02.24.16

Up and Coming

Erika Emerén is Doing Magical Things With Concrete

Swedish designer Erika Emerén's current practice involves dyeing and casting concrete in an experimental process that she has very little control over, then using it to make chairs, tables, and soon, lamps too. "The results always vary, especially when I'm mixing different colors," she says. "But that's what I prefer, to make something unique. The that I can't control is what makes the design interesting."

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02.23.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

Stools That Channel Our Favorite Modernist Sculptors

Isamu Noguchi, Hanna Eshel, Barbara Hepworth — these are the masters of marble who came to mind when we first saw French designer Guillaume Delvigne's beautiful new stool series for Tools Galerie in Paris. The young designer — who often does work for companies like Hermes or La Chance — just closed an exhibition there, the inaugural presentation at a brand-new Left Bank space for the gallery. The sculptural, totemic stools — which were inspired by mooring posts — are actually made from several different materials, including bronze, wood, and leather. But stone is the star here, in creamy white Carrera, flecked travertine, and a rich green called Vert Donay.

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02.22.16

Excerpt: Book

A New Book Features the Botanical Decor of Your Dreams

File this one under "why didn't we think of it first?" This fall, Magali Elali and Bart Kiggen of the Belgian online magazine Coffeeklatch — a destination for lovely interviews and photography that's been on our must-read list for years — released a book called Greenterior, which looks at the homes of designers and artists through the lens of their abundant houseplants.

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02.20.16

Saturday Selects

Week of February 15, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Unexpected collabs (Issey Miyake x Ittala, La Perla x Walter Terruso), surprise mug subscriptions (Helen Levi, Ben Medansky), and a striking Amsterdam store interior by Framework (pictured).

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02.19.16

Shopping

These Mirrors Will Make You Question the Meaning of Humanity

Chen Chen and Kai Williams's new Mirror Masks for Areaware are clearly just flat slabs of industrially produced glass printed with a few simple shapes. And yet somehow they ooze emotion — that's how strongly our brains are wired to read the feelings that lie behind facial expressions. To underscore that dichotomy, Areaware's art director Elsa Brown hired the up-and-coming Brooklyn artist Carson Fisk-Vittori to take the mirrors to Mexico City, then shoot evocative photographs of them in various settings around town.

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09.30.13

Fair Report

At the 2013 New York Art Book Fair

The 2013 edition of Printed Matter's New York Art Book Fair, which is held annually at MoMA PS1, featured a performance by MASKS, a Bruno Munari exhibition, a collage-making party, and the launch of the multi-talented Tauba Auerbach's new project, Diagonal Press, among other things. Unfortunately, we had to miss it in order to attend a hipster summer camp weekend upstate, but were we jealous? No! Because not only were we clever enough to ask noted bookworm and SU contributor Brian W. Ferry to document it for us, we'd also managed to trick ourselves into believing that attending would have been a terrible idea: It's a hot, crowded, and sweaty affair, one that has the tantalizing potential each year to completely bankrupt us. So yeah, we totally dodged a bullet, right? Right? Well either way, we can all live vicariously through Brian by checking out his pictures and commentary in this slideshow, after the jump.

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02.18.16

Studio Visit

Dutch Design Studio Os ∆ Oos Makes Work That’s Brainy But Beautiful

Four years ago, Sight Unseen featured the first product by what was then a brand-new studio on the scene: The Syzygy series by Dutch duo Os ∆ Oos consisted of three lamps whose intensity depended on the subtle rotation of three light-filtering discs placed in front of the bulb; it was inspired by the astronomical phenomenon of three celestial bodies aligning in space. As a design product, it was both conceptually driven and artistically minded, but it was, at the end of the day, a lamp. “We’re definitely not artists; we’re designers,” clarifies Oskar Peet, who with Sophie Mensen makes up the Eindhoven-based studio. “We like to make functional projects.”

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02.17.16

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Join Our 2016 New York Design Week Show

Each May, Sight Unseen produces and curates one of the biggest, most important fairs held during New York Design Week: Sight Unseen OFFSITE. This year we're stepping things up a major notch, with double the exhibition space — inside the historic W.R. Grace building — and an even more ambitious curatorial program, presented in partnership with Ford. The show runs from May 13–16, and our exhibitor application process is now open.

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02.16.16

Fair Report

15 Things We Loved At Stockholm Design Week 2016

While we would have happily braved the cold and darkness of Stockholm Design Week just to eat Kalles Kaviar for breakfast, snag some Acne staples at a cut rate, and do a self-guided tour of the key spots featured in Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle books, it's also one of our favorite design fairs, not least because the Scandi scene is so hyper-relevant right now. These 15 Stockholm Design Week highlights are must-sees.

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02.14.16

Saturday Selects

Week of February 8, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Still haven't found a Valentine's gift? How about a $7,000 trio of architectural weavings, a spiral gold ring, an avant-garde flower arrangement, or just a day date uptown to see the latest California Light & Space exhibit (above)? We've got you covered, ahead.

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02.12.16

Sighted

These Avant-Garde Arrangements Look So Right in Ben Medansky’s Vases

It's no secret that ceramics and plants are two of the biggest styling trends driving the interiors world right now, but our favorite thing is what happens when the two collide: The planting of jaw-dropping specimens in purpose-built pots has become something of a trend itself lately, from Adam Silverman and Kohei Oda's eccentric potted cacti to David Haskell's psychotic plants to Bari Ziperstein's recent ikebana collaboration with Junzo Mori. The latest entrant to that field is Ben Medansky, who partnered with the Los Angeles creative agency We Came In Peace on a series of limited-edition living works, on sale through Monday at Persephone's, a Valentine's-themed botanical pop-up shop in Hollywood.

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02.11.16

Sighted

Pro Tip: Designy Furniture That’s Hiding in Plain Sight

Two weeks ago, I happened to find myself on the Roche Bobois website, and I had a minor retail epiphany: Not only does the French furniture brand boast some pretty legit, on-trend offerings by designers like Cédric Ragot, Stephen Burks, and even Ettore Sottsass, it has showrooms everywhere — from Scottsdale to Dallas to Denver to Detroit, and that's just in America — meaning that cutting-edge, designy furniture may actually be closer at hand in the U.S. than we realized.

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02.10.16

Studio Visit

Playing Around With the Cool Kids of American Design

Inside the experimental playground that is Ladies & Gentlemen's new Brooklyn studio: “All of our work is an evolution of itself,” says Dylan Davis, one-half of the up-and-coming design couple. Shapes on a piece of jewelry might lead to a geometric take on lighting; that, in turn, might inspire the assorted forms suspended on a mobile. However distinct, each piece is unmistakably linked to the next, joined by an understated elegance and what the two refer to as "playful austerity." “We try to embrace that feeling you had as a kid when you got to really explore,” Davis says. “Our goal is to take that spirit of play and figure out how to use it professionally.”

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