Week of January 15, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a Paris apartment with a stellar stainless-steel kitchen (again!), a hotel with rooms by 14 different designers, aluminum furniture cast from waste polystyrene, and a few early highlights from Maison & Objet and IMM Cologne.
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This Holiday Rental in London is a Treasure Trove of 1970s and ’80s Furniture

Have you ever found the perfect piece of furniture, only to realize that you can’t fit it into your apartment because the pass-throughs are too narrow? For Hollie Bowden, access was particularly problematic during her renovation of a one-bedroom holiday rental apartment in London, which is located on the fifth and sixth floors of a Victorian building in Covent Garden and reached via a narrow and winding staircase. Which items could she bring up safely, without having to first hack them to bits? Luckily, she found a modular leather sofa bed by De Sede, one of many vintage finds from the '70s and '80s that give the sunny yellow space a retro-futurist feel, in a vibe we're calling High-Tech Country Kitchen.
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Born in Philly and Based in London, Andrew Pierce Scott Has a Knack for Turning Discards Into Drama

Metamorphosis is at the heart of what Andrew Pierce Scott does. The London-based American designer has a talent for taking leftovers and discards and turning them into sculptural metal furniture and objects or an evocative textile still-life. In Scott’s hands, recycled sheet steel becomes a lamp with a darkened yet almost iridescent finish; fabric scraps become a plate of oysters and glasses of wine that make you immediately wish for the pleasures of good company and a good meal.
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Week of January 8, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Tim Teven's excellent iridescent furniture, Meaghan Roddy's inspiring textile exhibition at Volume Gallery in Chicago, and did anyone else not know about Greta Garbo's ties to Swedish design?! 
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An Important New Residential Building in Philly — With Plans for Other Locales — Focuses On Community and the Arts

If you’re an artist who’s tired of schlepping to your studio, why not move into this new Philadelphia residential building — designed by architecture firm Leong Leong — rent one of the six studios available downstairs, and shorten your commute to a mere elevator ride? Called Ray, the building is part of a new initiative by Garage magazine founder Dasha Zhukova to, as the building's founders put it, "make art and design a part of everyday life."
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Tapestries and Textiles Give This Madrid Apartment a Modern Moorish Flavor

"Just renovated, but with no charm or personality” — judging from the time we've spent browsing Zillow, this is the precise way we'd describe so many homes that have hit the market in recent years. So it was for this 2,000-square-foot holiday apartment in Madrid, which was recently refreshed by local studio Casa Josephine for a young American-Kuwaiti businesswoman — who owns Ecru, a lifestyle brand based in Kuwait and India — and her family. Throughout the home, the designers have deftly blended a mix of influences, from Moorish to the Middle Eastern, to create a space filled with rich, contemporary textiles in colors that are unmistakably Spanish.
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At Three Design Hotels, A Sense of Place Rooted in the Local Environment

Hotels are often transitory, sometimes liminal, spaces. But three recently opened or newly renovated ones are rooted in their local environments, taking design cues from their surroundings and creating a distinctive atmosphere. You’re not just anywhere, or even in-between, you’re there: in Fukuoka City, Japan at Hotel Il Palazzo, in Tomales Bay, California at Lodge at Marconi (above), and at Otro Oaxaca, you’re firmly in the southern Mexican city.
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The Sight Unseen Art Kitchen, Plus Nine Other Incredible Rooms We Created For the SU x Lightology Country House

Upstate New York is one of our favorite places — close in proximity to one of the world's greatest cities, but so very far away in every other respect. In September, we rented a truck and drove up there, to a picturesque town outside Hudson, excited to do something we love doing almost as much as all of those other activities: styling a photo shoot inside a gorgeous home. For our second collaboration with the online lighting and furniture retailer Lightology, we traded the sleek minimalism and desert sun of Palm Springs for the charm of a (recently renovated) 1980s woodland escape — one whose blue floors, vaulted ceilings, and circular windows served as the perfect backdrop for the Sight Unseen x Lightology take on a country home.
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The 100 Best Things We Saw at Miami Art and Design Week 2023

The last time we physically attended Design Miami, believe it or not, was in 2014. We haven't ventured back since, in part because the party scene got so out of hand that it felt, in the end, like it was starting to eclipse the experience of actually seeing design and art. So we sat out the better part of the last decade, watching and collecting materials from the sidelines instead. This month was the first time we ventured back, and what we found was a completely transformed event: the glitz and fanfare were greatly diminished, while the work, particularly on the design side, seemed stronger than ever.
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Week of December 11, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Two outstanding installations in LA — a gingerbread replica of Flamingo Estate in collaboration with Mytheresa, and a public viewing of the famed 1987 amusement park Luna Luna with installations by the likes of Keith Haring and Salvador Dalí — plus the High Tech incense burner of our dreams.
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The 2023 American Design Hot List, Part V

This week we announced our 11th annual American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s editorial award for the names to know now in American design. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the last group of Hot List designers here (including Zoe Mowat, whose Isle light for Lambert & Fils is pictured above).
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