In This California Craftsman, Inspired By a Famed Copenhagen Museum, the Colors Unfold From Room to Room

Since 2021, Lisa Mayock — former co-founder of the beloved aughts fashion label Vena Cava — has been bringing her eye for shapes, proportion, pattern, and texture to interior design with Monogram. Mayock’s Altadena-based studio recently refreshed an 1890s Craftsman home in Pasadena for a family of five, and Mayock wanted the interior to reflect the “vibrant and high energy” way the family lives. While previous iterations of the space before its current residents moved in skewed more traditional — neutral palette, staid furniture arrangements — this transformation started with unexpected wall colors, inspired by Copenhagen's Thorvaldsens Museum.
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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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The Material-Rich Hundō Was One of Most Assured Furniture Debuts of the Season

One of our favorites launches at NYCxDesign was Hundō by Emily Thurman, an interior and product designer based in Salt Lake City. Thurman’s debut collection of furniture, lighting, and sculptural objects takes its name from the proto-Italic word for “pour out” — fitting as it gestures towards the fluidity that characterizes these pieces as well as the way in which some of them were made using the art of lost wax casting. The idea and process of “pouring out” also evokes the communal, collaborative effort behind this collection: Thurman turned to both local and far-flung designers and artisans to realize this transformative series.
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Galerie Néotu Was Legendary In Its Heyday. A New Show in NYC Invites You to Experience the Radical Furniture That Put it On the Map.

In 1984, Gérard Dalmon and Pierre Staudenmeyer co-founded Néotù in Paris — a now-legendary project existing somewhere between a gallery and a furniture producer, a home for designers who considered furniture to be a fine art medium, and a mode of emotional expression. Néotù wasn’t beholden to any particular aesthetic, though you could loosely and retrospectively apply the Postmodern descriptor. Rather, they sought to put divergent styles in conversation with one another and provide a singular home for a multiplicity of voices. They also wanted to challenge the then-dominant production and distribution models. The name itself is a phonetic wordplay on “néo-tout” or neo-everything. A new show, Néotù: The Visionary Years, now gives the gallery its due.
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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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Two of Our Favorite Woodworkers on Apprenticeships, Supportive Grandmas, and Learning the Rules So You Can Break Them

Rio Kobayashi and Luke Malaney each make sculptural furniture that exists somewhere between art, design, and carpentry. They're pieces that serve a function but at the same time question function: What should an object actually do? Where does its purpose lie? It’s a blurry line — or maybe not even a line at all. While they come from different backgrounds — Malaney is originally a Long Islander who lives in Brooklyn, while Kobayashi grew up in Japan and is currently based in London — they’ve arrived at a distinctively similar style and approach. Their work shares a playful and imaginative spirit, combined with a respect for longevity and integrity — objects that are well-made but also driven by curiosity, inventiveness, and experimentation. We suspected they’d have a lot to talk about — spoiler: they did! — so we wanted to introduce them and see where the conversation led.
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Week of April 21, 2025

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: textiles galore, including new Madeline Weinrib rugs in dialogue with Rene Ricard at Emma Scully Gallery, a Su Wu–curated tapestry exhibition in Dallas, and woven paintings on view in Brooklyn.
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Crumpled Silver & Pillowy Stone — This Cult Favorite Jeweler’s First Furniture Collection Explores Some Familiar Themes

There’s a creative tension that animates the work of Anna Jewsbury, founder and artistic director of Completedworks in London. It centers on the push and pull between “ornament and practicality,” as she puts it, exploring a balance of function and frivolity. What often results are pieces, loaded with character, that make you look twice — if not again and again — trying to figure them out. Completedworks began in 2013, with jewelry, before delving into ceramics and homewares. But most recently, Jewsbury decided to branch out even furniture, launching the brand's first-ever collection at Villa Borsani with Alcova in Milan earlier this month.
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Think of This London Renovation As Mid-Century, Modernized

Studio Hagen Hall, an architecture and design firm in London founded by Louis Hagen-Hall, has a talent for creating spaces that are striking yet serene — making them look effortless while also paying meticulous attention to detail. For Pine Heath, a townhome that’s part of a series originally designed by South African architect Ted Levy, Benjamin & Partners in the late 1960s, Hagen Hall brings California mid-century modern to North London’s Hampstead Conservation Area.
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Week of March 24, 2025

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the tiled cabinet of our dreams, an exhibition featuring 99 artists riffing on the piggy bank, and a sale of studio furniture either made or owned by the legendary Garry Knox Bennett. 
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A Swedish Artist Known for Her Vibrant Florals and Seductive Line Drawings is a Perfect Match for Marimekko

Marimekko has long been a go-to for those seeking joyful bursts of color and pattern in their clothing and home décor, from the oft-searched 1980s-era Dan River Tulip bedding to the ever-stylish (and, frankly, ahead of its time) gender-neutral shirting of the 1953 Jokapoika. Over the last few years, the Finnish design brand has expanded that vision with its Marimekko Artist Series, a collaborative opportunity “to provide artists with a canvas — in the shape of Marimekko products — to present their work,” as Marimekko’s creative director Rebekka Bay puts it. The series makes artwork accessible to a broader public while paying homage to an era when Marimekko’s founder Armi Ratia would invite artists and other creatives to design prints, Bay adds. The theme of this year’s series, the Anatomy of a Flower, was a perfect fit for Petra Börner, a Swedish artist who lives in London. Börner’s work often nods to floral subjects and motifs, cyclical growth and constant transformation, and this beautifully translates into a capsule collection for the Finnish brand.
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Sung Jang Paints Imperfect Maps of His Memories at Volume Gallery in Chicago

In Shape of Land, the Chicago-based designer Sung Jang evokes locations that have personal meaning for him and abstracts them into dream places. Finding a deep resonance in cartography, Jang knows maps aren’t simply navigational tools, but more metaphorically, help us situate ourselves and understand our histories. At the city’s Volume Gallery, Jang’s show of objects and paintings — a six-panel screen and wall works of acrylic on linen, textured with inked sand — draws on his Korean heritage, with imagery that resembles continents and an imaginary topography of mountains and rivers. Jang was particularly inspired by maps from Korea’s Middle Joseon period — depictions of the world more valuable for their artistic and interpretive quality than their precision and utility.
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