The New Wave of Los Angeles Design, On View Now at Our Site Specific LA Show at Austere

When the folks behind the airy Los Angeles design showroom Austere asked us to create an installation in their space, the theme was a no-brainer — we'd showcase the new wave of L.A. design, inviting 11 of our favorite studios to install a selection of their work. The result is Site Specific L.A., which opened on Saturday and runs through February 14, and is like a mini, localized version of our New York show, Sight Unseen OFFSITE.
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Our 2015 Holiday Gift Guide — Monica’s Picks

Welcome to Sight Unseen’s annual holiday gift guide! This week, we're sharing our best, most covetable, seriously-buy-me-now finds from around the web. We've narrowed it down to 25 items from each editor — a seriously herculean task when it's basically your job to source cool things all year round. Next up is Monica, whose wish list this year runs the gamut from hairy pillows to hiking boots.
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Week of November 23, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week we intended to skip Saturday Selects because of Thanksgiving, but we received so many incredible new object submissions — like the lamps by Schneid, above — that we're giving you a special abridged roundup.
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A Power-Show of Wall Hangings By Confettisystem, Mimi Jung, Clarisse Demory, and Amateurs

Le Gens Heureux, a three-year-old Copenhagen art gallery founded by Sanne Frank and Anneli Häkkinen, has two major selling points — its setting, and its knack for perfectly curated group shows. Now on view is a roundup of textile wall hangings by some of the best names in the business — Mimi Jung, Confettisystem, Amateurs, and Clarisse Demory — that are all entirely different, yet totally complementary, connected by tiny common threads of color and composition.
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A Beige Interior By BROOK&LYN That’s the Opposite of Boring

Our website is known for its love of color. Today, though, we're taking a rare moment to celebrate the lack thereof, with a Los Angeles interior project by BROOK&LYN and Akin Creative that proves a rare exception to the "boring beige" maxim. The two studios recently teamed up to outfit the new L.A. outpost of Bassike, an Australian fashion brand known for its high-end line of basics, and took visual inspiration from the label's understated approach.
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Design Miami neon lamps

Design Miami Sneak Peek: Sabine Marcelis’s New Resin and Neon Lamps

If there's one thing we've always hated about Miami, aesthetically speaking, it's all the neon signs. Yet they're a big part of the city's visual identity, making it all the more fitting that at this year's Design Miami show, Belgium's Victor Hunt gallery will be exhibiting a brand new edition of Eindhoven grad Sabine Marcelis's neon and cast-resin lamps — the Dawn series — that offers a moment of redemption for those gaudy illuminated tubes.
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Week of November 16, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: A surge of palm trees and lava lamps brings back a major '70s vibe, an exhibition at Table of Contents highlights the Memphis group's little-known second wave, and a shop in Sweden dedicates itself to selling the work of "kickass female designers."
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Jewelry Made From Stone, Resin, and Plastic Trash

Most of Mexican designer Poleta Rodete's jewelry is made from raw granite or marble. Her special collection for the Mexico City design gallery Ángulo Cero also appears to be composed of elements scavenged from nature — the kind of plastic or glass bits you sometimes find washed up on the shore — yet Rodete has fabricated the pieces from scratch, by mixing limestone, marble, granite, epoxy resin, and plastic trash to create an entirely new material.
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Ladies & Gentlemen and Robin Stein Team Up on a Still Life Inspired by Moholy-Nagy, Not Memphis

You know all those contemporary still-life clichés, like pastel backgrounds, cactuses, and Sottsass-approved geometric shapes? When New York photographer Robin Stein recently teamed up with Brooklyn design studio Ladies & Gentlemen for a studio visit (coming soon) and impromptu creative photo shoot (pictured after the jump), the longtime friends decided to toss all those ubiquitous tropes out the window and do something different.
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Bario Neal Men's Jewelry

Bario Neal & Linder Just Broke the Rules of Men’s Jewelry

The Philadelphia-based jewelry design studio Bario Neal has long offered wedding bands for men, and particularly expressive ones, at that: Some of its rings look like carved petrified wood, some have a hammered texture, some are boldly striped. But there's one steadfast rule of men's jewelry that even Bario Neal has never dared to break — until now.
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Hammertone

Why Designers Are Obsessed With a Metal Finish Called Hammertone

When something previously considered irreparably uncool — like Tevas, or turtlenecks — suddenly becomes a massive trend, it can be hard to pinpoint exactly why. Today, beginning with the Eric Trine pieces above, we're unpacking the rise of the bumpy industrial metal finish known as hammertone, surveying its best examples and hearing from the designers themselves why they've become such converts.
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Swiss Product and Furniture Designer Adrien Rovero

The work of Swiss designer Adrien Rovero has a certain recognizable Western European vibe — simple, often rounded forms paired with planes of solid color and an understated element of playfulness or cleverness. There's always a small innovation, a small twist. That latter part is what Rovero particularly excels at.
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