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."
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A Deft Mix of Materials Earned This Swedish Studio Sight Unseen’s Best in Show Award at Greenhouse, the Exhibition for Emerging Design at Stockholm’s Furniture Fair

Adrian Bursell and Siri Svedborg were students at Konstfack back in 2018 when they made the tables that would become the initial studies for their Burn & Turn collection, which debuted at the Stockholm Furniture Fair earlier this month, and which earned them Sight Unseen's Best in Show award at Greenhouse, the fair's up-and-coming designer showcase. At the time, they were studying the Arts & Crafts movement in a degree program for Interior Architecture and Furniture Design, and they agreed to explore a table that might reflect the movement's values — one that could be functional yet decorative, using a kind of stripped-down ornamentalism inspired by the Swedish folk tradition.
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Born in Philly and Based in London, Andrew Pierce Scott Has a Knack for Turning Discards Into Drama

Metamorphosis is at the heart of what Andrew Pierce Scott does. The London-based American designer has a talent for taking leftovers and discards and turning them into sculptural metal furniture and objects or an evocative textile still-life. In Scott’s hands, recycled sheet steel becomes a lamp with a darkened yet almost iridescent finish; fabric scraps become a plate of oysters and glasses of wine that make you immediately wish for the pleasures of good company and a good meal.
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Frederik Fialin on His New Tubular Metal Collection: “We All Like to be Comfortable, But Other Things Are Often More Important to Me”

Danish designer Frederik Fialin understands the idea that you have to know the rules before you can break them. He’s certain something is working not only when it’s functional and beautiful, but when it makes him laugh. It’s a way of taking the work seriously, without taking yourself too seriously, and it may have something to do with how Fialin got started, with a classic cabinetry apprenticeship. “I didn’t particularly enjoy it at the time, but now I see why everything has to be done in a certain way. I consider this, now, to be possibly the greatest foundation of my professional life that I could ever have asked for — especially because I can use, remix, and warp this never-ending chase for perfection that dominates the environment. There’s reason in the madness.”
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This Graphic Designer–Turned–Cabinetmaker’s Dyed-Wood Furniture is, Well, To Die For

Paris-based designer Jonathan Cohen has been working in wood for only a couple of years. Initially trained as a graphic designer, his eye for flat compositions naturally transferred into the three-dimensional world of furniture, with his creations quickly catching the eye of top architects and designers and local galleries. “When you have knowledge of good proportion, shape, and balance, you can design a letter or furniture,” Cohen says. “For me, it’s almost the same.” What lends the designer's work a certain je ne sais quoi, however, is the unique dye treatment he uses, applied in various techniques to bring out the grain and texture of the wood — forming patterns reminiscent of those created by Memphis artist Nathalie du Pasquier. 
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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.
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Bowen Liu Was Up to the Challenge of Making Furniture in Cast Glass

Without being towering, there’s a heft and monumentality to the cast glass Helle collection by New York designer Bowen Liu. The presence of these pieces is anchoring, a solidity that’s offset by their translucency. Made by glass workers in Brooklyn, the collection includes bookends, a coffee table, floor lamp, mirror, and side table, which debuted at New York Design Week in May. While the mirror and lamp feature white oak details, the coffee and side tables and bookends are made entirely of glass. If you don’t see a lot of cast glass furniture at scale, it's because it demands expertise, skill, and time to produce. But Liu was up for the challenge.
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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. 
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Caroline Chao Uses Glass, Mirror, Lucite, and Light Itself to Create Optical Illusions in Her Furniture Debut

The nature of furniture is participatory — chairs invite us to sit, tables to gather round — but this holds especially true for the work of New York–based designer Caroline Chao. Her pieces engage our powers of interaction and perception — perhaps because in addition to the glass and Lucite she uses, light itself is a kind of material for her. We recently spoke with her about interiors vs furniture, how to re-contextualize ordinary materials, and her work towards changing the concept of a “good view.”
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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.
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Frangere stained glass lighting

Each Item in This Stained Glass Lighting Collection is Like a Piece of Jewelry for Your Home

Carina Webb’s parents built the house she grew up in close to the sea in a small suburb of Auckland, New Zealand. Her dad, an engineer, believed that every home should have a small workshop in which to make things, so naturally the house was filled with handmade objects alongside those collected or inherited over the years. “From a young age I was taught the value of handmade, quality craftsmanship, and the sentimentality of objects,” she says. These are the values on which she bases her Auckland design studio Frangere, whose debut Fun Guy collection we fell in love with earlier this year — and which we'll be launching a piece of at our Sight Unseen Collection show this Thursday in New York.
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Thank This Couple For Bringing a Dose of Color to Berlin’s Interiors

Progressing from designing furniture for children to interiors for the whole family could easily result in spaces that were kitschy or too twee. But not in the hands of Berlin studio Jäll & Tofta, whose projects carry the joy and spirit of childhood whimsy, yet with a sophisticated, well-considered maturity. If you ever needed proof that colorful can be chic (which we didn’t, obviously), this is it.
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