09.18.25

The Weekly

Our top picks from Collectible, an under-the-radar Greek sculptor, and more

Welcome to the new Sight Unseen, a weekly newsletter that delivers the best of the design world — news, trends, shopping advice, interviews, travel recs, and more — straight to your inbox. If you’re not subscribed, follow this link to sign up. Want to partner with us, advertise, or submit your work? Email us at hello@sightunseen.com! A Cinematic New Hotel Lands in Stockholm For a new aparthotel in Stockholm, Note Design Studio refreshed the interior of a 1960s-era low-rise with color-blocked walls, vintage Swedish tapestries, and custom storage. Photos: Riikka Kantinkoski When we return to Stockholm in February for the annual furniture fair, we’ll be refreshing Sight Unseen’s official and excellent guide to the Swedish capital with the best places to stay, eat, drink, visit, and shop. But we already have one new contender: The Finnish hospitality company Bob W recently opened its first Stockholm property inside a Functionalist 1967 concrete low-rise, its interiors preserved and elevated by Note Design Studio. The apartment hotel features 54 studios, but each one had a different size and shape at the outset; to pull everything together, Note created a collection of beds, seating, kitchens, and storage that could thread throughout, with cabinet and drawer pulls shaped like blocky, ink-stained buttons. Monochromatic corridors lined with old Swedish tapestries link the rooms, and in the common spaces, vintage furniture, high-gloss tile, and contemporary works like a modular sofa — designed by Note for Lammhults — create a distinctly cinematic mood. As Bob W co-founder Niko Karstikko put it: “The design has a Kaurismäki ambiance; you wonder where the guy with the cigarette is.” This Renovated 19th-Century Guest House is a Preview of Things to Come The new interiors studio Betyle’s ingenious solution for thick walls in this 19th-century outbuilding? An internal wooden framework that’s both decorative and functional. Photos: Mathilde Hiley Based between Marseille and Paris, Betyle is a new interiors firm led by Nicolas Cazenave de la Roche and Carla Romano, and their first interior is the renovation of an early 19th-century outbuilding in the south of France (top of post and above). A hybrid office and guest room, the space features — say it with me now — glass bricks and stainless steel, and its thick walls are covered with a plywood sheath that stretches almost to the ceiling. The wooden framework is both functional and decorative; notched into the corners where two … Continue reading Our top picks from Collectible, an under-the-radar Greek sculptor, and more

More

Buy the Sight Unseen book

  • The Sight Unseen Book

Shop the Sight Unseen Collection

  • Frangere light

Pinterest

09.02.25

Editors' Letter

Introducing the All-New Sight Unseen, Launching This Week

When we first started Sight Unseen back in 2009, we’d spent nearly a decade working in traditional print journalism. Despite launching shortly after the rise of blog culture, we insisted that Sight Unseen be called an online magazine, doubling down on our commitment to long-form feature stories and our hallowed idea of what respectable journalism ought to be. But at the same time, right from the beginning, we thought of our site as a forum for indulging our own interests and obsessions, publishing things that were only tangentially related to the news of the day. As the years went by and our status as design authorities grew, we shifted away from interviewing our inner circle about their weird collections or the books they drew inspiration from and took a more expansive approach, covering of-the-moment exhibitions, interiors, and talents. And yet Sight Unseen still always felt curated — fundamentally a reflection of our personal point of view. It’s what people love so much about the site. As we approach our 17th year in business, that curated sensibility is what we want to double down on.
More
07.11.25

Sight Unseen Presents

Goodbye for Now… We’ll Be Back in the Fall!

When you work for yourself, as we have for the past 16 years, it can be hard to turn off your work brain entirely. When we travel, we're constantly noticing architectural details and furniture vignettes that could be content; when a furniture order comes in late at night, it's imperative to address in a timely fashion. However, what we *are* able to do, considering our lack of a corporate overlord, is to suddenly say: "Hey, should we take the summer off?" We eased into this glam-leaning European way of doing things back in 2021, when we were writing How to Live With Objects, and we've deployed it to varying degrees ever since when the temperature start to rise. This summer marks our longest hiatus yet. We'll be back online after Labor Day. Now, we will be working behind the scenes to some extent — tinkering with our editorial vision, working on personal projects, Instagramming, and, most important, running the Sight Unseen Collection, business as usual. But you won't see any editorial content on the site until we return in September. See you then!
More
03.23.24

Saturday Selects

Week of March 18, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: highlights from the inaugural Matter and Shape show in Paris, two exhibitions of cheerful winter-busting paintings in New York, a colorful new look for De Sede (above), and a double-sided terrycloth shower curtain that would enliven even the dullest bathroom.
More
07.04.25

Studio Visit

This Red Hook Studio and Woodshop is Redefining What a Design Community Can Look Like

When I first got wind of Piscina, the shared workshop and showroom run by designer Natalie Shook out of a 20,000-square-foot space in Red Hook, Brooklyn, my first thought was of other similar, collective design spaces we've known and loved over the years, Okay Studio and Atelierdorp among them. But after spending the better part of a day at the Piscina space this fall and chatting with both Shook and the other designers who work there — including Luke Malaney, Jenna Graziano, Charles Grantham, Ford Bostwick, Chuck VanDyck, and Giovanni Valdeavellano of Studio POA, who has since moved his studio upstate — a clearer picture emerged of how different Piscina is from its predecessors.
More
07.03.25

At Home With

Inside the Copenhagen Home (and Store) of Texan Fashion Designer Casey Larkin Blond, Who Merges Southern and Scandinavian Influences

World-blending forms the core of the Mr. Larkin vibe — what founder Casey Larkin Blond describes as “a strange little universe” where her Southern roots, West Coast ideals, and Scandinavian influences all converge. It’s also visible in the apartment she shares with her husband, Danish fashion exec Alan Blond, and their two children, in a leafy district of Copenhagen that was once the city’s impoverished countryside and is now home to some of its most quietly historic buildings. The space isn’t dissimilar to her store interiors — spare but colorful, with a curated mix of contemporary handmade design objects and vintage finds.
More
07.02.25

Sight Unseen Collection

The Melbourne Design Studio Creating “Soft-Spoken” Objects

How many new things should we actually be making? This is the question that plagues so many designers now as the issues facing our planet continue to worsen. “I find the design industry very troubling in a lot of ways, and I do feel the tension of creating new pieces in a world of excess, with the majority of furniture and lighting ending up in landfill. It’s really hard to reconcile sometimes,” says Kate Stokes, co-founder for Melbourne studio Coco Flip.
More
07.01.25

Fair Report

Everything We Loved at Everyone’s New Favorite Design Fair: 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen

Copenhagen's 3 Days of Design festival has made an uncanny ascent to the top of the ranks of global design fairs in the past couple of years. Soon after we started reeling over the number of non-professionals going to Milan for pleasure rather than business, we started hearing the same about 3 Days, which we had only ever personally experienced (as recently as 2021) as a tiny event with mostly local participants. To be fair, it owes a part of its popularity explosion to the fact that it takes place in Copenhagen, in the summer, which is not a bad place to be even when your social calendar isn't full of design aperitivos. But as interest has grown, so, too, has participation. We attended this year's edition as a guest of Royal Copenhagen, and our friends and colleagues who didn't go were dying of curiosity about what we saw. Today's roundup, we hope, will answer some of those questions.
More
06.30.25

Interiors

This Interior Design Studio Firmly Rejects “Instagram Moments,” But Its Spaces Are Still Super Photogenic

Despite a wane in the curated "Instagram aesthetic," hotels and restaurants still often must rely on vignettes that guests will be inclined to photograph, post, and tag as part of their organic — and free — marketing strategies. But for New York-based Islyn Studio, the aim is to lift these guests out of their digitally oriented lives entirely, and — even if for a brief spell — focus on the sensorial value of the space they’re in. “We reject trends and ‘Instagram moments’ in favor of timelessness,” says founder Ashley Wilkins. “Our hope is that our audience is so immersed in the moment, they forget to look at their phones.” 
More
06.28.25

Saturday Selects

Week of June 23, 2025

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a renovated 1920s mansion available for rent in Paris, the latest in stained glass as a furniture material, and one Brooklyn designer's attempt to bring back flatware manufacturing in America.
More
06.27.25

Sighted

This Italian Bed Brand Is Making the Statement Sleep Furniture of Our Dreams

In many bedrooms, it’s often what goes on the bed that adds personality to a space. Bold-patterned sheets, colorful comforters, punchy pillows — all of these are used as aesthetic signifiers while the bed itself often falls into the background. But, as we saw in Milan this year, there’s a resurging trend for fun iterations of headboards, bases, and frames — whether they’re unusually shaped, exaggeratedly oversized, expressively crafted, or just pretty to look at. While exciting experiments in bed design have largely been left to emerging designers until now, bigger brands — like the Italian bed specialists Bolzan — are finally waking up(!) to the power of imaginative designs for a piece in which we spend such a significant portion of our time.
More