10.05.24

Saturday Selects

Week of September 30, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Sophie Lou Jacobsen scales up her glass work, Pinch celebrates its 20th anniversary with an American pop-up, and we put a spotlight on two North Carolina fundraisers to benefit the decimated creative community in Asheville.

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10.04.24

Interiors

For Design Lovers, Spencer’s is the New York Spa We’ve Been Waiting For

I've been to spas all over the world, and it's not that I'm unable to relax, per se. It's that — to be perfectly frank about my occupational hang-ups — my mind has often remained restless in waiting rooms as I silently judge a spa's design decisions, wondering why it's so hard for someone to come along and design something truly cool. From the garish, Daily Candy–era palette of Bliss spas to the grotto-esque cosplay of Great Jones, there's never been something that felt completely like a true design person's vibe — until now. The new Spencer's spa in Soho was designed by founder Ryan McCarthy in partnership with Charlotte Taylor and EBBA Architects. Enter the space, and you're greeted by a soothing, impeccably furnished lounge that's akin to stumbling into your favorite Hackney vintage shop. The whole thing makes you want to throw away your furniture and start all over with a palette of swirly Ron Arad chairs, Regency-era benches, Paul Evans–esque coffee tables, primitive abstract sculptures, and a bookcase full of vintage gems about design, art, women, wellness, tarot, and the occult.

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10.02.24

Fair Report

11 Things We Loved at September’s Paris Design Shows

Earlier this month, at Paris Design Week and its concurrent shows, we were especially drawn toward work that explores material richness and depth — the use of upholstery to add dimensionality, tactility, and coziness, as well as furniture that highlights the grain and various textures of wood. Attention to detail is seasonless but there’s something about the change in the air, the way autumnal light shifts your perspective and what it attunes you to. Below, 11 of our favorite designers, launches, collars, and more from the week.

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10.01.24

Sighted

Hauvette & Madani’s Second Furniture Collection Channels 1930s Art Deco and the Strict Geometries of a Visionary Architect

When the French design duo Hauvette & Madani released their debut furniture collection in 2021, they called it Amuse-Bouche, after the small canapés served prior to a meal. Their newest collection, which launched during Paris's design week last month, has a slightly more esoteric name — following with the dining theme, they called it Entremets, dubbed for the decorative after-dinner or between-course treats popular in French cuisine — but it's a clear and logical evolution from their previous releases. Here, oak, lacquer, and Art Deco accents are the primary ingredients, resulting in a mélange of pieces with a distinctly 1930s feel. This means hard lines, essential geometries, and lots of layered materials, which have been cropping up a lot in new collections recently. Deco is seemingly the design era du jour.

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12.10.21

American Design Hot List

The 2021 American Design Hot List, Part V

This week we announced our ninth 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 fifth group of Hot List designers here: Studio Ahead, Sunshine Thacker, and Umberto Bellardo Ricci.

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09.28.24

Saturday Selects

Week of September 23, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Clare Vivier's first furniture and lighting collection, the (momentary) return of Zouzou rugs, and influential Italian/Swiss designer and architect Eleonore Peduzzi Riva finally gets her due.

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09.25.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

This Norwegian Studio Devised Its Own Machinery to Make These Joyful, Rainbow-Colored Stools

We learned something new today, so perhaps you will, too: The acronym for the colors of the rainbow in Norwegian is ROGGBIF, which Oslo-based Studio Sløyd has used to title its new collection of stools, as multi-colored and joyful as you’d expect from such a moniker. Comprising 24 different playful shapes, each is designed to explore applications of a newly created dyed wood technique, which founders Herman Ødegaard, Mikkel Jøraandstad, and Tim Knutsen — who decided to work together as students during a late-night karaoke session (extremely relatable) — have been developing over the past couple of years. “Rather than starting with a shape or form, we turned our usual process on its head for this project, experimenting our way to a new material,” says the trio. 

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09.21.24

Saturday Selects

Week of September 16, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an Ibiza boutique that mimics the sea, a Belgian artist's house-museum covered in velvet, and a two-person sculpture show nestled in the mossy landscape of Manitoba, Russel Wright's home an hour north of NYC.

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09.19.24

Sighted

Step Into the World of a Beloved Australian Furniture Brand at Its New Space in Sydney

There’s no denying that Instagram has been a source of inspiration and connection — especially in the design world — but it’s also impossible to escape the flattening quality of the social media scroll. Australia’s Ellison Studios, whose furniture takes the best of the '70s and makes it refreshingly modern, had long been envisioning a move, or an extension, from the digital realm to a physical one, but a traditional showroom didn’t feel quite right. So when an apartment in an iconic Sydney landmark became available, an idea took shape: The Rental. For the next six months, the studio is bringing their atmospheric point of view and the imaginative world-building of a mood board to life, creating a tangible, tactile space you can step into and even inhabit for a time.

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09.18.24

Up and Coming

This Swedish Designer Uses a Centuries-Old Technique to Create Mural-Like Landscapes and Domestic Scenes in Wood

In the hands of Swedish designer Carl Martinson, the centuries-old inlay technique of wood intarsia is made modern with compositions that are representational — quiet domestic scenes or landscapes — abstract, or somewhere in between. What runs throughout Martinson’s kitchen cupboards, cabinets, tables, wall works, and sculptural pieces is the soothing palette of wood tones and a material richness and warmth.

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09.14.24

Saturday Selects

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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09.13.24

Fair Report

Everything We Loved at Collectible’s First Design Fair in New York City

Last Sunday afternoon, as the first NYC edition of the Brussels-based contemporary design fair Collectible was just about to wrap, one of the fair directors paused in front of our booth and asked me how I thought the show had gone. “There are designers here we’ve never heard of,” I marveled, intending it as high praise indeed: For a European fair to show up on New York’s doorstep and show us something new (especially a fair planned in less than four months), well, I’d call that a success. Collectible, which took place at the burgeoning FiDi creative hub WSA, managed to both assemble a cornucopia of new ideas and draw a crowd, all from across the Atlantic. We brought our own dose of novelty to the show, with a booth that — while similar to our NY Design Week exhibition — showcased a new batch of 11 cabinets by 11 different design studios, all punctuated by hardware from my recently launched showroom, Petra.

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