Week of January 23, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: new good things like a pastel-colored jewelry store and an insanely affordable geometric rug, plus a few old good things like a marbled chair, a terrazzo table, and the glass-legged beauty pictured above.
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At the 2017 Maison et Objet and IMM Cologne Fairs

Neither the shadow of Milan nor the frigid, grey weather prevents us, each year, from being able to bring you all kinds of February goodness from the 2017 IMM Cologne and Maison et Objet fairs, which we’ve catalogued below. You’ll find such gems as a confetti-sprinkled carpet, a new design line out of Portugal, and no less than three distinct releases with patina-mottled surfaces that have officially triggered our trend-spotting sonar. Not a bad opening for what’s promising to be a turbulent year in all other regards.
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Hayley Eichenbaum Instagram Photographer

Hayley Eichenbaum on Going Viral, Being Instagram-Famous, and How Photography Almost Saved Her

The romance of the American road has a lot to do with renewal, how to take what’s fallen into cliché and make it alive again. This is just what Hayley Eichenbaum has done in several photographic series — going on road trips to capture and create images that reframe the familiar as unearthly and surreal. Her work is guided by the geometry and clean lines of minimalist architecture and design, revealing a mysteriousness beneath flat facades and surfaces. But her pictures are also cinematic, echoing everything from Technicolor melodramas to Stanley Kubrick.
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Seven Perfect Household Essentials for Your Favorite Minimalist

When we checked in with Jamie Wolfond this time last year, he had just relaunched Good Thing's website to better showcase the beauty and simplicity of the brand's accessible design objects. That momentum hasn’t waned. Continuing Good Thing's mission of creating practical tools with consideration and staying power, the latest collection is its largest yet.
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These Colorful Vases Are the Latest Sign that Acrylic Is on the Rise

Remember when we named the California Light and Space art movement one of the top trends to watch in 2017? Well, the evidence just keeps mounting. Seoul design trio Hattern say their new series of two-tone acrylic vases were inspired by the way Impressionist painters tried to capture the effects of changing light quality on nature, but we can't help but see elements of Vasa, Helen Pashgian, and Peter Alexander's work. Is acrylic the new marble?
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Visit Us This Weekend at Tinseltown, With Refinery29

Last week we shared with you our official Sight Unseen holiday gift guides, which were full of links to our most-coveted design and fashion items this year. But for those of you who prefer to browse in person — and will be in New York this weekend — we're taking our wish lists IRL at Tinseltown, Refinery 29's annual holiday shopping event, which we're co-hosting this year. Sight Unseen has invited seven amazing vendors to offer their wares for sale: Alex Proba, Best Made Company, Bower, CHIAOZZA, Dusen Dusen, Fredericks & Mae, and MAKE Cosmetics. Refinery29 are hosting RillRill and Print All Over Me, plus a cat-themed boutique and a hairstyling bar. Best of all, CHIAOZZA's Terri Chiao and Adam Frezza will be on hand all weekend offering personalized papier-mâché plants, so you can choose custom colors and patterns and get them painted for you on the spot! It's all happening at OpenHouse in Nolita, 201 Mulberry Street, on December 13 and 14, from 12PM to 8PM each day.
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Week of January 16, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a Japanese design pilgrimage, a new Dutch museum in nature, a sweater for your chairs (trust), and two fast-casual restaurants whose design is on par with the coolest eateries around.
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This Moscow-Based Studio is the Only Place Not Under Russian Influence

When you think of Moscow and its corresponding decor schemes, Scandinavian minimalism isn't the first thing that comes to mind. But take a look at the interiors in this post — with their exposed-bulb lamps, gridded pillowcases, herringbone floors, moody palettes, and splashes of pink, they'd be right at home in a Stockholm flat. In fact, they're the work of Crosby Studios, the Moscow- and New York–based furniture and interiors studio that debuted its first collection with us at last year's Sight Unseen OFFSITE.
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The Future Perfect Los Angeles

A Flawlessly Appointed Interior, On View Now at The Future Perfect Los Angeles

If you're anything like us, you've probably allowed yourself to dream about one day having a home (and a salary) where you might be able to show off your Calico wallpaper, your Michael Anastassiades lights, your terrazzo Rooms tables, your Ben & Aja Blanc mirrors, and your perfect, rust-colored, velvet De La Espada chairs. If, like us, you fear that day might never come, now at least you can visit your idealized domestic vision in the form of Casa Perfect, a new, appointment-only Los Angeles outpost of The Future Perfect, housed in a mid-century ranch in the Hollywood Hills.
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In a New Show, Hilda Hellström Blurs the Line Between What is Real and What is Fake

When we first interviewed Swedish designer Hilda Hellström back in 2012, just two weeks after her graduation from London's Royal College of Art, the designer drew an interesting distinction between her work and that of her peers: While so many Hellström's age were obsessed with the properties of different materials, she was more interested in the possibilities of narrative. But a funny thing happened in the five years that have elapsed since then: Hellström hasn't been able shake her fascination with pigmented Jesmonite, the acrylic-based plaster she originally used in her breakout Sedimentation vases.
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Week of January 9, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week we decided MORE IS MORE by embracing yet another collection of terrazzo tables, yet another source for affordable art, and yet another series of beautiful, sculptural vases (pictured above) that blur the line between art and design.
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Sunset-Inspired Color Fades Meet Slabs of Marble In This Stunning Paris Exhibition

The Belgian painter Pieter Vermeersch has been known to fill rooms with soft, colorful gradients that define architectural space in beautifully strange ways, bordering on optical illusion. Both those works and his new canvases, on view now at Galerie Perrotin, dovetail with Vermeersch's professional origins in photography in the way they deal with light and perspective — but the new works physically ground all that ethereal color with panels of heavy marble.
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This Collection Is Turning Design’s Biggest Trends Into Stuff You Can Actually Afford

We pride ourselves here on generally being able to spot or define trends as they're taking shape, but it's sometimes just as interesting to track what happens to those trends when they begin to be picked up by the masses. That's why retailers like West Elm have always been so fascinating to us: They're essentially the fulcrum, the point at which trends swing from an insider-y secret to something anyone might adopt into their living rooms. Their latest collection might be our favorite example of this yet.
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