06.18.16

Saturday Selects

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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06.17.16

Sighted

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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06.16.16

Sighted

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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06.15.16

Up and Coming

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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01.22.14

Q+A

Henny Nistelrooy on I’m Revolting

Like so many small-town kids before him, Henny van Nistelrooy didn’t move to just any city. He moved to the most tightly layered and epochally dense cities he could find, the sorts of places that have already had a dozen lifetimes. After graduating from London's Royal College of Art, Van Nistelrooy launched his design studio in London in 2008 and then moved to Beijing, another capital with more than a bit of historical fiber. They’re fitting locales for Van Nistelrooy’s textile process of taking seemingly finished material and slowly unraveling the threads for an entirely new weave.
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Zuza Mengham resin sculptures
06.14.16

Up and Coming

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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06.13.16

Q+A

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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06.11.16

Saturday Selects

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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06.10.16

Sighted

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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06.07.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

New Perspective-Bending Works By Eindhoven Duo OS ∆ OOS

Oskar Peet and Sophie Mensen of OS & OOS consider themselves designers, not artists, but their latest body of work — on view now in a solo exhibition at Zurich's Roehrs & Boetsch gallery — includes not only cast-concrete updates on their neon-tube Primary Fluorescents lights, but also two large sculptural works whose only purpose is to delight and tease the eye.
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Sight Unseen geometric rugs guide
06.06.16

Shopping

32 Statement-Making Geometric Rugs You Can Buy Right Now

At the end of last year, we began to notice a new trend in patterned rugs. Gone were the ubiquitous chevron stripes and hexagonal motifs, and in their place was a new kind of graphic, geometric look — elemental shapes that had been stacked, abstracted, layered, mixed, or simply juxtaposed alongside each other (in other words, a pretty healthy reflection of what's happening in furniture design right now as well). As with most trends, the second we began noticing one or two rugs in this vein, they were suddenly everywhere. So, we did what any object-obsessed, semi-helpful design blog ought to do — we gathered them all into one place, for your shopping enjoyment. Herewith, your definitive guide to Sight Unseen's favorite, statement-making geometric rugs — and where to find (and buy) them right now.
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