06.22.23

Sight Unseen Presents

Sight Unseen is Launching a Best in Show Award at Greenhouse, Stockholm’s Emerging Design Showcase: Apply Today!

If you're a longtime reader of Sight Unseen, you probably have some idea about our hierarchy of design fairs — and, as such, you may know that the Stockholm Furniture Fair ranks, year after year, at the very top of our list. We've been attending Stockholm off and on since 2008, and we've long been fans of the fair's emerging design showcase, called Greenhouse, which launched in 2003 and functions like a more curated version of Milan's Salone Satellite, open as it is to designers around the world. We've scouted major talents there in the past, it's certainly the place to be if you're at all interested in catching the eye of tastemakers, journalists, and — not least of all — potential manufacturers for your products and interior designers who might like to spec your work. That's why we are thrilled to announce that in 2024, we will be launching a partnership with the Stockholm Furniture Fair, running February 6-10: A Sight Unseen x Greenhouse Best in Show award, judged by yours truly, that will offer even more visibility and a greater platform for your practice.

06.19.23

How to Live With Objects

“The Willingness For Something to be Imperfect” — Inside the Mexico City Home of Rodman Primack & Rudy Weissenberg

Rodman Primack and Rudy Weissenberg are all over the map, both literally—with houses in Guatemala, Mexico City, and New York—and figuratively, with multiple professional interests that ultimately converge around contemporary design. Primack is a former director of Design Miami and currently runs the textile and interiors studio RP Miller, while Weissenberg, a former television exec, now works in real estate development. Together, the pair founded the design gallery AGO Projects, which is just a short drive from their colorful Mexico City apartment, featured here.

06.08.23

How to Live With Objects

Almost Everything in Lisa Mayock and Jeff Halmos’s LA Home is Vintage or Handmade

Next up in our How to Live With Objects house tours: Lisa Mayock and Jeff Halmos, who live in a 1920s-era Spanish-style house in the Glendale neighborhood of Los Angeles. Before moving to LA with their two children, Mayock and Halmos met in New York City, as designers of the somewhat legendary early-aughts cult-favorite fashion brands Vena Cava and Shipley & Halmos. After a brief stint co-running the graphic T-shirt line Monogram, they’ve both branched out into new lines of work — Mayock as an interior designer and Halmos in commercial real estate development. We visited them on a brilliantly sunny day in the summer of 2021, and although you'll have to wait for the Instagram-only behind the scenes content to peep their incredible backyard and pool, take a tour through some of their favorite vintage and handmade treasures after the jump.

06.07.23

Fair Report

10 Projects We Loved from the 2023 Melbourne Design Week

If anyone here is in the business of bringing journalists to Australia for Melbourne Design Week, please allow this to be us throwing our official hat in the ring. Because there's no other design fair right now that's both so exciting and yet that we feel so removed from, having never even set foot on the continent. The 10 projects we're featuring here today absolutely crackle with energy and are sensitive about material reuse in a way we hope to see replicated from here on out in other design fairs; we'd love nothing more than to have seen them in person. But we'll settle for this: choosing the best of the best, and sending them our digital love.

06.01.23

How to Live With Objects

Jonathan Pessin Shops 7 Days a Week to Amass the Collection of Objects He Jokingly Calls “Not For Sale”

A collector with a penchant for the oversized and the absurd, Pessin runs the cheekily named vintage showroom Not For Sale from a giant space next to his (now-former) loft in Los Angeles. When we visited, the boundary between the two spaces was practically nonexistent, cycling in as he does favorite finds like a giant Mr. Goodbar, a papier-mâché Bart Simpson, and, always, French industrial furniture from the 1950s. An excerpt from How to Live With Objects.

05.25.23

Fair Report

The Best of New York Design Week 2023, Part I

At the beginning of this month's New York design mania, I joked that while I've complained in the past that New York Design Week was too drawn out (it ballooned to nearly a month last year), this year felt too compressed, a kind of karmic retribution for my grumbling. How could we possibly see everything, and so close to Milan when we'd just gone through the same routine? But perhaps that sense of urgency was exactly what New York needed. (And, in truth, the "week" stretched to almost two). Because somewhere along the way, I realized I was having a significant amount of fun. Last year, we all agreed that "New York Design Week was back," etc. etc., and we saw wonderful work in beautiful locations. But this year something else returned to the city. New York got a little weird again — in a good way. After the jump, take a spin through some of our favorites, then come back tomorrow for another round of highlights, including our picks from this year's ICFF!

05.11.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

This London Exhibition Highlights the Particular Pleasure of Mixing New and Historical Works

If you've read our book, you probably know by now that mixing vintage and contemporary pieces is one of the many keys to our heart. So we were excited last month to see that the East London–based gallery and design shop Spazio Leone — who we know primarily as a purveyor of wonderfully Postmodern and classic collectible pieces — was presenting new works by the Eindhoven-based Italian designer Francesco Pace of Tellurico, alongside some of the more delightful objects drawn from Spazio Leone's collection.

04.27.23

Fair Report

The Best of the Salone del Mobile 2023: Part III

Today we’re featuring the best of Salone Satellite — the fair's emerging designer showcase — as well as Alcova and the rest of the Fuorisalone around town. Some favorites included the hefty, haute glass kettlebells by Chef Deco at Alcova, Daisuke Yamamoto's lightweight gauge steel chairs at Drop City, Sunnei's Murano glass pleasure objects at Convey, Loewe's tinsel and yarn repurposed chairs, and a swampy green shimmering glass bench and tubular steel chair at Satellite.

04.26.23

Fair Report

The Best of Salone Del Mobile 2023, Part II

Today we're focusing on brands: We loved the collection at Cassina — though it was hard to see through the throngs — and the brand's iMaestri exhibition, in a former bank vault, curated by Patricia Urquiola against a backdrop of blood red. Other standouts included a quiet presentation of lovely geometric rugs by Ruckstuhl at Assab One, Studiopepe's shock of lime green coffee table for Sancal, the addition of two friends of SU to the Tacchini stable (Umberto Bellardi Ricci and Brian Thoreen), Phillippe Malouin's cheeky magnetic lamp for Flos, Knoll's desert jungle pavilion, Acerbis's 1970s throwback in the form of a John Chamberlain-esque sofa system by Claudio Salocchi, and the debut of one of our favorite lamps — Mangiarotti's Lari lamp for Karakter — in a new, tiny, USB-charged portable size.

04.24.23

Fair Report

The Best of the 2023 Salone Del Mobile — Part I

While Salone del Mobile has often felt too sprawling for one person to take in, this was the year it seemed to fracture entirely. Scrolling through other people's Instagram Stories, seeing exhibitions that hadn't even made it onto my radar, much less my extensive Google doc, made me stop and wonder: "Are we even at the same fair?" The exhibition we loved the most though — and heard uniformly wonderful things about — was by Objects of Common Interest, who developed their experiments in opalescent resin into a full-fledged collection for Nilufar Depot, so we'll kick off our Milan recaps with that!

04.10.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

Three Exhibitions Explore a Multiplicity of Color at Salon 94 Design’s New Permanent HQ

Kwangho Lee's first-ever New York solo exhibition, which recently invaded the ground floor of Salon 94 Design's newly established permanent uptown HQ, is called Infinite Expansion. And in a way that's the best phrase we can think of to describe most of the pieces displayed over five floors of the enormous former townhouse, no matter who they're by. Each mini-exhibition shows an artist who has often dwelled on similar processes or forms throughout their career but has infused them each time with a sense of the new.

03.14.23

Fair Report

A Barbie Pink Living Room, A Patchwork Metal Cabinet: Everything We Loved From the 2023 Collectible Fair in Brussels

Consistently one of our favorite fairs on the design circuit, the sixth edition of Collectible opened last week in a new venue in Brussels, and even from afar we were struck by the fair's continued push towards experimentation. In a new section called Dialogue, galleries were invited to show works from the '80s and '90s in conversation with more contemporary pieces (probably our favorite exhibition trope, tbh); another new section, called Architect <=> Designer, showcased only work by architects and interior designers, while a third, called New Garde, featured the best recently launched galleries and collectives.