In Julie Richoz’s New Mirrors for Vitra, Color Theory and the Tiniest Details Work to Change the Way We See

When Julie Richoz, a Swiss-French designer in Paris, was envisioning her new Colour Frame Mirror for Vitra, she was drawn to elemental forms, inspired in part by wooden building blocks and toys, those staples of childhood. “I like the innocent gestures they refer to — the simple pleasure of playing with colors and shape,” she says. But even as her mirror references those basic objects, it also moves beyond them. There’s a fun lightness here, but there's also a high degree of sophistication, precision, and intent.
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Nathalie du Pasquier is So Much More Than the Poster Girl for Memphis Design

When a return to Memphis became the defining design trend back in 2014, a few of the movement's original members flew to the forefront of discourse once again, among them Peter Shire, Ettore Sottsass, and Nathalie du Pasquier, whose exuberant patterning became a kind of shorthand for cool around that time. (If you came home from Milan in 2014 without an NDP Wrong for Hay tote bag, were you even there?) But while Du Pasquier became pigeon-holed for that kind of blocky, frazzled look (remember when she designed for American Apparel?!), she's always been so much more than that, and the full fruits of her output as an artist are on view this month at an exhibition called "Speed Limit" at Anton Kern Gallery in New York.
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This Renovated Warsaw Apartment Masters the Vintage-Contemporary Mix

Is Piotr Paradowski the best interior design studio you've never heard of? We stumbled upon the latest project by the Krakow-based firm on Instagram this week and were surprised to find very little about the studio online besides their own site, which includes several richly-hued, vintage-inspired projects much like the renovated Warsaw apartment we're featuring today.
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Kasthall Sight Unseen rug

Anyone Can Design a Custom Rug With Kasthall’s New Online Tool — Here’s Proof

Today we're excited to launch Sight Unseen's first ever product for the home: A collection of two rugs we designed for the 120-year-old Swedish company Kasthall, using their online Rug Designer tool. The tool, a new edition of which launches today at Stockholm Design Week, allows any architect, interior designer, or enthusiastic aesthete — that's us! — to create a one-off custom hand-woven or hand-tufted rug using an expansive palette of colors and patterns.
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The Belgian Designers Making Candy-Colored Furniture in Their Backyard

Though now partners in work and life, Jef De Brabander and Kathleen Opdenacker of the Antwerp-based Nortstudio arrived at where they are via two very different paths: He’s an industrial engineer, she’s a graphic designer. No wonder, then, that the work they’ve produced since joining forces in 2016 has exhibited such a symbiotic relationship between color and form.
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Meet Elisa Ossino, the Milan-Based Designer and Stylist Who’s Suddenly Everywhere

This will come as a shock to no one, but the Milan design scene can be a little insular. Some of the best things don’t make it past the border, or even beyond the chic artery of Via Solferino for that matter. And unless you speak a bit of Italian and are ordering the right magazines from abroad, it’s not always apparent who’s making waves in the city. Take, for example, up and coming Italian designer Elisa Ossino, an architect and stylist who, after more than a decade of working diligently within the Milan design scene, is finally charting international waters.
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The South Korean Designer Making “Art Futons” A Thing

Sang Hoon Kim's Foam Series is a collection of seats, bookcases, chaises, tables, and even rugs made from colorful, flexible memory foam that's mixed in varying solutions to create levels of texture and cushion. The results have a blocky form language that's reminiscent of Kwangho Lee or Max Lamb mixed with the color sensibility of a Chris Schanck; the chaise is a particular favorite, resembling as it does the coolest futon you could ever imagine.
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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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Block Shop Los Angeles studio

Inside the Color-Drenched L.A. Studio of Block Shop Textiles

For their installation at Sight Unseen OFFSITE, sisters Lily and Hopie Stockman — the duo behind the textile line Block Shop — are drawing inspiration from their own studio, high up in a historic bank building in downtown Los Angeles. “Our studio is filled with rugs and pillows and dogs and books and other human beings coming and going. We wanted to recreate that in New York,” says Hopie. Voracious, eclectic readers, the Stockman sisters have envisioned the project as a reading room.
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Our 10 Most Popular Instagrams of 2017

Today we're turning our lens to our favorite social media platform — and the place that many of our fans probably only know us from (!) — Instagram. Here are the 10 images you loved best, in all their geometric, millennial-pink glory.
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Josef Albers is One Of Design’s Biggest Influences — See What Inspired the Artist Himself

Things have changed quite a bit since we began Sight Unseen eight years ago, but one interview question has remained steadfast in our arsenal: Who are your biggest influences? And while the same answers tend to pop up often enough — Barbara Hepworth, Agnes Martin, Luis Barragán, Donald Judd — there's one name that seems to get checked more than anyone else: Josef Albers, the 20th-century artist, educator, and designer, whose book, Interaction of Color, is one of the most essential design texts ever written. But in a new exhibition at the Guggenheim, Josef Albers in Mexico, one of Albers's own greatest influences is laid bare.
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