18 New Talents We Scouted at Greenhouse, Stockholm’s Showcase for Emerging Design

As an editor, each time I attend a design fair, I'm making snap judgements in my head: Does this designer's collection stand together as a whole? Is there a compelling narrative behind it? Does it use materials in a profound or creative way? Is it formally inventive? Is it pretty? If I had another suitcase, would I want to take a piece home with me? But before last week, I had never in my life had to choose my number one, absolute, hands-down favorite. And yet, at the Stockholm Furniture Fair's Greenhouse exhibition of emerging design, I did just that: For Sight Unseen's inaugural Best in Show award, I chose the Swedish duo Bursell/Svedborg — whose wonderful series of mixed-material pedestals we'll be diving into more in-depth next week — from a pool of 30 international design studios, who had been juried into the fair by a committee of six Stockholm-based designers. Today, though, I'm highlighting *all* of my favorite up-and-coming designers from the week.
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30 Projects We Loved at the 2024 Stockholm Furniture Fair

Perhaps no design fair makes me philosophize about the future of trade shows more than Stockholm. A small fair that has become even more compact over the past few years, as Danish brands have increasingly shifted their calendar to coincide with Copenhagen's 3 Days of Design, Stockholm tends to particularly shine in two areas that make a fair worth having in the first place: its curation — not only in booths but also in talks that one might actually care to attend — and the idea that sustainability ought to be baked in at every turn, or else what's the point of making new things?
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Week of January 29, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: paintings made by a giant squeegee, a perfectly preserved Art Deco hunting lodge outside of Paris, and a Barcelona apartment inspired by the 1992 Olympics.
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The Malin Opens a Moody, Textured, Pine-Accented Location in Nashville

Having been a member of the design-forward co-working space The Malin for nearly a year now, we could tell you a lot about their New York locations: how there's often a snack plate on offer (banana bread in the mornings, cookies in the afternoon); how there's always a row of lights running above the shared desks that were designed by two of Sight Unseen's longest-running collaborators; or which location has the best view (Williamsburg FTW). But Nashville, where the Malin recently opened its fourth and largest location — and first outside of New York — is something of an unknown quantity to us, having never before visited. We can't tell you which restaurants nearby have the best take-out, or what the artsy neighborhood it's in — called Wedgewood-Houston, or WeHo for short, because of course it is — is like. But part of what we love about The Malin is how they keep so many aesthetic elements the same, while switching things up just enough to make each outpost feel simultaneously familiar and fun.
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The 2023 American Design Hot List, Part IV

This week we announced our 11th annual American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s editorial award for the names to know now in American design. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the second group of Hot List designers here (including Frances Merrill of Reath Design, whose midcentury Altadena project is pictured above).
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The 2023 American Design Hot List, Part II

This week we announced our 11th annual American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s editorial award for the names to know now in American design. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the second group of Hot List designers here (including Little Wing Lee, whose graphic rug for the most recent Black Folks in Design exhibition is pictured above).
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In His Latest Solo Exhibition, Magnus Pettersen’s Glass Orbs Evoke a Sense of Metaphysical Disturbance

In Norwegian designer Magnus Pettersen’s latest solo exhibition, which was on view at QB Gallery in Oslo last month, a new series of sculptures was presented, which purport, per the press materials, to transgress the boundary between artworks and functional objects. But that isn't remotely the most interesting thing about the pieces; pretty much everything published on this site at this point achieves that with equal aplomb. For us, the most interesting thing is the addition of wood, yes, especially in brilliantly tinted hues like emergency orange. But more important is the inclusion of tiny glass orbs, perched on the arms or backs or smack dab in the middle of several of the seats, which sometimes prevent the pieces from being functional objects at all. Why are they there? What is their meaning? Has Pettersen recently discovered astrology?
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This Thanksgiving, Look Cute While Making a Statement in One of These Sight Unseen–Approved Aprons

Well, what do you know? Turns out all I needed to have fun on the internet again was to go shopping for aprons. What a strange pocket of online shopping — and historical discourse — aprons inhabit! They're somehow everywhere you'd least expect them to be and not at all in the places you'd think to look. I came away from this exercise understanding that the apron-buying public is vastly underserved; so much beige linen, not enough fun! Why isn't every cool restaurant across America selling aprons as merch? Regardless, the 37 aprons below are extremely solid, fashionable, sometimes surreal choices for when you're basting a turkey, glass of wine in hand, two weeks from today.
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Week of October 30, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a showstopping tiled fireplace in the middle of Oslo, a new destination for gift-buying in Dimes Square, and, finally, a solution for the dreaded overhead "boob light" in your urban rental.
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The Latest Interior We’re Coveting is… a Film Production Office?

We've been thinking a lot lately about the flattening of visual culture and what gets lost when everything looks the same. In design, this is most prevalent in furniture and small goods like ceramics, but we have begun to notice a crushing sameness in interiors as well, with each new office or co-working space aspiring to look like the ground floor of a Brooklyn brownstone or a Parisian flat. Which is why we thought it might be useful to analyze the latest project by New York–based studio Civilian, which, despite featuring many pieces that I'd like to have in my own home, somehow avoids these pitfalls and still firmly reads "office." The space is a multifunctional home base for a documentary production company called Sandbox Films, and what we actually love about this project is how it walks right up to the line between public and private space without crossing it. Let's go over the building blocks.
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