05.25.24

Saturday Selects

Week of May 20, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a vintage resale shop in Melbourne featuring some of our favorite Australian talents, a rug collection inspired by folklore and cinema, and the long-anticipated reopening of Philip Johnson's Brick House.

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05.24.24

Sight Unseen Collection

Our New York Design Week Launch: 10 Cabinets and Consoles by 10 Designers, All for Sale Through Sight Unseen

There's nothing better than a piece of furniture that simultaneously hides your possessions and, when open, offers them a beautiful backdrop. To celebrate our love of great storage options — and to offer our clients more of them — we presented 10 new pieces from our Sight Unseen Collection during New York Design Week (ahem, Month): casegoods by 10 different designers, some of which are already available to source on our site. Exhibited in the Chinatown showroom of Peter Staples's lighting studio Blue Green Works, the cabinets, consoles, and nightstands were the perfect way to also showcase decorative knobs and pulls from Monica's new project, Petra Hardware, in a collaborative exhibition.⁠

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05.23.24

Fair Report

This Month’s Festivities Cemented Tribeca as the Epicenter of the New York Design World

At this point, everyone agrees that we need a new name for what happens in New York during the month of May. NYCxDesign, always a slightly clumsy sobriquet, refers only to a specific set of dates and activities; New York Design Week has, over the past few years, ballooned into New York Design Month — another moniker that lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. But while no one can quite find consensus on a naming convention, everyone seems to agree on the new neighborhood hub: Tribeca, everyone's favorite up-and-coming zip code cemented itself this year as the epicenter of the New York design world.

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05.16.24

Shopping

Introducing the Iconic Women Collection, Sight Unseen’s Collab with the Brand Dedicated to Design-y Doormats

There are a few pieces of décor that can often be forgotten in the rush to make a house a home. Hardware, certainly, is one of them; another is the humble doormat. (Raise your hand if you consider yourself a "design person" and your doormat is a natural fiber number from your local hardware store.) Whether it sits inside or outside your threshhold, a mat is often the first thing you see when you enter a space, making it your very first chance, as it were, to set the mood. So when Heymat — a Norwegian company dedicated to making the entryway an artistic *moment* with their beautiful, sustainably made mats — approached us last year about collaborating, the answer was an unequivocal yes. The result is the Iconic Women Collection, a series of indoor mats in three shapes and colorways that celebrate the pioneering spirit of some of our favorite female designers from the past.

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05.14.24

Shopping

Meet Petra: Your New One-Stop-Shop For Designer-Made Statement Hardware

If you're an interior designer whose client has non-traditional tastes. If you're a renter who's tired of looking at a tired kitchen but can't renovate. If you bought a beautiful storage cabinet years ago and want to fall back in love with it. If you own a house in Connecticut or L.A. but want its front door to look like a villa in Italy. If you just need one perfect little weirdo bauble for your nightstand. Basically if you want to make a small change, anywhere in a home, that makes a big visual impact: You're going to want to bookmark Petra. Petra is my new showroom for artistic hardware, and it launched last week with drawer pulls, cabinet knobs, door handles, furniture pulls, appliance handles, and more by 27 international designers.

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11.04.21

Travel

How Two Sisters Turned Their Childhood Home in Mallorca Into an Artist’s Residency and Coveted Airbnb

Claudia del Olmo and her older sister Isabella got to grow up in a richly decorated villa in Mallorca, playing in the garden and watching their mother host countless parties and dinners. "It was always really magical," she says. So much so that as adults, the sisters wanted to recreate that magic, first channeling their own gift for hosting into a dinner series in London, and ultimately reclaiming their childhood home for themselves, transforming it into an events space, artist's residency, and Airbnb property called Casa Balandra.

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05.11.24

Saturday Selects

Week of May 6, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: pale green and stainless steel is the new butter yellow and stainless steel; an exhibition devoted to the vicissitudes of wood; and new rugs from everyone's favorite LA sister-run brand, Block Shop. 

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05.10.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

Bronze, Silk, Pine, Cherry: A Year Without a Kiln Forced Simone Bodmer-Turner to Reconsider Her Materials Palette

What does an artist do when they don’t have access to the tools their work requires? The ceramicist Simone Bodmer-Turner — celebrated for her abstract stoneware vessels and sculptures in shades of soft white or matte black — beautifully answers that question this month at Manhattan’s Emma Scully Gallery with her show of furniture and functional objects, A Year Without a Kiln.

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05.08.24

Interiors

In San Sabino, New York Gets the Buttery Yellow Restaurant Interior It Needs

After butter yellow's long and winding ascent to the top, finally we get a restaurant interior with that hue as the star. And it was well worth the wait — San Sabino is the next-door sibling to Don Angie, the still-too-hot-for-a-reservation restaurant in the West Village also designed by GRT Architects. But where that space has extremely chic elevated trattoria vibes, San Sabino has elements that read almost like a diner, at least during the daylight hours. There are the round, leather-topped bar stools; the stainless steel accents like a ceiling "crown" and metal-trimmed booth seating; and oh, that laminate.

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05.07.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Modernist Villa Outside Milan Provided the Backdrop for This Stellar Showcase of Emerging Design

This year in Milan, Alcova's founders chose to host half of its exhibition in one of our all-time favorite buildings: Villa Borsani, the 1945 residence designed by Osvaldo Borsani, architect and co-founder of furniture brand Tecno, in Varedo, north of the city. Although much of Borsani’s incredible original furniture was tucked away for the occasion (a reason to go back and revisit), several designers presented impressive new works against the villa’s striking patterned marble floors, custom textiles, and that staircase. Here are a few of our favorite things we spotted there, which, coincidentally, also provides a tour of sorts around this iconic building.

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05.06.24

Up and Coming

This New Rug Company Wants You to View Its Products as Works of Art

A serendipitous meeting in the mountains of Nepal birthed a new rug company called Maison Rhizomes, which employs the country’s expert artisans to create its colorful abstract designs based on the work of Belgian-French artist Charlotte Culot. Culot happened upon Berlin-based Hannah Vagedes up in the Himalayas in 2019, and the pair decided to join forces. By 2022 they had launched their first collection of 22 boldly patterned floor coverings, each modeled after a painting from Culot’s oeuvre, and which the duo hopes will be treated like artworks in their own right and passed down through generations.

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05.04.24

Saturday Selects

Week of April 29, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an exhibition that examines traditional Western wedding tropes, more fuel for the fire of our burning room divider obsession, an Amsterdam apartment with marvelous marbled mahogany paneling, and the perfect glassware for summer cocktails.

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05.03.24

Travel

French Installation Artist Daniel Buren Has Transformed Six Hotels With Color and Sculpture

Three years ago, the LVMH-owned hotel group Belmond began working with Italy’s Galleria Continua on a program to bring the work of a diverse group of renowned artists into their 46 global properties. But midway in, they decided it could be more impactful to commission a single person for a series that would span multiple locations, and so the gallery called the famed French installation artist Daniel Buren with an ambitious proposal: to create six site-specific works in six hotels across Italy, South Africa, France, and Brazil. For Mitico, the final results of which were unveiled over the past two months, each of his installations was envisioned in direct response to the architecture or surrounding landscape of the hotels.

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