12.01.22

How to Live With Objects

A 1920s Brooklyn Brownstone Offers the Perfect Backdrop for Kim Mupangilai’s Collection of Vintage Handmade Objects

Born and raised in Belgium, Kim Mupangilaï is a Belgian-Congolese interior architect, furniture designer, and graphic designer who lives with her boyfriend in a 1920s brownstone in Brooklyn. Its original period details offer the perfect backdrop for her extensive collection of vintage handmade objects, which she also sells through her side project, the online shop En la Mésá.
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11.28.22

How to Live With Objects

Kathryn Bentley Hand-Painted Her Restoration Hardware Sofa, and So Can You

Kathryn Bentley has one of the best contemporary object collections we've seen to date, from Roger Herman ceramics, to a Waka Waka coffee table (designer Shin Okuda is a longtime collaborator), to the BZIPPY urn she jokes she wants for her eternal life. One of our favorite homes from How to Live With Objects, we're excerpting images of her colorful house tour — including the incredible Restoration Hardware sofa the hand-painted with sponges — today.
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11.22.22

How to Live With Objects

Body Parts Are Trending in Design, and Our New Book Proves It

In the last five years — somewhere between the giant nose vase German duo BNAG produced for Felix Burrichter's dollhouse exhibition at Friedman Benda and the butt bookends Marco Braunschweiler made for Marta's In Support of Books — body parts in design became a full-fledged thing. That's why we weren't a bit surprised when we noticed, visiting the 16 homes we photographed for How to Live With Objects, that body parts were popping up seemingly everywhere — from the Nicola L eye lamp in Yoram Heller and Eleanor Wells's living room, to the giant hand sitting at the base of Jonathan Pessin's object-filled bookshelves, to the nose relief on display in the London home of Sadie Perry.
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11.17.22

How to Live With Objects

16 Incredible Vintage Objects You Should Know From Our Book

When it comes to a visual wow factor, vintage objects reign supreme — they're often the most expressive, unusual, and unexpected, not to mention the most accessible, if you get lucky at a flea market or have time to kill on eBay. As such, a copious amount of real estate in our new book, How to Live With Objects, is devoted to the discussion of how to shop for vintage and what makes a vintage object worth buying, which means that we had plenty of pages to illustrate with images of absolutely incredible bygone designs, from a circa-1900 Swedish candelabra to some epic Postmodern gems. In today's book excerpt, we're spotlighting 16 of the vintage objects we included that, if you didn't already know them, we're sure you'll be pleased to get to know them now.
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07.06.20

Sighted

Caroline Z. Hurley’s Gee’s Bend–Inspired, Stitched-Together Paintings

Caroline Z. Hurley is best known for her block-printed quilts, tablecloths, blankets, and fabrics by the yard, but if you follow Hurley on Instagram, you know that painting is also a huge part of the Brooklyn-based artist's practice. Her newest works combine elements of both mediums, using vintage fabrics or cottons woven by hand by artisans in Oaxaca as the base for painted and stitched-together canvases.
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11.16.22

How to Live With Objects

This London Townhouse Makes the Case for Painting Your Bedroom — Ceilings Included — Gold

Tatjana von Stein and Gayle Noonan cofounded the full-service creative studio Sella Concept in 2016, with von Stein in charge of interior architecture and furniture design and Noonan handling branding and identity. We had covered several of the pair's projects on the site before — including a gorgeous Mediterranean-hued bar in London, and a Hackney flat with a next-level tortoise-shell headboard — but we'd never gotten a glimpse inside their own home until we reached out during our book research. Boy, were we glad we did.
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The book is a wall-to-wall guide to finding your personal style and incorporating those meaningful works of art and design into your home.
11.15.22

How to Live With Objects

Out Today, Our Book Shows You How to Create a More Meaningful Home By Collecting Objects You Love

Two and a half years in the making, our first book, How to Live With Objects, is finally out and in bookstores — and, hopefully, in your home, if you pre-ordered! — today. We could not be more excited for people to finally see and touch and read this book — we very much wanted it to feel like an object in and of itself, since we're usually talking to you from behind a screen, and it's such a pleasure to hold the book in your hand and flip through it. So exactly what is the book about? Read on to find out.
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11.13.22

Saturday Selects

Week of November 7, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Sophie Lou Jacobsen's new glass menorah, a terrazzo-inspired lounge chair, a '60-inspired floral furniture collab, and Alex Tieghi-Walker's new New York gallery.
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11.11.22

How to Live With Objects

In Celebration of Our New Book, We Asked 18 Tastemakers to Name Their Favorite Objects

In our new book, How to Live With Objects, we try not to play favorites: We selected more than 150 vintage and contemporary objects to appear in its pages, and for the most part, we couldn't believe our luck that we got to be showcasing any of them in a book, much less one that we're absolutely not going to be shy about calling the new "bible of modern home decor and style" (thank you Vanity Fair!) However, god knows we love a list — in fact, there's a whole section of the book devoted to asking people from Alison Roman to Athena Calderone to name their most cherished possessions — so to celebrate the book's launch next week, we widened the circle to include some of our favorite people in design and fashion, sounding off about their favorite objects, both vintage and contemporary.
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11.10.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

For One Night Only at Superhouse, We Paired Works and Personal Mementoes by 16 Designers

To celebrate the upcoming launch of our book, How to Live With Objects, we put on a one-night-only exhibition last week at Superhouse Gallery in Chinatown with a *very* fun concept. To showcase How to Live With Objects' new approach to interiors — simply surrounding yourself with objects you love — we invited 16 designers, eight from our book, and eight from our exhibition partner, Areaware, to display two objects each: one they had made, and one that was meaningful to them. Each pair was displayed on a Duo Object Stand, a new, two-object pedestal designed by Sight Unseen and produced by Bestcase.
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How to Live With Objects Helene Rebelo
11.08.22

At Home With

How to Live With Objects Sneak Peek! Inside a Colorful Brussels Loft That Perfectly Mixes the Vintage and the New

Often when we first tell people we're releasing our first book, they assume it's a compilation of stories from Sight Unseen's archives, or a compendium of the homes of creatives. In fact, it's more like a reference book or handbook, one that — over the span of nearly 50,000 words — advises you on how to make your house a home. That said, we would have been remiss if we spent that much time talking about how to live with objects without showing you some prime examples of people who are successfully doing just that, like Hélène Rebelo and Edouard Beauget, whose colorful Brussels loft we're excerpting today.
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11.07.22

Interiors

Cobra Studios Transforms an Art Deco Building Into the Coolest Meeting Rooms Ever

If there was ever a way to bring back in-person meetings, this would be it: Design a location for that sole purpose by combining a “dated 80’s vibe” with shiny sci-fi surfaces, and create spaces that look more like a high-end design gallery or a very bougie spaceship. This is exactly what Belgium’s Cobra Studios has achieved at the newest location for Sparks, a company that provides these types of spaces on-demand for individuals and organizations to hire as needed.
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