One of 10 knitting machines at the Eindhoven factory where Emily Hermans designs and produces custom textiles for her clothing line, MLY.
11.30.09

Factory Tour

MLY by Emily Hermans

When Emily Hermans started her own clothing line in 2004, she did something kind of genius: She found a local knitwear factory in Eindhoven that would let her produce her own textile designs on its knitting machines, and then slowly convinced its owner to take her on as a partner. He would get equity in her line — MLY — and she could crank out prints to her heart’s content without paying a premium. There was only one catch.
More
Archipelago House by Tham and Videgard Hansson Arkitekter (Husarö, Sweden) "Conceived as a lightweight construction in wood and glass, this summerhouse is built on Stockholm’s outer archipelago. The robust horizontal character of the black stained exterior corresponds to reflections of the Baltic Sea."
11.25.09

Excerpt: Book

Arcadia

When Henry David Thoreau took to the woods in 1845 to begin his Walden experiment, it was more of an exercise in social deprivation than an outright attempt to recharge his creative batteries. But his flight from civilization does prove that he — and all the generations of writers and makers who have flocked to sylvan retreats for productivity’s sake — felt every bit as besieged by the distractions of modern life as we do nearly two centuries later. Paging through Arcadia (Gestalten, 2009), a catalog of contemporary architectural hideaways built among trees and mountains, all I could think about was how powerful a tool nature has always been in creative life: We need to be immersed in culture to inform the things we create, but we also desperately need escape to give our minds the space to process it.
More
Since starting the series in 2006, Van Ark has photographed the storerooms of 13 museums, including the Natuurmuseum Brabant in Tilburg, where this photo was taken.
11.23.09

The Making of

The Mounted Life by Danielle Van Ark

It started with a dead hamster. In the late ’90s, Dutch photographer Danielle Van Ark was living in Rotterdam, reacquainting herself with the charms of the grain-eating, wheel-chasing starter pet. Her hamster expired right around the time the Beastie Boys were coming out with a single called "Intergalactic". “The cover of that single was basically a giant hamster attacking humanity, and it inspired me to have my hamster stuffed,” Van Ark says. “I found someone in a village near Rotterdam who does it, and I loved the place instantly.”
More
A view of Psyrri, an upscale shopping area in the center of Athens. "It used to be full of wholesale centers and metal, wood, and leather workshops. Then in the '90s a lot of artists and designers kept their lofts and studios there," Kotsilelou says. "Now it's super-decadent. This picture is a great example of typical Athens architecture where buildings are extended vertically, one on top of the other."
11.20.09

Where They've Been

Greece Is For Lovers in Athens

A disclaimer: Athens can be a beautiful city, with striking juxtapositions between ancient and modern architecture and sunshine on par with Los Angeles. (check out this video for proof). But when seen through the eyes of the young design trio Greece Is For Lovers, who grew up there and now keep a studio at the foot of the Acropolis, the view isn’t quite so rosy.
More
Nacho_1_NEW
11.18.09

An Afternoon With

Nacho Carbonell, Designer

It’s half past eight on a Wednesday evening, and in the kitchen of the Pastoor Van Ars church, a few miles from Eindhoven’s prestigious Design Academy, a long table has been set with two propane gas burners. Normally, the burners here are used to boil massive amounts of newspaper into pulp bound for the cocoon-like structures of Nacho Carbonell’s Evolution collection. But tonight the Spanish-born designer has hijacked the flames to fry up two huge paellas: chicken and pancetta for the meat-eaters, eggplant and artichokes for the vegetarians.
More
19th-century sterling silver vulture brooch. "There are a few people in England I buy from, nice ladies who live in rural areas who can find better prices than I probably could. This brooch is my favorite new arrival. It’s the total opposite of most Victorian bird jewelry, which typically has sentimental and romantic symbolism with depictions of swallows and doves. This guy is huge and mean — there’s nothing romantic about a scavenger."
11.16.09

What They Bought

Russell Whitmore, Owner of Erie Basin

Certain areas in the Northeast are generally regarded as nirvana for antique collectors: Hudson, New York; Lambertville, New Jersey; Adamstown, Pennsylvania; Brimfield, Massachusetts. Red Hook, Brooklyn, isn't one of them. But that’s where 29-year-old Russell Whitmore decided to set up shop three years ago, on a corner just a few blocks from the East River wharfs. His much-loved store, Erie Basin, specializes in Victorian- and Georgian-era jewelry, furniture, and curiosities, with a dash of 20th century thrown in.
More
Almost everything the Iriarte sisters know about hand-tooling leather, they taught themselves. Four years later, "we're still not geniuses at it," says Sol. But you'd never know it — the bag line is doing well, and when we visited, the pair were in talks with their first American retailer.
11.12.09

Studio Visit

Iriarte Iriarte, Clothing Designers

For more than three years, the Argentinean sisters Sol Caramilloni Iriarte and Carolina Lopez Gordillo Iriarte kept a design studio on the second floor of a building in Barcelona, handcrafting an eponymous line of leather bags in relative privacy. Sol, 32, was working part-time as a set designer for films; Carolina, 25, had just finished a year apprenticing under her friend Muñoz Vrandecic, the Spanish couture shoemaker. Called Iriarte Iriarte, it was a modest operation. Then in June, fate intervened.
More
Tolaas has degrees in chemistry, art, and language, and her work is precisely a combination of the three. She uses her nose and her intuition to craft complex fragrance formulas using individual scent notes, then strives to present them to the world in ways that can be universally experienced and understood.
11.05.09

Studio Visit

Sissel Tolaas, Scent Expert

“I’m a professional provocateur,” Sissel Tolaas says between sniffles, her Norwegian accent blunted by one of the colds the artist and world-renowned scent expert often gets after maxxing out her mucous membranes. Visit her at-home laboratory in Berlin, where she concocts conceptual fragrance studies for museums and for megabrands like Coty, and the provocations begin almost immediately.
More
SNAKESKIN01
11.05.09

Excerpt: Book

Creative Space: Urban Homes of Artists and Innovators

Francesca Gavin is a London-based writer, editor, and blogger, and, like you and me, she’s a major voyeur. For her book Creative Space: Urban Homes of Artists and Innovators, she traveled the world, slipping inside the studios, apartments, and houses of designers, artists, photographers, stylists, curators, writers, and filmmakers to document the chaotic interiors she found there.
More
F-Factory-01_copy
11.04.09

Factory Tour

Freitag’s Zurich Headquarters

When you arrive in Zürich, you arrive with a few certainties: The trams will run like clockwork, the city will be spotless, and at least a third of the population, it seems, will be carrying a Freitag messenger bag. During my weeklong stay in Switzerland this spring, the Freitag bag — with its recycled truck-tarp shell, seatbelt strap, and inner-tube edging — began to seem something like a national accessory.
More
"The guy I bought these bottles from has a serious collection of glass from the 1910s and '20s. But behind his booth, he had these bottles ‘in dug condition,’ and I loved that. Many are old elixir bottles from the early 1900s. I bought eight, including the big brown and white ones directly in front of me in the photo. They’ll definitely inform my designs. Hypothetically if I was designing a candle holder, I might look at 10 to 15 round objects and collage them together in my mind, drawing on just the lip of that brown bottle — the thickness and proportion of the top rim in relation to the neck."
11.04.09

What They Bought

Paul Loebach at the Brimfield Antique Fair

Once or twice a year, Brooklyn furniture designer Paul Loebach gets out his straw hat and bandana, ties on a pair of crappy old sneakers, drags out his huge canvas tote, and drives up to Massachussetts, where dealers from all over the Northeast gather every spring, summer, and fall for the Brimfield Antique Show.
More
The designer in her garden
11.03.09

Up and Coming

Annie Lenon, Jewelry Designer

“I grew up going to pow-wows and stuff” isn’t the first thing you expect Annie Lenon to say as she’s puttering around the garden apartment and studio she shares with her boyfriend in a brownstone in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene. But then you recall that the 25-year-old jewelry-maker and Pratt grad hails from Bozeman, a city of 27,000 located in the southwestern corner of Montana — a state that with its prairies and badlands and Indian reservations seems downright exotic to most New Yorkers — and you realize she’s working from an entirely different reference point.
More

SU Shop

Wave Barrette
Handle Vase
Dome Bookends
Kokomo Pitcher and Cups
Amigos Blanket
Forma 2 Bowl

Trends, interviews, home tours, fair reports, and more.

The best of Sight Unseen, delivered to your inbox.

Sign Up
×