When Is a Hairy Mirror Not Just a Hairy Mirror? Talking Materiality and Minimalism with Ben & Aja Blanc

Wood, bronze, marble, and minerals are some of the raw, elemental materials Providence-based design duo Ben and Aja Blanc use to craft their minimal objects for the home. The couple, who graduated from RISD and were the unexpected darlings of last year's Sight Unseen OFFSITE, have only been collaborating for a little more than a year and a half. But their fledgling partnership has already yielded more than a few instant classics.
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The Melbourne Design Studio Creating “Soft-Spoken” Objects

How many new things should we actually be making? This is the question that plagues so many designers now as the issues facing our planet continue to worsen. “I find the design industry very troubling in a lot of ways, and I do feel the tension of creating new pieces in a world of excess, with the majority of furniture and lighting ending up in landfill. It’s really hard to reconcile sometimes,” says Kate Stokes, co-founder for Melbourne studio Coco Flip.
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Everything We Loved at Everyone’s New Favorite Design Fair: 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen

Copenhagen's 3 Days of Design festival has made an uncanny ascent to the top of the ranks of global design fairs in the past couple of years. Soon after we started reeling over the number of non-professionals going to Milan for pleasure rather than business, we started hearing the same about 3 Days, which we had only ever personally experienced (as recently as 2021) as a tiny event with mostly local participants. To be fair, it owes a part of its popularity explosion to the fact that it takes place in Copenhagen, in the summer, which is not a bad place to be even when your social calendar isn't full of design aperitivos. But as interest has grown, so, too, has participation. We attended this year's edition as a guest of Royal Copenhagen, and our friends and colleagues who didn't go were dying of curiosity about what we saw. Today's roundup, we hope, will answer some of those questions.
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Week of June 2, 2025

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the best launches from Melbourne Design Week, another super-sleek USM collab — this time in pink! — plus a special edition Gaetano Pesce vase debuting at the Philip Johnson Glass House.
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13 Group Shows We Loved at New York Design Week 2025

At this year's New York design week/month, opportunities were everywhere for showing new work, from an incredibly solid debut for the new trade fair Shelter, to the Hello Human–curated showcase at Public Records, to yes, the OG mothership that is now ICFF/Wanted. We found excellent work by ex-RISD kids in a Chinatown basement, design pieces mingling with fashion at boutiques like Colbo and Knickerbocker, and, a true sign of the times, quite of bit of great work in extremely expensive new residential developments. Yesterday we featured our favorite independent designers; today, we're focusing on our favorite group exhibitions from the week-turned-month that was.
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Three Up-and-Coming Designers On How They Use the iPad Pro to Bridge the Gap Between Analog and Digital Processes

When we founded Sight Unseen more than 15 years ago, our goal was to invite readers into the minds and studios of designers, in order to help readers understand how things are actually made. Though the site is about so much more now, we still get a perpetual thrill from learning how some of our favorite furniture pieces go from the wisp of a concept to a fully fleshed-out product. Much has changed within the actual design process in those 15 years as well, as new tools have completely transformed the way creatives work, and digital technology has evolved beyond our wildest dreams — icons are still made with a saw, but they're also made on a screen. We checked in with three contemporary designers to see how their process has changed over time, and how they're using tools like the iPhone, iPad Pro, and Apple Pencil Pro to bridge analog design processes and digital technology.
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Week of April 14, 2025

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: stainless-steel urinal sculptures, a coral-colored house balanced on a steep site, and fruit-decorated furniture that aims to tackle the stigma of eating disorders.
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A Wonderfully Cohesive Debut From Tobias Berg, Sight Unseen’s Best in Show Winner at Greenhouse, the Stockholm Showcase for Emerging Design

At the Stockholm Furniture Fair earlier this winter, we found the thing we're always searching for at these things: a designer whose work is so sophisticated and ready for the market that they're bound to be in the conversation for years to come. (A booth full of bangers, if you will.) And so our Best in Show at Greenhouse award this year went to Tobias Berg, a Norwegian designer with one of the most assured debuts we've seen in years.
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The 2024 American Design Hot List, Part IV

This week we announced our 12th annual American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s editorial award for the names to know now in American design. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the fourth group of Hot List designers here (including Parts and Labor Design, above, whose founders launched the stellar furniture collection Known Work early last year.) 
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Parts & Labor Design / Known Work

New York, partsandlabordesign.com / knownworkstudio.com An interior design firm launching a furniture line isn’t always a successful gambit, despite hearing from clients day in and out about how — and with what — people like to live. But with their first furniture collection under the name Known Work, Parts & Labor founders Danu Kennedy and Jeremy Levitt — along with creative director Alex Dilena — simply knocked it out of the park. A striped chenille loveseat nestled in a mappa burl husk, a Brutalism-tinged steel lamp topped by a glass cube, a lacquered plinth — yes, this is exactly how people like to live. In their interiors, the studio takes a similar interrogative approach, examining the relationship between us, our objects, and the spaces we inhabit. We can’t wait to see what’s next. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? American design, to us, is about personal expression. An opportunity to create, communicate, and extend something that didn’t exist prior. Design is a global language, and considering there are so many designers in New York and across the country who aren’t American, perhaps “American design” is a catch all for a consolidated expat vision. American design is inherently self-informing as well; because the country is so large, certain “languages” spread and affect each other across states/regions, creating these unique design vernaculars that evolve based on local landscapes. Seemingly, nowadays, another aspect of the American design landscape comes from this tension that exists in manufacturing and fabrication. We’ve observed this effort to make more for less in order to make design more accessible or increase margins. This inevitably leads to a bit of a copy/paste approach across the industry. In that same breath, there’s also the artisan folks who are building by hand, and American design engaging in the folklore of “the maker.” Especially here in New York, we’re fortunate to have a community of craftspeople. We’ve really seen a redirection from both a consumer and cultural standpoint leading to an appreciation and focus on quality and time spent in craft. American design is representing an antithesis to trends or an oversaturated market, embracing the celebration and refocus on heirlooms. We are most excited by this movement towards investing in your environment on the most personal scale, and the stewardship you feel over these precious collectible furniture and craft pieces that one day will be passed … Continue reading Parts & Labor Design / Known Work
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Rafael Prieto

New York City and Mexico City, @rafaelsavvy For years we knew Rafael Prieto simply as the founder of the creative agency Savvy Studio, where he did branding projects and produced a beautifully packaged chocolate line called Casa Bosques. But as he’s made more and more furniture — some for his interiors projects, some for galleries like MASA or Emma Scully, where earlier this year he had his first solo show — it became clear to us he belonged on this list, both as a solo practitioner and as one half of Marrow Project, a burgeoning design studio he shares with artist Loup Sarion. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? According to Chat GPT: American design is a dynamic fusion of functionality, boldness, and cultural diversity. It’s practical, modern, yet approachable. I know back in the day it was, yet now it’s much more diverse, more artful, less purposeful, and shallow in a beautiful way — it’s crafted and about technique, emotion, and feelings. The purpose is no longer just function. Lately between New York and L.A., there’s a blurring of art and design. And that excites me. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year?  A couple of different things. First, a group show with Emma Scully Gallery. I believe it will be a beautiful and poetic show. Then something I am quite excited about but I cannot share much about is this guest house that I’m working on in Mexico City. It’s an extension of the vision as Savvy Studio into CASA BOSQUES. Eleven rooms with a restaurant downstairs. It’s been a process of doing renovation, designing the spaces, the furniture, the lighting, interesting collaborations with different brands across the globe. It’s one of those times where I feel even more personal in my approach. It’s very me, and I hope people will feel very welcomed, comfortable, and peaceful. I’m excited about this, the mix of identity, space, and furniture design. There’s also the ongoing project that I have with my partner Loup Sarion: Marrow. We’re working on a summer show, different formats of chairs based on our anthropological approach to time and the human body — specifically the back, so this continuation excites me. The project is evolving quite beautifully. Lots of research on materiality and proportions. What inspires or informs your work in general? The pursuit of beauty, at … Continue reading Rafael Prieto
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Week of September 9, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an exhibition that delves into grotto life, tapestries that depict architectural deterioration, and a woven rug collection photographed at a folk-influenced farmhouse in Sweden.
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