A Puzzle-Piece Bed, a Ceramic Peanut, a Mosaic Table: Everything We Loved in Miami This Year

Miami in December is a fairly easy sell for those of us in the art and design industries (despite the fact that, check notes, precisely zero of Sight Unseen's editors attended this year!) Those who weren't book launch mode descended in droves for the city's annual Art Week, as it’s become known since the number of exhibitions put on around Art Basel Miami Beach and Design Miami ballooned somewhat out of control. Today we're featuring a few acts from the week's anchor fairs, but between poolside cocktail parties and trips to Twist, our reliably favorite fair is of course Design Miami, which showcased an impressively diverse — and thankfully colorful — range of collectible design during its 18th edition.
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Casa Perfect Opens in New York, And It’s Even Better Than the Instagrams

Casa Perfect — the shoppable interior concept from The Future Perfect — finally opened in New York City this weekend after the success of previous Los Angeles iterations, and it was predictably awesome: Copacabana-like tropical lights by Chris Wolston, ethereal glass pieces by John Hogan, lush velvets by Lazzarini & Pickering, oil-finished tables by Floris Wubben, and a spectacular Chipperfield-designed wood staircase that flies up the home's central void, all the way from the subterranean kitchen to the roof.
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At The Future Perfect, Bec Brittain’s SHY Lights Grow Up

Bec Brittain has been playing with different configurations of her constellation-like SHY Lights ever since they debuted all the way back in 2012. But because each light is constricted only by the width and length of an LED tube, as well as Brittain's own boundless imagination, the possibilities are quite literally endless. So for a new show at The Future Perfect, called Resolute, Brittain began experimenting with the path and quality of the light source itself rather than the configuration of the tubes.
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A Touch of Surrealism in a Sea of Pink, at The Future Perfect’s New Secret Space

We were so busy with our own events during NYCxDesign that we hardly made it anywhere else. But you couldn't have paid us to miss Outlines, the debut show at The Future Perfect's new, secret Noho space, and the first ever exhibition by New York designer Leilani Zahn. We know Leilani primarily as an amazing interior designer and stylist, but Outlines marked the debut of her design studio For Reference, and the exhibition featured her soft goods and lighting as well as tweaks on furniture by De La Espada and a series of gorgeous mobiles and sculptures by her husband (and SU alum), Karl Zahn.
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Collective, The Future Perfect, Chamber, and More: The Best of NYCxDesign, So Far

Remember when New York Design Week was, well, a week? This year, the festival known as NYCxDesign stretches all the way from May 3 through May 24, making this a marathon for those involved, as we are, in both design and art. The best thing about the new, elongated schedule, though, is that we actually got to see much of the good stuff, launching as it did last week before our own Sight Unseen OFFSITE fair kicks into high gear. Here are two dozen favorites from New York design month — so far.
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The Future Perfect Los Angeles

A Flawlessly Appointed Interior, On View Now at The Future Perfect Los Angeles

If you're anything like us, you've probably allowed yourself to dream about one day having a home (and a salary) where you might be able to show off your Calico wallpaper, your Michael Anastassiades lights, your terrazzo Rooms tables, your Ben & Aja Blanc mirrors, and your perfect, rust-colored, velvet De La Espada chairs. If, like us, you fear that day might never come, now at least you can visit your idealized domestic vision in the form of Casa Perfect, a new, appointment-only Los Angeles outpost of The Future Perfect, housed in a mid-century ranch in the Hollywood Hills.
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Piet Hein Eek’s Wonder Room at The Future Perfect

In case you missed it, on Saturday we recapped our favorite offerings from around town during NYCxDesign. But there was one location whose showcase we saved for its own story: The Future Perfect, where owner Dave Alhadeff has given over the entire Noho shop to Dutch designer Piet Hein Eek until mid-June.
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Carwan Gallery Launch: Paul Loebach

Through April 15, Sight Unseen will be showcasing the work of half a dozen designers and design firms exhibiting together at the Milan Furniture Fair under the umbrella of the soon-to-launch Carwan Gallery in Beirut. When we asked Brooklynite Paul Loebach which of the four products he'll bring to the show had the most intriguing backstory, he immediately nominated his Watson table, a sandwich of carbon fiber and wood with double-helix legs that took him two and a half years to develop. Like the rest of Loebach's oeuvre, the table reinterprets historical craftsmanship techniques using cutting-edge technologies, evoking yet another novel property from a material as old and as simple as wood. "I named the table after the guy who discovered DNA," Loebach says. "I felt like a scientist doing this project, so I named it after one."
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David Alhadeff, Owner of The Future Perfect

As design-store owner Dave Alhadeff sees it, there’s a distinction between the kinds of craftspeople he is and isn’t interested in: The latter make objects primarily to show off their manual skills, while the former are motivated by a larger concept, a wish to make tangible some abstract artistic meaning. Carving toothpicks into forest animals? Skills. Carving porcelain into vases so mind-bogglingly intricate they appear to be made by machine? Concept. A subtle difference, but one that helps it seem slightly less absurd to picture Alhadeff — who runs The Future Perfect, one of New York’s most well-respected purveyors of contemporary design — roaming the aisles of a Westchester craft fair, chatting up potters and glassblowers. Concept, he explains, is what builds a bridge between pure craft and design.
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