10 New Takes on the Pendant Light, From a Designer Down Under

In the category of cities we're seriously dying to visit, Melbourne is right up there with Tokyo, and now we have another reason to make the trek: the recently wrapped Denfair, a design fair now in its second year, which in the past week has introduced us to whole host of new talents, including the German-born, Melbourne-based designer Volker Haug, whose new lighting collection we're featuring today. Made by hand in Haug's Brunswick East studio, the lights represent a more minimalist direction for the designer, whose previous creations were more colorful and organic.
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The Coolest Glass Chairs Since Kuramata

Guillermo Santoma's interior work shows an acute understanding of things like just how much geometry is enough and how interesting cuts in the architecture can lift a just-great renovation into something otherworldly. Over the past few months, Santomá has released a series of chairs that embody many of those same principles.
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Week of June 13, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an armchair digest of our favorites from this week's Art Basel and Design Miami/Basel, a farewell to a beloved London retailer, and the discovery of a dreamy incense burner set by Lonewa (above) that's now for sale in the Sight Unseen Shop.
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Soft Baroque’s New Furniture Series is the Ultimate Trompe L’Oeil

One of the most clever and delightful projects on view this week at Design Miami/Basel was Soft/Hard, an installation by Soft Baroque commissioned by the Copenhagen gallery Étage Projects, which presented a series of trompe l'oeil domestic objects pairing materials like granite, OSB and bublinga wood with their digital simulacra printed onto soft silk textiles.
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2014, Part II

This week we announced the 2014 American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen's unapologetically subjective annual editorial award for the 25 names to know now in American design. We're devoting an entire week to interviews with this year's honorees — get to know the next five Hot List designers here.
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Furniture That Nails This Year’s Coolest Shapes

Last year, it was Memphis-inspired patterns and mobile-like lamps. This year, it's ziggurats and arches. Anna Karlin — the prolific New York designer who's practically her own department store — somehow always has her finger on the pulse of whatever it is we happen to be feeling at the moment. Today we're excerpting our favorite pieces from her third collection, launched at ICFF last month.
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Inside the Rope-Painting, Basket-Making World of Gemma Patford

After attempting to learn to crochet, Patford realized it was not for her and instead turned to artists who were working with rope like Doug Johnston, who remains one of her heroes. “I muddled my way through the Internet to find a process that worked with my abilities and with what I had at home. I had a sewing machine and paint — and the baskets were born,” she says.
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Zuza Mengham resin sculptures

One-Of-a-Kind Resin Sculptures, Whose Fates Are Sealed in an Flash

Most artists and designers start their practices small, then scale up their work as their ambitions, finances, and studio spaces grow. London-based Zuza Mengham has done the opposite: Back in art school, she welded semi-functional steel sculptures so large and unwieldy she sometimes had to destroy them afterwards, while recently she began turning her attention towards resin experiments compact enough to perch on a bookshelf. Both endeavors come from a similar interest in working within the transitional states of materials.
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IKEA’s Head of Research on the Future of Furniture

We recently sat down with Mikael Ydholm, the head of IKEA's research team, to hear some of its findings. What happens when you seal a family into an IKEA prototype house for 14 days? How do people really use a sofa when they forget they're being watched? And how do you design for a generation that eats in the bathroom? Read on to find out.
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Week of June 6, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: We re-discovered bygone designs like a Formafantasma runway, rekindled our love for Roberto Burle Marx, and re-examined the excitement factor of architectural glass, just made exponentially cooler by Scholten & Baijings (above).
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A New Program Turns Your Walls Into a Work of Art

The brand-new Designtex Bespoke Surfaces line taps more than 30 contemporary artists — many of whom are up-and-coming talents who live near Designtex's Portland, Maine, manufacturing headquarters — to create imagery for custom surfaces in the built environment. In other words, to turn your walls in the ultimate work of art.
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