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09.24.19

Sight Unseen Presents

Three Designers Turned Their Hotel Rooms Into Studios for A Weekend Residency — Here are the Results

With the help of the design-forward travel app HotelTonight — which allows designers to choose from a curated selection of hotels that might drive creative inspiration — we issued a challenge to three designers: Spend a weekend in a city you've never been to, bringing with you only the tools you can fit into a carry-on, and use your hotel room as a mobile studio in which to create a design object inspired by your travels.
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09.17.19

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Himalayan Salt Chair and a Purple Ombré Space Bench Were Among Our Favorites at This Year’s In Good Company

There were many quote-unquote "winners" in this year's In Good Company exhibition, which opened last week and was co-curated this time around by Fernando Mastrangelo and Milanese design doyenne Rossana Orlandi. But this year, there was an actual winner as well — someone who would be chosen by a jury of peers and offered $5000 to further their practice.
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07.17.19

Eye Candy

This Tubular Furniture is Made From the Most Basic Construction Material You Can Imagine

Coils and springs are bouncing around the current design trend Zeitgeist — or at least we've seen enough of them lately that we started a Pinterest board to keep track — but Korean designer Greem Jeong's take on them might be our favorite application yet. Her Mono series employs silicone tubes — typically an industrial material that's used to protect wires or pipes — that are here wrapped around a steel core form everything from table bases to a stiff bench, in colors that range from velvety blue to brilliant banana yellow.
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04.26.19

Excerpt: Exhibition

One of Our Milan Week Favorites? An Adult Playground Made From Industrial Flooring

We're now deep in the age of the Instagram-friendly immersive installation, which was especially evident at this year's Milan furniture fair, where we couldn't help but laugh at how many brands were touting some sort of earnestly dramatic light-based experience. And yet, for materials brands, there really is no better way to inspire visitors — and no one did that better last month than Tarkett, who with Note Design Studio installed a towering forest of playful geometric columns inside one of Milan's most beautiful buildings, the 150-year-old Circolo Filologico Milanese.
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Dutch Design Week 2018 Raw Color
10.30.18

Fair Report

35 Designers We Loved at Dutch Design Week 2018

The theme for Dutch Design Week 2018 was “If not us, then who?" — which says a lot about the current state of affairs in the world but also about the progressive and responsible spirit that lies at the core of the Dutch design scene. Here are some of our favorite finds from across the city.
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Marcin Rusak Manufacture
10.16.18

Sighted

Liquefied Metal, Applied Like Spray Paint, Creates Texture in a New Collection

The London-based, Polish-born designer Marcin Rusak first rose to prominence a few years ago exploring how natural materials — and, in many cases, live ones, like flowers and bacteria — could be harnessed and transformed into a wholly new aesthetic. Now, Rusak is developing a more industrial-based offshoot called MRM (or Marcin Rusak Manufacture), and the brand's first collection takes as its starting point a similar urge to recast commonly found natural elements as something otherworldly.
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06.25.18

Studio Visit

Meet Sigve Knutson, The Rising Star of Norwegian Design

Sigve Knutson is part of a special cadre of designers who seem to emerge from art school fully formed and gallery ready, their degree projects often representing some ingenious made-up process that acts as a bellwether for where the design world is headed. His 2016 thesis project from the Design Academy Eindhoven was immediately snapped up and developed by Carwan Gallery; earlier this year, when we called out a certain lumpen aesthetic as one of the top design trends for 2018, Knutson's work was the primary reason why.
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Kwangho Lee at Design Miami/Basel 2018
06.12.18

Q+A

Kwangho Lee On Using a 15th-Century Technique To Make Today’s Coolest Furniture

At Design Miami/Basel this week, Korean designer Kwangho Lee is presenting his latest work with the New York gallery Salon 94 Design — a 25-piece offering, spanning seating, side tables, cabinets, lamps, and planters, that continues Lee’s career-long quest to resuscitate enamel’s old-fashioned image. “Korean people aren’t very interested in it as a traditional material,” he explains of his longtime technique, chilbo, which dates back to the 15th century. “They think it’s something boring and old-fashioned.”
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Muji Materials Garden by Ladies & Gentlemen
06.04.18

Excerpt: Exhibition

Ladies & Gentlemen’s MUJI Materials Garden Was a Match Made in Minimalist Heaven

For this year’s NYCxDESIGN, MUJI teamed up with Jean Lee and Dylan Davis of Ladies & Gentlemen Studio on an installation to commemorate the Japanese lifestyle brand's ten years in the U.S. — the brand’s first-ever collaboration with an American designer. Called MUJI Materials Garden, the installation was comprised of seven vignettes showcasing MUJI collection mainstays alongside the materials from which they’re made.
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04.17.18

Fair Report

The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today, Day 3

In the 5Vie district, in an old flat that's been used for a couple of years as an exhibition space, we found the show Unsighted, curated by our friend Nicolas Bellevance-LeCompte of Carwan Gallery. For the brief he asked eight designers to create a collection not knowing who, what, or where it was bound for; our favorite of the collections was by a young designer named Roberto Sironi, who created Ruins, a series of benches, stools, mirrors and tables that juxtapose elements of the classical and industrial eras.
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03.12.18

Q+A

Fiberglass, Corian, Rubber, and Resin: Welcome to the Materials-Obsessed World of Wentrcek/Zebulon

Brooklyn design duo Kristen Wentrcek and Andrew Zebulon began making work together six years ago as Wintercheck Factory. And while their moniker has recently changed, their work has always derived its impact from the tension between the what and the why — the “what” being a material language that enforces approachability, and the “why” embedded in how it all comes together to elevate the mundane.
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