another new section, called Architect <=> Designer, showcased only work by architects and interior designers, while a third, called New Garde, featured the best recently launched galleries and collectives.
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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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