07.28.22

Interiors

Tour the Incredible 1930s and 40s Gio Ponti Interiors Hidden in a 13th-Century Italian University

Between 1934 and 1942, Gio Ponti decorated numerous rooms inside Palazzo Bo — home to the University of Padua, founded in the 13th century — creating one of his most important works in interior design. In fact, the 1940s were critical for Ponti's transformation from his previous styles of Novecento Italiano and Rationalism toward softer mid-century design, which became his trademark after the Second World War. Click through to tour this seminal work with Okolo's Adam Štěch.
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07.26.22

Current Obsession

This Is One 1980s Trend Revival We Didn’t See Coming

We're not sure if it's a comfort thing or a style thing, and we're not sure if it reminds anyone else of the La-Z-Boys of yore, but if you've been watching carefully the past few years, you may have noticed that furniture designers — most particularly when it comes to beds and sofas — have been embracing a very specific aesthetic with roots in the 1980s.
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07.25.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

In a Public Art Installation at Rock Center, Emily Mullin’s Floral and Ceramic Hybrids Are Suddenly Larger Than Life

In still-life ceramic and floral vitrines framed by Art Deco flourishes in the lobby of 45 Rock, in photographic murals lining the underground concourse level, and at Top of the Rock, the viewing platform where visitors can look out over Manhattan, Emily Mullin's work is suddenly available to all. It's a huge leap in visibility for the Brooklyn-based artist, who produced the photographic works on view in collaboration with her partner, Tony, as well as a throwback to the earliest moments of her New York career, when she commuted to Midtown for a job designing window displays up the street at Bergdorf Goodman.
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07.23.22

Saturday Selects

Week of July 18, 2022

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the first furniture collection from interior designer Robert McKinley, colorful glass candlesticks by Lex Pott, and a Wright auction full of postmodern treasures.
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07.21.22

Travel

This Renovation of a Montauk Motel Retains Its Seaside Charm Even As It’s Become Eminently Instagrammable

When I heard that longtime friends of Sight Unseen Home Studios were spearheading the renovation of Daunt's Albatross, a 23-room motel in the center of town that's been in the same family since 1977, I was cautiously — but extremely — optimistic. That Home's design for the space would be beautiful was never in question — have you seen what this studio can do with tile? — but could the motel retain the quirky fishing village charm of old Montauk while still being someplace I'd want to obsessively Instagram?
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07.15.20

Current Obsession

Scandinavian Art Mirrors Are Having a Moment — Here’s Our Latest Favorite

If you are one of the 36,000 people who follow 26-year-old Simone Noa Hedal on Instagram, you probably know her as a very specific kind of Danish influencer who posts photos of herself — wearing clothes that are often the color of cotton candy or peach sorbet — interspersed with art and design inspirations working within a similar palette: Wang & Soderström, Helle Mardahl, Roger Muhl, Justin Morin, and the Seoul bakery Banana Haruki, among others. But last year, Hedal began posting in earnest pieces she had made herself that fit snugly into her already-established aesthetic — a series of mirrors painted with swoops of pastel acrylic paint.
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07.20.22

Sighted

Vaspaar, an Up-and-Coming Digital Design Gallery, Looks at Collecting As an Act of Preservation

For Kaisha Davierwalla and Andrea Grecucci, the Milan-based designers who run the digital gallery Vaspaar, the art of collecting amounts to more than simple acquisition. It’s not merely about possessing a beautiful material object — though Vaspaar offers plenty of those — but an act of preservation. Whether that’s preserving “something from the passing of time, or as a token of memory, a symbolic representation of an era, or the significance of an object and the emotions involved,” they explain, “we look at the act of collecting from both a deeply academic viewpoint and also from how personally we tend to get attached to these pieces.”
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07.17.22

Saturday Selects

Week of July 11, 2022

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an entirely blue exhibition, an absolutely wild daybed, and a strong contender for bathroom vanity of the year.
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07.14.22

Q+A

Axel Chay Channels Man Ray Through His Erotic Bent Metal Designs

“Not a bit phallic, a lot phallic!” laughs French designer Axel Chay when I suggest his lamp slightly resembles a penis. Based on a 1920s sculpture by Surrealist artist Man Ray, the playful pink design — which I later found out is actually called Phallus — and a sconce shaped like a nipple are the most blatantly erotic and humorous of Chay’s designs. Others more subtly exude sensuality through their curves or elements entangled with one another, but are finished in bright greens, yellows, and blues so could also be interpreted in a completely different way. 
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07.12.22

Q+A

Aimee McLaughlin On Starting a Ceramics Podcast (Pot-cast?) and Why Ceramics is Like Therapy

Though Aimee McLaughlin, of Objet Aimée, is drawn to the shapes, proportions, and details of antiquity, there’s nothing dusty about her ceramics. With a voracious curiosity and thoughtfulness, she re-contextualizes and refreshes classical forms: She’ll make the earthy naturalism of a speckled stoneware pot more romantic with twisted handles; render a pitcher that evokes fluted Greek columns in a satisfyingly deep, glossy green; or achieve a beautifully tonal black-on-black pattern of snake scales for the serpent-shaped arms that adorn a sinuous, double-headed vessel.
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07.11.22

Q+A

Meet the Duo Making Psychedelic-Patterned Ceramic Tiles With a Machine They Built Themselves

Back in 2017, best friends Gilles de Brock and Jaap Giesen decided they wanted to make patterned ceramic tiles. They knew nothing about tiles or ceramics, but driven blindly by passion for the idea, they spent more than three years developing their own CNC glaze-printer — and accommodating its peculiarities within their design process — until they were finally able to launch Palet tiles earlier this year, offering an array of customizable tiles in bold colors that feature a signature psychedelic ombré look.
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07.10.22

Saturday Selects

Week of July 4, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a new line of tiles from a New York ceramic darling, design born from stormy weather, and a coffee table that gets serious with our incense habit.
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07.08.22

Shopping

From Ceramic Hair to Luncheon Meats to Sleek, Simple Porcelain, Tissue Box Covers Are Having a Renaissance

In a world where nearly every product has been upgraded and rendered hip through new, Gen-Z-approved packaging — from toilet paper to tampons to breakfast cereal — you'd think there would no further need for a throwback like the tissue box cover, which is meant to cloak your drugstore eyesores in a mantle better suited to your decor. And yet at the moment, in part because tissue boxes haven't really been redesigned and in part because they're usually kept out very much in public view, the tissue box cover seems to be having a tiny renaissance.
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