12.04.19

Gift Guides

Ceramic Goblets and Wavy Cutlery — The 2019 Sight Unseen Gift Guide, Part II

By now we've come to understand how hotly anticipated our annual gift guides are, so considering that it's after Thanksgiving, we'll cut to the chase: We did our gift guides a bit differently this year. In addition to our editor picks — today's by Monica — we asked our favorite designers and influencers to share their best gift ideas, and over on Instagram, you'll have the chance to win four of the coolest items from each of our three guides.

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12.03.19

Gift Guides

Two-Toned Vases and Velvet Body Pillows — The 2019 Sight Unseen Gift Guide, Part I

By now we've come to understand how hotly anticipated our annual gift guides are, so considering that it's after Thanksgiving, we'll cut to the chase: We did our gift guides a bit differently this year. In addition to our editor picks — today's by Jill — we asked our favorite designers and influencers to share their best gifts for giving and receiving, and over on Instagram, you'll have the chance to win four of the coolest items from each of our three guides.

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12.02.19

Sighted

The New Dutch Talent Whose Colorful Scale Models Caught Our Eye

If you clicked on this story thinking that the main image, above, was a chair, and that maybe — even if only in your internal fantasy world — you could somehow buy it for your house, bad news: It, and all of the covetable glass objects featured in this post, are tabletop-sized models created for research purposes by the newly graduated Rotterdam product designer Fleur Peters.

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11.26.19

Excerpt: Exhibition

Nina Cho’s New Mirror Series Asks You to Contemplate Infinity, NBD

“Even though a mirror is two-dimensional, it feels three-dimensional to me,” explains Detroit-based designer Nina Cho, who has been putting reflective surfaces at the center of her work since her debut collection back in 2015. For her latest exhibition, developed by Colony Consult, Cho created a series of geometric, two- and three-toned mirrors called Maung Maung.

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11.25.19

Up and Coming

This Cape Town Designer Makes Velvet Couches and Stone Tables Inspired By the Moon

The first piece of furniture interior designer Mia Senekal ever designed was like something out of Game of Thrones. “I have to laugh,” she says. “It was in college.” The complicated chair made of strips of hooped iron now lives in her mom’s garden with ivy growing all around it. With its rounded curves and luxurious upholstery, her first furniture collection released under the brand name murrmurr is acres more elegant.

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10.16.18

Sighted

Liquefied Metal, Applied Like Spray Paint, Creates Texture in a New Collection

The London-based, Polish-born designer Marcin Rusak first rose to prominence a few years ago exploring how natural materials — and, in many cases, live ones, like flowers and bacteria — could be harnessed and transformed into a wholly new aesthetic. Now, Rusak is developing a more industrial-based offshoot called MRM (or Marcin Rusak Manufacture), and the brand's first collection takes as its starting point a similar urge to recast commonly found natural elements as something otherworldly.

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11.23.19

Saturday Selects

Week of November 18, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, holiday season teasers, a design show at Le Corbusier’s convent, and a new resource for environmentally conscious designers and brands.

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11.22.19

An Afternoon With

A Tour of Mexico City’s Secret Spots With One of Its Biggest Tastemakers

Despite being a recent transplant, Su Wu — who rose to prominence as a writer and curator with her cult-favorite blog I’m Revolting — is already a fixture on the local art and design scene in Mexico City. Spending the day with her would be a dream assignment for any design writer, or really anyone who considers themselves a fan of good things and great stories. From her family home to an all-but-lost Noguchi mural tucked away above a bustling downtown market, Wu’s vision of Mexico City stays true to her own compelling vernacular.

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11.22.19

Shopping

One of the Best Galleries in Mexico City is Inside a Modernist Apartment

A hybrid cultural venue and design gallery intimately nestled in a modernist apartment building in the Roma Norte neighborhood of Mexico City, Studio IMA — which stands for “in my apartment” and nods to the Japanese word for “the present” — follows the shoppable interior model of The Apartment by the Line or Casa Perfect. But while those locations merely gesture towards an inhabited domestic space, Studio IMA founder Bettina Kiehnle Garza lives right alongside the art and objects on display day and night.

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11.21.19

Q+A

The Archeology of Mexican Artist-Architect Alberto Odériz

It’s no secret that here at Sight Unseen, we have a bit of an obsession with stone and its many forms. Perhaps that’s why we’re so smitten by the work of Mexican architect and sculptor Alberto Odériz. Stone is his inspiration, his material, and his passion. From small sculptures, to full room installations, to huge plazas and other inhabitable spaces, Odériz’s work is dynamic and innovative.

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11.21.19

Studio Visit

The Mexican Art and Architecture Studio Tezontle on the Necessity of Reinvention

For Tezontle, the materiality of their work guarantees its ruination — existence necessitates obsolescence, birth and death, concurrent in their designs. This sensitivity to the cyclical nature of creation is the crux of their practice.

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11.20.19

Studio Visit

A Vintage and Contemporary Design Gallery in Mexico City Whose “It” Factor is No Accident

Despite the off-the-cuff name, Chic By Accident and its taste-making founder Emmanuel Picault don’t seem to leave much up to chance. Since opening up in the Roma neighborhood in 2001, Picault and his collaborators have slowly been masterminding Mexico City’s reputation as a must-visit destination for great art and design. Part shop, part gallery, part meeting place for the international design set, Picault has something of a Midas touch when it comes to projects.

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11.20.19

Studio Visit

Inside the Mind-Blowing Live/Work Compound of Mexican Artist Pedro Reyes

The sprawling studio compound of Mexican artist and designer Pedro Reyes is as much a laboratory as it is a factory — an environment with controlled variables and a given set of inputs working toward a desired outcome, whether that’s the downfall of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon or simply preserving outmoded technologies. Reyes is preoccupied not with objects in and of themselves, but how they’re made, why they’re made, and how they in turn shape us.

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