09.09.23

Saturday Selects

Week of September 4, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: A sexy dentist's office in France, a swoony neon interior in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and a reconsideration of the piano as a vehicle for design.
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09.08.23

Interiors

This Australian Renovation is Giving Off Major “Historical House Museum Outside of Milan” Vibes

If I were moving to Australia and I wanted my house to look like an Italian villa, I would probably hire YSG Studio on the basis of these images of their three-story renovation in Sydney that the studio has nicknamed Black Diamond. YSG's Sydney-based client wanted their new home to evoke a boutique hotel, but to our mind, there's more "historical house museum outside Milan" here, what with the glass bricks, port windows, ceiling plaster, travertine, banana bark, zellige tiles, raffia, smoked bronze glass, and limestone.
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09.07.23

Shopping

We Turned a Palm Springs Architectural Marvel Into a Sun-Drenched Lightology Dream Home

When the team at Lightology approached Sight Unseen hoping to collaborate, we proposed curating a selection of our favorite pieces from the lighting and furniture retailer and installing them into a stunning architectural home in the Palm Springs desert. The now-sold 4,000 square-foot property has floor-to-ceiling windows and double-sided glass breezeways that make it the epitome of indoor/outdoor living — and the perfect sun-drenched backdrop for our vision of a Lightology dream home.
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09.06.23

Sight Unseen Collection

Objects & Ideas Are Making Sculptural, Relational Objects in the Canadian Wilderness

Since we last checked in with Di Tao and Bob Dodd of Toronto’s Objects & Ideas, their furniture designs have moved increasingly towards functional sculpture. “We’ve always thought that every piece we make needs to have a strong character and a strong expression — that has never changed. But the way we express our ideas has evolved,” says Tao. The latest pieces are visually alluring objects that have a use, of course: The enveloping Beaver Tail chair offers a seat, the curving Ascend floor lamp provides illumination. But these works also — and just as importantly — are relational, changing the space that they, and you, occupy.
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05.19.22

Giveaway

Enter to Win a Night at Ace Hotel Brooklyn, Whose Rooms Were Inspired by Corbu’s Cabanon

In the 9 or so months since it opened, Ace Hotel Brooklyn has emerged as one of the borough's most enjoyable hubs. Inside a 13-story concrete-and-glass building custom-designed by Roman and Williams, it boasts a restaurant with a striking mosaic installation, a consistently-packed Brutalist bar, a lobby that plays host to exhibitions like this month's furniture showcase from Black Folks in Design, and a light-filled interior courtyard that offers gentle respite from the bustle outside its doors. The property is a social lynchpin for downtown Brooklyn, even amongst locals like us. We're offering you the chance to experience it for yourself, with a giveaway for one free night at Ace Hotel Brooklyn. Click through to enter!
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08.16.23

Sight Unseen Collection

These Three Studios are Redefining Cool Outdoor Furniture for a New Generation

Until the middle of last century, most outdoor furniture was serving Period Piece, “with stamped-out metal, bunches of flowers and leaves,” as the late designer Richard Schultz wrote in an essay reprinted in his 2019 book, Form Follows Technique: A Design Manifesto. But lately, we’ve been clocking a growing number of contemporary designers taking up the torch of inventive outdoor furniture design. It tracks alongside the growing collective awareness that nature is precious and that cultivating our feelings of belonging within nature is more important than ever. We caught up with three exciting talents on the scene.
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08.11.23

Sighted

The New Gallery Making It Easier to Acquire South African Design in the States

New York City is close to 8,000 miles from Cape Town, where Fiona Mackay grew up. Now based in Brooklyn as an art adviser and entrepreneur, she wondered why more of the great design she saw in South Africa on her trips home wasn't available in the US; it turns out, for independent designers, shipping an object those 8,000 miles can easily double its price. “I wanted to create a platform that would not only introduce Americans to the nuanced beauty and unique POV of South African design, but also create an opportunity for South African designers to sell their work in the United States,” Mackay says. By launching Kombi, a new design gallery in New York, Mackay is bringing contemporary collectible Southern African design to the States with a co-ordinated solution: to consolidate orders through one platform to be shipped together every few months.
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08.07.23

Sighted

These Woven Outdoor Chairs Are Built to Withstand the Test of Time — As Well As the Elements

By now, we’ve become accustomed to the reissues of classic furniture designs for interiors — so much so that it can sometimes be hard to keep track. But the same can’t be said for outdoor furniture, so when the relaunch of an iconic product for exterior use does come along, we sit up and take notice. Case in point: Spanish manufacturer Expormim’s Lapala collection of chairs, typified by their woven seats and backrests, which turns 25 this year. Highly chameleonic and adaptable to almost any plein-air setting — from garden patio to urban balcony — the design has proven its longevity through a variety of only the subtlest tweaks over the years. 
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08.05.23

Saturday Selects

Week of July 31, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Seven-foot patchwork hand pillows we'd love to cuddle, an exhibition about longing from Charlap Hyman & Herrero, and the latest rental home in the French countryside designed by Joséphine Fossey, above.
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CB2 Black in Design Collective
08.04.23

Q+A

Studio Anansi’s Latest Collaboration with CB2 Materializes the Unlimited Possibility of Black Futures

Evan Jerry was, in his own words, on a quest to explore the relationship between contemporary design and Black culture when he founded Studio Anansi in 2018. Now five years into the artist’s practice, he has launched the Black in Design Collective, a collection of works curated in partnership with and for sale at CB2 that brings together 10 Black artists from Los Angeles to Lagos, including Jerry himself. The range of pieces respond to Studio Anansi’s initial question around the project: How do you see the future of design if Blackness was included? The result makes tangible the heterogeneity of Black culture — spanning centuries, materials, objects, and themes.
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08.02.23

Travel

The Latest Wave of Design Hotels Will Take You from Hong Kong to Louisville, Kentucky

We hate to break it to you, but summer is more than half over. Luckily, you still have time to travel to a beachside destination in the south of France, a quaint Spanish villa, the heart of Hong Kong, or Louisville, Kentucky (trust us, it's a thing). Embrace August's wanderlust and the spirit of the season by staying at some of the best new design-focused properties.
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08.01.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

Each Piece in Kim Mupangilai’s Debut Furniture Collection is a Meditation on Cross-Cultural Identity

Each of the pieces in Kim Mupangilaï’s debut furniture collection, on view in a solo exhibition called HUE/I/AM – HUE/AM/I through August 20 at Superhouse Vitrine, is comprised of numerous, sometimes unexpected aspects that all cohere. Without being heavy-handed, and as the name of the show implies, the collection embodies the ways we might understand and conceive of our own identities.
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