04.05.24

Sight Unseen Collection

In a Major Spring Update, Our Shoppable Collection Has New Outdoor Furniture, Classic Wood Dining Tables, Pendant Lights, and More

When we first started Sight Unseen, as two journalists excited to run our own magazine, we never dreamed we'd one day be able to say, "We sell designer fire tools" 😂 — and yet here we are, nearly 15 years later, with a shoppable furniture collection that encompasses those fire tools, plus bar carts, chic upholstered sofas, sculptural dining chairs, and more, all by some of the best talents we've featured in recent years. Today marks the launch of a huge spring update to the Sight Unseen Collection, which is our biggest expansion yet.

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.

02.27.24

Sight Unseen Collection

Punk and Playfulness Co-Exist in Nice Condo’s Monumental Furniture

Combining influences from Brutalism and Memphis with traditional wood craft, Nice Condo’s Chris Held and Sara Graham create monumental designs that — while often statement-making in some way, from the off-kilter color palette of a dining table to a cabinet with sawtooth hardware — are each intended to anchor a space and fit with a variety of interior styles. "Challenging the expectations of a client in formal ways quickly veers into sculpture, and I'm not interested in making sculpture," Held says. "I'm interested in making things people put in their homes and spill drinks on — live life on and around."

02.05.24

Sight Unseen Collection

It’s Not Often That a Designer Strikes Gold With Their First Big Product, But Studio Mignone Nailed It With Their Beloved Tavolo Morbido

When Studio Mignone’s Tavolo Morbido coffee table debuted in 2019, it became something of an instant, and soon much copied, classic. Tavolo Morbido is Italian for soft table, which gets at what Isabella Wood, one half of the Australian design duo, calls the “illusionistic softness” of the piece. But the name is also a little ironic: The original version was made of solid concrete pillars. It’s a relatively simple design, but a generative one that’s led to many iterations. It perfectly embodies a kind of maximal minimalism — clean, straightforward forms that contrast with the exuberance of their materials, colors, and surfaces — which is also what makes it work in so many different style spaces.

09.14.23

Sight Unseen Collection

Farrah Sit’s Work — Including Her Best-Selling Serpentine Sconce — Feels Both Effortlessly Current and Like a Prehistoric Artifact

Equilibrium and harmony: They’re difficult to achieve in life and maybe only slightly easier in design. But the search for balance, especially a desire for balance with nature, has lately been driving New York designer Farrah Sit — in a stylistic sense, but also in the way she produces the lighting and furniture for her eponymous line. Sit makes pieces that embody substantial and even existential concerns but wear their heaviness lightly; they’d look really great in your living room but they’re also meant to do more than that. “Part of what we’re trying to do as designers,” she says, “is create awareness between you and your environment.” Her aesthetic has largely hewn to neutral colors and natural materials and a dedication to elegant, mysterious forms — like Sit's best-selling Serpentine sconce, which debuted as part of Sight Unseen Offsite in 2020 and is now part of the Sight Unseen Collection. A ceramic wall sconce, Serpentine seems both effortlessly current and like an unearthed artifact — a relatively simple form that wordlessly conveys a whole world of feeling.

09.06.23

Sight Unseen Collection

Objects & Ideas Are Making Sculptural, Relational Objects in the Canadian Wilderness

Since we last checked in with Di Tao and Bob Dodd of Toronto’s Objects & Ideas, their furniture designs have moved increasingly towards functional sculpture. “We’ve always thought that every piece we make needs to have a strong character and a strong expression — that has never changed. But the way we express our ideas has evolved,” says Tao. The latest pieces are visually alluring objects that have a use, of course: The enveloping Beaver Tail chair offers a seat, the curving Ascend floor lamp provides illumination. But these works also — and just as importantly — are relational, changing the space that they, and you, occupy.

08.16.23

Sight Unseen Collection

These Three Studios are Redefining Cool Outdoor Furniture for a New Generation

Until the middle of last century, most outdoor furniture was serving Period Piece, “with stamped-out metal, bunches of flowers and leaves,” as the late designer Richard Schultz wrote in an essay reprinted in his 2019 book, Form Follows Technique: A Design Manifesto. But lately, we’ve been clocking a growing number of contemporary designers taking up the torch of inventive outdoor furniture design. It tracks alongside the growing collective awareness that nature is precious and that cultivating our feelings of belonging within nature is more important than ever. We caught up with three exciting talents on the scene.

07.13.23

Sight Unseen Collection

Only a Year Out From Graduating RISD, Alexis & Ginger Already Have Two Collections Under Their Belt

Was it fate that brought Alexis Tingey and Ginger Gordon together? The designers’ studio benches happened to be positioned next to each other during their furniture design Master's program at RISD, and after two years of sharing ideas and inspirations, the pair decided to officially join forces and set up a business together after graduating in 2022. A year later, Alexis & Ginger have moved to Brooklyn, launched two collections — one as part of our Sight Unseen Collection — and already have plans for so much more.

06.29.23

Sight Unseen Collection

This Design Duo Makes the Understated Furniture They Couldn’t Find Anywhere Else

“The pursuit of approachable everyday objects, put together using readily available materials and simple fabrication techniques,” is, it turns out, much harder than it sounds. For visual designer Masha Osorio and architect Christian Kotzamanis, the search was, in the end, futile. So they decided as the newly-formed Mock Studio to design and produce the simple, reductionist pieces they’d been looking for themselves.

05.23.23

Sight Unseen Collection

Two Days Left to See Our Sight Unseen Collection Show, Featuring Work by 23 Designers, in New York City

New York Design Week is in full swing, and while we'll be featuring a round-up of all of the excellent things we've seen later this week, today we're putting a spotlight on our own collection, which is on view in New York through Wednesday. The show features 23 designers and studios from our newly launched Sight Unseen Collection, for which we chose furniture, lighting, and objects from a stable of emerging and mid-career designers from around the world — all of which can be ordered directly through Sight Unseen.

05.19.23

Sight Unseen Collection

Ben Willett Joins the Sight Unseen Collection With Warm Wood Furniture That Channels 1970s and 80s Europe

You could say that moving into furniture design was something of a pandemic project for Ben Willett. At the start of the shutdown, he and his wife, chef and cookbook author Molly Baz, were on vacation in California and decided to stay there, eventually making a permanent move from a 700-square-foot New York City apartment to a house on the far east side of Los Angeles. With space came the need to fill it, along with a new West Coast perspective; the result is a collection still in the works but previewed in the images here, with pieces like the WS-Shorty credenza, a beauty in Douglas fir that debuted last night at our Sight Unseen Collection show in New York.

05.18.23

Sight Unseen Collection

Danny Kaplan Wants His New Furniture Collection, Made From Clay and Oak, to Appear Built By Nature

Danny Kaplan is a ceramicist, but he’s also a bit of a wizard, conjuring pieces that somehow manage to feel earthy and ancient — as if they’ve always existed — yet also exceedingly current and fresh. “A lot of my forms were born from looking at Etruscan ceramics and thinking about midcentury ones as well,” says the New York–based designer. “I love the idea of blending these things in an organic way where it feels like my pieces are almost built by nature,” their geometry and angles always slightly relaxed or imperfect. This especially applies to his latest collection, Brick, which is launching as part of our Sight Unseen Collection today, both online and in NYC through May 25 at Voltz Clarke Gallery on the Lower East Side.