02.16.24

Fair Report

18 New Talents We Scouted at Greenhouse, Stockholm’s Showcase for Emerging Design

As an editor, each time I attend a design fair, I'm making snap judgements in my head: Does this designer's collection stand together as a whole? Is there a compelling narrative behind it? Does it use materials in a profound or creative way? Is it formally inventive? Is it pretty? If I had another suitcase, would I want to take a piece home with me? But before last week, I had never in my life had to choose my number one, absolute, hands-down favorite. And yet, at the Stockholm Furniture Fair's Greenhouse exhibition of emerging design, I did just that: For Sight Unseen's inaugural Best in Show award, I chose the Swedish duo Bursell/Svedborg — whose wonderful series of mixed-material pedestals we'll be diving into more in-depth next week — from a pool of 30 international design studios, who had been juried into the fair by a committee of six Stockholm-based designers. Today, though, I'm highlighting *all* of my favorite up-and-coming designers from the week.

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02.14.24

Fair Report

30 Projects We Loved at the 2024 Stockholm Furniture Fair

Perhaps no design fair makes me philosophize about the future of trade shows more than Stockholm. A small fair that has become even more compact over the past few years, as Danish brands have increasingly shifted their calendar to coincide with Copenhagen's 3 Days of Design, Stockholm tends to particularly shine in two areas that make a fair worth having in the first place: its curation — not only in booths but also in talks that one might actually care to attend — and the idea that sustainability ought to be baked in at every turn, or else what's the point of making new things?

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02.13.24

Q+A

Artist Chidy Wayne on How Doubt and Uncertainty Guide His Hand

Barcelona-based artist Chidy Wayne boasts an assured hand, honed from years of sketching as a former fashion designer and from working for over a decade as an illustrator commissioned by big brands like Nike and Kinfolk. But his gestural paintings often start from a place of naïveté: “I close my eyes and pretend I can’t draw to truly connect with myself,” he admits.

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02.10.24

Saturday Selects

Week of February 5, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: The latest releases by Portugal duo Garcé + Dimofski (pictured), a furniture collection made from the unused "crusts" of industrial aluminum blocks, and two interiors with an impeccable use of color-blocking.

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02.09.24

Interiors

Home Studios’ Latest Restaurant Interior, All Rounded Corners and Soft Textures, Invites You to Literally Take the Edge Off

At Theodora, a new restaurant in Fort Greene, Brooklyn’s Home Studios has perfected the cozy but airy welcoming interior. For Tomer Blechman’s (of Miss Ada and Nili) latest outing, Home Studios took their cues from Theodora’s Mediterranean-inspired menu and created a simple-looking yet highly thoughtful environment. Literally underscoring the idea that Theodora is a convivial place where you might relax and take the edge off, most of the surfaces here are rounded and curved, from the tabletops to the bar to the cutest sextet of ribbed-glass porthole windows.

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04.10.21

Saturday Selects

Week of April 5, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a puffy bed collab we never saw coming, a paragon of trendy tile designs, and a handful of art shows unmistakably born from the last year of pandemic life.

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02.07.24

Sighted

At the New Permanent Eames Archive in California, You Can Deep-Dive Into the Design Process of Charles and Ray Through 40,000 Artifacts

From the moment that Charles Eames, formerly an architect and teacher, and Ray Eames, formerly a fine artist, began a shared design practice in 1941, they cultivated an unusually meticulous creative process: in lieu of drawings and schematics, they worked out ideas and solved problems in real-time by creating endless physical models and prototypes. It's no wonder, then, that until the Eames Office closed after Ray's death in 1988, they were able to rack up more than 40,000 artifacts of their design process — and also no wonder that it took the family nearly 25 years to catalog them and finally make them available for public viewing all in one place, at the newly opened Eames Archive in Richmond, California.

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02.05.24

Sight Unseen Collection

It’s Not Often That a Designer Strikes Gold With Their First Big Product, But Studio Mignone Nailed It With Their Beloved Tavolo Morbido

When Studio Mignone’s Tavolo Morbido coffee table debuted in 2019, it became something of an instant, and soon much copied, classic. Tavolo Morbido is Italian for soft table, which gets at what Isabella Wood, one half of the Australian design duo, calls the “illusionistic softness” of the piece. But the name is also a little ironic: The original version was made of solid concrete pillars. It’s a relatively simple design, but a generative one that’s led to many iterations. It perfectly embodies a kind of maximal minimalism — clean, straightforward forms that contrast with the exuberance of their materials, colors, and surfaces — which is also what makes it work in so many different style spaces.

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02.03.24

Saturday Selects

Week of January 29, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: paintings made by a giant squeegee, a perfectly preserved Art Deco hunting lodge outside of Paris, and a Barcelona apartment inspired by the 1992 Olympics.

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02.02.24

Fair Report

The 11 Best Things We Saw at This Year’s 2024 Fog Design+Art Fair in San Francisco

In January I finally attended the Fog Design+Art show for the first time. The design scene in SF seems to be picking up a bit these days, and we've been getting to know its talents — from interior designers like Studio Ahead and Michael Hilal to local furniture and object makers like Kate Greenberg, Caleb Ferris, and Ido Yoshimoto — so I figured it would be a good chance to both network with the locals and see what the out-of-towners were bringing to the fair itself. Here's everything I liked at the show(s).

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02.01.24

Interiors

How Do You Make a Home Inside a Monument? Ask the Gachots, Who Just Spent Three Years Living in a Paul Rudolph Masterpiece

In 1976, the architect Paul Rudolph bought the 19th-century townhouse at 23 Beekman Place where he’d had an apartment since the early '60s. While keeping the existing building as residences, he constructed his now-landmarked, multi-level penthouse on top of it: a steel and cement work of art that is rigorous and spare in its lines yet dizzying in its scope and form. Inside, beams clad in reflective material support a light-filled space with few walls, delineated by platforms and catwalks and cantilevered, landscaped terraces with spectacular views out over FDR Drive and the East River. For Rudolph, it was a kind of creative laboratory — and it’s also not hard to imagine it as a site for glamorous, louche, late disco-era parties. But how about a family home? Enter designers John and Christine Gachot, of New York’s Gachot, known for the warm modernism they bring to their high-end interiors.

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01.29.24

Sighted

The Malin Opens a Moody, Textured, Pine-Accented Location in Nashville

Having been a member of the design-forward co-working space The Malin for nearly a year now, we could tell you a lot about their New York locations: how there's often a snack plate on offer (banana bread in the mornings, cookies in the afternoon); how there's always a row of lights running above the shared desks that were designed by two of Sight Unseen's longest-running collaborators; or which location has the best view (Williamsburg FTW). But Nashville, where the Malin recently opened its fourth and largest location — and first outside of New York — is something of an unknown quantity to us, having never before visited. We can't tell you which restaurants nearby have the best take-out, or what the artsy neighborhood it's in — called Wedgewood-Houston, or WeHo for short, because of course it is — is like. But part of what we love about The Malin is how they keep so many aesthetic elements the same, while switching things up just enough to make each outpost feel simultaneously familiar and fun.

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01.25.24

Sighted

Technology and Craft Meet in Tino Seubert’s New Aluminum and Glass Works

London-based designer Tino Seubert has a way of juxtaposing the industrial and the natural to create a coherent whole — even, or perhaps especially, as these elements clash and contrast. He’s been working in this vein, mixing traditional craftwork with technological sleekness and using unexpected combinations of materials and forms, since 2014, when we first spotted him at London's Royal College of Art, lacquering galvanized steel to brilliant effect. Different iterations have followed, as have pieces like a side table of bent rattan and brushed aluminum and his Corrugation lights, which combine ash veneer and aluminum tubes into rippling yet static sine curves. With Ferric Glass and Cosmos, his two new collections exhibited at in BAM Practice in Berlin this past November, Seubert has pushed these juxtapositions even further.

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