A Former Kenzo Design Director Finds Creative Freedom in a Pivot to Ceramics

When you’ve spent seven years as design director for a major Parisian fashion brand — in this case, Kenzo, the luxury house founded in 1970 by Japanese designer Kenzo Takada — where do you go from there? In Ben Mazey's case, the answer was: move back to the Antipodes, set up a ceramics studio, and fall in love with the creative process all over again. The New Zealand–born Mazey was on vacation in Australia when the pandemic hit; he took the opportunity to put down roots and began exploring clay as a material with total freedom. Out of this self-directed sabbatical came a highly expressive world of colorfully glazed pieces, and a unique visual language that’s not easy to define, in the best possible way.
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In Julie Richoz’s New Mirrors for Vitra, Color Theory and the Tiniest Details Work to Change the Way We See

When Julie Richoz, a Swiss-French designer in Paris, was envisioning her new Colour Frame Mirror for Vitra, she was drawn to elemental forms, inspired in part by wooden building blocks and toys, those staples of childhood. “I like the innocent gestures they refer to — the simple pleasure of playing with colors and shape,” she says. But even as her mirror references those basic objects, it also moves beyond them. There’s a fun lightness here, but there's also a high degree of sophistication, precision, and intent.
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Sunnei and cc-tapis Just Dropped the Ultimate Fashion x Design Collab, Where Carpets Become Clothing and Vice Versa

In addition to their playfully chic sartorial offerings, Sunnei has been on our radar for years thanks to their periodic overlaps with the design world, from a thoughtful ongoing object collection to the collaboration they presented during Salone in 2022 with our friends at Bloc Studios. And yet I was still surprised and delighted when, after I emailed the brand's PR team asking for a press kit for the brand's FW24 fashion show, it turned out the striking striped knitwear pieces that I'd immediately been drawn to were actually a collaboration with one of our other favorite Milanese brands, rug-maker cc-tapis.
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A Bronze Mirror Side Table, A Stained Mahogany Dining Table: Our Favorite Finds From CB2’s New Black in Design Collection and More

There are two things happening at CB2 right now that we find endlessly exciting. The first is their ongoing collaboration with the estates of design legends like Paul McCobb and Gianfranco Frattini; that's a McCobb task chair paired with a Frattini desk above, and can we talk about this striped outdoor sofa?! The other initiative is something that we mentioned in our Q&A with Evan Jerry of Studio Anansi last summer: the Black in Design collective, which brings together, under Jerry's curation, works by 13 Black designers. This spring welcomes Niger’s Atelier Masomi, founded by Mariam Issoufou Kamara, and Nifemi Marcus-Bello’s nmbello Studio in Lagos, Nigeria, to the fold, along with a slate of new pieces from the Collective's existing studios.
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Known Work — the Furniture Spinoff of Interiors Studio Parts and Labor Design — Just Launched an Immediately Iconic Debut Collection

Perhaps it was inevitable that Parts and Labor Design, a New York interiors studio noted for its atmospheric hospitality projects — including the subterranean Negroni bar Sotto, which we featured last fall — would launch a furniture design studio. After all, some of the more memorable details from their interiors have often been custom, in-house designed fixtures, which explore the tension between kinetic material and earthly texture. Called Known Work, their furniture arm debuted its first collection, Perceptions, at Zona Maco in Mexico City last month as part of Sculpted, a joint show with artist Jorge Yazpik, curated by Materia. The collection consists of nine pieces, each as alluring as you might expect.
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At the New Permanent Eames Archive in California, You Can Deep-Dive Into the Design Process of Charles and Ray Through 40,000 Artifacts

From the moment that Charles Eames, formerly an architect and teacher, and Ray Eames, formerly a fine artist, began a shared design practice in 1941, they cultivated an unusually meticulous creative process: in lieu of drawings and schematics, they worked out ideas and solved problems in real-time by creating endless physical models and prototypes. It's no wonder, then, that until the Eames Office closed after Ray's death in 1988, they were able to rack up more than 40,000 artifacts of their design process — and also no wonder that it took the family nearly 25 years to catalog them and finally make them available for public viewing all in one place, at the newly opened Eames Archive in Richmond, California.
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The Malin Opens a Moody, Textured, Pine-Accented Location in Nashville

Having been a member of the design-forward co-working space The Malin for nearly a year now, we could tell you a lot about their New York locations: how there's often a snack plate on offer (banana bread in the mornings, cookies in the afternoon); how there's always a row of lights running above the shared desks that were designed by two of Sight Unseen's longest-running collaborators; or which location has the best view (Williamsburg FTW). But Nashville, where the Malin recently opened its fourth and largest location — and first outside of New York — is something of an unknown quantity to us, having never before visited. We can't tell you which restaurants nearby have the best take-out, or what the artsy neighborhood it's in — called Wedgewood-Houston, or WeHo for short, because of course it is — is like. But part of what we love about The Malin is how they keep so many aesthetic elements the same, while switching things up just enough to make each outpost feel simultaneously familiar and fun.
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Technology and Craft Meet in Tino Seubert’s New Aluminum and Glass Works

London-based designer Tino Seubert has a way of juxtaposing the industrial and the natural to create a coherent whole — even, or perhaps especially, as these elements clash and contrast. He’s been working in this vein, mixing traditional craftwork with technological sleekness and using unexpected combinations of materials and forms, since 2014, when we first spotted him at London's Royal College of Art, lacquering galvanized steel to brilliant effect. Different iterations have followed, as have pieces like a side table of bent rattan and brushed aluminum and his Corrugation lights, which combine ash veneer and aluminum tubes into rippling yet static sine curves. With Ferric Glass and Cosmos, his two new collections exhibited at in BAM Practice in Berlin this past November, Seubert has pushed these juxtapositions even further.
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These Bauhausian, Artisan-Made Rugs Embody The Spirit of Argentina

When you think of Argentina, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Steak? Soccer? For many, it’s tango —the passionate partner dance that’s fast, fiery, and frankly far too complicated for my two left feet. Since Australian textile brand Pampa works with skilled artisans in remote parts of Argentina, as well as across Latin America, the company has chosen to dedicate its latest collection of rugs to the vibrant culture of its partners. So using bright red natural dyes to color the 100% wool fibers, they created the Tango collection as an homage to the spirit of Argentina, and specifically to its national dance.
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Sweden’s Oldest Rug Brand Finally Lands in Soho

Scandinavian design brands have been a favorite of American consumers since the mid-20th century — and of Sight Unseen since we could barely recognize something as "design." This month, one of our favorite of those brands — the Swedish rug company Kasthall, with whom we partnered for Sight Unseen Offsite in 2017 and created a capsule collection of rugs pre-pandemic — opened up a new permanent showroom in Soho, leaving behind the trade-friendly but consumer no-mans-land that is the D&D Building for the cobblestone streets and extensive foot traffic of downtown NYC. The company has created beautiful woven and hand-tufted rugs at its factory in Kinna, Sweden, since 1889, and its spacious new flagship on Howard Street will allow customers to touch and see the quality of those carpets IRL.
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Sarah Ellison Just Made Some of Her Most Iconic Designs Outdoor-Ready (It’s Summer in Australia, At Least)

Australian designer Sarah Ellison has a way of blending contrasting qualities into a beautifully integrated whole: refined yet comfy, chunky yet shapely, lowkey yet high polish, distinctive yet versatile. It’s a totally engaging vibe, one that seems made for lounging on a patio by a pool. It only makes sense that the studio would bring it outside, sustaining the warm, earthy neutrals they’re known for while translating some of their signature indoor pieces into weather-ready versions.
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