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01.14.23

Saturday Selects

Week of January 9, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a moody Swiss ski chalet, a tile-clad workspace in Barcelona, and a preview of three great projects from next week's Maison & Objet fair in Paris. 
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01.12.23

Sighted

Saba’s New Collection, Photographed in a Greenery-Filled Italian Villa, Leans on its Imperfect Influences

Wabi-sabi, a centuries-old Japanese aesthetic philosophy, is one of those concepts that’s difficult to distill and translate, but also: you know the feeling when you have it. Based in Zen Buddhism, it involves an awareness of the beauty in imperfection and impermanence and an acceptance of that — an embrace, even. While the new Wabi bed from Italian furniture brand Saba is meant to last, there is something about it that evokes the wabi-sabi ethos. Conceived of by Belgian designer Alain Gilles, it combines shapes and proportions that don’t exactly go together at first glance ­— except that they do, forming a piece that’s stylish but not uptight.
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01.11.23

Travel

Four New Design Hotels With Interiors to Melt Your Winter Blues

Anyone else get back from their end-of-year break and immediately start thinking about their next vacation? We’re only a week into 2023 and already mapping out trips for the rest of the year. To help plan yours, or simply provide a moment of mental escape from the January gloom, floods, and other bizarre happenings, here are some of our favorite new, gorgeously designed hotels that offer everything from a beach getaway in Oaxaca, to a romantic weekend in Paris, to total relaxation in the Azores.
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01.10.23

Sight Unseen Presents

For West Elm’s Design Challenge, We Show You How to Personalize Your Living Room With Objects, Sight Unseen-Style

When West Elm approached us last fall to participate in their ongoing Design Challenge series — in which subjects start with a blank canvas and create a room entirely from scratch — we immediately said yes. After all, what better way to show people how to live with objects than to demonstrate it ourselves? The project would bring to life some of the big ideas from our recently published book, and it would give us the opportunity to flex our design muscles, which we don't always get the chance to do. The result is a four-minute video that delves into our philosophy of objects, and how they can bring a major dose of personality to any interior.
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01.07.23

Saturday Selects

Week of January 2, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a gorgeous Helsinki apartment renovation by the queen of minimalism, Katie Lockhart; a portraiture exhibition with no faces; and a showroom whose ethos is "cave-meets-club."
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01.05.23

How to Live With Objects

Mark Grattan’s Mexico City Apartment Oozes a Kind of Sensual Charm

Mark Grattan’s work is moody, smoky, sensual, and chic — all qualities that, a few years back, earned him first prize on the erstwhile TV show Ellen’s Next Great Designer (which also featured longtime SU friend Arielle Assouline-Lichten). Grattan's Mexico City apartment, on the fourth floor of a building by famed architect Luis Barragán — which we photographed for How to Live With Objects but which he has since left for New York City — had a similar vibe, filled with black leather, velvet, wall-to-wall carpeting, and sleek, low pieces designed by Grattan himself.
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01.04.23

Interiors

Note Design Studio Returns a Stockholm Apartment to Its Former Glory (With a Contemporary Twist)

On today’s episode of “Why don’t we live here?!”: a 1920s Stockholm apartment reimagined by locally-based Note Design Studio. Situated in a splendorous historic building, the interior had sadly been stripped of its original character and details. But since the 3700 square feet of floor plan required a full functional rethink, everything from the flooring patterns, ceiling stucco profiles, radiator covers, and door and window frames were fair game to be restored or rethought.
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12.17.22

Saturday Selects

Week of December 12, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Our favorite new London shopping destination, a chic eatery in Melbourne, and a New Zealand–born collection of stained glass lights that has us praying they'll ship to America.
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12.16.22

At Home With

In Her Object-Filled Mexico City Home, Su Wu Surrounds Herself With Gifts, Mexican Crafts, and Contemporary Design

Even though Su Wu's home has since become, in our circles, one of the most well-known stops on the Mexico City circuit of cool, it felt inevitable that we should include it in our book, How to Live With Objects — both to commemorate our long professional relationship, and to acknowledge that when you're talking about the beauty and power of objects, hers is a voice that deserves to be part of the conversation. Wu is a staunch champion of the local Mexican design scene, using her home — which she shares with her husband, the artist Alma Allen, and their two children — as a place to co-curate exhibitions and showcase her ever-growing collection of gifts, Mexican crafts, and contemporary art and design.
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12.15.22

Q+A

Sarah Sherman Samuel Moved to “Furniture City” and — Lo and Behold — Self-Produced a Furniture Collection

Moving back to Michigan from Los Angeles four years ago might’ve been the best decision Sarah Sherman Samuel ever made. As well as offering her family heaps more room, the in-demand interior designer — who has shot to fame over the last few years with high-profile interiors for the likes of Mandy Moore, Vanessa Carlton, and Garance Doré — has been able to set up a new office and showroom in Grand Rapids, nicknamed Furniture City for the amount of manufacturers based there, and reconnect with her childhood nostalgia of exploring the woods and lake shore. Returning to this landscape was also the driving force behind the SSS Atelier collection, the first that her studio has both designed and produced in-house, now that she has the space and resources to do so.
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12.14.22

Q+A

Sophie Lou Jacobsen Gets Emotional About Objects

For Brooklyn-based designer Sophie Lou Jacobsen, objects have a life of their own. “I firmly believe that objects have their own energy, and that what they bring to your environment and daily experience is almost spiritual,” she says. “I’m not religious by any means, but I do believe in the interconnectedness of our world, and that there should be this sort of mutual relationship between us and our things — one of respect, care, and thoughtfulness. I think in my mind I live in a very Beauty and the Beast-like world!” It's not just in her mind, though — we can easily see the likes of Mrs. Potts interacting with Jacobsen’s curving, almost animate vases, intricate stainless steel candleholders, and draping glass lamps.
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12.13.22

Sighted

Ben Wolf Noam’s Mushroom Menorahs Were Inspired By the Intersection of Judaism and Psychedelia

Encapsulated in a school of thought called the Kabbalah, the Jewish belief in biblical mysticism isn't shared by everyone, but its theories can be compelling — and in the case of L.A. artist Ben Wolf Noam, inspiring, too. He recently launched a collection of one-of-a-kind ceramic mushroom menorahs with The Future Perfect that reference the intersection of Judaism and psychedelia, not to mention making for wildly colorful centerpieces for your holiday table. We recently chatted with him about the series and its origins.
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