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06.11.25

Travel

Two New Sight Unseen–Approved Hotels Are As Much Living Rooms For Locals As They Are Destinations for Design-Seeking Travelers

When the Ace Hotel opened in Manhattan in 2009, it established a blueprint for the idea of a hotel lobby as a living room for the city. With its Stumptown Coffee, Opening Ceremony outpost, April Bloomfield-helmed restaurant, rows of laptop-friendly desks (in an era before WeWork, no less), vintage-inspired photo booth, and a bustling events calendar, the Ace was as much a hangout for locals as it was a haven for travelers. Ace continued to imprint this model as it opened in cities around the world, and other hotels soon followed suit. As this mode of hospitality became the norm over the past decade and a half, though, it's gotten harder for new hotels to stand out, which is why design has become such an important distinguishing factor. But as I found in my travels over the last six months, there are a few properties who are really doing things right — who have taken the idea of the hotel as living room, tweaking it through both expansion and refinement, to something resembling perfect: the Stockholm Stadshotell and the Ace Hotel Kyoto.
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06.05.25

Excerpt: Exhibition

This Bower x Emily Mullin Showcase Was the Unexpectedly Tough — and Perfect — Exhibition New York Design Week Needed

Here is a list of things I do not particularly like: surfaces designed to look as if they were tattooed, ceramics bound by chains or ropes, almost anything with spikes. Part of the reason I don't like these things is that, as a child of the '90s, they often feel a little poser-y to me — like the designer thought that by using the signifiers of toughness that they could take a shortcut to actually being that thing. But you know what I do like? When designers use materials or processes that are often associated with something hard or edgy in an unexpected or weird or superfluous way. This includes Bower's new Woven collection of mirrors — which weave thin strips of leather through a grid of mirror-polished stainless steel, a kind of Anni Albers for the post-punk era — and Emily Mullin's raku-fired ceramics, which get their signature look from combusting in a blaze of smoke and straw.
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05.30.25

Fair Report

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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05.29.25

Fair Report

20 Designers Whose Launches 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. Tomorrow we'll be featuring our favorite group exhibitions, but today we're focusing on our favorite independent designers, collection debuts, and one-offs from the week-turned-month that was.
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05.08.25

Excerpt: Book

The Modernist Travel Guide by Adam Štěch — The First Book Edited and Published By Sight Unseen — is Here to Take Your Travel Game to the Next Level

In this world, there are two types of travelers: those who prefer to relax, and those who prefer to explore. But within that second group, there are those who will go to extreme lengths to acquire secret intel, especially in regards to one of our favorite subjects — peeping Modernist architecture around the world. The person we know who's best at this is Adam Štěch, the architecture photographer behind the popular Instagram account @okolo_architecture, who has visited almost 50 countries on five continents to explore nearly 10,000 design landmarks, and today we're launching a project together that's been years in the making: the Modernist Travel Guide, photographed and written by Adam and edited and published by us.
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04.25.25

Trend Report

Is Bed Rotting the Biggest Trend to Come Out of Milan?

I'm slightly wary of what I'm about to write. After all, the last time I talked about a design trend reflecting our collective desire to escape, we plunged, not a month later, into the pandemic — which was certainly an exit from contemporary life of sorts. But while scrolling through Instagram during this month's Milan furniture fair, I began to notice an inescapable trend along those same lines: Beds were absolutely everywhere.
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04.12.25

Saturday Selects

Week of April 7, 2025

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a major new art talent on view in Los Angeles, a new Scandinavian vintage design showroom in Chelsea, and the print version of a satirical newsletter on the intersection of dating and design. 
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03.04.25

Fair Report

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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02.13.25

Fair Report

25 Projects We Loved at 2025’s Stockholm Design Week

This year marked the fifth time I've attended the Stockholm Furniture Fair, so at this point I consider myself something of an armchair expert in the machinations of this small but mighty fair. All over town this year, there were conversations about the future of SFF, which has contracted in recent years due to a mix of factors — including the pandemic, a protracted recession, and the rise of fellow Scandinavian fair 3 Days of Design — and now seems to be in a transition period, with a new director at the helm (Daniel Heckscher, formerly of Note Design Studio) and a ticking clock at its heels. (The fair was recently sold by the city of Stockholm and the current fairgrounds are due to be demolished in 2027 to make way for housing). And while I still maintain that an imminent location change ought to push the fair's organizers to move the dates to a more welcoming time on the calendar (would love to never Google "is there snow on the ground in Stockholm" again), I also began to reframe my thoughts this year about what success really means against the backdrop of a global design calendar.
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