Foot Vases and Artichoke Plates: The 2021 Sight Unseen Gift Guide, Part I

We always look forward to putting together our annual gift guides, where we get to turn our brains off, scour our favorite stores for wishlist-worthy objects, and focus on sheer indulgence for a minute. What's our favorite candle this year, our favorite wine glass? Which books are we dying to have on our coffee table now, and in the case of Monica (whose guide is featured today), which foot-shaped vase? We hope you can get some inspiration from these lists — particularly when it comes to supporting small businesses and talented independent makers.
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Win a $2,000 Credit For This Zwirner-Backed Site That Lets You Buy High-End Art in Your Pajamas

By doing away with the inquiries-only model, the new click-to-buy online marketplace Platform makes acquiring high-end art easy and transparent — you don't even need to be a collector, much less a VIP, to shop it (interior designers take note!). Backed by David Zwirner gallery, it offers 100 original works each month, by artists ranging from Lily Stockman to Erin O'Keefe to Kalup Linzy, at prices ranging from $1,500 to $50,000 — and if you win this giveaway, you could have one of them hanging in your living room. Click through to enter!
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Week of July 12, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a rainbow-colored housewares store in Berlin, the latest extruded-plastic works by James Shaw, a group show of vases by 19 ceramicists, and a highlight from this year's Design Parade in France (above).
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A Playful Pét-nat, and Other Graphic Design Picks for July

Each month The Brand Identity shares with our readers a selection of the most interesting studios, packaging designs, and branding and identity projects featured recently on their site. This month: Colorful packaging for a sustainable beauty line, a photographer with a font inspired by the early 1900s, and a playful identity for a Ukranian wine brand (above).
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Our 2021 Collection Launches Today on 1stDibs — With New Work From 16 International Designers

The pandemic may have prevented us from hosting our Offsite show this year, but we didn't want to entirely abandon our role as a platform for supporting the work of independent designers — especially since they haven't let it stop them from coming up with brilliant new ideas, even without a physical fair to debut them at. So for 2021, we decided to curate a special collection of furniture and accessories by 16 contemporary designers and launch it for sale exclusively on 1stDibs, starting today.
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Meet the Site Helping You Discover New Designers and Artists — Starting With These 14

When it launched, Wescover was an index of places and spaces — the Ace Hotels, De Maria restaurant in New York, Hauser & Wirth in LA — annotated with the names of artists and designers whose work they contained. Now its goal is to foster the discovery of independent talents within its pages, primarily through contextual interior photography that helps bring their work to life. To give you a jumping off point for exploring the site, we've rounded up 14 of our favorite creators, both familiar and new.
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Week of November 30, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week was all about the epic upgrade: Eny Lee Parker reimagining an Adrian Pearsall bench, Odd Matter making recycled-plastic furniture chic, and Sean Gerstley making us forget about every other ceramic table ever on his very first crack at the genre.
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sight unseen gift guide 2020

Slime Lamps and Head-Shaped Incense Burners: The 2020 Sight Unseen Gift Guide, Part II

On the one hand, to publish a gift guide in 2020 seems like an immense act of magical thinking. On the other hand, one of the small, analog joys we have found in this period of sequestering and uncertainty is the act of sending a gift by mail. In our second 2020 gift guide, this one by Monica, may we interest you in some incense burners? How about a gloppy, foamy desk lamp, or some CBD hot sauce? We're also pretty excited about Christin Ripley's marble-printed husband — who couldn't use a hug from a pillow right now? Give a gift, or two, to someone you love. It might just make you feel better.
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A New Independent Design Label Launches in the South of France

The tiny town of Hyères in the South of France is only 50 square miles, but has long had an outsized presence on the contemporary design map as the home of the arts foundation Villa Noailles and its annual Design Parade festival. The festival was canceled this year due to the pandemic — more on that next week! — but two young Parisians have managed to fill in the gap with an exhibition called Été Super, which is serving as the launch of their independent design brand 13Desserts and its permanent showroom in a former Hyères skate shop.
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