The Sight Unseen Art Kitchen, Plus Nine Other Incredible Rooms We Created For the SU x Lightology Country House

Upstate New York is one of our favorite places — close in proximity to one of the world's greatest cities, but so very far away in every other respect. In September, we rented a truck and drove up there, to a picturesque town outside Hudson, excited to do something we love doing almost as much as all of those other activities: styling a photo shoot inside a gorgeous home. For our second collaboration with the online lighting and furniture retailer Lightology, we traded the sleek minimalism and desert sun of Palm Springs for the charm of a (recently renovated) 1980s woodland escape — one whose blue floors, vaulted ceilings, and circular windows served as the perfect backdrop for the Sight Unseen x Lightology take on a country home.
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It’s Colin King’s Tastefully Curated, Beige-Hued, Branch-Forward World. We’re Just Living In It.

If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed Colin King's slow creep towards ubiquity over the last five years. First came the styling credits for unabashedly chic interiors, like Giancarlo Valle's New York apartment in Architectural Digest, or any number of the exactingly produced homes for Athena Calderone's, Live Beautiful. Then came the brand work — styling for the likes of Anthropologie, Hay, and B&B Italia — and the collabs: a collection of small goods for the Danish brand Audo, a rug series for Beni, and a collection for West Elm, among others. But things really began to ramp up when King's book, Arranging Things — a lavishly illustrated how-to guide to his own particular style — announced its 2023 release. By all accounts, a book by a stylist — normally a solidly behind-the-scenes job — is somewhat of a novelty. While those on the inside may be well-versed in the who’s who of creatives realizing magazine editorials and brand campaigns, rarely does someone break out and make themselves known in the mainstream. But King has achieved just that.
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This Campaign for a Sailboat-Inspired Sofa Transports You to a 100-Year-Old Sailing School in Venice

The Vela, designed for Saba Italia by Zanellato/Bortotto, is an interesting take on the puffy sofa: It's soft and cushy yet somehow still crisp, with arms that taper to a subtle point and striking diagonal tufting seams that gently reign in its voluminousness. That contrast is intentional, reflecting the inspiration for the sofa, which also lent it its name ("sail" in English): "We both love the sea and have always been fascinated by the unfurled sails blown by the wind near the Venice lagoon," says Daniele Bortotto. For its new campaign, Saba sent photographer Mattia Balsamini to photograph it at the Compagnia della Vela, a nautical school founded in 1911 on the island of San Giorgio.
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Ceramic Fireplaces and Leather Doors: Inside the Paris Atelier and Home of Valentine Schlegel

Once a forgotten name in French post-war decorative arts, the late ceramicist Valentine Schlegel came roaring back to prominence in the contemporary design and art world a few years back, becoming a muse to the likes of Simone Bodmer-Turner, Rogan Gregory, and others who appreciated her sculpted organic forms. And yet in spite of — or more likely because of — her resurgence, her longtime Paris apartment and studio was recently emptied out entirely and sold at auction. Adam Stech was lucky enough to photograph it before that happened.
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This Italian Furniture Brand Made a Clever Trompe L’Oeil Table, Then Shot It in a Carlo Mollino Masterpiece

January saw the introduction of an interesting new expression of trompe l'oeil, in the form of Saba Italia’s Teatro Magico table by 967 Arch, a dining table whose sinuous polyurethane base echoes the form of theater curtains and can part like them, too. The brand coincided the launch with the reopening, after a two-year renovation, of Turin’s Teatro Regio, whose Carlo Mollino–designed interior contains its own multitude of visual illusions.
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13 Incredible Mid-Century Lobbies in Turin Featuring Mosaic Walls, Sculptural Murals, and Other Avant-Garde Motifs

During the 1940s and 50s, a group of highly unorthodox and original designers and architects working in Turin, Italy, were known for their organic and sensual forms, their eclectic inspirations and rich decorations, and their utopian ideas — a Turinese avant-garde. Many interiors reflecting this style remain in tact in the city today, including extraordinary artistic entryways which, hidden from public view, reflect the enduring wildness of the city’s architectural elite.
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Ken Miller’s New Book Pictures Photography Anew

A new volume by editor and curator Ken Miller celebrates photography not for the referential images it can capture, but for the possibilities of the medium in and of itself. Titled PICTURES, the book celebrates non-representational photography, and it’s a formal announcement of sorts that photographs, as an art form, have come into a category all their own and not just in service of documentation, representation, or narrative.
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Lauren Coleman Experiments with Gravity and Melting Metal in a New Skincare Campaign

Brooklyn photographer Lauren Coleman's love of science-lab equipment made her an obvious choice for an important collaboration we're debuting today: an artistic depiction of the properties of a new product by the Swiss beauty brand La Prairie, which since 1954 has been known for its scientific approach. La Prairie invited Sight Unseen to commission a series of animated cinemagrams to mark the launch, and we invited Coleman to conceptualize them.
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DS & Durga Set Themselves Apart By Appealing to More Than Just Our Sense of Smell

"Perfume is armchair travel." This year, as we find ourselves collectively and forcibly grounded, DS & Durga’s tagline has taken on a new significance: Fragrance’s transporting ability, whether it be to carry us back in time to a familiar place or offer a portal to a destination we’ve never experienced, is more powerful and desirable than ever.
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The Fantastical Fungi (And Other Subjects) of Phyllis Ma’s Supernatural Still Lifes

Photographer and animator Phyllis Ma’s work is centered around what she calls “special nothings:” ordinary objects that, in the right context, can appear “magical, surreal, or even uncanny.” Fuzzy flowers nuzzling each other, a block of aspic the exact dimensions of an iPhone, a phallic gherkin covered in warty bumps — all resplendent in hyper-stylized settings and hyper-saturated hues. Recently, Ma — who was born in China and immigrated to Brooklyn when she was eight — turned her lens on the mushroom kingdom.
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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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