Sabine Marcelis on Her Newest Collaboration, Her Material Research, and Her Complicated Feelings About the Color Blue

Sabine Marcelis has become a design breakout star, her minimal-yet-colorful work in glass and resin having penetrated the worlds of architecture, fashion, music, and TikTok. Now she’s conquered yet another realm of wider culture — beauty — through a major collaboration with the Swiss skincare brand La Prairie, with whom she’s just launched a vanity tray that marries her signature use of resin with the brand’s signature shade of cobalt. We decided it was a good moment to catch up with Marcelis, and talk to her not only about this project, but also about what materials she’s been experimenting with lately, how she feels in the wake of all the social media hype, and why she — cobalt excluded, of course — doesn’t actually like the color blue.
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We Turned a Palm Springs Architectural Marvel Into a Sun-Drenched Lightology Dream Home

When the team at Lightology approached Sight Unseen hoping to collaborate, we proposed curating a selection of our favorite pieces from the lighting and furniture retailer and installing them into a stunning architectural home in the Palm Springs desert. The now-sold 4,000 square-foot property has floor-to-ceiling windows and double-sided glass breezeways that make it the epitome of indoor/outdoor living — and the perfect sun-drenched backdrop for our vision of a Lightology dream home.
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Week of July 31, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Seven-foot patchwork hand pillows we'd love to cuddle, an exhibition about longing from Charlap Hyman & Herrero, and the latest rental home in the French countryside designed by Joséphine Fossey, above.
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Escape From Everything at This Silent, Solar-Powered, Artisan-Made New Hotel on the Mexican Coast

The main strip of Zihuatanejo, near the southern end of Mexico's Pacific coast, is basically a resort town — choked with all-inclusives, timeshares, jet skis, infinity pools, and all the other hallmarks of Big Travel, which favors convenience and familiarity over intimacy and locality. But drive an hour south, into an area of tropical wilderness below the Sierra Madre del Sur mountains that's interrupted only by small towns, and you'll arrive at Hotelito, a 13-bedroom boutique hotel that's the epitome of considered, off-the-grid peacefulness.
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A New Design Gallery in Berlin Gives a Long-Overdue Platform to Up-and-Coming German Studios

Despite being a longtime haven for artists and creatives — with its (formerly) cheap rents and surplus of accessible studio and exhibition spaces — Berlin never really made any sort of cohesive mark on the contemporary furniture-design world. That's why I got so excited recently when I heard about Forma, a new pop-up design gallery on the Spree river showing mostly contemporary work by mostly German or Germany-based designers like Nazara Lazaro, Carsten in der Elst, and Haus Otto — as well as why its founder, Vanessa Heepen, almost didn’t go through with it.
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This Campaign for a Sailboat-Inspired Sofa Transports You to a 100-Year-Old Sailing School in Venice

The Vela, designed for Saba Italia by Zanellato/Bortotto, is an interesting take on the puffy sofa: It's soft and cushy yet somehow still crisp, with arms that taper to a subtle point and striking diagonal tufting seams that gently reign in its voluminousness. That contrast is intentional, reflecting the inspiration for the sofa, which also lent it its name ("sail" in English): "We both love the sea and have always been fascinated by the unfurled sails blown by the wind near the Venice lagoon," says Daniele Bortotto. For its new campaign, Saba sent photographer Mattia Balsamini to photograph it at the Compagnia della Vela, a nautical school founded in 1911 on the island of San Giorgio.
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Week of June 12, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: acid-house Victorian-floral bedding by Jonathan Saunders, a fun new striped bench from Spain, and lots of summer travel porn in the form of two restaurants and two hotels in four different sun-soaked locales.
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On the Hunt for Objects? Shop Our Book IRL at Nordstrom’s Manhattan Flagship

In our book, How to Live With Objects, we talk a lot about how rewarding it is to slowly and thoughtfully surround yourself with unique objects you feel a connection to, hence why we also caution against the department-store mentality of treating your interior as a series of empty spaces you should fill all at once. But when the department store itself becomes the place to find those unique objects, that advice obviously no longer applies — case in point, our new pop-in inside Nordstrom's midtown Manhattan flagship store, where now through June 17, you can shop nearly 100 truly special handmade, one-of-a-kind, and vintage objects from some of the makers and dealers featured in the book (as well as the actual book).
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Pop-In at Nordstrom, 2023

To celebrate New York Design Week as well as the release of our book, Nordstrom's special projects team — led by Olivia Kim — invited Sight Unseen to create a pop-in inside its Manhattan flagship store.
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Week of April 17, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a jaw-dropping color-blocked bathroom in Belgium, a shape-y new rug collection by Garance Vallée, and a 21st-century reimagining of the 17th-century Villa Medici in Rome by India Mahdavi.
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Week of March 6, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a show of more than 50 lamps by up-and-coming artists and designers in Brooklyn, the "most Instagrammable" restaurant interior in Tbilisi, and a home in Australia that makes the case for green-on-green-on-green (above).
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