12.11.23

American Design Hot List

The 2023 American Design Hot List, Part I

This week we announced our 11th annual American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s editorial award for the names to know now in American design. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the first group of Hot List designers here (including Charlap Hyman & Herrero, whose baby blue Brooklyn bedroom is pictured above).
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12.10.23

Saturday Selects

Week of December 4, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Pierre Yovanovitch’s chic new Chelsea gallery, lamps that look like melted butter, and the work from home setup of our dreams.
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12.07.23

Giveaway

Meet (and Win!) Sunne: A Solar-Powered Lamp That Color-Shifts to Mimic the Moods of the Sun

Dutch designer Marjan van Aubel — whom we interviewed yesterday to mark the debut of her new collaboration with Lexus — is a fervent proponent of solar energy, and specifically of using design to make the technology more appealing and accessible. Today, we're offering you the chance to win her solar-powered Sunne lamp, a statement piece for the home that can, with a tap on its frame, cycle through three different vibrant color spectrums meant to evoke sunrise (pale yellow) and sunset (fiery red or purple-y pink). Head to our Instagram to enter, or if you can't wait, head to our shop to purchase one!
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12.06.23

Q+A

Marjan van Aubel on Her Work At the Intersection of Design and Solar Energy — and Her Artful New Collab With Lexus

Marjan van Aubel calls herself a “solar designer,” and since she graduated from the RCA in 2012, she’s devoted her career to finding ways of making solar power more beautiful and accessible, using projects like solar-cell window hangings and rainbow-gradient solar roofs to inspire people to look at and use the technology in a new way. This week, she’s applying the same approach to the automotive realm, with a colorful interactive installation for Lexus in Miami that proves design can help speed us toward the future of environmentally conscious driving. We took the opportunity to sit down with van Aubel and learn more about the project, how she fell in love with solar energy, and why its future shouldn’t be dominated by men in blue suits.
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03.04.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

Meet UNNO, the New Online Gallery Championing Latin American Design

UNNO, a new online-only gallery from architect Laura Abe Vettoretti and interior designer Maria Dolores, is making the most of the situation after plans to open a physical gallery in Milan last year were put on hold. Their mission, they tell us, is to introduce the richly varied landscape of Latin American design to collectors across the globe, spurred on by the region’s fertile mix of craft tradition and yet-to-be-discovered crop of contemporary designers.
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12.05.23

Up and Coming

Frederik Fialin on His New Tubular Metal Collection: “We All Like to be Comfortable, But Other Things Are Often More Important to Me”

Danish designer Frederik Fialin understands the idea that you have to know the rules before you can break them. He’s certain something is working not only when it’s functional and beautiful, but when it makes him laugh. It’s a way of taking the work seriously, without taking yourself too seriously, and it may have something to do with how Fialin got started, with a classic cabinetry apprenticeship. “I didn’t particularly enjoy it at the time, but now I see why everything has to be done in a certain way. I consider this, now, to be possibly the greatest foundation of my professional life that I could ever have asked for — especially because I can use, remix, and warp this never-ending chase for perfection that dominates the environment. There’s reason in the madness.”
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12.04.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

In His Latest Solo Exhibition, Magnus Pettersen’s Glass Orbs Evoke a Sense of Metaphysical Disturbance

In Norwegian designer Magnus Pettersen’s latest solo exhibition, which was on view at QB Gallery in Oslo last month, a new series of sculptures was presented, which purport, per the press materials, to transgress the boundary between artworks and functional objects. But that isn't remotely the most interesting thing about the pieces; pretty much everything published on this site at this point achieves that with equal aplomb. For us, the most interesting thing is the addition of wood, yes, especially in brilliantly tinted hues like emergency orange. But more important is the inclusion of tiny glass orbs, perched on the arms or backs or smack dab in the middle of several of the seats, which sometimes prevent the pieces from being functional objects at all. Why are they there? What is their meaning? Has Pettersen recently discovered astrology?
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12.02.23

Saturday Selects

Week of November 27, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a med spa so chic we'd live in it, three unmissable group exhibitions in New York and San Francisco, and pretty new photos of a standout Italian furniture collection (above).
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12.01.23

Sighted

These Bauhausian, Artisan-Made Rugs Embody The Spirit of Argentina

When you think of Argentina, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Steak? Soccer? For many, it’s tango —the passionate partner dance that’s fast, fiery, and frankly far too complicated for my two left feet. Since Australian textile brand Pampa works with skilled artisans in remote parts of Argentina, as well as across Latin America, the company has chosen to dedicate its latest collection of rugs to the vibrant culture of its partners. So using bright red natural dyes to color the 100% wool fibers, they created the Tango collection as an homage to the spirit of Argentina, and specifically to its national dance.
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11.29.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

Eny Lee Parker’s “Pretty Secrets” Exhibition Puts the Spotlight on 7 Major New Female & Nonbinary Talents

We’ve been Eny Lee Parker stans ever since she debuted her first collection with Sight Unseen at our 2017 Offsite show, and it’s been rewarding to watch her meteoric rise from breakout star to global name. Recently, the New York–based artist and designer has been doing her own part to highlight a new generation of emerging talent, the latest by curating a showcase of works by seven female or nonbinary designers in collaboration with Spring New York.
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11.27.23

Sighted

Sweden’s Oldest Rug Brand Finally Lands in Soho

Scandinavian design brands have been a favorite of American consumers since the mid-20th century — and of Sight Unseen since we could barely recognize something as "design." This month, one of our favorite of those brands — the Swedish rug company Kasthall, with whom we partnered for Sight Unseen Offsite in 2017 and created a capsule collection of rugs pre-pandemic — opened up a new permanent showroom in Soho, leaving behind the trade-friendly but consumer no-mans-land that is the D&D Building for the cobblestone streets and extensive foot traffic of downtown NYC. The company has created beautiful woven and hand-tufted rugs at its factory in Kinna, Sweden, since 1889, and its spacious new flagship on Howard Street will allow customers to touch and see the quality of those carpets IRL.
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