06.23.16

Studio Visit

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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07.10.22

Saturday Selects

Week of July 4, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a new line of tiles from a New York ceramic darling, design born from stormy weather, and a coffee table that gets serious with our incense habit.
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06.03.22

Q+A

Gabrielle Teschner on Why Being an Artist Is a Job You Can’t Lose

Gabrielle Teschner’s signature “Sculptures-That-Are-Flat” are made of individually painted planes of muslin that are stitched together, then ironed. Their scale ranges from hand-held (called ‘Minutes’ and measuring around 7x10 inches) to environmental, monolithic (up to 16x14 feet). Employing the symbolic and physical language of architectural forms, spatial relationships, and, often, weather patterns, Teschner explores dichotomies, concepts of strength and softness, force and flow, and phenomena of perception, among other impulses and ‘attractions,’ as she calls them. All of these are a way of understanding and questioning what it is to be in the world.
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06.01.22

Up and Coming

Lesser Miracle’s Debut Solo Show is Fantastical and Deeply Felt

For some, a global pandemic was just the intervention they needed to change course or to finally give a latent vocation the opportunity to blossom. For Brooklyn-based art producer and sculptor-turned–furniture designer Vince Patti, a pandemic-enforced interlude of “being underemployed with a lot of time with my hands” — coupled with a newfound interest in the home environment — led him to escape more frequently to his Bed-Stuy studio. There, he began making side tables, dining tables, benches, and platform beds — and eventually hooked up with Mischa Langley, Patti’s now partner in furniture and life. Together, they formed the design practice Lesser Miracle, whose debut solo show at David Lewis’ home-cum-gallery in Chelsea is where we met for this interview on a sunny Sunday afternoon in May.
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05.21.22

Saturday Selects

Week of May 16, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: perforated rugs, a truly absurdist exhibition featuring these excellent glass-blown googly eyes, and an apartment that looks like the set of a sci-fi soap opera.
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05.13.22

Q+A

A New Lighting Brand, With Deep Roots in New Orleans and France, Putting a Modern Spin on Traditional Techniques

Swadoh — an anagram of shadow that founder Valerie Legras devised after reading the Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki’s “In Praise of Shadows” — works exclusively with small artisans who do intricate and often time-consuming hand work at their workshops in France. That, and the idea that each artist should be working in a wonderfully unique way with their chosen material, is the strict guiding principle behind Swadoh.
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Sight Unseen Furniture Collection Bestcase
05.12.22

Sight Unseen Presents

Cool Chromes and Candy-Colored Resin: Introducing the First Sight Unseen Furniture Collection, Created in Collaboration With Bestcase

As an editorial platform and sometimes-IRL design show, Sight Unseen has been showcasing furniture and accessories by talented designers for almost thirteen years. But it wasn't until nearly a decade in, when our old friend Charles Constantine went to co-found a metal manufacturing facility called Bestcase, that we began to wonder — wait, shouldn't we also be making furniture ourselves? After figuring out the possibilities and constraints of designing with metal, creating a '70s-inspired mood board with references to how we wanted the collection to feel — at once icy and warm, vintage-inspired, yet of the moment — and reaching out to a handful of designers who could absolutely nail this look, the resulting six-piece collection launches today, both on Sight Unseen's 1stDibs storefront and through Bestcase’s distributor network.
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05.09.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

At a Los Angeles Gallery, Ceramic Fountains and a Living Room Rendered Entirely in Clay

For those of us who’ve gotten to know our homes and domestic spaces a little too well in the last couple of years, House and Garden, a joint installation of new work by Lily Clark and Analuisa Corrigan at Stroll Garden, offers a chance to refresh the familiar. At the LA gallery, Corrigan has rendered a living room of furnishings in clay while Clark has created a garden of working ceramic fountains staged with live plant vignettes by Alice Lam of A.L. BASA. All of it Invites you to pause and give a second thought to what seems ordinary and everyday and then think yet again.
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05.05.22

Up and Coming

Lukas Cober’s Practice Grew From Building Surfboards in his Teens

From a young age, there was never any doubt in Lukas Cober's mind that he would pursue a career in design. “I have always been into crafts, so for me, it was clear at a very early stage that I would be building things with my hands” says the designer, who grew up in Aachen, a small medieval city at the tripoint of Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. But Cober inevitably embarked on his current path by pursuing a somewhat surprising endeavor for such a hopelessly landlocked city. “At one point in my late teens, I got heavily into the art of hand-shaping surfboards,” he recalls, “which sparked my fascination with functional art and gave me a deep understanding about to approach aesthetics."
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04.13.22

Sighted

Fiona Lynch’s New Furniture Collection References Everything from Rudolf Schindler to the Ace Hotel Aesthetic

Melbourne-based interior designer Fiona Lynch's first furniture collection was spun out of her own interior design for the new Ace Hotel Sydney, which opens later next month. Before coming up with her ideas for the hotel’s rooftop restaurant spaces, Lynch traveled to New York City and Los Angeles as a kind of “study tour” of American design, visiting and drawing inspiration from the Schindler house, Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock, and the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in New York.
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02.27.22

Saturday Selects

Week of February 21, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a Nathalie du Pasquier subway art installation in Italy, a color-blocked collection of rugs by Ethan Cook for Hay, and a new PR headquarters in London that's both deaf-friendly and vegan.
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01.27.22

Interiors

Could You Live in This Color-Blocked Home?

The Madrid-based Burr Studio recently played a neat trick, transforming an office in their native city into a home without modifying the layout in the slightest. For a project called NN06, surface coverings on the ceilings, floors, and walls were removed, leaving a clean slate, and rooms were divided using color-blocking and changes in materiality as their only system of delineation.
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