All the Best Things We Saw at This Year’s 2025 Fog Design+Art Fair in San Francisco

Traveling to last month's FOG Design+Art fair was a particularly charged experience for me this year — held two weeks after the wildfires that devastated Los Angeles, where I've been hibernating all winter, it was something of a reprieve; a chance, both literally and figuratively, to take a breath after all that happened here. Of course I only had the privilege to do so because I was unaffected materially by the fires, unlike so many others facing horrible loss, but it's just to say that traveling to a fair in the wake of a tragedy was not such a frivolous event as it may have been in past years. I was eminently more grateful just to be there. Seeing good work was merely the icing on the cake.
More

Week of January 6, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: A conceptual fashion space hidden in a Tashkent street market, joyful ceramic candleholders shaped like sardines and bananas, and a new collection of lamps inspired by the Triadic Ballet.
More

Jermaine Gallacher Helped Pull This Celestial-Themed 1990s Textile Collection From the Archives

As a lover of all things vintage and archival, there are few things that excite me more than a project that plumbs the historical trove of a company or design movement and resurfaces its forgotten gems; it’s the same thrill I get shopping a flea market or antique mall and discovering something incredible that had previously gone unnoticed or been cast aside. Which is why I felt a pang of envy when I saw the launch earlier this month of Torch, for which TON magazine editor and interior designer Jermaine Gallacher got to help pull a collection of rugs and textiles out of a 90s time capsule and reimagine it for contemporary use. Originally titled Elements and Beyond, the celestial-themed series was the work of the seminal textile designer Christine Van Der Hurd, who celebrated 50 years in the business last year, and who spent 18 months working with Gallacher to revisit and refine her original vision.
More

Chocolate Sardines and Albers Hats: Monica’s 2024 Sight Unseen Gift Guide

This month marks Sight Unseen's 15th birthday (!!!) and there was only one gift we really wanted, which — unfortunately — we woke up on November 6 to find we definitively had not received. But before we gear up for a tough few years, we'll be reveling in this season's temporary reprieve, and the moments of togetherness and/or much-needed rest it will bring. In that sense, it's the perfect time to share with you our annual Sight Unseen gift guides, which while always at least a little bit practical (who wouldn't love an $18 chocolate sardine?), offer a hefty dose of fantasy and fun. Today’s guide comes from Monica, who's coveting Josef and Anni Albers hats, Greek ceramics with 1960s motifs, a sweater adorned with Franco Albini's iconic Milan metro handlebar, a wooden box meant to discourage you from doom-scrolling, and more. See — and shop — her full list after the jump!
More

Mid-Century Seaside Glamour Meets Contemporary Design at the New Ace Hotel Athens

Built in 1975 as part of a stylish mid-century Greek tourism program called xenia, The Fenix hotel on the southwest coast of Athens eventually became a very un-stylish Best Western. But, as part of a revival of both these architectural gems and the so-called "Athenian Riviera" in which it's located, it's been reborn as the newest Ace Hotel, complete with period-specific furniture and a restoration of its whitewashed Brutalist facade.
More

Week of September 23, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Clare Vivier's first furniture and lighting collection, the (momentary) return of Zouzou rugs, and influential Italian/Swiss designer and architect Eleonore Peduzzi Riva finally gets her due.
More

Everything We Loved at Collectible’s First Design Fair in New York City

Last Sunday afternoon, as the first NYC edition of the Brussels-based contemporary design fair Collectible was just about to wrap, one of the fair directors paused in front of our booth and asked me how I thought the show had gone. “There are designers here we’ve never heard of,” I marveled, intending it as high praise indeed: For a European fair to show up on New York’s doorstep and show us something new (especially a fair planned in less than four months), well, I’d call that a success. Collectible, which took place at the burgeoning FiDi creative hub WSA, managed to both assemble a cornucopia of new ideas and draw a crowd, all from across the Atlantic. We brought our own dose of novelty to the show, with a booth that — while similar to our NY Design Week exhibition — showcased a new batch of 11 cabinets by 11 different design studios, all punctuated by hardware from my recently launched showroom, Petra.
More

The 10 Best Modernist Buildings in Greece, According to Objects of Common Interest

They work so fluidly across geographic boundaries — regularly exhibiting everywhere from Milan to Miami, Brooklyn to Brussels — that it's easy to forget that the design duo behind Objects of Common Interest are Greek, born and bred. (In addition to their studio in New York, they also keep an office in Athens, too). Today they're offering Sight Unseen readers a history lesson in Greek architecture, compiling their ten favorite Modernist buildings around the country, some still in use and some gone (but not forgotten).
More

10 Process-Driven Designers to Watch, According to Designer/Gallerist Max Radford

Having spent the last three years inviting some of the region's most promising design talents into his eponymous London gallery (names like Lewis Kemmenoe, EJR Barnes, Andu Masebo, Isobel Alonso), interior designer and curator Max Radford's group exhibition lineups are now considered a veritable who's who of the UK scene. But Radford also keeps an enthusiastic eye on the goings-on outside his home turf, of course, and today he's sharing the ten most-promising non-UK designers who, like many on his own roster, are making process-driven furniture and lighting. 
More

The Top 10 New-Gen Vintage Dealers in the US, According to For Scale’s David Michon

We're willing to bet that as a Sight Unseen reader, a decent percentage of your Instagram feed is devoted to vintage dealers, whether you're actually in the market or just need a daily adrenaline hit of killer finds. Post-COVID, their numbers have only multiplied, and today's guest list-maker is an expert in their ranks: David Michon, the design scribe behind For Scale, a heady Substack in which he discusses topics like "airport terminal as home décor" and the "un-curation of domestic space," and keeps an ever-evolving list of top-tier décor sources around the world.
More

The 10 Things You Should Have in Your Bedroom, According to Charlap Hyman & Herrero

Most of us spend the majority of our time and money perfecting the look and feel of our living rooms, and then fail to offer the same attention to the space where we spend more than 1/4 of our lives: our bedrooms. Granted we're unconscious for many of those hours, but it's hard to overestimate the impact that good design can have on our mood and thus, ultimately, the quality of our rest. Today, Adam Charlap, co-founder of the bi-coastal architecture and interiors firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero, shares the ten objects you'd find in his fantasy bedroom, from midcentury lighting to a set of faux bois sheets his grandparents slept in that are still on the market today.
More

The 10 Design Books You Should Have on Your Shelf, According to Stephen Markos of Superhouse

Walk into one of the always-thought-provoking historical exhibitions at Superhouse gallery in New York — where founder Stephen Markos has built a program around showing both contemporary designs and those of the often little-known makers that preceded and influenced them — and you'll get to browse a smattering of books he's collected that reference those makers' bygone works. Here, he shares a list of 10 favorites from his personal library which also span past to present.
More