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.

A Milan Renovation That Keeps Its Old-School Italian Layout and Doubles Down on the Classics

This apartment reno in Milan by Dmitri Martino features a whole lot of midcentury Italian furniture and a bathroom homage to Portaluppi. Photos: Luca Rotondo

Today we are thrilled to finally be featuring a residential interior that is NOT French (or Australian, for that matter) — this one, in case you couldn’t tell immediately from the photos, is Italian, an apartment in a 1940s building in Milan. Rather than chopping up and reorganizing the original space, as most do, the architect, Dmitri Martino, actually left the traditional Italian layout alone: a long hallway, painted glossy sage green, with rooms off to both sides. (If you’ve seen HBO’s adaptation of My Brilliant Friend, you might be familiar). Inside those rooms, Martino and his team stuck faithfully to Italian design classics like Angelo Lelii’s Stella lamp, Guglielmo Ulrich chairs, Sergio Mazza’s Delta pendant, and a Paolo Buffa armchair, pairing them with custom pieces like black lacquer dressers and a green velvet sofa. Then they went a bit wilder in the bathroom, where black walls, a buttery yellow ceiling, and glass blocks combine in a vibed-out homage to Piero Portaluppi. My favorite, though, is the bedroom, with its statement-making oxblood headboard spanning the entire wall, and the impeccable choice of art perched on top. Imagine if you rented an apartment during Salone and it looked like this? Alas, most of us have to settle for Airbnb Ikea while admiring such private spaces from afar.

Europeans and New Yorkers Meet In Vermont to Show Work With the Objects That Inspired It

Show Me to Me is a new exhibition in the Vermont gallery space of Nurture By Nature. Photos: Joe Kramm

Being a design curator in New York City — or Paris, or L.A. — offers the advantage of proximity, both to a robust design community and to the wealthy clientele required to sustain it. But being a curator off the beaten path in Burlington, Vermont, offers other advantages — namely rent that’s affordable enough to open a 2,000 square-foot gallery where you can showcase work by your favorite talents, even if gallerist isn’t even your primary job title. That’s the setup enjoyed by Kate Swanson, an interior designer by trade whose practice, Nurture By Nature, spawned a physical exhibition space last year, and a new, larger one this month. (Is this a growing trend? It’s a similar story to Sarah Sherman Samuel, whose new Detroit gallery we covered last month.) Swanson says the gallery is a kind of vertically integrated platform for makers who she wants “to grow alongside as the design practice evolves,” with their work being integrated into and influencing the homes she creates. “New work can be introduced, lived with, placed in context, and shared with clients before evolving into commissions or larger design projects,” she says.

After a group show of 15 designers from around the Northeast, like Natalie Shook and Miles Gracey, Swanson is back with a third exhibition opening this weekend, christening her new space: Show Me to Me, in which Luke Malaney, Jabez Bartlett, and Jane Wright were asked to pair new works with personal objects that influence their creative process. Bartlett — whom we raved about after his Milan debut last spring — is showing new lights and a low metal table alongside a compass and a photo of a 10-foot-tall Supreme tshirt, while Wright (also a Milan rave) chose two ceramic figurines, stones, and a book to display alongside her lace curtain and leather rug. Malaney, for his part, went a little more literal with the assignment, pairing new seating in wood with a sculpting tool and bottle of wood glue. The whole curious assortment is on view through December 5.

Lovehouse Gets Into Furniture With Fringed, Floral Boudoir Stools

Lovehouse teamed up with textile designer Spencer Malinski to create five decadent, Italian-inspired stools. Photos: Sean Davidson

Just a little shortie to share the latest release from the New York gallery Lovehouse, who typically represent other people’s furniture and are increasingly starting to manufacture their own. For this series of five upholstered boudoir-ish stools, Lovehouse founders Jared Heinrich and Aric Yeakey established the shapes, then teamed up with textile designer Spencer Malinski on the fabrics. You might recall Malinski’s name from a previous foray into the design world, via the rugs she created with her friend Eny Lee Parker; Malinski was formerly a print designer for the likes of Marc Jacobs, Tory Burch, and Coach, but here she was able to do her own thing and dream up a decadent floral velvet made at a 19th-century Brescia mill, a Deco-inspired fan pattern, and an abstract, almost glitchy looking jacquard, both made in Como. Fringe colors from Samuel & Sons were selected to match, but since the stools are exclusively made to order, you can specify your own combo, collabing the collab, if you will. The stools officially drop next week, October 8.

A Former Industrial Workshop Becomes a Serene Home for One of Our Favorite Ceramicists

The home of Fran Aniorte and Sergio Lara was designed into a former 1970s industrial workshop. Photos: Javier Márquez

I was just lamenting to Jill the other day how our recent switch to a newsletter format — which focuses more on, well, news — makes it hard to justify commissioning photo shoots of people’s homes like we used to. That was always one of my favorite aspects of our job, particularly when the home in question belonged to a creative person we admired. That’s why when this project came into our submissions box, with photos at the ready, I queued it up for inclusion immediately: It’s the Barcelona home of one of my favorite artists and ceramicists, Fran Aniorte, and his partner, the writer Sergio Lara, with interiors by the firm Mouzo Villagrasa Architects. I’ve been a fan of Aniorte’s for a few years now, featuring his work not just here but in this fun little story I did for T Magazine, but it’s not only the inclusion of his vessels, lamps, and tile-topped tables in this project that make it interesting. The space itself was once an industrial workshop, in the 1970s, and the custom metalwork and glass-enclosed writing room for Lara create a space that nods aesthetically to that past while still being decidedly residential. The all-cream palette unifies the space and makes Aniorte’s work really pop, which was key since he also uses it as a showroom for private clients. The project ran this summer in AD Spain, who featured more good photos of it — head here to see them, including a closer view of that stunning hand-tiled bathroom.

All the Design Books We’re Coveting This Fall

Six books we’ll be reading this fall, from Rizzoli, August Editions, RVB, Phaidon, and Artisan.

Fall is prime book-release season for many reasons, not least of which is that everyone’s trying to get their creations into the world in time for holiday gifting (a fact we remember quite well from our own book launch nearly four years ago). This year is as packed as ever with good debuts, so I wanted to call out some of the volumes I’m particularly excited about — and will be enthusiastically gifting myself this year.

THE COMPENDIUMS: Four great ones are on deck to come out this month, including three focused on interiors and one on objects. Dung Ngo’s Knife Fork Spoon follows exhibitions of his vast personal collection of flatware in Denver and of pieces he commissioned in Copenhagen, with the book reaching much farther to spotlight 500 designs from the past 120 years. Living in a Japanese House looks at 35 interiors around the country, including some never-seen in English-language publications, while How Architects Live — written by the founder of Boutique — focuses on the homes of those who build homes for a living. My most immediate add-to-cart, though, is Hallways by photographer Romain Leprade, which is a corollary of sorts to my favorite coffee table book of all time, Entryways of Milan, but in this case features lobbies of Parisian buildings built from the 1950s to the 1980s (see examples here).

THE MONOGRAPHS: Design monographs are as rare as tap water, and this fall brings a zillion as usual — Sean Anderson, Meyer Davis, plus a bunch of famous bygone furniture designers. Two contemporary ones we’re looking forward to are the second monograph on French designer Pierre Yovanovitch, featuring 11 of his best interiors from the past decade, and the first book on New York’s Valle de Valle Studio, Giancarlo Valle’s firm that’s now co-run by Jane Keltner de Valle. I haven’t seen that book in person yet but — though I would have chosen a more colorful image for the cover — based on his work alone there’s no way it’s not a stunner.

Editor’s List

CLOCKWISE, FROM TOP LEFT:

–
I haven’t worn belts since my 20s, and yet I sort of lost my mind when I saw this new and very architectural version from Tibi, which is precisely up my sartorial alley as a design editor with a penchant for minimalism: It’s so utterly simple yet so striking, the function becoming the form. Just by taking a standard belt and tripling the buckle, they created something new and exciting. I will for sure be living in it this fall.

–
Despite featuring selections from Paris Design Week two weeks ago, tidbits are still trickling in, and I would be remiss if I didn’t pay homage to the newest furniture and lighting collection by the French interiors firm Hauvette & Madani, a perennial Sight Unseen favorite. I put a few things on our Instagram earlier this week, but my top pick is this relaxed wooden chair with tassels hanging off the back, which the designers evocatively call “the one for conversations that linger after dinner.” You can see the whole new collection here.

–
Forever favorite Hans (Jean) Arp is currently having his first exhibition in New York in 15 years, on view at Hauser + Wirth’s 22nd St. location. Called Heads or Tails, the show focuses on his later Threshold sculptures, tracing their lineage backwards through his work. His art in general is so easy to love; I have this book and reference his formal language when I talk about some of the inspirations behind my hardware line Petra Fundamentals, so I need to get over there before the show closes October 17!

–
When it comes to contemporary artists, one that I’ve been really feeling lately is Australia’s Heath Wae, who’s also managed to something really simple — close-up paintings of flowers — and make them surprisingly special. His recent series of orchids for New York’s Carvalho gallery combine beautiful muted colors with a dreamy Gerhard Richter–esque blur… One to keep an eye on.

News

A glimpse into the London home of designers Jochen Holz and Attua Aparicio, courtesy of Blunk Shop, left; a ceramic vase by Mel Arsenault, one of this year’s Officine Saffi Award finalists, right

–
I love a good editorial newsletter — natch — but most brand newsletters I toss or unsubscribe from, with a few exceptions: Block Shop’s (which is basically editorial at this point), a few fashion brands to keep an eye out for sales, and Blunk Shop, which last week sent out a fun house tour with designers Attua Aparicio and Jochen Holz, who live together in London (and will have a show at Mariah Neilson’s associated gallery, Blunk Space, soon). We’ve been longtime fans of both of them, so it was fun to see inside their shared space. You can get a recap of the story here, but sign up for the gallery/shop’s newsletter here so you don’t miss future content.

–
Just opened in Milan this week is the 6th annual exhibition of finalists for the Officine Saffi Award, which recognizes 28 international artists working in ceramics. Officine Saffi is an Italian ceramics foundation and production center, and to get to 28 finalists for its award for innovation and artistry in the field, it had to wade through 1,000 applications; there’s a 10,000 Euro top prize as well as several residencies on offer. Among the finalists featured in the exhibition, which is on view now at Officine Saffi’s HQ, are two Americans: Cody Hoyt and Sean Gerstley. Fun!

–
Artist Anders Ruhwald has a new solo show of his lumpy ceramic “Sculptures for Plants and People” at Nina Johnson gallery in Miami, on view now through November 14. It comprises 10 colorful, totemic sculptures that incorporate planters and, in some cases, seats, hence the show’s title — creating a little indoor garden inside the gallery space.

–
For those of you who are not planning to travel to Milan or Miami anytime soon, here’s something you can enjoy from the comfort of your own home: 10PM, a new card deck for couples just launched by friends of mine. Each card offers a suggestion to reinvigorate your sex life, from simpler suggestions to wilder ones, and the graphic design is a selling point here — what could have easily been cheesy in the wrong hands is instead gorge and sophisticated.

–
Anyone who’s ever been thrifting with me knows I will go out of my way to buy anything 100% silk — in this insane world we’re living in, silk feels like one of the last real luxuries. That’s why I perked up this week when Armadillo launched its first 100% silk rug, in five solid reds, beiges, and greens. Yes, they are more expensive, but you end up with something that feels amazing underfoot and has a pretty, subtle luminosity you won’t find among its wool cousins. Rugs make the room, obviously, so it’s a good investment if it’s within your reach.