07.24.24

Shopping

5 Furniture Icons That Have Been Reimagined for Outdoor Living

While outdoor furniture has undergone its fair share of aesthetic transformations over the last century — from natural wicker to synthetic resin, Adirondack chairs to sleek lounges, curlicued wrought iron to ribbed aluminum — it has almost always looked, in the end, like it was purpose-built for the great outdoors. In many ways, this was a function of practicality, as it's incredibly difficult to build a piece of furniture that can actually withstand the elements, from ongoing dirt accumulation to full-on inclement conditions (which, if you have a sprinkler system, is pretty much every morning around 4AM). But something began to happen in the last decade or so, accelerated by the pandemic into a full-fledged trend: Brands began to treat outdoor furniture as simply interior pieces with different materiality, reimagining some of their most iconic works for outdoor use. When we heard that one of our favorite brands, Ellison Studios, was launching a capsule collection of some of their most beloved designs in outdoor-friendly fabrics and materials, we realized it was time to round up some of our favorites in the game.

07.16.24

Interiors

This London Cafe Proves There’s No Color Butter Yellow Can’t Elevate

A new cafe at London's Somerset House, run by acclaimed chef Rishim Sachdeva and designed by the London- and Milan-based studio Duelle, seems to prove a rule that people keep forgetting: that any color or trend can feel fresh again depending on the context in which it's placed. Seeing Café Petiole's cafe tables and 1930s bentwood chairs doused in a layer of antique rose and set against a backdrop of butter yellow and blue, made me feel like I was seeing Millennial Pink for the first time all over again.

07.10.24

Excerpt: Book

A Brutalist Cemetery, a Center for Spiritual Exploration, a Compendium of Product Design: What We’re Reading, Summer 2024 Edition

This week, the New York Times is counting down the 100 best books of the 20th century. So while you could be reading one of those this summer — or, perhaps, the book everyone I know is talking about, which does tangentially relate to this site in the form of a motel-room renovation — we've recently had a few more hefty design tomes come across our desk. What better time, then, to inaugurate a new column, where we tell you all the great things we're reading, browsing, or simply returning to again and again for inspiration.

07.01.24

Sight Unseen Presents

Want to Have Your Work Judged by Sight Unseen in Stockholm Next Year? Apply to Greenhouse Today!

I've now been to Stockholm in the dead of winter, when the ground is often covered in ice, on four different occasions. I've visited in the throes of summer — season of archipelago-hopping, 10PM sunsets, and simple but chic country houses — a grand total of zero times. But there's a non-masochistic reason why I keep returning: The Stockholm Furniture Fair, which in 2025 runs from February 4-8, is one our longtime favorites, and it's become even moreso in the last couple of years as we've developed our partnership with the fair's organizers, adding a Sight Unseen Best in Show award to the fair’s emerging design showcase, Greenhouse. We're excited to announce we'll be returning to the fair in 2025 — having bestowed last year's honor on the exciting up-and-coming duo Bursell/Svedborg — and we're hoping to convince more than a few of you today to submit your work to the jury in the hopes of being selected for next year's fair.

06.07.24

Fair Report

10 Artists We Loved at New York’s Frieze, NADA, and Independent Fairs

In between the parties and the gallery openings and the furniture fairs and the dinners and the multiple Sight Unseen launches, we somehow managed to make it to three different art fairs last month — not because we felt obligated to transform them into content, but because we find stepping outside our realm to be something of a palette cleanser. That said, our taste it art tends to run on a grooved track alongside our affinities in design, and it's therefore unsurprising that the installations we found most rewarding often had elements of three-dimensionality or references to architecture, industrial design, domesticity, and the decorative arts. After the jump, find 10 of our favorite artists we discovered or became reacquainted with during our cross-disciplinary detour.

05.23.24

Fair Report

This Month’s Festivities Cemented Tribeca as the Epicenter of the New York Design World

At this point, everyone agrees that we need a new name for what happens in New York during the month of May. NYCxDesign, always a slightly clumsy sobriquet, refers only to a specific set of dates and activities; New York Design Week has, over the past few years, ballooned into New York Design Month — another moniker that lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. But while no one can quite find consensus on a naming convention, everyone seems to agree on the new neighborhood hub: Tribeca, everyone's favorite up-and-coming zip code cemented itself this year as the epicenter of the New York design world.

05.11.24

Saturday Selects

Week of May 6, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: pale green and stainless steel is the new butter yellow and stainless steel; an exhibition devoted to the vicissitudes of wood; and new rugs from everyone's favorite LA sister-run brand, Block Shop.

05.08.24

Interiors

In San Sabino, New York Gets the Buttery Yellow Restaurant Interior It Needs

After butter yellow's long and winding ascent to the top, finally we get a restaurant interior with that hue as the star. And it was well worth the wait — San Sabino is the next-door sibling to Don Angie, the still-too-hot-for-a-reservation restaurant in the West Village also designed by GRT Architects. But where that space has extremely chic elevated trattoria vibes, San Sabino has elements that read almost like a diner, at least during the daylight hours. There are the round, leather-topped bar stools; the stainless steel accents like a ceiling "crown" and metal-trimmed booth seating; and oh, that laminate.

05.01.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

How Should We Live Now? In Milan, RISD’s Objects May Shift Exhibition Offered a Woozy Vision for Our Domestic Future

As a general rule, Milan thrives on spectacle. Some of the most memorable Salone exhibitions in recent years have relied on elaborate scenography, from Established & Sons in 2010 — when the British furniture brand filled a former Jai Alai court with walled "rooms" made from stacks of untreated tulipwood — to 2018, when Hermès constructed, over the course of three weeks inside a Milanese museum, seven towering pavilions made from thousands of jewel-toned zellige tiles. (Ask me what was inside those pavilions? Zero recollection.) So how is a student-run exhibition, from a newly founded design course exhibiting in Milan for the first time, supposed to compete? That was the conundrum facing 20 Rhode Island School of Design students, who debuted the conceptually-driven show Objects May Shift at Salone Satellite in Milan last month.

04.26.24

Fair Report

50 Pieces and Presentations We Loved at The 2024 Milan Furniture Fair

Rather than seeing the ever-spiraling array of events at Salone as a source of FOMO and a series of missed opportunities a journalist could never hope to comprehensively cover, we began to look at Milan in a new light this year, and you'll see that reflected in our coverage. We'll be devoting longer stories to particular favorites, or to things that maybe passed under your radar, rather than doing roundups of every single thing we saw and liked. We'll be focusing as much as possible on independent designers. We'll be shining a light on smaller, non-newsy things we saw, like the wonderful Cini Boeri archive exhibit at a library in Parco Sempione we never knew existed? For now, though, here is our one roundup of 50 favorites.

04.24.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

These 5 Installations in Milan Turned Materials Into the Main Event

I spent a lot of last week in Milan thinking about innovation in materials; in presentation after presentation, some of the best work to emerge from the fair came from materials companies who had hired A-plus designers to translate their raw product into something almost implausibly beautiful. From recycled aluminum to post-industrial plastic to a company that's asking us to reconsider the humble linoleum tile, here are five of our favorite materials-based projects from the week.

04.04.24

Current Obsession

Gaetano Pesce Influenced the Current Generation of Designers More Than Anyone We Know

Earlier this week, I had the occasion to look back at an article we'd published in 2016, where I referred to Donald Judd as the patron saint of Sight Unseen. I was puzzled, even as I reread my own words: "As our tastes and interests have shifted over the years, we could often point to different historical figures — Ettore Sottsass during our heavy Memphis phase; Bruno Munari during our Shape Shop days." I suppose I felt uneasy in my nearly decade-old declaration because in my mind, as we've watched the design landscape mutate and come together over the past few years, there's been one designer who has remained at the top, inspiring more of the current crop of young designers than anyone else we know: Gaetano Pesce, who the world lost today at the age of 84.