03.17.17

Sighted

Your Search for the Perfect Coffee Table Ends Here

What is it with designers named Jonathan? Our preoccupation with the Perth, Australia–born, Los Angeles–based Jonathan Zawada in some ways reminds us of the way we feel about Jonathan Muecke — they don't release new work all that often, but when they do, we seem to want every single piece of it. In Zawada's case, that spartan output may be a professional necessity — Zawada spends much of his time creating digital art, album covers, and advertisements in his more commercial practice. But this week finally saw the official expansion of Zawada's Affordances line, which we first covered way back in 2013.

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03.15.17

Up and Coming

Meet the Couple That’s Reinventing Bathroom Style

Call it what you will — wash room, water closet, commode, loo — the bathroom is nothing if not the unsung hero of many a home and apartment. It is a place of quiet refuge for space-deprived urbanites and, if Pinterest is any indication, an actual spa if you live outside New York City. No one knows this better than Lisa and Michael Fine, the founders of Quiet Town (she, a stylist, he, a photographer). They've taken their complementary skill sets and combined them to make a covetable line of bath essentials including shower curtains, rugs, and wall hooks that pleasingly upend convention while marrying (often geometric) form to function.

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03.13.17

Q+A

A Brooklyn Home Accessories Brand On Mining the 1970s For Inspiration

Phoebe Sung and Peter Buer — the couple behind the textiles and accessories line Cold Picnic — make conversation-starters. Their witty, often abstracted designs work as décor, for sure, but they also exist as their own little worlds. Recently, Sung and Buer took this idea of imaginary landscapes one step further, turning their newest rugs into a series of dioramas that are as evocative as they are fun.

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03.11.17

Saturday Selects

Week of March 6, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: linoleum gets a big thumbs up, a dive bar in a Super 8 motel gets a jaw-dropping reinvention, and a master of Dutch design gets a beautifully designed retrospective (above).

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03.10.17

The Making of

A Turner Prize–Winning Architecture Collective Sets Up Shop in Brooklyn

U.K. architecture collective Assemble has created an installation — dubbed “A Factory As It Might Be” — in the courtyard of A/D/O, the brand-new, forward-looking design space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The temporary factory features an industrial clay extruder, which Assemble — and their Liverpool-based social enterprise the Granby Workshop, along with fellow collaborators — used to make the factory’s cladding as well as a host of products from dinnerware to planters. The effort is the debut US project for the team, who famously became the first architects to win the Turner Prize in 2015.

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09.10.15

Up and Coming

Portland Artist Drew Tyndell

Portland-based Drew Tyndell is the creative director of his own studio, Computer Team, which specializes in 2D hand-drawn and stop-motion animations. But he’s also an accomplished artist in the more traditional sense of the word, and his most recent project is a commissioned mural for Dolby’s new headquarters in San Francisco.

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03.09.17

Up and Coming

An Up-And-Coming Dutch Duo On Why They Don’t Identify As “Designers”

In 2008, when Daphna Isaacs Burggraaf and Laurens Manders began collaborating, they kept their studios separate. It wasn’t until four years later that they officially founded their company, compounding ideas and names — the latter of which was deemed a challenge until the Internet threw up the solution. “We were looking to find out if images of our products had been published, and we found an image of our lamps with the name ‘Daphna Laurens’ written above it.” Upon reading this, they realized that it was exactly what they’d been looking for — an anonymous name that symbolized their way of working together; a new ego that has allowed them to playfully carve out a space for themselves as form-flexing experimenters.

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03.08.17

Sighted

We’re Taking the Day Off to Support Women’s Rights

Today, across the world, women — when they can — are staying home from their jobs, refusing to spend money, wearing red, or heading out to marches and rallies as part of A Day Without A Woman, a 24-hour strike to support equality, justice, and human rights for women. Sight Unseen, of course, is run by women, and so in lieu of content, we're posting a simple statement of support. We'll see you in the streets.

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03.07.17

Fair Report

30 Artists and Galleries We Loved During New York Art Week 2017

We can't quite put our finger on what it was that made this year's Armory Arts Week feel so fresh. Was it the new venues? After all, NADA moved from Basketball City to Skylight Clarkson North, while Spring/Break moved from the old Post Office to an ex-Condé Nast office at 4 Times Square. Was it the fresh blood — the fact that NADA was even there at all, after years of coinciding with May's Frieze Fair? Or maybe it was simply the weather — we made the rounds on a gorgeously sunny Thursday that made the views at Spring Studios' Independent fair even more glorious. Whatever the case, we found much to love

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03.06.17

Graphic Design

A French Creative Studio Gives the Silk Scarf a Majorly Cool Upgrade

In the last few years, the silk scarf has seen a major upgrade from studios like Massif Central and A Peace Treaty, but one of our favorites on that short list of cool is Suprême Bon Ton, the French creative studio whose fourth collection is as playful and stunning as past iterations. “Totem” features a variety of blue, teal, and cream-colored organic shapes that appear to be stacked, wedged, and floating around the silk canvases, following the brand's longtime obsession with rocks and geology.

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03.04.17

Saturday Selects

Week of February 27, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a plywood paradise in Topanga Canyon, a fashion presentation outfitted with contemporary design icons, and a series of tapestries that are way too chic to be acoustic panels.

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03.03.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

We Already Can’t Wait For This Exhibition of Norwegian Designers in Milan

Where has a year gone? It feels like just yesterday we were swooning over the images from this stellar exhibition in Milan of Norwegian designers (and getting excited for our own inaugural show with some of those same talents). Now it's nearly Milan time again, and with it comes news of a brand new show of young Norwegians, this time curated by our friend Katrin Greiling under the umbrella "Everything is Connected."

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03.02.17

Sighted

Pink Travertine and Rusty Velvet in a Coolly Minimalist Cape Town Boutique

On a recent family trip to Cape Town, I determined to go to the best restaurant in the city, to revisit to my favorite beach hangout (Beta), and, thanks to a hot tip from a friend's Instagram, to pop in on a store that can only be described as #sosightunseen. The eponymous boutique of fashion designer Margot Molyneux, the shop opened at the end of last year, showcasing the brand's minimal-chic designs — in a color palette of peach, green, rust, white, and black — with a store design by Molyneux's husband to match.

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