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We’d Ditch Design Hotels For These Deco-Inflected Rental Apartments in Paris

Pied À Terre’s two newest rental apartments near Paris’s Palais Royal, both designed by Necchi Architecture. Photos: Isabel Bronts

In the last two decades, the world of travel has officially fractured into two discrete camps: folks who prefer the comfort and services of a hotel versus folks who like the breathing room — and kitchen access — of a temporary residence. It used to be that renting an apartment was more affordable, too, but came with trade-offs like dressers full of someone else’s underwear. But these days the line between the two is more dissolved than ever, a prime example being the French boutique rental company Pied À Terre: Founded in 2021, it has been scooping up apartments around Paris and, with the help of Necchi Architecture, turning them into unabashedly stylish short-term accommodations. The properties are even more balls-to-the-wall, from a design standpoint, than most design hotels are these days; surely you’ve seen one of the now dozen-plus Art Deco–inflected interiors on Instagram, where they’ve gone viral many times over.

The latest property in the portfolio, pictured above, is Palais Royal, and consists of two apartments renovated into a 1775 building that feature lots of wood paneling, custom furniture, vintage lighting and artworks, and Necchi’s now-signature use of checkerboard and grid patterns. I personally will always be a hotel girl, but would break the habit for the chance to step into an interior design fantasy for a weekend.

With a New Space in Hackney, Spazio Leone Evolves From Cult Status to Prime Time

Spazio Leone’s new gallery in Hackney fills a former textile factory with icons from Scarpa, Aulenti, Castiglioni, and more. Photos: Celia Spenard-Ko

It’s always a little bittersweet when vintage dealers inevitably level up over time. They start out wild and freewheeling, driving around to estate sales and flea markets doggedly pursuing whatever weirdo visions they might have before offering their finds up to their niche followers, but then eventually they take a space, and their business grows, and their space grows, and as their market becomes more sophisticated, their offerings become more focused, more pedigreed. The latest to get a glow-up is London’s Spazio Leone, founded by Gennaro Leone, which we first featured back in 2021. After starting his business six years ago with just 20 eccentric pieces he personally collected around Italy, Leone has just moved into a huge former Victorian textiles factory in Hackney, where he’s put together an impressive first showing that includes famed pieces by Carlo Scarpa, Josef Hoffmann, Gae Aulenti, and — with the white dining set in the first image above, our favorite — Hans Günther Reinstein. Nary a wiggle or a weld in sight, though Leone is including select works by up-and-coming contemporary designers among the iconic ones, like textiles by Grace Atkinson and lights by Preziosi. Don’t get us wrong, we’ll never not appreciate a new design destination like this one, and besides, there’s never a shortage of young-gun dealers coming up on the scene (here’s a good list for London in particular). The world needs both!

These New Lighting Collections Reflect How Much Design Has Changed Since the Plastic Age

Ross Gardam’s Aeris and Solace lighting collections in hand-blown glass. Top and left images: Mr.P Studios; Bottom right photo: Haydn Cattach

In the 1960s and 70s, designers had a field day experimenting with new plastic materials to create lighting molded into all sorts of novel shapes taken from life and from nature. Some of those — from designers like Mario Bellini, and Susi and Ueli Berger — mimicked bulbous cloud formations, a pop interpretation of an iconic natural element and a whimsical, almost child-like formal gesture in line with the playful aesthetic of the time. Against that backdrop, you could read the latest lighting collections from Australian design studio Ross Gardam as a direct reflection of how much times, and values, have changed since then: Its Aeris series, which also takes clouds as an inspiration point, funnels the shape instead through an appreciation for natural materials and honest hand-crafting techniques. Through customizable vertical and horizontal clusters of globes — in clear, white, black, or frosted black glass — the Aeris fixtures, as well as a collection of teardrop-shaped glass pendants and table lamps called Solace, strives for a visual softness meant to impart calm into our crazy hectic lives. The fixtures, explains Gardam, are blown by local glass artist Liam Flemming. “Both use innovative glass techniques to create the form,” he says. “Aeris utilizes a double optic mold to create the rippling in the glass, while Solace uses a static cast-iron mold, leaving an incredible texture in each piece.” While it may not be easy to see such subtle textures in a few images on the internet, it’s not hard to imagine how their glow could be so much more ethereal and dimensional than their plastic forebears, a mood far more than just a shape.

Two Talents to Watch Out of Stockholm – One Giving Noguchi, The Other Giving Grandma

Above, Iris Berlund’s Balneum bird feeder; below, Siri Gerda Lövén’s glassware, giving grandma folk vibes

For the past few years, Jill has attended Stockholm Design Week in service of Sight Unseen’s participation in the Greenhouse showcase for emerging designers, where we give an annual best-in-show award. The official event took a breather for 2026, announcing a move to a more intentional biennial schedule, but that doesn’t mean there were no design exhibitions going on in Stockholm this month, or that we weren’t keeping an eye out for new talents from afar. I happened to find two of them through my usual sleuthing. First, above, is young Beckmans student Iris Berlund with her Balneum project, made with the outdoor furniture brand Nola. While Berlund designed it as an abstract birdbath to aid people with dementia, all I see is an avant-garde sculptural homage to Noguchi, and I’ll be over here waiting for the chair version. Second is Siri Gerda Lövén, who graduated Beckmans last year and was part of this year’s Stockholm Creative Edition. She exhibited glassware made during a scholarship at the glass factory Boda in Småland, Sweden; she created molds for various goblets and dishes, the glassblowers at Boda realized the pieces, and then she went back and added frosted and handpainted florals to several of them, part of her ongoing interest in finding contemporary expressions of traditional decorative motifs. Granted Scandinavian grandma folk vibes have always been kind of cool from where we’re standing, but Lövén has still managed to take the look up a notch — a few more pics here.

This Group Exhibition Officially Has Our Antennae Up on Montreal

Above, a group shot from the Pot-au-Feu exhibition in Toronto earlier this month; below, two works in the show by Igor Zigor. Photos: Simon S. Belleau

Okayyyy Montreal, we see you! In a dispatch from another very cold design week earlier this month — DesignTO in Toronto — seven up-and-coming Québécois talents came together to produce one of the most well curated group exhibitions we’ve seen in awhile. Called Pot-au-Feu, the show was essentially a survey of the Montreal scene (actually the third in an ongoing series), pairing design with fine art, and works by new talents with pieces from bigger studios like Lambert et Fils and Sangare. The result was, for lack of a better word to describe it, cool as hell. Standouts included a suite of bolted rubber tables by Atelier Fomenta, inside-out seamed upholstered tables and lights by Séjour Studio, wooden sculptures by Karim Charlebois, and several edgy carved- or singed-wood pieces by the delightfully named Igor Zigor. The show series, called Ensemble, has an Instagram account, so you can take a peek at more photos than we’re able to post here. For my part, I have been planning a trip to Montreal primarily to eat the food, but now I’m excited to stack up the studio visits as well. See you all in the spring!

Editor’s List

CLOCKWISE, FROM TOP LEFT:

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Thought I’d seen this thick, blocky, “cut it from a single chunk of wood”–style chair one too many times until I saw Pedro Avila’s version, the Rope (Shibari) chair, offered through Aalto gallery. The zaftig twists on the front are so good — they sort of remind me of vintage Italian sterling jewelry.

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I audibly gasped when I saw this 1950s console table on the site of the Chicago vintage purveyor South Loop Loft. Designed by French artist Jacques-Pierre Dufresne in cast bronze, with a verdigris patina, it’s so thrilling with that sculpture framed into the triangular base — somehow classicist and futurist at the same time. This represents what I’d like my dream house to look like, if I knew how to decorate!

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When French designer Sarah Castay teamed up with Charlotte Taylor late last year to design a virtual 3D interior called Chez Cleo, one of the pieces she put into it was this lamp in wood, linen, and metal. The internet approved, mightily, and so Castay is now working on making the concept a reality. I approve, too, especially of that jaunty little spiral light switch. Follow Castay’s IG for updates on the IRL edition.

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The collab we did not see coming: London furniture designer Grace Prince has dropped a line with upstart fashion brand Paloma Wool that encompasses some design objects — like a door handle (!) and a small stool — but also clothing and accessories, like this Hershey’s Kiss of a leather bag with a metal armature for carrying. Metal hardware actually forms the core of the line, recurring on belts, leather jackets, and sweaters; it’s kind of a great case study of how design can cross over into fashion in a chic way.

News

Work by contemporary Mexican designers, photographed by Alejandro Ramirez Orozco inside a building in Merida by Tánat + Pemo + Carlos GN.

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Two weeks ago I wrote a newsletter all about Mexico City Art Week, and on my must-see list of exhibitions was an ambitious show by photographer Alejandro Ramírez Orozco where he took objects by 14 different contemporary Mexican designers to four different contemporary architecture sites across the country, shooting portraits of them in situ. Not only are the photographs themselves gorgeous — including the one above, taken at Casa Mérida by Tánat + Pemo + Carlos GN — but Orozco has staged an exhibition of the images inside sculptural frames handmade by Manu Bañó, and surrounded them with the actual objects that he traveled with. We wish we had more space to devote to photos of the show, but you should definitely try to catch it if you’re in Mexico City between now and February 27, at the design gallery Difane.

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If you’re in Los Angeles for Frieze week this week — because the circuit truly never stops, geez — don’t miss Ryan Preciado’s exhibition / installation Diary of a Fly at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock house, on view through April. I’ve been to a few contemporary design shows at the house now but this one is my favorite so far, partly because the colorful textiles — made with Oaxacan artisans — are so pretty, and partly because of how surprisingly harmonious some of Preciado’s more postmodern forms and materials feel in the context of FLW’s work. I did not expect that!

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Speaking of design/fashion crossovers, fun little trend piece over on T Magazine rounding up examples of fashion-inspired furniture, like curtains in the shape of garments by Oeuvres Sensibles and Sam Stewart’s wooden pant and shirt cabinets (we might have also included recent work by Sam Klemick). Have to say though, I was honestly more interested in the first part of the story, which depicted highly literal representations of furniture and domestic objects in fashion, which is not only funnier but more unusual; reminds me of this story we did last year on Sunnei sending cc-tapis carpets down the runway. Love to see more of that trend!

From the Collection

RIBBON BENCH BY LAUN

Look familiar? We started representing LA architecture studio Laun’s Ribbon series of outdoor chairs and tables back in 2017, when we first launched the Sight Unseen Collection. But this versatile powerhouse of a design is eminently customizable — made from a nearly indestructible repeating profile of bent aluminum tubing, you can keep adding tubes beyond the dimensions of a chair to make benches of any length, either straight, as shown above in this ranch project by House of Honey, or curved. Splay the legs a bit and you get a low-slung lounge; remove the back entirely and you get a circular bench with space in the middle for plants. Contact us if you want to explore ideas!

Jobs

House of Honey is seeking a full-time interior architectural designer in Los Angeles

Ringo Studio is seeking a senior architectural designer and project manager in New York City

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