05.03.16

Sighted

Sneak a Peek at our Collaboration with Designtex, Debuting at Collective Design!

When Collective Design invited Sight Unseen to create a special installation for the second year in a row, spotlighting new work by five independent American design studios on the rise, we knew we wanted a visual thread that might tie the collections together and add an extra dimension to the presentation. Enter Designtex, the Steelcase-owned manufacturer of textiles and wallcoverings, whose genius Made to Measure program we'd been eyeing a while, partnering as it does with some of our favorite artists, illustrators, and designers to create a totally customizable wallcoverings or textiles. For Collective Design, opening tomorrow, our five designers — Only Love Is Real, Chris Wolston, Studio Proba x Bower, and Fort Makers — will debut a collection of furniture and lighting set against a backdrop of custom wallpaper they’ve developed with Designtex especially for this show.
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05.01.16

Saturday Selects

Week of April 25, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the best in totally affordable and totally unaffordable fashion and design, two illustrations and a Toronto house we wish we could move into immediately, and a few more Milan fair stragglers, including the playful room divider above by Ana Arana.
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04.29.16

Studio Visit

Eric Trine Wants to Bring Powder-Coated Joy to the Masses

In the three years since we met Eric Trine — who, at the time, was a grad student skipping his art-school graduation to show with Sight Unseen during New York Design Week — the Long Beach, California–furniture designer has emerged as a true talent. And though his powder-coated pieces — geometric, clean, bright, and fun — have wowed us from the start, over time he’s honed his approach and philosophy, shifting from a DIY mentality to a full-fledged operation with a driving vision behind it: to make great-looking, high-quality products that are actually affordable.
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04.27.16

Sighted

The Architectural Ceramics of Andrew Molleur

Ceramicist Andrew Molleur — who's based in upstate New York and will be participating in our shoppable ceramics bar at this year's Sight Unseen OFFSITE — makes slip-cast vessels and tableware that draw on his interests in the formal language of buildings, and in Japanese and Scandinavian design aesthetics.
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04.26.16

At Home With

Douglas and Bec’s Beautifully Understated New Zealand Home

There are elements of Bec Dowie’s northern New Zealand home that are impossible to capture in photographs alone. One may not realize, for instance, the scope of its rural surroundings. It may be hard to detect the relative quiet in comparison to the city where the designer, her husband, and daughter previously made their home. And it most certainly may be difficult to grasp that, despite a noticeable lack of embellishment, it’s a multifaceted — and completely modifiable — space that belies its minimal appearance. To put it plainly: Its walls move.
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01.03.14

Sighted

Josephine Meckseper in Interview Magazine

Living in New York City, you'd think it would be easy to see world-class art nearly every weekend. But life tends to get in the way, whether it's needing a haircut or having to wait in a six-hour line just to see a 45-second exhibition. But one show we're going to do our darndest to see before it closes January 18 is the first New York solo exhibition by German-born, New York–based artist Josephine Meckseper at the Andrea Rosen Gallery. While we don't often love art that appropriates advertising imagery, Meckseper's deft combinations of that imagery with things like hand made sculpture casts and paintings speaks to us somehow. This particular show deals with Meckseper's own complicated history, having moved in the late '80s as a young adult from a sheltered, artistic European community to Valencia, California, where mall was king. We spotted this recent Q&A with the artist in Interview Magazine (which has kind of been killing it on the art front, lately, what with the epic Roberta Smith/Jerry Saltz conversation) and wanted to share a tiny excerpt below. Read on and then click through at the end for the interview in its entirety.
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Leong Leong's TOPO installation for Sight Unseen OFFSITE
04.25.16

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Get Ready to Experience Leong Leong’s Epic Infinite Sound Bath for Ford

Christopher and Dominic Leong, brothers and founding partners in the New York–based architectural office Leong Leong, have since 2009 developed a practice shaped by an understanding of architecture as a discipline in constant dialogue with other disciplines, such as art, film, and music. Their installation for this year’s edition of Sight Unseen OFFSITE is no exception: TOPO is an immersive and experiential landscape — created in partnership with ARUP and inspired by the design thinking behind the Ford Edge — that turns a flowing field of more than a thousand foam rollers into a kind of musical instrument, using acoustic actuators to pick up ambient sounds and translate them into a sonic soundscape.
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04.23.16

Saturday Selects

Week of April 18, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a massive art chaser to counteract the design hangover we've had ever since Milan: new exhibitions by SU faves like Naomi Clark, Lily Stockman, Brent Wadden, Carol Bove, Kate Steciw, and more. (Plus: the amazing golden Stabile chair by Barcelonan designer Max Enrich, above, because we couldn't resist!)
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04.21.16

Sighted

Elisa Strozyk’s Ceramic Mirrors Are Simplicity at its Best

We love a crazy design experiment as much as the next guy, but lately we've been appreciating the pleasures of simplicity. There's something so nice about an understated yet surprising approach to an ordinary technique. Enter this collection of mirrors by Berlin designer Elisa Strozyk, which are accented with panels of swirly glazed ceramic. No tricks here, unless you count rotating and blowing on the clay discs to accentuate the marbling.
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04.20.16

Fair Report

The Best of the 2016 Milan Furniture Fair, Part III

The 2016 Salone del Mobile and Fuorisalone — aka the Milan Furniture Fair — was one of our favorites yet, and we were there on the ground, running around like crazy people trying to absorb a year’s worth of new furniture in less than a week’s time. According to our iPhones, we walked about 7.5 miles a day in our quest to scout great design. Here’s the last of three posts chronicling what we found.
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04.19.16

Giveaway

Win $2,500 Worth of Colorful Designs in Our Brand New Hue Giveaway

Give your interiors a spring color refresh! Enter our Brand New Hue giveaway by April 26, and you could win more than $2,500 worth of vibrant housewares from some of our favorite brands and stores, including Areaware, Poketo, Umbra Shift, Need Supply, Casetify, Tetra, Unison Home, and our very own Sight Unseen shop.
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04.18.16

Fair Report

The Best of the 2016 Milan Furniture Fair, Part II

The 2016 Salone del Mobile and Fuorisalone — aka the Milan furniture fair — closes today, and we were there on the ground, running around like crazy people trying to absorb a year's worth of new furniture in less than a week's time. According to our iPhones, we walked about 7.5 miles a day in our quest to scout great design. Here's the second of three posts chronicling what we found.
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04.16.16

Fair Report

The Best of the 2016 Milan Furniture Fair, Part I

The 2016 Salone del Mobile and Fuorisalone — aka the Milan furniture fair — closes today, and we were there on the ground, running around like crazy people trying to absorb a year's worth of new furniture in less than a week's time. According to our iPhones, we walked about 7.5 miles a day in our quest to scout great design. Here's the first of three posts chronicling what we found.
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