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 Minimalist Conversation Pit and a Maximalist Lounge Were Our Faves at the Brooklyn Heights Showhouse

Top and middle left, Llewellyn Chupin’s room at the Brooklyn Heights Designer Showhouse; middle right and bottom, Max Aboody’s. Photos: Tori Sikkema

The biennial Brooklyn Heights Designer Showhouse wrapped its latest edition this past weekend, having invited 19 designers to take over a landmarked 1852 mansion on Monroe Place. The results ranged from classic, antique-filled rooms (as we all know, most showhouses skew pretty trad) to a couple of wilder decorative experiments, but two of our favorites happened to occupy opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum: a serene, almost minimalist gathering space by Llewellyn Chupin and a dark, Space Age–inspired lounge by Max Aboody Interiors.

We’ve been following French-born, New York– and Paris-based designer Llewellyn Chupin since naming her to our American Design Hot List last year, with a furniture collection that paired architectural forms with jewelry-like details. For the showhouse, she transformed a small cellar-level room into the equivalent of a chic conversation pit. A continuous, cream-colored banquette wrapped around three sides of the space, facing a low travertine coffee table, while floor-to-ceiling curtains and strategically placed mirrors made the room feel taller and more expansive. In addition to the table, the sofa’s frame and arms acted as pedestals for a smattering of vintage objects. The overall effect evoked an intimate Parisian salon with a Japanese sense of minimalism.

Upstairs, Brooklyn designer Max Aboody drenched a room in color and pattern. Aboody — who studied fashion at Parsons and worked in couture before turning to interiors — created a lounge that was almost too rich and layered for its stated inspiration source of “retro space-age design.” Walnut-paneled walls were punctuated by lighted circular openings and perforated shutters, while the rest of the room was swathed in blue carpet and upholstery, offset with a painterly wallpaper from Arte. Perfectly placed objects like a chainmail stool from Mexican studio Panoramma and a vintage tramp art frame from Freaks NY completed the scene. If Chupin’s space invited you to settle in and chat for hours, Aboody’s made you want to pour a drink and put on a record. It’s kind of a bummer that both were only temporary in the end.

Of: Enso Fills a New York Office With Vintage Finds and a Painting-Adorned Daybed

The new Cosmos offices by Of: Enso include the studio’s own objects as well as vintage ones, but my favorite is a painting hung on the side of a daybed. Photos: Marco Galloway

Considering the founder of Cosmos — the visual inspiration platform intended as a Pinterest alternative for high-brow creatives — was also a co-founder of the New York vintage furniture gallery Galerie Was, it tracks that his company’s new headquarters in Tribeca is object-laden and curated to a tee. He invited interiors studio Of: Enso to create a space that feels less like it was furnished all at once than assembled lovingly, piece by piece, over time. We’ve covered more than our fair share of offices that look like living rooms lately, but this one feels particularly appropriate given the client’s obsession with images, objects, and the way people collect and organize them.

Occupying the 19th floor of a 1930s building, the office has the kind of architectural bones that don’t need much embellishment: high ceilings, concrete floors, and enormous original windows overlooking the city. Of: Enso used that envelope as a clean backdrop to the furnishing scheme, which mixes vintage finds with their own custom designs like a cherrywood screen with leather-rope detailing, and a mustard-yellow silk pendant with a hand-painted floral motif. Elsewhere, vintage Japanese objects, leather sling-back chairs, and a hanging Indian Kantha quilt give the space texture, in addition to my very favorite part of the scheme: a tiny landscape painting hung on the back arm of a Judd-like daybed, which plays to my ongoing obsession with artworks displayed in unconventional ways. The designers made a point of choosing furniture that could be moved around as the company grows — a practical consideration that thankfully doesn’t seem, in this case, to have come at the expense of aesthetics.

Jialun Xiong Explores Her Cozier Side For a New Bakery in L.A.

Jialun Xiong’s interiors for the new bakery Dear Guest in L.A.’s Silverlake neighborhood. Photos: Elizabeth Carababas

The early work of L.A. designer and Hot List alum Jialun Xiong was almost exclusively monochromatic, angular, and heavy on metal; her 2023 restaurant project, 19 Town, introduced a little more warmth and texture, but still relied on a neutral palette and rigorous architectural forms. We love to see a designer’s practice expand and shape-shift, and Xiong’s newest project — the interiors for a bakery called Dear Guest in L.A.’s Silverlake neighborhood — tests the boundaries of her aesthetic, trading some of that restraint for buttery yellows, reddish-brown wood, polka dots, and a sunnier take on Art Deco in general.

The interior combines elements of a vintage hotel lobby with a hint of inspiration from Japanese ryokans; wood trim divides the walls into geometric panels, punctuated by circular mirrors, while overhead, custom lantern-like pendants pair metal frames with silk shades. In addition to those lights, Xiong designed much of the furniture herself, including the upholstered-wood Void chairs and the leather Skeleton lounges in the central seating area. Details like the pearlescent glass tiles behind the counter and the star-shaped Bankston knobs mounted on the storage cabients add decorative moments that would have been hard to imagine in her earlier work, not to mention the illustrations of hotel paraphernalia hand-painted on the bathroom walls. Personally I always found those contemporary bakeries with sleek, industrial interiors kind of offputting; if I’m going in for comfort food, I want to enjoy it in a cozy setting. Xiong has found a way to adapt her versatile design language just enough to do just that.

Sin’s First Collection in Metal Has a Little Michael Graves and a Lot of Tiny Balls

For the Ritual collection, Virginia Sin abandoned ceramics in favor of sleek steel and aluminum.

Back in 2019, we wrote about how “Virginia Sin Can Make Literally Anything Out of Ceramic,” charting the Brooklyn designer’s progression from porcelain versions of paper plates to pushing the structural limits of clay with tables and shelving systems. Seven years later, she’s flipped her entire practice on its head for Ritual, a collection of six everyday objects that trade her signature material and sinuous design language for a postmodern-tinged experiment in steel and aluminum.

With echoes of Michael Graves’s designs for Alessi in the ’80s, Ritual’s butter dish and storage box look like tiny architectural structures, with sloping “roofs” and #tinyballs as handles, while a matching stackable serving tray has a recessed center that contrasts a brushed finish with a polished one. The wastebasket, tissue box, and toothbrush holder hew closer to Sin’s previous forms — with the latter being a direct translation — yet still introduce the same unexpected machined sleekness into her repertoire. Produced with metalworking artisans in India, the pieces suggest that Sin’s aesthetic translates surprisingly well to a material that, while it doesn’t offer the same freedom to improvise by hand, does lend itself particularly well to wet bathroom counters and refrigerator doors. No stress about her abandoning her medium of choice, though; she’s already released an even newer collection, Interlude, that returns to it.

Editor’s List

CLOCKWISE, FROM TOP LEFT:

–
We do love it when an interiors firm busts into the objects biz — for creative folks who spend so much time thinking about furnishings, it makes sense they’ll eventually want to create their own. When they’re not put off by the daunting task of manufacturing and marketing them, you end up with a line like the new one from Casalta, the two-year-old firm of Catherine and Nathan Bruckner. Their first product collection includes glass candlesticks and vases, lacquer trays and boxes, flatware, and more, and they shot it all in their own home, a 1941 Manhattan townhouse designed by William Lescaze. Jealous.

–
I’ve been watching the work of the young French designer Marissa Mariller, who’s been making some nice things in metal from her home base in Marseille (this sconce is such a banger). This week she dropped a new wall mirror for which she’s welded tiny squares onto the frame in a kind of patchwork pattern, and I just want us all to pause and say a HUGE YES to this new wave of female welder-designers and can we please have even more.

–
Always love a new Adam Štěch article we can link out to, in this case a feature in World of Interiors this month on a Greek metal sculptor named Philolaos whose home and studio outside Paris he photographed back in 2018. You just have to see this story — the pieces this sculptor made for his home are incredible, and you can see more of them in Štěch’s Instagram post about the story here. That’s where I spotted the absolutely wild object above, which is actually a TV stand/cabinet. May we all someday live in homes where we can trade the mundane for the spectacular in this fashion.

–
While you’re no doubt anxiously awaiting our annual gift guides, which will go out in about a month’s time, let me whet your appetite with this steel cheese platter designed by Studio Elen Letort for Les Objects Amsterdam, which combines a stepped side for grip and transport with a shiny marble ball for a visual finishing touch. There’s still time to snag it for your Thanksgiving table, too.

News

A bronze candlestick by James Naish, on view now at Rhett Baruch gallery in L.A.

–
If you’re in LA anytime soon, go check out the current show at Rhett Baruch’s gallery space in Koreatown, where there’s a small but fun show of paintings by Charlie Yates and candlesticks by metal artist James Naish (I am really maxxing out on metal this week I guess!). My favorite is the swoopy double candelabra shown above, which features one of Naish’s signature patina finishes on blobby cast-bronze.

–
Speaking of the holidays, earlier this week, the Brooklyn-based objects showroom LES Collection dropped a collection of six vintage menorahs sourced by founder Lauren Sands, and while a few of our favorites have sold out, you can scope what’s left here (and sign up for their newsletter to be apprised of any future additions). There’s no excuse for a sad menorah with so many good ones on offer these days!

–
In New York, if you’re a Gio Ponti fan, have we got the show for you! Donzella Ltd gallery has put together a Ponti blowout inside their project space in the New York Design Center, featuring more than 60 works created by the Italian master between the 1920s and the 1970s. Drawn primarily from private collections, many of the pieces have been shielded from public view for decades. Because they had to fit so many pieces into a relatively small space, the exhibition looks a bit crazy, but it’s worth visiting before it closes December 22 for the discovery factor alone.

–
Also in New York, Polish-born, France- and Italy-based designer Daniel Kolodziejczak of Studio Daniel K has a new exhibition at Ateliers Courbet that takes a body of work the gallery first previewed at Design Miami last year and spins it into a full solo show. The former jewelry designer has drawn upon that experience to create a series of tables and vessels made from reclaimed quartz and crystal remnants that he’s cut and carved himself, then accented with cast-bronze handles. The pieces are a little more handcrafted and gestural than his furniture, and they’re on view through January 16.

The Collection

CICATRIX CABINET BY JESSE GROOM

When we showed our Sight Unseen–commissioned collection of cabinets at Collectible back in 2024, Jesse Groom’s Cicatrix blew everyone’s mind — not just for its good looks but for its insane level of hand craftsmanship: Each one is made by hand-welding rows upon rows of aluminum to a base form made of weak, flexible aluminum sheeting, a task that can take up to 200 hours to complete. Finished off with Petra’s stone-adorned knobs by The Perfect Nothing Catalog, it’s a truly singular piece of art for your interior. Buy it here.