04.25.24

Fair Report

An Interview With Formafantasma, Whose Queer-Coded, Modernism-Inspired Solo Show Was the Best Thing We Saw at This Year’s Milan Fair

In the whirlwind of this year’s Salone, Formafantasma’s perfect solo show, La Casa Dentro — presented on the quiet second floor of the Fondazione ICA Milano — made us stop and catch our breath. La Casa Dentro (meaning The Home Within) is as much a collection of furniture and lighting as it is a meditation on design, memory, the familiar, and the uncanny. It conjures a dream state where the clinical feel of a medical office gives way to the comforts of an old family home (if your grandparents were the kind with an eye for stylish detail). Bent tubular metal forms are combined with embroideries and embellishments painted on wood, floral patterns, and silky decorative fabric. It's work that takes certain signifiers of the past and reanimates them in a new moment. Attempting to “queer the codes of Modernist design,” as the designers put it, the collection is as conceptually charged as it is materially stunning, and its theoretical considerations can’t be unraveled from personal and emotional ones.

03.28.24

Q+A

Architectural and Archetypal, Kalon Pieces Are Defined By Their Thoughtful Details

Since 2007, Michaele Simmering and Johannes Pauwen have been producing work that is as poetic as it is practical through their Los Angeles studio, Kalon. The studio borrows its name from an Ancient Greek concept of ideal beauty that comprises both physical and moral aspects. It’s a high bar to set. In their practice, Simmering and Pauwen take a principled approach that seriously considers the environmental and social impact of what they do; “sustainability” has become an overused word, but for Kalon, it’s a true ethos, guiding not only their production process — in terms of the materials and labor involved — but also how their designs exist in the world. To celebrate Kalon joining the Sight Unseen Collection, we checked in to get a sense of what’s changed — and what hasn’t — since we last touched base.

02.13.24

Q+A

Artist Chidy Wayne on How Doubt and Uncertainty Guide His Hand

Barcelona-based artist Chidy Wayne boasts an assured hand, honed from years of sketching as a former fashion designer and from working for over a decade as an illustrator commissioned by big brands like Nike and Kinfolk. But his gestural paintings often start from a place of naïveté: “I close my eyes and pretend I can’t draw to truly connect with myself,” he admits.

12.06.23

Q+A

Marjan van Aubel on Her Work At the Intersection of Design and Solar Energy — and Her Artful New Collab With Lexus

Marjan van Aubel calls herself a “solar designer,” and since she graduated from the RCA in 2012, she’s devoted her career to finding ways of making solar power more beautiful and accessible, using projects like solar-cell window hangings and rainbow-gradient solar roofs to inspire people to look at and use the technology in a new way. This week, she’s applying the same approach to the automotive realm, with a colorful interactive installation for Lexus in Miami that proves design can help speed us toward the future of environmentally conscious driving. We took the opportunity to sit down with van Aubel and learn more about the project, how she fell in love with solar energy, and why its future shouldn’t be dominated by men in blue suits.

09.21.23

Q+A

Sabine Marcelis on Her Newest Collaboration, Her Material Research, and Her Complicated Feelings About the Color Blue

Sabine Marcelis has become a design breakout star, her minimal-yet-colorful work in glass and resin having penetrated the worlds of architecture, fashion, music, and TikTok. Now she’s conquered yet another realm of wider culture — beauty — through a major collaboration with the Swiss skincare brand La Prairie, with whom she’s just launched a vanity tray that marries her signature use of resin with the brand’s signature shade of cobalt. We decided it was a good moment to catch up with Marcelis, and talk to her not only about this project, but also about what materials she’s been experimenting with lately, how she feels in the wake of all the social media hype, and why she — cobalt excluded, of course — doesn’t actually like the color blue.

09.20.23

Q+A

It’s Colin King’s Tastefully Curated, Beige-Hued, Branch-Forward World. We’re Just Living In It.

If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed Colin King's slow creep towards ubiquity over the last five years. First came the styling credits for unabashedly chic interiors, like Giancarlo Valle's New York apartment in Architectural Digest, or any number of the exactingly produced homes for Athena Calderone's, Live Beautiful. Then came the brand work — styling for the likes of Anthropologie, Hay, and B&B Italia — and the collabs: a collection of small goods for the Danish brand Audo, a rug series for Beni, and a collection for West Elm, among others. But things really began to ramp up when King's book, Arranging Things — a lavishly illustrated how-to guide to his own particular style — announced its 2023 release. By all accounts, a book by a stylist — normally a solidly behind-the-scenes job — is somewhat of a novelty. While those on the inside may be well-versed in the who’s who of creatives realizing magazine editorials and brand campaigns, rarely does someone break out and make themselves known in the mainstream. But King has achieved just that.

08.04.23

Q+A

Studio Anansi’s Latest Collaboration with CB2 Materializes the Unlimited Possibility of Black Futures

Evan Jerry was, in his own words, on a quest to explore the relationship between contemporary design and Black culture when he founded Studio Anansi in 2018. Now five years into the artist’s practice, he has launched the Black in Design Collective, a collection of works curated in partnership with and for sale at CB2 that brings together 10 Black artists from Los Angeles to Lagos, including Jerry himself. The range of pieces respond to Studio Anansi’s initial question around the project: How do you see the future of design if Blackness was included? The result makes tangible the heterogeneity of Black culture — spanning centuries, materials, objects, and themes.

08.01.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

Each Piece in Kim Mupangilai’s Debut Furniture Collection is a Meditation on Cross-Cultural Identity

Each of the pieces in Kim Mupangilaï’s debut furniture collection, on view in a solo exhibition called HUE/I/AM – HUE/AM/I through August 20 at Superhouse Vitrine, is comprised of numerous, sometimes unexpected aspects that all cohere. Without being heavy-handed, and as the name of the show implies, the collection embodies the ways we might understand and conceive of our own identities.

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.

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.

10.07.22

Q+A

Fred Rigby Draws Upon the English Landscape for His New Furniture and Homewares

In Fred Rigby’s mind, clouds can be sofas, raindrops in a puddle become a collection of coffee and side tables, and pylon conductors translate into stackable bowls. Growing up in the English countryside, with not much to do but play in the fields and make things in the garage, the London-based designer now draws inspiration from the natural world, and the industrial objects set within it, to create furniture and homeware that’s honest, tactile, and intended to have conversations with its users.

08.01.22

Q+A

This Brooklyn Designer is Trying to Create a Zero-Waste Studio

Coming from an art background, Nathaniel Wojtalik had no interest in creating furniture that was purely functional and offered no meaning behind it. But through Cultivation Objects, the Brooklyn studio he founded during the pandemic, Wojtalik has been able to find a way to craft intentional narratives by virtue of concept and technique to end up with designs that are beautiful and intriguing, yet still maintain a utilitarian quality.