07.13.19

Saturday Selects

Week of July 8, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: A totally over-the-top New Orleans hotel, an exhibition that explores how we might reintroduce women to their rightful place in the canon, and the coolest clothespins — yes, clothespins — we've ever seen.

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07.12.19

Sighted

The Latest Collection by Rooms Evokes Neoclassical Furniture, Primitivism, and Arabian Folk Tales

Back in 2008, when we featured the first collection by the newly launched Tbilisi studio Rooms in our previous magazine, I.D., our excitement admittedly had to do partly with the discovery of high-level work coming out of a relatively unlikely place — work that blended in seamlessly with international design trends. But by 2016, when the designers left that comfort zone and began channeling inspirations that were closer to home, it became clear (ironically enough) that their success no longer owed any debt to the exotic appeal of their locale. The duo’s newest line feels like the next step in their evolution.

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07.11.19

Up and Coming

This Toronto Design Studio Finds Inspiration in the Canadian Wilderness

The Toronto-based design group Objects & Ideas works within a conceptual-meets-functional framework, and they talk about their work as an active excavation of the voice and soul of objects. "What we do is much closer to art than to mass production," says co-founder Bob Dodd. "Like everyone, we have to make money, and we have to make products people want to possess and cherish, but our furniture is definitely a vehicle to express our ideas and concepts. The best products have a soul and a presence."

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07.10.19

Up and Coming

A Self-Taught London Designer On How to Make Furniture That’s Poetic But Not Pretentious

EJR Barnes is interested in the ways furniture can become poetic or dreamlike when reframed with unexpected materials, forms, and juxtapositions. His creations engage a wide range of materials and techniques — birch plywood, gilded silver leaf, lacquered oak, powder-coated steel, pressed cane, cork, paper pulp slathered in wheat paste, even faux fur or scruffy suedes. Through all of this experimentation, Barnes seeks a quiet sort of subversion.

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12.26.16

Sight Unseen Presents

We’re Predicting These Six Design Trends Will Be Big in 2017

Each year at around this time, we take a moment to look back, but this year we're also looking forward, thanks to Lonny Magazine — they decided to call in a group of design experts to predict the biggest trends on the horizon for 2017, and Sight Unseen's editors were among them. Check out the six materials, motifs, and movements we think you'll be seeing a lot more of in the new year.

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07.10.19

The Essentials

EJR Barnes — Your New Favorite Instagram Follow — On His Top 10 Vintage Furniture Finds

Elsewhere on the site today, we're featuring the London designer EJR Barnes, whose work first came to our attention via his smooth, aptly named Buffalo Mozzarella chair. But we were actually first introduced to Barnes via his Instagram, where he chronicles his favorite — and often completely obscure — vintage furniture finds, from Borsani daybeds to Vignelli glassware to Kukkapuro lamps. Click through for a glimpse at Barnes's current obsessions.

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07.09.19

Up and Coming

5 Breakout Ceramics and Glass Artists From This Year’s RCA Showcase

Something kind of special is happening in the Ceramics and Glass program at London's Royal Collage of Art. We can remember a time when the RCA was churning out future furniture design stars like Max Lamb, Martino Gamper, and Raw-Edges, but in the last few years, the locus of talent seems to have shifted to those "it" mediums.

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07.06.19

Saturday Selects

Week of July 1, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Three very different new ceramics projects that just shot to the top of our wish list (including the stone-topped jar above), a verdant new restaurant interior by Joseph Dirand, and a new exhibition curated by Charlap Hyman & Herrero that has us seriously coveting an Italian throne.

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07.03.19

Eye Candy

This Art-For-Hire Company By a London Interiors Stylist is a Genius Idea

As an interiors stylist, Laura Fulmine was constantly on the hunt for license-free art that could easily be photographed and shared — a deeply frustrating task made even harder by more stringent recent copyright laws. So she did what any reasonable person in 2019 might do: She started a company that would offer the exact thing she had always been searching for.

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07.01.19

Current Obsession

Here’s One Design Trend We Never Expected to Be Tracking: Furniture With Tiny Balls

Though it likely dates back much further, we traced the trend's first modern appearance back to Wiener Werkstätte–era Josef Hoffmann, who used tiny wooden spheres as decorative and structural flourishes in his Fledermaus series, among others. Balls also had a resurgence during the Memphis era. But the new trend feels more refined.

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06.30.19

Saturday Selects

Week of June 24, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: A flower delivery service upping its vase game, an Italian designer exploring the interior possibilities of acetate, and a vase employing both ceramics and glass — i.e. the two coolest materials of the moment.

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06.28.19

Interiors

This Shoppable Montauk Bungalow is Everything We Want In a Vacation Rental

There's been a major trend lately in creating shoppable vacation rentals, but this breezy Montauk bungalow by Studio Robert McKinley might be the trend's most successful outing yet. Just look at those palm tree–green, lime-washed walls. Does that look like an Airbnb to you?

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