11.30.21

Gift Guides

Gloopy Cake Plates and Striped Dog Beds: The 2021 Sight Unseen Gift Guide, Part II

We always look forward to putting together our annual gift guides, where we get to turn our brains off, scour our favorite stores for wishlist-worthy objects, and focus on sheer indulgence for a minute. What's our favorite candle this year, our favorite wine glass? Which books are we dying to have on our coffee table now, and in the case of Jill (whose guide is featured today), which which four-figure Gio Ponti vase? (Yep, that's how we're rolling this year.) We hope you can get some inspiration from these lists — particularly when it comes to supporting small businesses and talented independent makers.

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11.29.21

Gift Guides

Foot Vases and Artichoke Plates: The 2021 Sight Unseen Gift Guide, Part I

We always look forward to putting together our annual gift guides, where we get to turn our brains off, scour our favorite stores for wishlist-worthy objects, and focus on sheer indulgence for a minute. What's our favorite candle this year, our favorite wine glass? Which books are we dying to have on our coffee table now, and in the case of Monica (whose guide is featured today), which foot-shaped vase? We hope you can get some inspiration from these lists — particularly when it comes to supporting small businesses and talented independent makers.

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11.23.21

Sighted

This 20th-Century Vintage Design Store in London is Giving Peak Postmodern Maximalism

Vintage dealer M.Kardana opened a store on Hackney Road in London earlier this year, a physical space that allows owner Mario Kardana to take joy in the arranging of things. “What I love is curating all of these various pieces that could be 70 years apart and making them work together and complement each other,” he says. “I always make sure to mix styles and eras as this is what I find the most fun and interesting.” Downstairs, on the original wonky wooden floorboards, it’s maximalist and colorful whereas the newer upstairs room is more suited to Postmodern and clean-cut pieces.

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11.22.21

Interiors

Tour the Unbelievable 1930s Color-Blocked Fantasy Interior Hiding Inside a Simple Brick Building in Belgium

The modernist pioneer Jozef Schellekens was the public architect of Turnhout, a Belgian town halfway between Antwerp and Eindhoven, where he worked on schools and city halls. But his best-known and greatest work was his own house, a 1935 rectangular brick-and-glass structure whose simplicity belies the expressiveness of its interior, where Schellekens created a colorful world full of bespoke built-in furniture and other functional and decorative details.

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11.20.21

Saturday Selects

Week of November 15, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, taste the rainbow: a new, multicolored chandelier by Bec Brittain, an iridescent rock table by Anne Nowak, and a shop in LA that transitions from terracotta to Yves Klein Blue as you move through the space.

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11.18.21

Giveaway

Win a $2,000 Credit For This Zwirner-Backed Site That Lets You Buy High-End Art in Your Pajamas

By doing away with the inquiries-only model, the new click-to-buy online marketplace Platform makes acquiring high-end art easy and transparent — you don't even need to be a collector, much less a VIP, to shop it (interior designers take note!). Backed by David Zwirner gallery, it offers 100 original works each month, by artists ranging from Lily Stockman to Erin O'Keefe to Kalup Linzy, at prices ranging from $1,500 to $50,000 — and if you win this giveaway, you could have one of them hanging in your living room. Click through to enter!

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11.17.21

Shopping

23 On-Trend Menorahs for Throwing the Latke Party of Your Dreams

For years, Judaica was majorly overlooked in the design world. There was, like, the one cool menorah. But if you celebrate Hanukkah — like your faithful Sight Unseen editors do! — you're in luck. Suddenly there is a plethora of cool menorahs! Not to mention some lovely Shabbat candlesticks, seder plates, and even a mezuzah or two! Here are a 22 of our favorites just in time for the holiday.

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11.16.21

Sighted

Hallelujah — Our Favorite Scandinavian Art Objects Retailer is Finally Shipping to the States

This week, the Swedish design object retailer The Ode To launches shipping to the United States — and just in time. We can't think of a better place to shop for gifts for people who are notoriously hard to shop for. Where else can you find a vase shaped like a white go-go boot, a sculpture meant to look like a watermelon, or a deflated mirror decorated with a truly unhinged smiley face?

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11.15.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

13 of Our Favorite New Design Studios From Edit Napoli

Late last month, Edit Napoli, the independent fair that brings together designers, artisans and small-scale producers, returned to the center of Naples for the third year. More than 80 exhibitors were in attendance, at both the main fair house in the 13th-century cloister Complesso San Domenico Maggiore, as well as scattered across the city; we were lucky enough to travel down to Naples for the event, so here, in no particular order, are our 13 favorite projects from the fair.

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11.14.21

Saturday Selects

Week of November 8, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: two blockbuster exhibitions in Athens by Philippe Malouin and Sigve Knutson, the first Boy Smells store in LA, and the shelving unit of our dreams (above) by Barbora Žilinskaité.

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11.11.21

Shopping

Yes, Watches and Clocks Are Still a Thing — Here Are 50 of Our Favorite Designs, Sourced on eBay

By all reasonable logic, watches and clocks should have gone the way of the fax machine, or the VCR. Yet luxury watch sales are at an all-time high, and designers continue to release new wall and table clocks as if the past 20 years never happened. We love coming across amazing watches and clocks when we're shopping, especially for vintage, so we decided to devote a post to cataloguing our favorite examples, sourced from one of our favorite shopping platforms, eBay — which happens to be ground zero for watch lovers.

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11.10.21

Up and Coming

This Belgian Designer’s Color-Blocked Kitchens Channel the De Stijl Movement

“My first study was the preservation of paintings,” Dries Otten tells us over the phone from his home in Antwerp, Belgium. “But I decided it was too boring — your job is only appreciated when it's invisible!” Since hanging up his white gloves, though, Otten’s work has been impossible to ignore — bright, color-blocked interiors and furniture that set him apart from the neutral-obsessed minimalists that dominate contemporary Belgian design.

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