Sight Unseen Presents 2017

With Sight Unseen Presents, We’re Helping Design Week Take Over New York

By all accounts, design week in New York has grown by leaps and bounds over the past few years, thanks in large part to events like ours. But to us, it was still missing that all-encompassing, can't miss, cultural takeover feeling you get whenever Fashion Week happens in New York. And so this year — in addition to OFFSITE — we decided to launch the first annual Sight Unseen Presents, an event series meant to increase the visibility of New York Design Week by activating a dozen retail spaces and restaurants throughout the city with design content and programming.
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Week of May 8, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: one epic red-glass dining table, two Max Lamb sightings, and three drop-dead beautiful store interiors, including the new Phillip Lim in L.A. (above).
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An LA Interior Designer’s Indoor-Outdoor Silverlake Bungalow — Complete With Chickens

Interior designer Rebecca Jezek applies the guiding tenets of her design practice — a propensity for warmth, an appreciation for architecture, and a deep respect for the classics — to her own Los Angeles home, whose French doors and concrete flooring provide a bright, blank canvas. In many ways, it’s a standing tribute to what’s shaped her: from her own father, an architect influenced by Bauhaus and Dieter Rams (and for whose commercial interior architecture firm Jezek worked as a teenager); to various Czech porcelain artists; to the great designers of Cassina, including Bellini, Magistretti, and Corbusier.
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Digital Renderings of “Rocks and Light,” Inspired by Mono-ha

Plenty of designers are obsessed with Mono-ha. But when Swedish art director Anders Brasch-Willumsen looked closer at the Japanese art movement, he noticed one thing in particular he could personally relate to: the ephemeral nature of its works. "The works that came out of Mono-ha would often exist only in photographs," he says. "I felt connected to this idea because creating digital sculptures is similar: they only exist in images." Inspired by that realization, Brasch-Willumsen decided to create "Rocks and Light," a new series of digital artworks pictured after the jump.
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Collective, The Future Perfect, Chamber, and More: The Best of NYCxDesign, So Far

Remember when New York Design Week was, well, a week? This year, the festival known as NYCxDesign stretches all the way from May 3 through May 24, making this a marathon for those involved, as we are, in both design and art. The best thing about the new, elongated schedule, though, is that we actually got to see much of the good stuff, launching as it did last week before our own Sight Unseen OFFSITE fair kicks into high gear. Here are two dozen favorites from New York design month — so far.
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Dutch design studio Os ∆ Oos

Dutch Design Studio Os ∆ Oos Makes Work That’s Brainy But Beautiful

Four years ago, Sight Unseen featured the first product by what was then a brand-new studio on the scene: The Syzygy series by Dutch duo Os ∆ Oos consisted of three lamps whose intensity depended on the subtle rotation of three light-filtering discs placed in front of the bulb; it was inspired by the astronomical phenomenon of three celestial bodies aligning in space. As a design product, it was both conceptually driven and artistically minded, but it was, at the end of the day, a lamp. “We’re definitely not artists; we’re designers,” clarifies Oskar Peet, who with Sophie Mensen makes up the Eindhoven-based studio. “We like to make functional projects.”
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Week of May 1, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: wishing we were at a design fair on the French Riviera, visiting some of our favorite designers at home, and ogling these new geometric textile abstractions by artist Brent Wadden.
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Symbols, Snakes, and Spirituality in a New Collection of Terrazzo Furniture

Carly Jo Morgan's debut furniture collection, which includes the Yin Yang Table (twin surfaces in pink and black, enhanced with brass inlay), the Cozy Club Chair (with optional sheepskin), and the zig-zagging Serpentine Heart Song Lamp, was unveiled at the new Los Angeles gallery Not So General on April 20th. Today, Morgan shares her thoughts on transformation, her toughest critic, the satisfaction of “deep” sisterhood, and faking it until you make it.
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The Glass-Walled LA Loft of New Fashion Brand Everybody is Anything But Basic

As former creative leads at American Apparel, it’s no surprise that Iris Alonzo and Carolina Crespo have an idiosyncratic sense of what counts as basic. After all, these are the women who visually defined a generation by re-proportioning denim and T-shirts into high-waisted mom jeans and plunging V-necks. In leggings as pants and a rainbow array of unitards — and in a now-notorious series of advertisements — was the sense that wearing a uniform could be outré, as well as an embrace of ease that paved the way for the subsequent movements of athleisure and normcore. The duo's new line follows suit: EVERYBODY, a collection of unisex, seasonless basics ranging from a white cotton flightsuit to a perfect garment-dyed denim work coat. We recently visited them in their studio.
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Egg Collective’s Designing Women Exhibition is This Week’s Must-Visit

Perhaps it was inevitable that this year's NYCxDesign would focus so heavily on women. After all, the works on view this month were in many cases developed within the last half a year or so — a time when womanhood itself has been under attack in America. What this means for design is that over the next few weeks, we'll see, among other things, an all-female exhibition at Chamber Gallery, two brand-new female designers launching at Sight Unseen OFFSITE in a special capsule section, and Designing Women, an exhibition that opened this Monday, curated by Egg Collective and featuring 16 New York–based female artists and designers.
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Raw Color home tour

Dutch Design’s Masters of Color At Home in Their Eindhoven Loft

When we caught up with Raw Color last fall amid the madness of Dutch Design Week, Christoph Brach and Daniera ter Haar — along with their son, Ando — had been living and working in their new house for exactly a year. Theirs, like other lofty, new-build homes in Eindhoven, artfully blends the parallels of modern-day life: the family eats and rests upstairs, and works downstairs, following a studio build in the basement last March.
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Good Thing furniture

A Favorite Housewares Brand Makes the Move to Furniture

Today marks the start of a month of design in New York, so perhaps it's fitting that we kick things off with a brand that's been working for years to revitalize the American design scene from the ground up. Good Thing, the Brooklyn-based housewares and accessories label founded by RISD grad Jamie Wolfond in 2014, has always sought to not only engage local manufacturing and producers but also to work with as wide a swath of designers as possible.
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