05.29.24

Fair Report

Material Intrigue and Rich Details Unite These Three Standout Collections From New York’s Design Festivities

Over-the-top and outrageous has a place in our hearts, but we need to be in the mood for it. What always seems to hit right is design that combines a certain restraint with sumptuous details: material richness, attention to composition, elegance of form. Three of the best collections we saw at New York Design Week — from Sunfish, Nicholas Obeid, and Gregory Beson — do just that: Not too much, but still refreshing and surprising; a little asymmetry, an unusual but just-right choice, or a wow-inducing flourish.
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05.28.24

Fair Report

27 Things We Loved at 2024’s New York Design Week, er, Month

A funny thing happened in New York this month: While it felt like the city's design class was constantly out at a party, celebrating *something,* it somehow didn't feel like that much new work was on view, at least for very long. But somehow this year's shambolic vibe came together into something resembling cohesion while putting together this round-up. There were, in the end, so many things to love.
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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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12.15.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

Sculpture or Furniture? Supaform’s New Collection Puts Feeling Before Function

In Russian designer Maxim Scherbakov's new furniture exhibition at Rome's Contemporary Cluster gallery, he asks the question: What if design could be all about emotion, and little else? His barely functional pieces, and his general conceit, feel uncomfortable at first — we're not sure we want to live in a world where design is purely an aesthetic indulgence — but in an era when furniture is increasingly difficult to distinguish from art, it does feel in some ways like we already are.
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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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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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