06.06.25

Excerpt: Book

Heading to Copenhagen for 3 Days of Design? Take our Modernist Travel Guide With You!

If you're heading to the 3 Days of Design festival in Copenhagen soon, we're guessing your schedule is already packed with exhibition visits and design aperitivos. But there's also a good chance that, if you're anything like us, you always carve out at least a little time for mandatory design sightseeing, too? With Scandinavia being a goldmine for mid-century anything, it's definitely folly to go to a place like Copenhagen without digging for architectural gems, and this year, we're making it incredibly easy to find them with our Modernist Travel Guide. ICYMI, Adam Štěch, the architecture photographer behind the popular Instagram account @okolo_architecture, distilled two decades of his work documenting over 10,000 Modernist landmarks into a handy, pocket-sized travel guide covering 363 buildings (with addresses!) in 30 cities around the world, and luckily for all of us, Copenhagen is one of them.

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06.05.25

Excerpt: Exhibition

This Bower x Emily Mullin Showcase Was the Unexpectedly Tough — and Perfect — Exhibition New York Design Week Needed

Here is a list of things I do not particularly like: surfaces designed to look as if they were tattooed, ceramics bound by chains or ropes, almost anything with spikes. Part of the reason I don't like these things is that, as a child of the '90s, they often feel a little poser-y to me — like the designer thought that by using the signifiers of toughness that they could take a shortcut to actually being that thing. But you know what I do like? When designers use materials or processes that are often associated with something hard or edgy in an unexpected or weird or superfluous way. This includes Bower's new Woven collection of mirrors — which weave thin strips of leather through a grid of mirror-polished stainless steel, a kind of Anni Albers for the post-punk era — and Emily Mullin's raku-fired ceramics, which get their signature look from combusting in a blaze of smoke and straw.

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06.03.25

Excerpt: Exhibition

To Christen Their New Dimes Square Gallery, Love House Kept It in the Family

This past month, Love House founders Jared Heinrich and Aric Yeakey debuted a new space just off Dimes Square in New York's Lower East Side; to christen the gallery, they curated their first group show ever — 60 brand-new works from the deep bench of contemporary design talent they've spent years fostering. The exhibition was titled, appropriately, The Family Show, and each artist or designer was asked to contribute a piece that represented their own interpretation of the theme.

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06.02.25

Fair Report

The Material-Rich Hundō Was One of Most Assured Furniture Debuts of the Season

One of our favorites launches at NYCxDesign was Hundō by Emily Thurman, an interior and product designer based in Salt Lake City. Thurman’s debut collection of furniture, lighting, and sculptural objects takes its name from the proto-Italic word for “pour out” — fitting as it gestures towards the fluidity that characterizes these pieces as well as the way in which some of them were made using the art of lost wax casting. The idea and process of “pouring out” also evokes the communal, collaborative effort behind this collection: Thurman turned to both local and far-flung designers and artisans to realize this transformative series.

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05.30.25

Fair Report

13 Group Shows We Loved at New York Design Week 2025

At this year's New York design week/month, opportunities were everywhere for showing new work, from an incredibly solid debut for the new trade fair Shelter, to the Hello Human–curated showcase at Public Records, to yes, the OG mothership that is now ICFF/Wanted. We found excellent work by ex-RISD kids in a Chinatown basement, design pieces mingling with fashion at boutiques like Colbo and Knickerbocker, and, a true sign of the times, quite of bit of great work in extremely expensive new residential developments. Yesterday we featured our favorite independent designers; today, we're focusing on our favorite group exhibitions from the week-turned-month that was.

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11.18.23

Saturday Selects

Week of November 13, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an array of chic, ready-to-install mantels, an exhibition inspired by a classic work of American literature, and a sock utopia opens in Brooklyn.

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05.29.25

Fair Report

20 Designers Whose Launches We Loved at New York Design Week 2025

At this year's New York design week/month, opportunities were everywhere for showing new work, from an incredibly solid debut for the new trade fair Shelter, to the Hello Human–curated showcase at Public Records, to yes, the OG mothership that is now ICFF/Wanted. We found excellent work by ex-RISD kids in a Chinatown basement, design pieces mingling with fashion at boutiques like Colbo and Knickerbocker, and, a true sign of the times, quite of bit of great work in extremely expensive new residential developments. Tomorrow we'll be featuring our favorite group exhibitions, but today we're focusing on our favorite independent designers, collection debuts, and one-offs from the week-turned-month that was.

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05.28.25

Sight Unseen Presents

For New York Design Week, We Surrounded Ourselves With Friends for a Sight Unseen Collection x Petra Exhibition

When the founders of the hospitality design firm AvroKo, who have been friends of ours for more than a decade, invited us to take over their Soho showroom and events space, Host on Howard, we in turn invited a group of our favorite designers to exhibit their work with us, not to mention co-host a few really fun parties along the way. Four studios trotted out their latest contributions to our Sight Unseen Collection — the furniture and lighting we represent direct to the trade — including Sunfish, Sam Klemick, Cultivation Objects, and Known Work, while Monica showcased nearly 20 new pieces from her hardware showroom Petra by friends like Sally Breer, Elyse Graham, Alexis & Ginger, and more.

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05.20.25

Excerpt: Exhibition

Galerie Néotu Was Legendary In Its Heyday. A New Show in NYC Invites You to Experience the Radical Furniture That Put it On the Map.

In 1984, Gérard Dalmon and Pierre Staudenmeyer co-founded Néotù in Paris — a now-legendary project existing somewhere between a gallery and a furniture producer, a home for designers who considered furniture to be a fine art medium, and a mode of emotional expression. Néotù wasn’t beholden to any particular aesthetic, though you could loosely and retrospectively apply the Postmodern descriptor. Rather, they sought to put divergent styles in conversation with one another and provide a singular home for a multiplicity of voices. They also wanted to challenge the then-dominant production and distribution models. The name itself is a phonetic wordplay on “néo-tout” or neo-everything. A new show, Néotù: The Visionary Years, now gives the gallery its due.

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05.19.25

Saturday Selects

Week of May 12, 2025

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: limited-edition Gaudí chairs, a cathedral-like eyewear store, and a boutique that’s part Milanese cafe, part Lower East Side laundromat.

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05.13.25

Excerpt: Exhibition

In a New Exhibition, Minjae Kim Unpacks Los Angeles Through a Lens of Wild Animals and Silent Film

Who else is obsessed with wild animals who become celebrities — living, as they often do, in the thick of human society? In 2023, I was gripped by the news about Flaco, the owl who escaped the Central Park Zoo and flew free in Manhattan for a full year. For Korean-born, New York–based artist Minjae Kim, it was P-22, the mountain lion who famously lived in LA’s Griffith Park from 2012 to until his death in 2022, who triggered the concept for Kim's latest exhibition at Marta gallery. Called Phantom-22, the show represents the “passage of creatures, ideas, and topographies that define Los Angeles as it continues its constant shift between fantasy and reality,” which Kim examines through this comprehensive body of work playing on several LA tropes. 

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05.09.25

Up and Coming

So Long, Synthetics — This Sustainable Furniture Collection is Bound by Natural Tree Sap

Harnessing tree sap to bind wood is a technique that dates back more than 45,000 years — a fact that fascinated Catskills-based studio Earth to People enough to revive the age-old process, using nature's glue to assemble furniture pieces crafted from reclaimed cedar and aluminum. Founders Jordan and Brittany Weller are “driven by a love of ancient stewardship and the handmade,” and for the past two years, they've dedicated their practice to reviving historic furniture-making traditions — taking things back to basics to create more sustainable, but still beautiful, seating and lighting.

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05.08.25

Excerpt: Book

The Modernist Travel Guide by Adam Štěch — The First Book Edited and Published By Sight Unseen — is Here to Take Your Travel Game to the Next Level

In this world, there are two types of travelers: those who prefer to relax, and those who prefer to explore. But within that second group, there are those who will go to extreme lengths to acquire secret intel, especially in regards to one of our favorite subjects — peeping Modernist architecture around the world. The person we know who's best at this is Adam Štěch, the architecture photographer behind the popular Instagram account @okolo_architecture, who has visited almost 50 countries on five continents to explore nearly 10,000 design landmarks, and today we're launching a project together that's been years in the making: the Modernist Travel Guide, photographed and written by Adam and edited and published by us.

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