05.28.16

Saturday Selects

Week of May 23, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a resurrection of old Castiglioni furniture, the most anticipated art exhibition of the summer opens at the Guggenheim, and four (more) of our favorite releases from New York design week, including the tables by Yield above.
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05.27.16

Sighted

We May Have Just Found the Holy Grail of Rugs

Launched at Matter during New York Design Week, these gorgeously sophisticated rugs designed by Studio Proba and Aelfie Oudghiri strike a much-sought-after — but rarely achieved — aesthetic balance: They're basic enough to go with almost anything, but stylish enough to anchor a well-designed room. The holy grail of rugs.
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10.30.13

Excerpt: Exhibition

Salone Satellite at La Rinascente

From now until Christmas, pieces by 11 standout stars from this year's Salone Satellite young designers' showcase in Milan will be on view and for sale at La Rinascente. Considering that the Milan-based department store is basically Italy's version of Barneys, this is kind of a Big Deal for those young designers on the verge of stardom. And if the pieces look like they could actually be part of the same collection, perhaps it's because they all tackle the same theme from last year's Satellite: “Design and Craftsmanship: Together for Industry," a typically Italian name that just means that the designers were tasked with figuring out how to retain traditional craftsmanship techniques and processes while still producing for a mass audience. It's also because many of the items draw from a similar materials palette: "This is a compendium of “poor” materials, ranging from wood to glass, to iron to terracotta, reinterpreted and worked in a surprising fusion of craftsmanship and industrial techniques." We've picked some of our favorites to share with you today.
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05.26.16

Sighted

Kathleen Whitaker Just Took Her Simple, Geometric Jewelry Up a Notch

Nearly a year ago, we profiled the Los Angeles jewelry designer Kathleen Whitaker, known for starting the whole staple and dot stud earring trend that went viral a couple years back, and previewed the limited-edition project she was starting in parallel to her base collection — one that would elevate those designs into more rarefied territory by adding semiprecious stones to their simple, minimalist geometries. Earlier this spring, she officially debuted the results in the form of the Stone Collection, and we are coveting every. single. piece.
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05.25.16

Up and Coming

Meet the Talented Sisters Behind Our New Favorite Lighting Brand

If you visited Sight Unseen OFFSITE last week, you might have noticed one standout booth in particular, dressed as it was in moody shades of blue, showcasing an incredible number of variations on the sculptural, globe-bulbed typology that's recently become so en vogue in the lighting world. In fact, in its striking beauty, the booth was impossible to miss: The lights were the work of London-based sisters Gwendolyn and Guillane Kerschbaumer, two Austrian-born designers who work under the studio name Areti.
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05.23.16

Fair Report

The Best of New York Design Week 2016

New York Design Week may come hot on the heels each year of the all-consuming behemoth that is the Milan furniture fair, but to pay it any less attention would be a mistake — between Sight Unseen OFFSITE, ICFF, Colony, Wanted, and the goings-on at outposts like the Future Perfect and Matter, the days when America's most important contemporary design event was simply a watered-down rehash of Europe's are indisputably over. Here's a roundup our favorite finds from this year's show.
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05.20.16

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Take a Tour of the 2016 Show, Part II

This year's show was, as always, meticulously curated to ensure both the highest quality of designs and a variety of experiences. We had pop-ups where visitors could buy chocolate, cosmetics, fragrances, ceramics and smoking accessories; we hosted our second annual lunch cafe by Sunday Supper, this year in collaboration with Baked by Lexie Smith; we partnered with Homepolish to create and style a lounge using furniture by the show’s designers; and we had mega-Instagrammable moments in the form of Bower’s infinite hall of mirrors, kinder MODERN’s Design Chess matches, Land of Nod’s supersized play room, Eric Trine’s pink toilet, and Leong Leong’s foam-roller TOPO installation for Ford, which throughout the weekend became a jungle gym for our littlest Sight Unseen fans. Here's Part II of our tour.
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Sight Unseen OFFSITE 2016
05.19.16

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Take a Tour of Our 2016 Show, Part I

Since Sight Unseen OFFSITE began three years ago, we've held the fair in three different locations, and people often ask whether that nomadic spirit translates in practice to something of a logistical nightmare. The answer, of course, is yes, and yet, each May, there's a huge payoff: Our space has informed the character of each year's show in an immeasurable way, and this year's fair was no different. See what you missed firsthand in this part one of two tours of our 2016 show,
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05.16.16

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

These Norwegian and American Designers Spent Six Months Collaborating on Skype

For the Norway x New York booth at Sight Unseen OFFSITE, we set up a cross-cultural exchange pairing 5 entrepreneurial American studios (Ladies & Gentlemen, Bower, Farrah Sit, Jonah Takagi, Assembly) and 5 up-and-coming Norwegian ones (Vera and Kyte, Bjørn van den Berg, Silje Nesdal, Hallgeir Homstvedt, Morten and Jonas), who spent the past six months working together via Skype and emails on a long-distance collaboration, with the aim to develop an object or series of objects that utilized an American workshop for fabrication.
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05.14.16

The Making of

Leong Leong’s TOPO Installation for Ford at Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Design-lovers seeking a moment of calm this week will find just that in TOPO, the immersive sound bath installation designed by Leong Leong for Ford that's featured at our third annual Sight Unseen OFFSITE show, open today through Monday. Inspired by the experience of driving through landscapes in the Ford Edge, TOPO is a space to chill out, lounge around, and tune in to a meditative experimental soundtrack created by the designers with the engineers at ARUP.
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