BZIPPY, Kathryn Bentley, and Waka Waka at L.A.’s Dream Collective

We've seen creatives collaborate in plenty of novel, inventive ways — by mailing materials back and forth, by playing games of exquisite corpse. But sometimes the best joint projects arise more loosely, like the one currently on view at Dream Collective in Los Angeles, featuring work by Bari Ziperstein, Waka Waka, and store owner/jewelry designer Kathryn Bentley.
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The Spectrum Issue of Gather Journal

Since its launch in 2012, each issue of the biannual food journal Gather has been organized around a theme, but this summer's is by far our favorite. We're excerpting a story from “Spectrum,” an entire issue devoted to color.
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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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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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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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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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