Week of April 22, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: A design hotel to support our new Italian coastal lifestyle, an actually perfect mustard-velvet sofa, and a DIY company that hopes to encourage Enzo Mari–esque self-production — not to mention critical thought about design, consumption, and production.
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One of Our Milan Week Favorites? An Adult Playground Made From Industrial Flooring

We're now deep in the age of the Instagram-friendly immersive installation, which was especially evident at this year's Milan furniture fair, where we couldn't help but laugh at how many brands were touting some sort of earnestly dramatic light-based experience. And yet, for materials brands, there really is no better way to inspire visitors — and no one did that better last month than Tarkett, who with Note Design Studio installed a towering forest of playful geometric columns inside one of Milan's most beautiful buildings, the 150-year-old Circolo Filologico Milanese.
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This Design Museum Turns Real Swedish Homes Into Museums for a Day

The Swedish Design Museum is not your typical museum — it has no permanent collection, nor does it have a cool Modernist structure in which to house its contents. It's a virtual museum whose goal is to bring Swedish design to the many — the way accessible Swedish design was always meant to be. Now, however — in a slight twist — the Swedish Design Museum is offering visitors the rare opportunity to peep inside real Swedish homes, to witness IRL design as it was meant to be.
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Studiopepe Went Full Mystic For Milan Design Week

A few weeks ago, while other brands and design studios were barraging our inboxes with press releases and preview images pre-Salone, Studiopepe — the Milan-based interiors duo of Arianna Lelli Mami and Chiara Di Pinto — kept relatively mum, announcing only that they would be investigating "the interconnection between matter and the archetypal power of symbols" in a former gold factory in Porta Venezia. In other words: design week catnip.
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Note Design Studio Stockholm Furniture Fair

The Coolest Booth in Stockholm Was for a Vinyl Flooring Company

While it's not exactly news that formerly uncool materials can be made to look beautiful and sophisticated, it's perhaps never been done as well or on as large a scale as it was this week at the Stockholm Furniture Fair, in a booth Note Design Studio created for the French flooring company Tarkett. Called the Lookout, the booth was made from a mix of wood, textiles, linoleum and a vinyl flooring material called iQ Megalit; the trick was in employing Note's frequent use of geometry and a tight, tonal color palette of rust, coral, apricot, moss green, and mint.
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Win $1,870 In Prizes from Need Supply, Saturdays, and More In Our Spring Style Giveaway

We've done a few giveaways over the years, but this could be our coolest one yet — the winner gets a shopping spree from some of the biggest names in fashion and beauty. Enter our Spring Style giveaway by April 29, and you could score more than $1,800 worth of housewares, sunglasses, lamps, surf gear, smoking accessories, and skincare products from Need Supply, Illesteva, Herbivore, Saturdays NYC, Tetra, and our very own Sight Unseen Shop.
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Week of April 15, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: A sneak preview of an all-star Spanish design exhibition coming to New York next month, the hard-to-get pastel-colored glassware we're pining for, and a jaw-dropping new collaboration between a Belgian fashion designer and architect, pictured above.
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The Best of Milan Design Week, Part V

Yesterday and today we’re sharing the best of the rest, including a Josef Hoffman-esque gridded wood series by Cara/Davide, an Anton Alvarez presentation inside a 14th-century church, a takeover of a classic Milanese patisserie by Cristina Celestino, and Pretziada's latest works pairing designers and Sardinian workshops.
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The Best of Milan Design Week 2019, Part IV

Today and tomorrow we’re sharing the best of the rest, including Nilufar Depot's inflatable bubbles by Space Caviar, Cristina Celestino whirligig-inspired lights, up-and-coming studio Kabinet's assured and tortoiseshell–filled debut, and Matthew Day Jackson's laminate, lunar-inspired table and seating for Made By Choice.
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The Best of Milan Design Week 2019, Part III — Salone del Mobile

Today we're sharing the best launches from Salone del Mobile, the 2.5 million-square-foot fairgrounds outside the city, where some of our favorites included the Bouroullecs' découpaged ceramic vases for Vitra, Stefan Diez's purple modular recyclable polypropylene sofa for Magis, and Michael Anastassiades's expressive track lighting system for Flos — possibly the first and only time we'll wax poetic about track lighting on this site.
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The Best of Milan Design Week 2019, Part II — Salone Satellite

We're devoting all of our coverage this week to the 2019 Milan furniture fair, from the best things we saw around town, to the best of this year's Euroluce show, to the up-and-coming designers and new brands we discovered along the way. Today we're sharing our 13 favorite collections at Salone Satellite, the section of the Salone del Mobile fairgrounds devoted to emerging talents — which is where we discovered many a Sight Unseen veteran back in the day, from Sebastian Herkner to Ana Kras.
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The Best of Milan Design Week 2019, Part I

Each year in Milan brings something truly wonderful to behold, whether it's furniture hoisted into inflatable bubbles (Nilufar Depot), a newly open-to-the-public Piero Portaluppi interior (Massimo de Carlo Gallery), or the coolest amoeba-shaped marble tables we've ever seen (by Studio Binocle, which we're featuring here today). We'll be devoting our whole week to coverage from the fair so stay tuned, and click through for the first of our favorites.
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