Casey McCafferty sculptural furniture

Casey McCafferty’s Mythological Furniture Keeps Getting Bigger

Whether it’s Aztec carvings, Native American totems, Norse idols or African masks that you see in Casey McCafferty’s work, the Los Angeles and New Jersey–based designer uses mythology from all of these diverse cultures to inform his fantastical furniture creations. Heavily influenced by Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth conversations, as well as historical science fiction, he blends characters from archeology and lore with shapes found in nature when carving pieces from wood and stone that each have their own personality.
More

Lewis Kemmenoe’s Debut Collection Features One Very Of-the-Moment Material

“For as long as I remember I loved just making things,” says London-based designer Lewis Kemmenoe. “My parents told me that when I was eight, I begged them to let me go to art school, right there and then.” He may not have matriculated quite as early as he had hoped, but Kemmenoe eventually enrolled in Central Saint Martins to study Fine Art. Eighteen months ago, he began working on his first collection of furniture, a series of chairs, tables, shelving, and lighting in burl veneer, plywood, and timber — either left in its natural state or stained with linseed to highlight the grain.
More

The 2020 American Design Hot List, Part I

This week we announced our eighth annual American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s editorial award for the names to know now in American design. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the first three Hot List designers here: Campagna, Casey Johnson Studio (above), and John Eric Byers.
More

A Plywood Pioneer and Champion of Eco-Modern Design Whose Work is Ripe for Rediscovery

Even though two of Peter Danko’s chair designs are in MoMA's permanent collection, many of his works were never all that commercially successful, leading him to view himself as something of an underdog. But the first time we discovered Danko's 1980 Bodyform chair on one of our early sourcing excursions, there was no question of whether to snap it up. Both it and and many of Danko's other designs are pieces of art and sculpture, and are ripe to be rediscovered by a generation that truly values those qualities.
More

Each Piece By French Designer Baptiste Lanne is an Ode to Nature, His Biggest Inspiration

After almost 10 years working for acclaimed studios like Habitat and Philippe Starck in Paris, French designer Baptiste Lanne felt a longing to get away from the screen and 3D modelling software. It was a trip to Japan to visit some woodworkers’ workshops that influenced his decision to make a living out of his personal affinities. Today he hand-carves impossibly refined design objects out of rough hunks of wood as if they’re as malleable as clay.
More

Sorry, Hygge Hive — Mattias Sellden Just Took Nordic Design Out Of Its Comfort Zone

For Swede Mattias Sellden, the first step towards making a name for himself was, for better or worse, admitting that he wanted to. “For me, even showing what I do was a hurdle. I still don’t have a website and I started my Instagram only in August of last year — three months after my graduate exhibition.” Sellden chalks this reticence up to the Nordic code of conduct known as Janteloven, which he describes as “the very Swedish notion not be a show-off.”
More
Strauss Bourque-Lafrance

Strauss Bourque-Lafrance and the Deconstructed Domestic Space

Strauss Bourque-LaFrance’s work reflects a holistic approach to materials informed by the social function and status of objects as well as our relationship to them; the roles they play in our lives as symbols, signs, and totems. In Bourque-Lafrance's world, objects and paintings often get mixed up together with sculpture and interior design; his approach may be best summed up by his gallerist, Rachel Uffner, who calls it: “painting-in-the-expanded-field, painting-as-collage, painting-as-performance, and painting-as-sculpture.”
More

Designer, Artist, and Animator Todd St. John

Todd St. John launched a stand-out furniture line this spring, but “I do a lot of animation, illustration, and narrative work,” says the designer, whose background is in graphic design, and whose clients have included The New York Times, Prius, Nickelodeon, Pilgrim Surf Supply, and MTV. “So I’m often experimenting with and developing new characters. There are tests around here everywhere.”
More

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."
More

Mattiazzi's Udine Headquarters

An hour east of Venice, in the province of Udine, Italy, three small outlying villages make up an area quaintly known as “The Chair Triangle.” For centuries, the municipalities of Manzano, Corno di Rosazzo, and San Giovani al Natisone have been home to workshops and factories, woodworkers and artisans, tool-makers and sawmills, all devoted to producing the more than 40 million chairs that emerge each year from the region. The city of Udine itself is no slouch in the manufacturing department — it’s home to Moroso, one of Italy’s most storied brands — but the chair triangle is known more for its specialized production and for manufacturers who do anonymous, subcontracted work for the big brands.
More

Patternity, furniture and textile designers

For Anna Murray and Grace Winteringham, pattern is everywhere — in the flaking paint of street bollards and the crisscrossing beams of scaffolding, in the fashion photography of Mel Bles and the banded stiletto heels of Parisian shoemaker Walter Steiger. Together, Murray and Winteringham run Patternity, a studio and online resource for pattern imagery where each photo is curated, sourced, or taken by the designers themselves. Spend some time on the site, and their obsessions become clear: One week it’s rocks and strata; another it’s the vivid African textiles that line the stalls of the Ridley Road street market that runs daily in Dalston, the East London neighborhood both women call home.
More