03.04.25

Fair Report

A Wonderfully Cohesive Debut From Tobias Berg, Sight Unseen’s Best in Show Winner at Greenhouse, the Stockholm Showcase for Emerging Design

At the Stockholm Furniture Fair earlier this winter, we found the thing we're always searching for at these things: a designer whose work is so sophisticated and ready for the market that they're bound to be in the conversation for years to come. (A booth full of bangers, if you will.) And so our Best in Show at Greenhouse award this year went to Tobias Berg, a Norwegian designer with one of the most assured debuts we've seen in years.

02.28.25

Up and Coming

Each Project By This International Interiors Studio is More Than “Nice” — It’s a Self-Contained Jewel

Whoever said “nice guys finish last” clearly never met designers Sacha Leong and Simone McEwan. Since they started their London-based studio, Nice Projects, five years ago, the duo has completed a string of hospitality interiors that each has a distinctly expressive identity rooted in context, a strong focus on natural materials and local craft, and a touch of magic that has helped the dining spots soar in popularity.

02.21.25

Fair Report

25 Up-and-Coming Talents We Scouted at Greenhouse, Stockholm’s Showcase for Emerging Design

In my general round-up of the Stockholm Furniture Fair last week, I noted how ably Scandinavians seem to grapple with the realities of our culture of waste. Nowhere at the fair is this more evident than at Greenhouse, the emerging design section that mixes independent designer showcases with group installations by design schools and curated projects.

02.19.25

Up and Coming

This Parisian Designer’s Furniture Looks Like it Was Left Out in the Rain

Following a storm, there’s a moment when surfaces are left covered with beautiful, randomly dispersed droplets that glisten until they evaporate. In his new series — appropriately titled After the Rain —Parisian designer Quentin Vuong has been able to recreate this effect with startling accuracy across a series of blackened oak furniture pieces, upon which he painstakingly hand-applies black epoxy resin. Currently on show at Galerie Gastou, the series is the latest example of Vuong’s delicate approach to imbuing his works with intriguing details that require significant time and focus to achieve.

01.22.25

Up and Coming

This Self-Taught Designer’s Dark Wood Furniture is Imbued with Spirituality

It wasn’t until the pandemic that South American designer Rafael Triboli found his calling. Triboli grew up in Porto Alegre, in the south of Brazil, and studied communications at a university there. He later moved to São Paulo and worked as an art director and scenography designer. But during lockdown, which forced him back home for a period, he looked inward and delved into his own artistic practice: signing up for free courses; discovering influences in artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, and Eileen Gray; and, eventually, experimenting in a friend’s wood shop. With the time and opportunity to research, learn, and experiment in the world of art and design, the Brazilian creative quickly learned that his favorite woods to work with are the darker, harder varieties — such as mahogany, imbuia, and ipe — that are native to Brazil. He uses these to produce simple seats, benches, daybeds, dressers, trunks and tables that wouldn’t look out of place in a friary – albeit a very stylish one.

12.10.24

Interiors

A Teal and Tobacco Study, a Pistachio Bedroom — David Lucido’s Sophisticated Sense of Color Makes Him One of our Favorite Interior Designers to Watch

David Lucido has a gift for combining proportion, shape, and color in ways that are sophisticated and refined but not at all stuffy. His interiors, whether residential, commercial, or in hospitality, are never overdone but also never boring; they’re just right. It’s a challenge he makes look easy, but effortlessness almost always requires a lot of effort. Lucido, who currently splits his time between Palm Beach and New York City, pulls it off by balancing a strong work ethic and meticulous attention to detail with a lack of personal pretension. “I’m not a very serious person,” he says. “It’s not surgery, so why not be a little more expressive with things?"

12.02.24

Up and Coming

Jorge Kilzi Wants You to Make Friends With His Furniture

Many designers talk about imbuing their work with character, whether that means giving them anthropomorphic features, unusual shapes, or textures that reveal the hand of their maker. But Jorge Kilzi takes this concept a step further: His furniture and lighting designs really do resemble animate beings. It’s not that Kilzi’s designs are overtly human; it’s that the forms he’s achieved somehow conjure movement, emotional expression, and personal connection all at once, as though they could have been alive and talking while you were out of the room, then froze just before you entered — a kind of domestic Toy Story.

11.14.24

Up and Coming

The Green Goblin, Norwegian Black Metal, SpongeBob: Up-and-Coming Designer Clay Brown’s References Run the Gamut

Clay Brown’s work is shot through with an imaginative sense of play that is, quite simply, fun — but that’s not all it is. Somehow his pieces come off as minimal and spare yet highly referential and evocative, like his resin Island lamps, which call to mind cake domes; the Formica and birch I’m Ready cabinet, which could be a “mini-bar or maybe a wardrobe for a toddler;” and the jagged yet precise aluminum 1234567 bookcase, which is sharp but not at all forbidding. His Stave cabinet, part of the Sight Unseen collection, rises to a steep peak in darkly moody colors but it’s also… friendly. With its oxblood Thumbprint pull by Sam Stewart — with whom Brown has worked on several projects — it’s like a classic wooden toy scaled up to human proportions.

10.16.24

Sight Unseen Collection

This California Designer’s Steely Minimalism Was Inspired by Japanese Architecture and the Light & Space Movement

It's a common conundrum for creatives: knowing exactly what you want for your own space, but, more often than not, finding it does not exist. California-based designer Orlando Pippig began producing furniture for this very reason, without any formal training, to create a home filled with pieces he actually loved. Eight years later, something of an accidental furniture designer, he’s amassed a collection of striking minimalist designs — several of which we sell through our own Sight Unseen Collection — and he continues to expand his range of “usable sculptures” through experiments with materials, scale, and proportion.

09.25.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

This Norwegian Studio Devised Its Own Machinery to Make These Joyful, Rainbow-Colored Stools

We learned something new today, so perhaps you will, too: The acronym for the colors of the rainbow in Norwegian is ROGGBIF, which Oslo-based Studio Sløyd has used to title its new collection of stools, as multi-colored and joyful as you’d expect from such a moniker. Comprising 24 different playful shapes, each is designed to explore applications of a newly created dyed wood technique, which founders Herman Ødegaard, Mikkel Jøraandstad, and Tim Knutsen — who decided to work together as students during a late-night karaoke session (extremely relatable) — have been developing over the past couple of years. “Rather than starting with a shape or form, we turned our usual process on its head for this project, experimenting our way to a new material,” says the trio.

09.18.24

Up and Coming

This Swedish Designer Uses a Centuries-Old Technique to Create Mural-Like Landscapes and Domestic Scenes in Wood

In the hands of Swedish designer Carl Martinson, the centuries-old inlay technique of wood intarsia is made modern with compositions that are representational — quiet domestic scenes or landscapes — abstract, or somewhere in between. What runs throughout Martinson’s kitchen cupboards, cabinets, tables, wall works, and sculptural pieces is the soothing palette of wood tones and a material richness and warmth.

09.12.24

Up and Coming

A Speaker That Looks Like a Sculpture, and So Much More, From a New Australian Design Talent

There’s a raw simplicity to Australian designer Tom Fereday’s work that comes from applying simple gestures to great effect. The majority of his pieces are sculpted or constructed from a single material, and have one, carefully considered defining feature. Take his Cor light, a pillar of travertine with fileted corners, from which a curved slice is pared away to reveal a hollow core and a light source that glows from within. Or his Cove Lounge, a chair with a slender metal frame that — rather than wrapping around the backrest — elegantly disappears into the curved panel on one side and reemerges on the other. “I try to add innovation in the pieces from a perspective where we might look, for example, at articulating engineering details with natural materials,” Fereday says. This approach to simplified and sophisticated contemporary form-making is proving to be a hit with design lovers worldwide.