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06.04.24

Sighted

Is Design In an Age of Maximalism, Or Minimalism? The Answer Is Both — and Pelle’s New Collection Offers Proof

Are we currently in an age of maximalism, with wood paneling, hand-painted ceilings, ruffled fabrics, and decorative pillows constituting the reigning aesthetic in design? Or an age of minimalism, when sleek chrome and the High-Tech vibe have never been more popular? The answer, really, is both — the two styles have often happily coexisted in the past, and we've been happily embracing both for awhile now. That might be why the latest collection from the Brooklyn studio Pelle, released a few weeks ago during New York design month, appeals to us: It unabashedly embraces both extremes.
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06.01.24

Saturday Selects

Week of May 27, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: highlights from a design fair for Sweden's independent talents, Caitlin Mociun's new 90s-inspired jewelry line, Giancarlo Valle's new showroom in New York, and the latest Modernist architectural icon to open its doors to overnight guests.
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05.24.24

Sight Unseen Collection

Our New York Design Week Launch: 10 Cabinets and Consoles by 10 Designers, All for Sale Through Sight Unseen

There's nothing better than a piece of furniture that simultaneously hides your possessions and, when open, offers them a beautiful backdrop. To celebrate our love of great storage options — and to offer our clients more of them — we presented 10 new pieces from our Sight Unseen Collection during New York Design Week (ahem, Month): casegoods by 10 different designers, some of which are already available to source on our site. Exhibited in the Chinatown showroom of Peter Staples's lighting studio Blue Green Works, the cabinets, consoles, and nightstands were the perfect way to also showcase decorative knobs and pulls from Monica's new project, Petra Hardware, in a collaborative exhibition.⁠
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05.14.24

Shopping

Meet Petra: Your New One-Stop-Shop For Designer-Made Statement Hardware

If you're an interior designer whose client has non-traditional tastes. If you're a renter who's tired of looking at a tired kitchen but can't renovate. If you bought a beautiful storage cabinet years ago and want to fall back in love with it. If you own a house in Connecticut or L.A. but want its front door to look like a villa in Italy. If you just need one perfect little weirdo bauble for your nightstand. Basically if you want to make a small change, anywhere in a home, that makes a big visual impact: You're going to want to bookmark Petra. Petra is my new showroom for artistic hardware, and it launched last week with drawer pulls, cabinet knobs, door handles, furniture pulls, appliance handles, and more by 27 international designers.
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05.03.24

Travel

French Installation Artist Daniel Buren Has Transformed Six Hotels With Color and Sculpture

Three years ago, the LVMH-owned hotel group Belmond began working with Italy’s Galleria Continua on a program to bring the work of a diverse group of renowned artists into their 46 global properties. But midway in, they decided it could be more impactful to commission a single person for a series that would span multiple locations, and so the gallery called the famed French installation artist Daniel Buren with an ambitious proposal: to create six site-specific works in six hotels across Italy, South Africa, France, and Brazil. For Mitico, the final results of which were unveiled over the past two months, each of his installations was envisioned in direct response to the architecture or surrounding landscape of the hotels.
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04.18.24

Fair Report

This Milanese Brand — and Its Newest Collection, Just Launched in Milan — Brings the Maximalist Trend to Your Table

We noticed a funny little recurring motif at this week's Milan fair: At many of the gatherings we attended, we were served wine and/or water from the kind of frilly, classical goblets you might expect to find at a fancy summer garden party in Tuscany rather than in the middle of a big city known for its Modernist design. But maximalism has been on the rise in our world for awhile now, and the proof can be seen not just in our design-week drinkware but in the rise of brands like Sophie Lou Jacobsen, Gohar World, Levant, and the Milanese fashion and housewares label La DoubleJ, for whom frilly goblets are an enduring staple. La DoubleJ's founder J.J. Martin is known for her love of pattern-mixing, florals, vibrant colors, and all things old-school Italian, and the label's latest tabletop collection, Solar, embodies all those tendencies.
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04.05.24

Sight Unseen Collection

In a Major Spring Update, Our Shoppable Collection Has New Outdoor Furniture, Classic Wood Dining Tables, Pendant Lights, and More

When we first started Sight Unseen, as two journalists excited to run our own magazine, we never dreamed we'd one day be able to say, "We sell designer fire tools" 😂 — and yet here we are, nearly 15 years later, with a shoppable furniture collection that encompasses those fire tools, plus bar carts, chic upholstered sofas, sculptural dining chairs, and more, all by some of the best talents we've featured in recent years. Today marks the launch of a huge spring update to the Sight Unseen Collection, which is our biggest expansion yet.
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03.30.24

Saturday Selects

Week of March 25, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a sizeable exhibition of furniture and art in Rome by the now-solo Ronan Bouroullec, (yet another) newcomer South Korean furniture studio we've got our eye on, and three interiors in France and New York with a warm, vintage-heavy appeal, including the eclectic project above by Corpus Studio.
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03.12.24

Sighted

Sunnei and cc-tapis Just Dropped the Ultimate Fashion x Design Collab, Where Carpets Become Clothing and Vice Versa

In addition to their playfully chic sartorial offerings, Sunnei has been on our radar for years thanks to their periodic overlaps with the design world, from a thoughtful ongoing object collection to the collaboration they presented during Salone in 2022 with our friends at Bloc Studios. And yet I was still surprised and delighted when, after I emailed the brand's PR team asking for a press kit for the brand's FW24 fashion show, it turned out the striking striped knitwear pieces that I'd immediately been drawn to were actually a collaboration with one of our other favorite Milanese brands, rug-maker cc-tapis.
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03.06.24

Fair Report

All the Exhibitions, Projects, and Artworks We Loved From This Month’s 2024 Frieze Week in Los Angeles

Last week was Frieze week in L.A., the only time of year when the city provides art and design folks with a robust events schedule full of opportunities to repeatedly mingle with old friends and new, eat lots of free food, and of course, see great work. The action centers around the Frieze Los Angeles art fair itself, which just wrapped its especially color-soaked fifth edition, but at the same time encompasses the Felix Art Fair at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, the city's ever-growing roster of art and design galleries, and a host of other exhibitions and events that pop up around them.
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02.10.24

Saturday Selects

Week of February 5, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: The latest releases by Portugal duo Garcé + Dimofski (pictured), a furniture collection made from the unused "crusts" of industrial aluminum blocks, and two interiors with an impeccable use of color-blocking.
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02.07.24

Sighted

At the New Permanent Eames Archive in California, You Can Deep-Dive Into the Design Process of Charles and Ray Through 40,000 Artifacts

From the moment that Charles Eames, formerly an architect and teacher, and Ray Eames, formerly a fine artist, began a shared design practice in 1941, they cultivated an unusually meticulous creative process: in lieu of drawings and schematics, they worked out ideas and solved problems in real-time by creating endless physical models and prototypes. It's no wonder, then, that until the Eames Office closed after Ray's death in 1988, they were able to rack up more than 40,000 artifacts of their design process — and also no wonder that it took the family nearly 25 years to catalog them and finally make them available for public viewing all in one place, at the newly opened Eames Archive in Richmond, California.
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