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 (guidelines here)? Email us at hello@sightunseen.com.

Barnaby Lewis’s Personal Metalwork Finds a Public Stage in London

On view now in London at the APOC store is a solo show of studio works by metalsmith, designer, and sculptor Barnaby Lewis.

Hot on the heels of opening their first brick-and-mortar in London earlier this year, indie fashion retailer APOC is launching a series of in-store solo gallery presentations, the first with London blacksmith and furniture designer Barnaby Lewis. Since Lewis started his metal shop a few years back, he’s done a lot of fabrication and private commissions — for Jermaine Gallacher, among others — but always kept humming along on his personal work in the background, building up a huge cache of pieces that he’s finally getting the chance to show off. The selection is incredibly diverse, everything from a giant Anglepoise lamp to a huge wall sculpture to little desktop works, all in different textures and techniques. “Variation is essential to my practice,” says Lewis. “It’s just as enjoyable and important to me to make quickly arranged pieces from scrap as it is to spend far too long on an incredibly detailed piece.”

Counted in the second category is what I consider to be the showstopper of the exhibition: a steel three-panel room divider featuring one of Lewis’s favorite themes, a ’90s-ish sun and moon motif. A variation on a headboard he made two years ago — which I still can’t stop thinking about — the divider is a typology Lewis particularly appreciates. “It’s an object you can really explore with, kind of like a painting,” he says. “I really leaned into this, trying to work with as many textures and colors as possible.” If you’re in London it’s a must-see.

A Former Candy Factory Gets Butter Walls, a Burgundy Bar, and an Eggplant Bath

Clockwise from top, a spiral staircase in MA Studio’s Tribeca residence project, with an Alpine floor lamp at left; an eggplant powder room; and Known Work furniture in the living room. Photos: Joe Kramm

We’re a little late to the party on this residential project in Tribeca, which was completed this past spring, but felt it was worth publishing anyway. Mostly because it’s so impressive; a two-year gut renovation of a 4,000 square-foot 19th-century former candy factory by London’s Muqaddas Akkari Studio, with a statement staircase and excellent art. The designers kept the apartment’s key elements — like 18-foot ceilings, a central brick wall, industrial wood beams, and a soaring skylight — but added their own contemporary build into it, going dark and cozy in more private spaces like a burgundy bar and an eggplant guest bath while keeping things light and airy in the more open, communal areas of the space. (Hellooooo butter-yellow living room media wall.) (Also yes, this four-bedroom home has an actual bar, plus a sauna upstairs and two separate living rooms.)

But if we’re being honest we also wanted to share it because MA Studio teamed up with New York design gallery Lovehouse to furnish it, and we juuuust so happen to have a few overlapping designers in Sight Unseen’s own Collection whose works are featured here, like Astraeus Clarke’s Alpine floor lamp, in the first image above, and pretty much everything by Known Work, above and below left. Great minds and all that!

The Elegant Department Store Is Alive and Well in Switzerland, Care of Tutto Bene

The main shopping floor, above, and private shopping suite, below of Globus Basel, designed by Tutto Bene. Photos: Ludovic Balay

You’ve heard us babble enough by now about office spaces that look like residential interiors, but what about a department store that we would move into, like, tomorrow? Of course it had to be somewhere like Switzerland, and of course it had to be someone like Tutto Bene, the London/Milan studio of Felizia Berchtold and Oskar Kohnen, who have some of the best taste around right now. The pair were recently charged with redesigning the Globus Basel department store, which sits behind a famous 1904 Art Nouveau facade, and inside it they actually created two separate, color-blocked spaces with two distinct moods: the open shopping floor, bright and luminous in shades of beige, pale yellow, and seafoam, and a private shopping suite that’s actually intended to feel like a luxe collector’s home. That area is lined in soft, powdery slate blue, with wood-paneled walls and lots of black, and it’s where most of the magic happens — custom furniture by Tutto Bene, vintage styling objects by Two Rooms Gallery in Zurich, Cini Boeri and Rodney Kinsman furniture, and the pièce de résistance, a series of trompe l’oeil drapery screen prints affixed to the dressing room mirrors that pay homage to Swiss icon Trix Haussmann, which we appreciate indeed.

Current Obsession: Object-Adjacent Artist-Made Frames

Top and lower right: Paintings and frames by Ana Won. Lower left: Drawing and frame by Omer Shach.

We’re in an age when art, craft, and design are so seamlessly merged that scarcely anyone questions the distinction between them, yet there are still times when we see all three practices overlapping and can’t help but appreciate it. Case in point: the elaborate artist-made frames we’ve been spotting on Instagram, particularly ones by young artists that resemble the kinds of handcrafted objects being shown now at emerging design galleries. It’s a fun genre, one with long, established roots in art history. “Artists have always designed their own frames, from the hobbyist painters to the heavy hitters,” says dealer Patrick Parrish, who cites Whistler, Degas, Kandinsky, and O’Keeffe, “plus the amazing Florine Stettheimer, who often made the frame as important as the painting itself.”

More recently you could point to artists like Matthew Barney and Ashley Bickerton, but the two talents that got me thinking about all this in the first place are Argentine painter Ana Won and Israeli-American artist Omer Schach. Won actually creates her wooden frames first, drawing them for her team of craftspeople to hand-carve before she adds the actual artworks in. The frames are often inspired by “furniture found in the homes of our mothers or grandmothers,” she says, and “they come from a long process of sketching and reflection, while the painting itself is more spontaneous.” Schach taught himself how to solder stained glass to make his latest works: “For me the fun really starts when I can give an ancient technique a fresh interpretation,” he says. His frames help him create more of an experience around his drawings, “inviting viewers to peek at the little demons within.”

If you’ve seen any other amazing examples of artist-made frames lately, DM us. And in the event that you’re just in the market for great handcrafted pictureframes, standalone — which are also having a renaissance — my current favorites are these by Apholi and these newcomers by Paula Atelier.

Editor’s List

CLOCKWISE, FROM TOP LEFT:

–
I get a particular joy when I see a piece or a project by a friend and objectively really love it, zero bias needed. This bright-green painting of a staircase corner by Olivia Drusin — a woman after my own heart with her focus on reframing “pedestrian encounters with urban and domestic space” — stopped me in my tracks when I saw it in the lineup of a new group show at Anton Kern gallery, “Give Me Two“. It’s on view in New York through February 21.

–
It’s always nice to rediscover a maker we connected with early on in Sight Unseen’s story. We first featured the home studio of ceramicist Jessica Hans back in 2013 (lordy please ignore the terrible photo quality), and this week I was appreciating her work anew on Instagram, where she’s been sharing a series of dishware with a more classic studio-craft vibe. Don’t be mad though when most of them are already sold out — you know the drill people, watch and wait.

–
Perhaps you saw in our Instagram Stories earlier this month, but after spotting this tableau on Demisch Danant gallery’s feed, and then being reminded by a friend of the “can’t hang a painting in a landmarked house with no solid walls” moment at the Philip Johnson Glass House (above, photo by Eirik Johnson), I mused that perhaps paintings in freestanding frames should be the 2026 equivalent of paintings hanging from the ceiling on chains. It just looks so cool and minimalist. Give it a try!

–
Here’s another great group show on the opposite coast, this one at the craft-focused art gallery Atla in Los Angeles. For “The Host, the Guest,” on view through March 1, curator Nichole Caruso took as a starting point an 18th century Japanese haiku (“no one spoke // the host, the guest // the white chrysanthemum”), then put together pieces that all nod to hospitality in some way. Standouts include paintings by Vamba Bility, stone-studded ceramics by Yoshikazu Tanaka, and the carved wooden box shown in the foreground above by Nik Gelormino.

News

Studio Ahead have created a facsimile of an antique shop to showcase new bowls at The Future Perfect during Fog. Photo by Ekaterina Izmestieva

–
It’s Fog week in San Francisco, and while I’m not attending this year, I’m watching the hits roll out from afar, including the candlesticks show at Blunk Space we featured last week, a tag-team presentation from Marta of work by Dominik Tarabanski and Minjae Kim, and this charming show by Studio Ahead at The Future Perfect, which recreates the organized chaos of a classic antique store as a framework for showcasing new bowl designs by the likes of Bari Ziperstein, Cody Hoyt, and Alana Burns. The vintage furniture is from Mid Century Møbler, the old stuff is from C. Mariani Antiques, and there are books peppered throughout from Et Al Gallery — a real(-ish) cabinet of curiosities.

–
R & Company has two exciting exhibitions opening tomorrow in New York, one solo show which we’ll probably feature next week, and this one on the glass creations of Richard Marquis, an American artist who worked with Venini in the 1970s. To be honest, murrine has always been one of my least favorite Murano glass techniques, but I’ve never seen it like this before. Thanks to R & Company — who have paired Marquis’s work with other murrine examples from the prior century — for changing my mind.

–
Live in Los Angeles? Always wanted to live in a Schindler? Wallpaper reported last week that a great one is available for rent in Silverlake, a one bedroom in his Manola Court building. Whether it’s still available at the time this newsletter goes out, we can’t be sure, but have a peek here.

–
I haven’t watched Heated Rivalry just yet — it’s on the list — but for those of you who are mega fans, The Architect’s Newspaper just interviewed the architect of Shane’s glass-walled cottage in the woods of Canada. A bit too rustic-contemporary for my taste, but we love a good pop culture meets architecture moment.

Jobs

Night Palm is seeking both a project manager / designer and a design assistant in Los Angeles

Business of Vintage is seeking a freelance PR strategist in the US to promote vintage shops and their stories

Alex P. White is seeking a freelance interior designer (remote)

POST A JOB
VIEW ALL JOBS