03.18.23

Saturday Selects

Week of March 13, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: essential spring attire from Marimekko, a tonal terracotta Asian diner in Byron Bay, and a lamp that looks like a stack of giant Malteasers.

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03.03.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

In a New Milan Exhibition, These Elemental Materials are Anything But Basic

Wood and metal — often used interchangeably for the same purposes, known as symbols of strength, both are innately rigid, while also malleable and capable of being crafted into almost any shape imaginable. As part of the recent Makers 1 exhibition in Milan, these two materials, which dominate the construction and furniture industries, were investigated in their many weird and wonderful guises by no less than 28 designers.

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02.26.23

Saturday Selects

Week of February 20, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: megalithic sculptures carved from storm-felled trees, lamps inspired by summer siestas, latex skirt sculptures, and a series of delicately decorated ceramics that are unexpectedly influenced by Soviet propaganda.

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02.06.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

Alekos Fassianos’ Hellenic Designs Offer a Fanciful Take on Ancient Greece

The simplicity of Greek classical and folk art was an eternal muse for the late artist Alekos Fassianos. Best known for his paintings, which blend ancient iconography and contemporary scenes in vibrant swashes of blue, red, and gold, his overtly Hellenic influences and signature palette also gave birth to a wide range of furniture designs. Carwan Gallery in Athens is presenting the first retrospective of these pieces, following the artist's death last year, and they’re just as transportive and delightful as his 2D works.

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02.02.23

Sighted

Studiopepe’s New Rugs for Muuto Were Inspired by 1960s-Style Land Art

Muuto is such a staple of the Scandinavian design set that it’s hard to believe the Danish company is only now releasing its first tufted rug collection. A new collaboration with Milan-based duo Studiopepe is exactly what we’d hoped for from both. Using the “tension" between Scandinavian and Italian design as a starting point, studio founders Arianna Lelli Mami and Chiara Di Pinto combined common features of both: high-quality materials, graphic shapes, and simple yet impactful gestures, which in this instance meant filleting one of the rug’s four corners.

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01.17.23

Travel

This NYC Hotel Boasts Central Park Vistas and Insane Marble Bathrooms

For visitors to New York City, whether first-timers or repeat travelers, a view over Central Park from their hotel room typically ranks on most wishlists but can often be hard to come by. Finding a space with interiors that are equally as visually captivating is even more rare. Enter the brand new Thompson Central Park, whose Upper Stories rooms check both boxes to a T.

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01.11.23

Travel

Four New Design Hotels With Interiors to Melt Your Winter Blues

Anyone else get back from their end-of-year break and immediately start thinking about their next vacation? We’re only a week into 2023 and already mapping out trips for the rest of the year. To help plan yours, or simply provide a moment of mental escape from the January gloom, floods, and other bizarre happenings, here are some of our favorite new, gorgeously designed hotels that offer everything from a beach getaway in Oaxaca, to a romantic weekend in Paris, to total relaxation in the Azores.

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01.04.23

Interiors

Note Design Studio Returns a Stockholm Apartment to Its Former Glory (With a Contemporary Twist)

On today’s episode of “Why don’t we live here?!”: a 1920s Stockholm apartment reimagined by locally-based Note Design Studio. Situated in a splendorous historic building, the interior had sadly been stripped of its original character and details. But since the 3700 square feet of floor plan required a full functional rethink, everything from the flooring patterns, ceiling stucco profiles, radiator covers, and door and window frames were fair game to be restored or rethought.

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12.15.22

Q+A

Sarah Sherman Samuel Moved to “Furniture City” and — Lo and Behold — Self-Produced a Furniture Collection

Moving back to Michigan from Los Angeles four years ago might’ve been the best decision Sarah Sherman Samuel ever made. As well as offering her family heaps more room, the in-demand interior designer — who has shot to fame over the last few years with high-profile interiors for the likes of Mandy Moore, Vanessa Carlton, and Garance Doré — has been able to set up a new office and showroom in Grand Rapids, nicknamed Furniture City for the amount of manufacturers based there, and reconnect with her childhood nostalgia of exploring the woods and lake shore. Returning to this landscape was also the driving force behind the SSS Atelier collection, the first that her studio has both designed and produced in-house, now that she has the space and resources to do so.

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12.12.22

Fair Report

A Puzzle-Piece Bed, a Ceramic Peanut, a Mosaic Table: Everything We Loved in Miami This Year

Miami in December is a fairly easy sell for those of us in the art and design industries (despite the fact that, check notes, precisely zero of Sight Unseen's editors attended this year!) Those who weren't book launch mode descended in droves for the city's annual Art Week, as it’s become known since the number of exhibitions put on around Art Basel Miami Beach and Design Miami ballooned somewhat out of control. Today we're featuring a few acts from the week's anchor fairs, but between poolside cocktail parties and trips to Twist, our reliably favorite fair is of course Design Miami, which showcased an impressively diverse — and thankfully colorful — range of collectible design during its 18th edition.

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12.10.22

Saturday Selects

Week of December 5, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: “Neolithic-core” tables, gummy worm–striped salt and pepper mills, soothingly smooth-edged furniture, and an Alpine-inspired lodge in upstate New York that we want to spend all winter in.

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12.02.22

Sighted

Frederic Pellenq’s New Furniture Collection Has Touches of Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Lloyd Wright

Frédéric Pellenq is not afraid to reference. Whether it’s artist Ellsworth Kelly, whose hand-drawn geometries informed a series of chairs; architect Frank Lloyd Wright, whose famed Prairie style is translated into a side table; or decorator Jacques Grange, who is paid tribute through an armchair, Pellenq has nodded to the titans of 20th-century art and design for his first solo exhibition.

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