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04.04.15

Saturday Selects

Week of March 30, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week was all about designers doing mesmerizing things with very simple shapes: from Nendo's new color-gradient cube tables to a series of interactive geometric projections to the London grad who's pushing the boundaries of jewelry with his mixed-material compositions (pictured).
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03.31.15

Shopping

Acme Releases Deadstock Memphis Objects

It was only a week and a half ago that we reported on a cache of original, made-in-the-80s Memphis jewelry designs that the brand ACME has spent the past few months pulling from its archives and posting for sale on its Legacy website (where it appears that even more designs, particularly those by Peter Shire, have since been added). But we had to come in for round two today when we found out that, just this morning, Acme unleashed the motherlode: actual objects, long unavailable and highly rarefied, by the likes of Ettore Sottsass, Andrea Branzi, and Aldo Rossi. Many of them are original prototypes, some of them are one-of-a-kind, and none of them were ever put into mass production. We've posted a selection of the offerings after the jump, along with the bits of history provided by ACME — get them before the collectors do!
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03.24.15

Up and Coming

B-FIT Assemblage by Fact Non Fact

B-FIT, a project by the Seoul-based design collective Fact Non Fact, is the very definition of eye candy — the geometric shapes it comprises are meant not to function in specific ways, but merely to look pretty and highlight the materials they're made from, which include iron, brass, plaster, terra cotta, marble, wood, glass and concrete. If "A-FIT," according to Fact Non Fact, refers to all the objects in our lives that are optimized for specific functions, like chairs or door handles, "B-FIT" refers to the kinds of objects that aren't. After making the pieces, designers Jinsik Kim, Yuhun Kim, and Eunjae Lee brought them to life in three ways: as a physical installation, as a conceptual deskscape, and as the Assemblage images you see here.
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03.21.15

Saturday Selects

Week of March 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 Bahamian ceramics wunderkind Instagrams her way into our hearts, a group design show makes us wish we lived in Saint-Étienne, and two Greek designers kill it with the most beautiful house (above) and choker necklace we've seen in recent memory.
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03.18.15

Sighted

Acme Legacy’s Archival Memphis Jewelry

After our recent post on jewelry created by famous '80s-era Memphis-group architects, readers came to us asking where they could find the pieces (good luck), while even copies of the out-of-print book we pulled the images from immediately became exponentially harder to procure (for under $350, at least). And so despite the excitement the post generated, it was destined to remain a mere digital artifact for most. That's why we were so happy to discover, shortly thereafter, Acme's Legacy collection, through which the 30-year-old accessories brand — which these days focuses on designer pens — has been quietly pulling Memphis jewelry pieces out of its archives and making them available for sale at shockingly reasonable price points. From 1985 to 1992, Acme founders Adrian Olabuenaga and Leslie Bailey produced more than 100 different earrings, brooches, and necklaces by design titans like Ettore Sottsass, Joanna Grawunder, Alessandro Mendini, and George Sowden, a big chunk of which are now up for grabs on its Legacy page. We asked Olabuenaga a few questions about the history and future of the project.
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03.11.15

Studio Visit

French Illustration Duo Atelier Bingo

Someday, when someone writes the definitive book looking back on how the internet changed life in the 21st century, they'll include stories like Atelier Bingo's: After living in Paris for two years post-graduation, Adéle Favreau and Maxime Prou decided on a whim one day to leave their burgeoning graphic design careers behind for a life in the countryside, and guess what? It didn't make a lick of difference. The pair now run a bustling illustration studio from a converted factory in Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre owned by Favreau's uncle, and thanks to the magic of email, it hasn't stopped them from selling prints online and working with clients like Vogue, The Plant, and Wrap Magazine, plus companies they did graphic design for back in Paris, now three hours away.
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03.07.15

Saturday Selects

Week of March 1, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: A glimpse into the past (the three-year-old side table, pictured above, we can't believe we overlooked), present (six can't-miss art exhibitions happening now), and future (four pieces launching in Milan next month).
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03.05.15

Sighted

Still Lifes by Belgian Photographer Frederik Vercruysse

Still life photography is having a big week on Sight Unseen — yesterday we featured a pair of stylists who built their reputation on it and are now moving into interiors, and today we're highlighting a photographer who approaches shooting interiors just as though they were still lifes. Belgian-born talent Frederik Vercruysse, in fact, describes his entire body of work as "still life photography in the broadest sense of the word," according to his website, applying the approach not just to interiors but to portraits, fashion shows, and the occasional landscape as well (for clients like Wallpaper magazine, Sophie Buhai, and Muller Van Severen). But then, of course, there are his actual still lifes, which we've decided to focus on here. Shot mostly for magazines, they represent the purest form of his aim "to photograph the subject in its purest form."
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03.02.15

Sighted

Dusen Dusen Home

The past few years have proven that — every once in a while — a fashion label can make a successful, mostly non-embarrassing crossover into furniture and housewares. Margiela, Hermès, and Rick Owens all come to mind, but who better than a textile designer to make the leap? At last week's Capsule show, Ellen Van Dusen of the Brooklyn-based clothing brand Dusen Dusen launched a brand new line of soft goods for the home that feature her signature geometric patterns — sheets, blankets, rugs, towels, pillows, and a pouf — and the extension feels totally natural, like it was meant to be. Today she's giving Sight Unseen a first peek at the line's lookbook photos, which were shot by SU contributor Brian Ferry and feature cameos by both SNL comedian Aidy Bryant and Van Dusen's official canine mascot, Snips.
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02.26.15

Studio Visit

Cave Collective, Artists

We discovered Cave Collective by way of their jewelry, which we spotted at the boutique No. 6 in New York, this past October. In late November, we shot founders Cat Lauigan and Alex Wolkowicz in their Greenpoint workspace. Then, by the end of January, we found out that they'd dismantled most of the studio and jewelry line, that Lauigan had relocated to California, and that both artists were focusing on their individual practices until they figured out what to do next. And yet by that point, we knew enough about Cave Collective to take the news in stride — ever since Lauigan and Wolkowicz began their collaboration in 2010, it's been an endlessly shape-shifting and exploratory project, one that's seen them living thousands of miles apart for nearly as long as they've lived in the same city.
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02.23.15

Travel

Hotel Covell Is Now the Place to Stay on L.A.’s East Side

There was a time, not so long ago, when visitors to New York wouldn't dream of staying anywhere but Manhattan — that all changed, of course, as soon as Brooklyn became an international brand with Williamsburg as its capital, spawning hotels like the Wythe and the Mccarren. Airbnb's rise has also inspired adventurous travelers to fan out to all sorts of peripheral neighborhoods in big cities around the world. And so it's inevitable that a place like Los Feliz, an epicenter of Los Angeles's east-side hipster scene, recently joined the hospitality game, with the opening of the five-room Hotel Covell. Sitting above a popular wine bar of the same name, it pairs a few familiar boutique hotel tropes (thrift-store art, vintage record players) with amazing furnishings by some of our favorite local designers, including Eric Trine, Brendan Ravenhill, and Atelier de Troupe.
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02.21.15

Saturday Selects

Week of February 16, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: two new designs by American Design Hot List alums, a solo show by a master of Mono-ha, and various accoutrements for the chicest breakfast table ever, including marble egg cups and this epic speckled pitcher by BTW Ceramics.
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