09.19.24

Sighted

Step Into the World of a Beloved Australian Furniture Brand at Its New Space in Sydney

There’s no denying that Instagram has been a source of inspiration and connection — especially in the design world — but it’s also impossible to escape the flattening quality of the social media scroll. Australia’s Ellison Studios, whose furniture takes the best of the '70s and makes it refreshingly modern, had long been envisioning a move, or an extension, from the digital realm to a physical one, but a traditional showroom didn’t feel quite right. So when an apartment in an iconic Sydney landmark became available, an idea took shape: The Rental. For the next six months, the studio is bringing their atmospheric point of view and the imaginative world-building of a mood board to life, creating a tangible, tactile space you can step into and even inhabit for a time.

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.

09.14.24

Saturday Selects

Week of September 9, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an exhibition that delves into grotto life, tapestries that depict architectural deterioration, and a woven rug collection photographed at a folk-influenced farmhouse in Sweden.

09.13.24

Fair Report

Everything We Loved at Collectible’s First Design Fair in New York City

Last Sunday afternoon, as the first NYC edition of the Brussels-based contemporary design fair Collectible was just about to wrap, one of the fair directors paused in front of our booth and asked me how I thought the show had gone. “There are designers here we’ve never heard of,” I marveled, intending it as high praise indeed: For a European fair to show up on New York’s doorstep and show us something new (especially a fair planned in less than four months), well, I’d call that a success. Collectible, which took place at the burgeoning FiDi creative hub WSA, managed to both assemble a cornucopia of new ideas and draw a crowd, all from across the Atlantic. We brought our own dose of novelty to the show, with a booth that — while similar to our NY Design Week exhibition — showcased a new batch of 11 cabinets by 11 different design studios, all punctuated by hardware from my recently launched showroom, Petra.

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.

12.07.21

American Design Hot List

The 2021 American Design Hot List, Part II

This week we announced our 9th annual American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s editorial award for the names to know now in American design. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the second group of Hot List designers here: Ellen Pong, Husband Wife, and Michael Cihlar.

09.11.24

Up and Coming

Carsten in der Elst Lets the Materials Lead Him Where He Wants to Go

Raw is the adjective that first comes to mind when looking at the work of German designer Carsten in der Elst. There's his Graywacke Offcut Series, for which in der Elst exclusively uses the jagged "crust" that's discarded when turning sandstone slabs into German sidewalks; his Accession chair, whose seat is formed from a sawn carpet of latex tubes resembling pasta noodles; and his ongoing Aluskin seating series, whose shells are crafted from the cast-off skins salvaged from high-precision aluminum production and whose cushions are foam remnants that puff up, lumpily, like loaves of sandwich bread. His designs feel contemporary and fresh but continue the red thread of predecessors like JB Blunk, Max Lamb, and Kwangho Lee (the former two in der Elst cites as inspiration). Like in der Elst, all of these designers seem to tease form from a material, allowing its inherent properties to lead to the final shape.

09.05.24

Interiors

This Victorian Home in Melbourne is a Love Letter to Tile and Stained Glass

For its latest project, a full renovation and extension of a Victorian weatherboard residence in Melbourne, Australia, the team at YSG Studio — based in Sydney and founded in 2020 by Yasmine Saleh Ghoniem —was tasked with a distinct challenge. At the head of the client's family were two spouses with divergent styles: one Egyptian-Australian and drawn to the pattern, color, and shapes of Middle Eastern design; the other Danish and partial to Scandinavian minimalism. Even more? Both partners have a kind of color-blindness that makes neutral tones appear washed out. In addition to melding these two aesthetic tastes, YSG needed to make an older house complement and connect with a newer addition — the first built project to be completed by YSG’s in-house architectural team since its addition to the team in 2022. See the results after the jump!

09.04.24

Sighted

Audo, Our Go-To for Cozy Danish Furniture, Just Dropped a Whole Slate of Products Perfect for Small-Space Living

By now, we’ve established that Copenhagen’s 3 Days of Design is a staple on the annual design-fair circuit, particularly as many Danish brands forgo Milan in favor of their own city, where their work can be exhibited both in context and in a more sustainable fashion. For Audo Copenhagen, this summer's 3 Days offered the opportunity to celebrate the brand's Nordic roots — and newly released products — at the revitalized Audo House in the Nordhavn district. Launched in 2019 as a combination monobrand store, restaurant, and residence, Audo House got a glow-up this year in collaboration with Stockholm’s Note Design Studio to showcase updated favorites. But perhaps it's ironic that Audo's refreshed collection launched in summer, as so many of Audo's products are designed for maximum indoor coziness. As such, many of the products this season arrive in new, more petite sizes.

09.03.24

Up and Coming

When Their Commercial Work Dried Up During the Pandemic, This London Studio Bought a Laser Cutter and Started Making Furniture From Aluminum Scrap

As Jamps Studio, a London-based design and fabrication consultancy, Martha McGuinn and Tom Pearson collaborate with artists like Marguerite Humeau and Yinka Ilori and help create the design environments for exhibitions at the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Friends for a decade, McGuinn and Pearson studied together at the Royal College of Art, teaming up on a few small projects while Pearson was employed in fabrication and McGuinn worked as a high-end cabinet maker. Six years ago, they made their own practice official with Jamps Studio. Post-pandemic, that sense of play, inventiveness, and fun has now led to By Jamps, objects and furniture McGuinn and Pearson make out of leftovers — mostly aluminum — from fabrication projects they’ve done. If it’s an exercise in letting nothing go to waste, By Jamps also springs from a love of a particular material: the versatility and mutability of aluminum.

08.31.24

Saturday Selects

Week of August 26, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the New York debut of the Collectible design fair — featuring yours truly! — plus a sunny new store on the Aegean coast, R&Company's new American triennial, and the chicest reissue from Knoll.

08.23.24

Top Ten

The 10 Best Modernist Buildings in Greece, According to Objects of Common Interest

They work so fluidly across geographic boundaries — regularly exhibiting everywhere from Milan to Miami, Brooklyn to Brussels — that it's easy to forget that the design duo behind Objects of Common Interest are Greek, born and bred. (In addition to their studio in New York, they also keep an office in Athens, too). Today they're offering Sight Unseen readers a history lesson in Greek architecture, compiling their ten favorite Modernist buildings around the country, some still in use and some gone (but not forgotten).

08.22.24

Top Ten

10 Process-Driven Designers to Watch, According to Designer/Gallerist Max Radford

Having spent the last three years inviting some of the region's most promising design talents into his eponymous London gallery (names like Lewis Kemmenoe, EJR Barnes, Andu Masebo, Isobel Alonso), interior designer and curator Max Radford's group exhibition lineups are now considered a veritable who's who of the UK scene. But Radford also keeps an enthusiastic eye on the goings-on outside his home turf, of course, and today he's sharing the ten most-promising non-UK designers who, like many on his own roster, are making process-driven furniture and lighting.