Home Authors
08.13.20

Shopping

Fall is Coming. Here Are 36 Sculptural Candles to Make Working From Home a Bit Cozier.

What is happening in the candle world? It seems like only a few years ago that everyone got on board again with tapers, which were once relegated only to formal dining rooms and Victorian-era cosplay. Now, not only are tapers available in every color of the rainbow, but you can also find candles in nearly any form you can imagine, from a female torso, to waxed Italian fruit, to ropes, yin-yangs, and Romanesco broccoli — all imbued with a sophistication and color palette that lifts them beyond their mall gift-store origins.
More
08.08.20

Saturday Selects

Week of August 3, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a ceramic kitchen collection perfect for your cottagecore tablescape, a single statement earring we'll soon be rocking on our Zoom calls, and yet another interior that visualizes our collective desire to crawl into a cave and pretend that 2020 never happened.
More
07.31.20

Sighted

These Blocky Pastel Pieces By Studio Nucleo Will Make You Do a Double Take

When we first saw these pieces by the Turin-based collective Studio Nucleo, we thought they were miniatures. Between the pastel colors and the blocky Tetris aesthetic, we understood them, at first, to be maquettes, studies for a larger project. But after looking twice, judging them by the details of the garage they were photographed in (and, more recently, seeing the pieces with a human for scale) we realized they were the real deal — called Primitive, the pieces represent the 10th anniversary of a collection originally created in all white and now re-imagined in color for an ongoing exhibition at Nilufar Gallery in Milan.
More
07.30.20

Up and Coming

Harvey Bouterse’s New Ceramic Lamp is a Study in Contrasting Textures

It's basically our job here at Sight Unseen to follow the career trajectory of up-and-coming designers, and in our professional capacity, we've come to realize that most ceramicists follow a certain path: First come the smalls, like cups and mugs and plates and vases. The next step is usually lamps — think of Natalie Weinberger's pleated clay shades, Workaday Handmade's listing table lamps, and BZIPPY's pyramid-shaped bases. Today, we're featuring one of the first lamps by Belgium-based Harvey Bouterse.
More
07.24.20

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Independent Design Label Launches in the South of France

The tiny town of Hyères in the South of France is only 50 square miles, but has long had an outsized presence on the contemporary design map as the home of the arts foundation Villa Noailles and its annual Design Parade festival. The festival was canceled this year due to the pandemic — more on that next week! — but two young Parisians have managed to fill in the gap with an exhibition called Été Super, which is serving as the launch of their independent design brand 13Desserts and its permanent showroom in a former Hyères skate shop.
More
07.23.20

Up and Coming

This French Design Studio’s Process is Steeped in Tradition

The couple behind Haos – neither of whom is formally trained in design – work primarily with French artisans who often have decades of experience working with the same material. It's a process rooted in all things tangible and permanent, one whose outcome can only and inevitably be an object that's been stripped down to its most essential form.
More
07.19.20

Saturday Selects

Week of July 13, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: paintings inspired by orange wine, a fruit bowl that prevents bruising and rot, and a turquoise-and-yellow eco-retreat we'll probably never travel to, so at least we can gawk at the pics.
More
07.15.20

Current Obsession

Scandinavian Art Mirrors Are Having a Moment — Here’s Our Latest Favorite

If you are one of the 36,000 people who follow 26-year-old Simone Noa Hedal on Instagram, you probably know her as a very specific kind of Danish influencer who posts photos of herself — wearing clothes that are often the color of cotton candy or peach sorbet — interspersed with art and design inspirations working within a similar palette: Wang & Soderström, Helle Mardahl, Roger Muhl, Justin Morin, and the Seoul bakery Banana Haruki, among others. But last year, Hedal began posting in earnest pieces she had made herself that fit snugly into her already-established aesthetic — a series of mirrors painted with swoops of pastel acrylic paint.
More
07.14.20

At Home With

How Brendan Ravenhill Ended Up Living In — And Restoring — a 1938 Schindler House in the Hills of Los Angeles

Brendan Ravenhill and his wife, Marjory Garrison, had been living in Echo Park for years before they realized that they were living around the corner from a gem of Modernist architecture. Built in 1938 by Rudolf Schindler, the Austrian architect whose volumetric residences dot Los Angeles, the Southall house, as it's called, was hidden from street view and in a state of disrepair when it fell into Ravenhill's lap in the mid-2010s.
More