Our 2016 Honorees

Today, we're pleased to announce the honorees of our fourth annual American Design Hot List — an unapologetically subjective editorial award for the 20 names to know now in American design. The list acts as Sight Unseen’s guide to those emerging and mid-career talents influencing the design landscape in any given year, whether through standout launches, must-see exhibitions, or just our innate sense that they’re ones to watch.
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Week of November 28, 2016

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 beautiful uses of natural materials like ceramic, glass, brass, and leather: in a new series of vessels by Apparatus, in a sofa by a Danish designer who we predict might be the next big thing, and in a new jewelry box, pictured above, that turns a glass orb into a secret hiding spot.
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A New Graphic Rug Collection — And the Posters That Inspired It

Though Alex Proba is ready to finish her four-year-long A Poster a Day project and move on to something else, she had so many amazing graphics — in so many interiors-friendly colors — that she realized she ought to think of a way for the posters to live on. This week, Proba is launching a series of eight rugs, their patterns culled from her vast poster archive, and that's just the start of it.
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The Best Gifts for Design Lovers, $250 and up

For our last holiday gift guide, we're letting loose. On our most extravagant list? A leather-topped turntable, an ombré wall mirror, and an epic pink armchair — among others — that will make you want to blow your rent check and never look back.
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design gift guide 2016

The Best Gifts for Design Lovers Under $50

For as long as we've been publishing holiday gift guides — and this is our fourth annual one! — we've been dividing them up by editor, which eventually became predictable even to us. Want something monochrome? Go to Monica's gift guide. In the mood for something colorful? Jill's got you covered. Need something ever-so-slightly less girly? Our junior editors are invariably men. This year, we decided to do our readers a service, and lay things out according to the cold hard cash you'll have to put down.
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Herman Miller’s New York Flagship is a Design Store for the Way We Live Now

Five years in the making, the new Herman Miller flagship opened on Park Avenue South in New York just before Thanksgiving, at the same address where George Nelson once had his offices. The new store nods towards Herman Miller's storied place in American design but more often than not, it also looks forward, both re-contextualizing vintage items and archival Herman Miller pieces in a fresh, more modern context and incorporating some of our current favorite independent designers and brands,
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design miami 2016 preview

The 40 Best New Works You’ll See at Design Miami This Week

When we think of Design Miami, which opens tomorrow, the idea of the fair as a place to scout exciting new work by an elite cadre of emerging designers isn't necessarily the first thing that comes to mind. Lush, immersive installations and epically cool lounges, yes; vintage gems by French designers like Prouvé, Royère, Perriand, and Pergay, of course. But the past couple of years have featured a notable swing towards a younger, more experimental crowd.
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Two Former Architects on Finding Common Ground (In the Middle of Manhattan)

Some of Pelle's work belies their background in architecture — their Klemens mirror, for instance, stretches a thin mesh fabric over a structure that looks like scaffolding. More often than not, their work is organic and even whimsical, with their two best-known projects being a chandelier that daisy-chains bubble-like glass globes and their Soap Stones, for which they hand-carve dyed and fragranced glycerin soap into a gemlike shape. But all of their work speaks to the idea of finding common ground despite their differences.
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Strauss Bourque-Lafrance

Strauss Bourque-Lafrance and the Deconstructed Domestic Space

Strauss Bourque-LaFrance’s work reflects a holistic approach to materials informed by the social function and status of objects as well as our relationship to them; the roles they play in our lives as symbols, signs, and totems. In Bourque-Lafrance's world, objects and paintings often get mixed up together with sculpture and interior design; his approach may be best summed up by his gallerist, Rachel Uffner, who calls it: “painting-in-the-expanded-field, painting-as-collage, painting-as-performance, and painting-as-sculpture.”
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Week of November 14, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week we're putting the focus on some of the coolest women in design and art: an exhibition of hard-edged abstract paintings by the late Californian Helen Lundeberg, a sleek black lacquered furniture collection by up-and-comer Ania Jaworska, and the best vase in the archive of the late Finnish glass artist Helena Tynell.
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