05.01.17

Sighted

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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04.29.17

Saturday Selects

Week of April 24, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: we’re being struck by swimsuit mania, having mixed feelings about the design influence of Soviet sanatoriums, and obsessing over a lo-fi pizzeria in a small Spanish town.

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04.28.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

At a New Brooklyn Gallery, The Paperweight is Anything But Obsolete

If there's anyone who knows from paperweights, it's New York gallerists Patrick Parrish and Zoe Fisher. The two began working together when Fisher — who at the time was helming her own fledgling gallery — began working for Parrish at his Tribeca space, which not only sells vintage examples of those sculptural objects but also boasts a well-documented obsession with Carl Aubock (perhaps king of all paperweight-makers). So it makes sense that when Fisher and Parrish finally decided to go into business together, they would choose the paperweight as their first canvas.

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04.27.17

Sighted

A Down Under Furniture Brand Meets an American Favorite in Soho

Opening today, one of our favorite design duos, Ladies & Gentlemen Studio, will be launching a concept shop in SoHo for the month of May, showcasing the new Australian design brand SP01. Over/Under, as the project is called, presents a leap for L&G beyond objects like lighting, furniture, and jewelry, and into a holistic interiors experience. SP01, making its U.S. debut, looked to L&G for a concept beyond the traditional showroom, a place where guests could relax.

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04.26.17

Sighted

Bower Made a Collection for West Elm, And It’s Really Good

If you're a frequent reader of this site, you've probably heard us bemoan the lack of cool, but affordable, American furniture more times than you can count. Which is precisely why collaborations like this one — which pairs Bower's signature, mixed-material aesthetic with West Elm's years of accumulated knowledge — are so important.

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06.24.14

Travel

Taking the Temperature of the Scandinavian Design Scene In Norway

If anyone needed proof this year that Scandinavia had quietly usurped London's status as the world's hottest contemporary design scene, it could be found at the Salone del Mobile in April, where the presentation that Danish brand Hay put on, complete with a pop-up shop and an utter madhouse of a cocktail party, was pretty much the talk of the town. It's entirely thanks to the rise, in the past few years, of not just Hay but brands like Menu, Ferm Living, One Nordic, Muuto, Gubi, and Design House Stockholm, all of whom are working with emerging talents across the region. As we've watched the Nordic scene grow, we've managed to pay visits to Sweden (three times), Denmark (twice), and Finland (once, in the dead of winter, natch) — even to Iceland, for its DesignMarch festival three years ago. That left Norway as our personal holy grail, made doubly intimidating because of its famed reputation for being outrageously expensive. Two weeks ago, as you may have noticed on Instagram, we finally took the plunge.

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04.24.17

Q+A

Jose Davila Creates Sculptures From Glass, Stones, and Gravity

Using simple materials like stone and cardboard, Mexican artist Jose Dávila mines art history to create some of the most relevant works today. His oeuvre is defined by a diverse, medium-traversing output, from his precariously balanced sculptural arrangements to his “cutout” series, in which he extracts the focal point of iconic works of art, creating an absence that bestows a three-dimensionality upon the resulting pieces. In all of his art, there is an underlying exploration of how the modernist movement continues to influence the modern mind.

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04.22.17

Saturday Selects

Week of April 17, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week we must be experiencing spring fever, because we've fixated on a lot of green (a gallery by Antonino Cardillo, an interior by Arquitectura-G, the border of the Vera Panichewskaja mirror above) and a lot of plants (an indoor garden in Paris, and more). Now if only the sun would come out in New York...

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04.21.17

Excerpt: Book

A New Book Celebrating the Secret Beauty of Milan

Having just gotten back from Milan, where the foyer of our Airbnb apartment building looked like this, the subject of a new book from Taschen hits awfully close to home: Called Entryways of Milan, the book takes readers inside the heavy wooden doors that often conceal the city's most beautiful thresholds, or ingressi.

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04.19.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

Outfit Your Whole House With These Magical Desert Sand Sculptures

For Escape, a collection that debuted over the course of two weeks in Milan at Rossana Orlandi Gallery and in New York at Maison Gerard, Fernando Mastrangelo takes a leap forward in terms of color and his experimental approach to materials, layering hand-dyed granules — including sand, coffee, powdered glass, and silica — to create an ethereal suite of furniture, inspired by his trips to the American Southwest.

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04.18.17

Sighted

In This Designer’s Hands, Recycled Leather Becomes Something Undeniably Cool

Continuing with a self-produced material he calls Structural Skin, Madrid-based designer Jorge Penadés has turned his exploration of recycled leather waste into a sleek collection of mirrors and table lamps, on display earlier this month at the Rossana Orlandi gallery in Milan. Penadés gets the leather offcuts for his pieces from Hermès, which means the color palettes become a kind of artistic constraint — and yet, the shredded leather, combined with resin to create a reconstituted material, is undeniably cool, resembling marble or a particularly colorful particleboard.

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04.17.17

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Join Us for our 2017 Sight Unseen OFFSITE Show!

Today we're excited to share the details of our fourth annual Sight Unseen OFFSITE show, taking place May 19–22 on the ground floor of 100 Avenue of the Americas in Soho. The 2017 event will be even more focused than in past years on individual presentations: Pared back to just 25 participants, each will have a larger exhibition space in which to show a collection of more elevated work. Sight Unseen’s editors have also chosen a select number of up-and-coming talents for a standalone group exhibition.

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04.17.17

At Home With

At Home With Sally Breer, LA’s Coolest Up-and-Coming Interior Designer

For someone who spends her working hours designing the interiors for many of Hollywood’s “successful young hustlers,” Sally Breer needed her own home to provide a neutral palette and be ideal for “clean head space.” But beige and softness — aka comfort — can still be stunning for a designer like Breer, who describes herself with words like absurd, ballsy, and passionate.

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