07.18.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

This Surrealism-Tinged Exhibition Includes Flamboyant Salad Sculptures and Snail-Bedecked Stools

On view through October 1, French curator Anne-Laure Lestage has imagined a Surrealist-inspired exhibition called House of Dreamers at Villa Empain, a storied Art Deco jewel of a building in Brussels. The group show offers visitors the chance to wander through the rooms of a home furnished with imaginative objects that fall somewhere between art and design, making a case for mixing the surreal with the decorative. Here, a tablescape boasts a flamboyant salad sculpture centerpiece; there, a wooden stool is covered in spiral snail shells. In another room, ferns grow from a planter shaped like a medieval castle. 
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07.16.23

Saturday Selects

Week of July 10, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a zesty creative hub in Milan, a set of “noisy” rugs, and a sofa modeled after boxing gloves.
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07.13.23

Sight Unseen Collection

Only a Year Out From Graduating RISD, Alexis & Ginger Already Have Two Collections Under Their Belt

Was it fate that brought Alexis Tingey and Ginger Gordon together? The designers’ studio benches happened to be positioned next to each other during their furniture design Master's program at RISD, and after two years of sharing ideas and inspirations, the pair decided to officially join forces and set up a business together after graduating in 2022. A year later, Alexis & Ginger have moved to Brooklyn, launched two collections — one as part of our Sight Unseen Collection — and already have plans for so much more.
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07.11.23

Up and Coming

Bowen Liu Was Up to the Challenge of Making Furniture in Cast Glass

Without being towering, there’s a heft and monumentality to the cast glass Helle collection by New York designer Bowen Liu. The presence of these pieces is anchoring, a solidity that’s offset by their translucency. Made by glass workers in Brooklyn, the collection includes bookends, a coffee table, floor lamp, mirror, and side table, which debuted at New York Design Week in May. While the mirror and lamp feature white oak details, the coffee and side tables and bookends are made entirely of glass. If you don’t see a lot of cast glass furniture at scale, it's because it demands expertise, skill, and time to produce. But Liu was up for the challenge.
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03.17.22

Giveaway

Win a $2,000 Huggy Chair from Sarah Ellison, Whose Furniture Is Now Available in the US

When the Australian designer Sarah Ellison released her Huggy chair two years ago, it blew up. There was only one problem: If you weren't a big-name designer with a bottomless budget, it just wasn't that easy to get one. But that all changed this winter, when Ellison partnered with Design Within Reach to make her work readily available in the US; together, they're offering one lucky Sight Unseen reader the chance to win a $2,295 Huggy chair in a choice of upholsteries. Click through to enter!
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07.08.23

Saturday Selects

Week of July 3, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a Japanese-inspired burger bar in Geneva, an avant garde planter expo in Antwerp, and a reimagined Sardinian home.
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07.07.23

Graphic Design

Meet Ami Ami, the Boxed Wine Whose Packaging Channels 1920s Italian Futurism

If you came of age, like I did, in the '80s or '90s, boxed wine probably means one thing — and one thing only — to you. But while in the past few years there's been something of an arms race to see who can make the best boxed wine — and turn that ubiquitous Franzia into nothing but a memory — there's only one new contender that tastes delicious and also has the kind of loose, contemporary, slightly kooky vibe that we'd actually want to display on our counters or in the fridge when guests come over: Ami Ami, a new, DTC, minimal-intervention boxed wine whose playful packaging and super-memorable logotype (the dots in the I's and the negative space in the A's are meant to resemble wine glasses) were both designed by the LA- and Montreal-based studio Wedge.
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07.05.23

Interiors

This Kelly Wearstler–Designed Cocktail Bar Boasts an Enviable Art Collection

With additions like Hauser + Wirth and the Ace hotel, downtown Los Angeles long ago ascended from commercial wasteland to must-visit destination. But this status was perhaps fully cemented when the Proper hotel chain opened its Kelly Wearstler–designed property in the neighborhood in October 2021. Her fourth hotel for the brand — and her second in LA, following the Santa Monica Proper, with its epic and oft-Instagrammed chair porn lobby — the hotel recently added an intimate cocktail bar, called Dahlia, to its offering — and, whoo, it’s a stunner.
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07.01.23

Saturday Selects

Week of June 26, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Reconsidering the color purple, delving into reincarnation (we promise it's design-related), and wondering about the economics of small-scale independent design brands in the face of Amazon-esque retailers. 
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06.30.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Design Gallery in Berlin Gives a Long-Overdue Platform to Up-and-Coming German Studios

Despite being a longtime haven for artists and creatives — with its (formerly) cheap rents and surplus of accessible studio and exhibition spaces — Berlin never really made any sort of cohesive mark on the contemporary furniture-design world. That's why I got so excited recently when I heard about Forma, a new pop-up design gallery on the Spree river showing mostly contemporary work by mostly German or Germany-based designers like Nazara Lazaro, Carsten in der Elst, and Haus Otto — as well as why its founder, Vanessa Heepen, almost didn’t go through with it.
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06.29.23

Sight Unseen Collection

This Design Duo Makes the Understated Furniture They Couldn’t Find Anywhere Else

“The pursuit of approachable everyday objects, put together using readily available materials and simple fabrication techniques,” is, it turns out, much harder than it sounds. For visual designer Masha Osorio and architect Christian Kotzamanis, the search was, in the end, futile. So they decided as the newly-formed Mock Studio to design and produce the simple, reductionist pieces they’d been looking for themselves. 
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06.28.23

Interiors

Heard of Quiet Luxury? This Newly Renovated French Riviera Hotel Epitomizes the Trend

The French Riviera, long a playground for the rich and famous, is undeniably chic, both in its physical structures and its natural beauty. And perched atop Cap d’Antibes, a rocky promontory between Cannes and Nice that was used as a backdrop in both Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief and Jacques Deray’s La Piscine, is a hotel that embodies that elegance in the most nonchalant way: The Cap D’Antibes Beach Hotel, recently reimagined by Belgian architect Bernard Dubois, a frequent collaborator with Brussels’ Maniera Gallery, who is known for his beautiful, brutally efficient approach to interiors.
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