The Best of 2016’s London Design Festival

Because many of London's top designers create work throughout the year for international galleries or the Milan Furniture Fair, the LDF, in its best years, feels less about splashy furniture debuts and more about experimentation and collaboration. The stakes are lower, the opportunity for delight is higher. Here are some of the best things we found this year.
More
Bower American Design

Bower On Becoming One of the Hottest Studios in American Design

Bower's products and furniture always feel just right for the moment in which they're made, somehow ahead of what's current but not so trendy that they'll soon fall out of fashion. That these sophisticated harbingers are made from an enormous Brooklyn woodshop with no A/C seems about right when you meet them.
More
Sight Unseen x Bower for 29Rooms

We Outfitted Fashion Week’s Coolest Pop-Up With This Painted-Plywood Furniture

Refinery29's 29Rooms event is basically a funhouse of art and culture, where each room presents its own mega-Instagrammable moment. But what if you need a teeny tiny break from all that selfie-ing? That's where we came in. When Refinery asked Sight Unseen to curate the 29Rooms lounge area, we turned immediately to Bower, who came back at us just a few hours later with a sketch for this amazing collection.
More
Calico Wallpaper's Red Hook Loft: A Brooklyn Home Tour

Calico Wallpaper’s Envy-Inducing Airy Red Hook Loft

In hindsight, it feels almost like fate that Nick and Rachel Cope would end up in the sprawling, historic Red Hook loft they now call home. After all, where else in New York City could they have found the room to showcase not one but six of the wallpaper collections they've created since 2012 as partners in the Brooklyn-based Calico?
More

A New Photographic Series Channels All Our Favorite Trends

When we first met our frequent collaborator Pippa Drummond, it was via a series drawn from her personal portfolio: Using beauty-salon staples, in collaboration with a prop-stylist friend, she created beautiful assemblages with a fair amount of optical trickery. (The fake nails and brushes, disassociated from their typical use, became almost random, abstract shapes.) Her latest work employs an optical-illusion effect as well, but the Barbara Kasten-y aesthetic here is more sophisticated, drawn as it is from a series of high-brow influences.
More

Week of January 5, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: chairs knit from sweaters, furniture made from kitchen flooring, and a sculpture fabricated by a robot and installed by a crane.
More

Week of September 12, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Moroccan-inspired rugs by way of Paris, a conceptual one-day gallery-cum-exhibition and an octogenarian design couple finally making it onto our collective radar.
More

Inside Jonas Wood’s Perspective-Bending Interior World

The LA artist Jonas Wood currently has a new exhibition on view at Anton Kern Gallery; called Portraits, it depicts various loved ones — his family on the occasion of his Bar Mitzvah; his wife, Shio Kusaka, with an unruly-haired dog — in Wood's signature colorful, mise-en-abyme–happy style. (We like to think of it as Henri Rousseau, if Rousseau lived in 2016 Culver City). But our favorite Wood era remains Interiors, the 2012 catalogue that's being re-issued this week and that we're excerpting on the site today.
More

A Breathtaking Furniture Installation Staged Inside a Famed Brutalist House

When we named Jonathan Muecke to our American Design Hot list in 2014, the enigmatic Minnesota architect summed up his motivations with a 1963 George Brecht quote about seeking precision in objects — the same kind of precision, presumably, that he saw in the starkly angular 1974 Van Wassenhove House by Belgian architect Juliaan Lampens, where he recently spent a week making a new body of work for Maniera gallery.
More
Kelly Behun x Barneys

Kelly Behun x Barneys: A Patterned Pop-Up, Where Maximalism Prevails

For Barneys New York, Kelly Behun and her team have created an immersive pop-up and capsule collection, on view through October 31st, that translates the studio's super graphic design aesthetic into a collection of items for the home. Called A Kook Milieu, the pop-up was inspired in part by the pattern and decoration–obsessed 1970s New York gallerist Holly Solomon, who was known for blurring the line between art and design.
More

Week of September 5, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: highlights from our trip to Oslo, an internet wormhole that led us to a Modernist jewelry icon, and a trio of store interiors that are the very definition of "warm minimalism."
More

The Gallery Show as Studio Visit: Ana Kraš at Les Gens Heureux

Staged in an enviably spartan top-floor apartment in the heart of Copenhagen, gallery Les Gens Heureux’s current exhibition Visit allows for an intimate glimpse into the oeuvre of one of our favorite young makers, Ana Kraš. The solo exhibition features the Serbian-born photographer, illustrator, product designer, and part-time model’s most recent works, produced over the course of the last year in her adoptive hometown of New York.
More
Dropbox mural by New York graphic designers Aaron Robbs and Alex Proba

A Tech-Office Mural is the Ultimate Canvas for These Graphic Designers

By now, the large-scale mural has become something of a familiar, de rigueur decoration for tech HQs — the past few years have seen everything from Trek Matthews for Dolby Labs, to Serena Mitnik-Miller for Facebook, Ian Ross for Lyft, Camille Walala (also for Facebook) and more. But this latest might be our favorite yet: Commissioned for Dropbox's 26,000-square-foot Flatiron office in New York, the mural we're featuring today is a collaboration between New York graphic designers and former Kickstarter co-workers Aaron Robbs and Alex Proba of Studio Proba.
More