RCA emerging designers 2016
06.28.16

Up and Coming

Six Talents to Watch from RCA’s 2016 Graduate Show

Martino Gamper, Tomás Alonso, Raw-Edges, Soft Baroque — these are just a few of the designers who came from abroad to study at London's Royal College of Art and ended up making a home in the UK. So it's no wonder a dampened mood filled the air at this year's graduate showcase, in the wake of the EU Referendum, with an underlying anxiety of how the political sphere might affect the influx — and future prospects — of applying students. Still, the show was as fruitful as ever at uncovering this year's next big thing designers — click through for six of our favorites!
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06.27.16

Up and Coming

A Finnish Textile Designer Who Tossed Out All the Rules of Textile Design

Reeta Ek is one of those fine artists who studied design for practicality's sake, as a way to ensure she'd actually be able to get a job upon graduation. Yet when it came time for her to start her thesis, she gave herself one last taste of freedom, opting to throw out all of textile design's typical rules and restraints and just create whatever pleased her.
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06.25.16

Saturday Selects

Week of June 20, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: new love for an old Cini Boeri chair, one of the best oversized planters we've seen, and a great show of rare originals by Pierre Paulin on view in New York City, pictured above.
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06.23.16

Studio Visit

When Is a Hairy Mirror Not Just a Hairy Mirror? Talking Materiality and Minimalism with Ben & Aja Blanc

Wood, bronze, marble, and minerals are some of the raw, elemental materials Providence-based design duo Ben and Aja Blanc use to craft their minimal objects for the home. The couple, who graduated from RISD and were the unexpected darlings of last year's Sight Unseen OFFSITE, have only been collaborating for a little more than a year and a half. But their fledgling partnership has already yielded more than a few instant classics.
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12.19.14

Q+A

Tanya Aguiñiga and Meg Callahan on Cotton

Nearly a year ago, when we first conceived the notion of arranging interviews between two creatives working with the same material, the idea was to make things interesting by choosing people with very different practices — a designer using resin to make furniture, for example, conversing with an artist using it to make paintings. That’s exactly what we thought we’d done when we invited Meg Callahan, an Oklahoman quilt-maker living in Rhode Island, to talk cotton with Tanya Aguiñiga, a furniture and accessories designer raised in Mexico and based in Los Angeles, and yet it turned out the pair had much more in common than we’d realized: both studied furniture at RISD, both create contemporary work with traditional influences, and — with Callahan about to, it turns out, launch a furniture collection — both have an interest in blurring the boundaries between hard and soft. Which was fitting, in a way, since this story was inspired by a new series of films produced by Cotton that explore the common threads in the daily lives of two seemingly disparate people.
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06.22.16

Sighted

New, Super-Graphic Housewares from MPGMB

Montreal duo Maude Beauchamp and Marie-Pier Guilmain of MPGMB may be responsible for one of our favorite necklaces in the Sight Unseen Shop, but they also have a thriving housewares line — in 2014, they released the Arizona Collection of stoneware planters perched atop wood-fiber stands, and now they've released a new summer series inspired by some of its design elements.
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06.21.16

Fair Report

10 New Takes on the Pendant Light, From a Designer Down Under

In the category of cities we're seriously dying to visit, Melbourne is right up there with Tokyo, and now we have another reason to make the trek: the recently wrapped Denfair, a design fair now in its second year, which in the past week has introduced us to whole host of new talents, including the German-born, Melbourne-based designer Volker Haug, whose new lighting collection we're featuring today. Made by hand in Haug's Brunswick East studio, the lights represent a more minimalist direction for the designer, whose previous creations were more colorful and organic.
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06.20.16

Sighted

The Coolest Glass Chairs Since Kuramata

Guillermo Santoma's interior work shows an acute understanding of things like just how much geometry is enough and how interesting cuts in the architecture can lift a just-great renovation into something otherworldly. Over the past few months, Santomá has released a series of chairs that embody many of those same principles.
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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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