Welcome to Our New Website!

If you’re a longtime reader of Sight Unseen, you might know that the site you saw at this URL until yesterday was essentially the same one we’d had since the day we launched in November 2009 — practically the Jurassic era, in terms of web design. We've stayed true to that original look for so long in part because it was, well, super pretty. But today we're debuting a new look!
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Week of August 10, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: jaw-dropping jewelry, desktop wallpaper from Baggu, and the latest and greatest in Scandi design, including the new brand AYTM, pictured above.
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Before and After: Our First Home Makeover

This winter, designer Eunsun Park was living with her boyfriend in a sunny studio apartment on New York's Lower East Side that contained almost no furniture. That's when she spotted the auction we were hosting on eBay in partnership with Paypal, which offered a personal home makeover by Sight Unseen's editors to the highest bidder. Forty-eight bids later, Park emerged the winner, we got to make over her tiny apartment from top to bottom — see the before and after photos after the jump!
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Miami Artist Francesco Locastro

Despite the ubiquity of — and our affection for — Instagram and the internet, the way we discovered Italian-born, Miami-based artist Francesco Locastro this summer remains one of our favorite ways to source new talent: wandering aimlessly through the aisles of an art or design fair until something stops you in your tracks with its sheer beauty.
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Meg Callahan geometric quilts

Meg Callahan is Making Quilts Cool Again

Earlier this month, Jamie Gray of New York’s Matter was named a “game-changer” for his patronage role in the American design scene, and we've got to give the man his credit. Though we pride ourselves on unearthing emerging talents in design, it was Gray who introduced us to Meg Callahan, the recent RISD grad whose coolly geometric, midcentury-meets-Ma Walton quilts were released through Mattermade, his in-house furniture line, last spring. Callahan quickly became one of our favorites, for the way she mixes the traditional with the new, alternating hand-stitching with machine-quilting, color-blocking with digital printing. “I started making quilts because I really like the aesthetic nature of things, but I also like figuring out how things are made,” Callahan says. “A quilt is a functional, 3-D object but it’s also 2-D, a composition of color blocks; you have to figure out the math of how to construct it. The combination of the two intrigued me.” When she approached us with a series of images she shot back home in Oklahoma of her new Caddo quilt — well, we’d have been crazy if we didn’t publish them and get the story behind their making.
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Nicolás Aracena Müller at Chamber

If you happen to have been wandering under the High Line in New York's Chelsea neighborhood sometime over the last week, you might have seen something you don't see every day — the bespectacled, wild-haired Chilean designer Nicolás Aracena Müller making chairs from found scraps of wood in the gallery windows of Chamber, a concept shop and exhibition space opened last year by Juan Mosqueda.
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Week of August 3, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an IRL pop-up shop from our favorite auction house, a design legend lost too soon, and sneak previews from fall collections including Areaware and Hawkins New York, the design duo responsible for that shaggy pillow goodness up top.
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Top 5: Yoga Mats

A periodic nod to object typologies both obscure and ubiquitous, featuring five of our favorite recent examples. Today, our subject is the yoga mat, a typically utilitarian slab of inoffensively colored foam that, thanks to the magic of digital printing, is getting a new dose of personality.
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Fredrik Paulsen chairs

A Furniture Collection Inspired By Pick-Up Sticks

We gave you a sneak peek of Fredrik Paulsen’s solo exhibition at Paris’s Galerie Torri earlier this summer, but when we saw the Stockholm-based designer had properly photographed the whole collection, we wanted to share the results. Called Mikado — a name we assume originates from the European form of pick-up sticks — the chairs are made from simple pieces of pine that Paulsen stains a brilliant teal blue.
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Justine Ashbee of Native Line

Justine Ashbee is one of those talents we've been circling around for years — first coveting a fine, copper-threaded special-edition light she did with Iacoli & McAllister, then ogling her beautiful wall hangings in stories like our own home tour with Totokaelo's Jill Wenger and outlets like Maryam Nassir Zadeh. But we've never had a proper introduction to the onetime Seattle-based artist — now living in Brighton, England — until today.
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Paul Wackers at Morgan Lehman Gallery

Most of you probably know Brooklyn artist Paul Wackers for his paintings, which depict plants, rocks, and shelves full of abstract knick-knacks. But his work really comes alive when it's exhibited alongside his ceramics — as is currently the case in his new Morgan Lehman show "Thank You For Being You" — which makes it appear as though the paintings have come to life.
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Mexico City Artist Pia Camil

A 2014 exhibition from Mexico City–based artist Pia Camil, featuring hand-dyed and stitched textile panels complemented by paintings and geometric, low-fired ceramic sculptures.
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