12.21.24

Saturday Selects

Week of December 16, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the best of Design Miami in what seemed like a quiet year, a New York cannabis store that looks almost residential, and a PoMo glass-blowing exhibition in The Netherlands.

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12.20.24

Fair Report

Now In Its 24th Year, Dutch Design Week Remains One of the Best Places to Scout Playful, Innovative Objects

In its 22nd year and featuring more than 2,600 designers over 120 venues, Dutch Design Week continues to impress us. Our favorite objects from Eindhoven this year delighted by building upon history and what has come before — both in terms of personal memory as well as a collective — while also presenting surprising innovation, and, in many cases, a sense of playfulness. Below were just a few of our favorite exhibitions and pieces.

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12.17.24

Travel

A Mural-Bedecked Soho Escape and a Paris Hotel With Portugal Energy Are Among Our Latest Hotel Recs

Winter travel plans typically skew one of two ways: You can embrace the cold, throw on a cute overcoat, and take in the festive magic of a ski resort, historic European city, or even a staycation. Alternately, you can reject the chilly vibes entirely and haul your vitamin D–deprived self to somewhere warm and sunny. The three design-forward hotels we’ve chosen for our latest round-up are more than up to the task, including a mural-bedecked Soho escape, a Paris hotel with Portugal energy, and an historic property overlooking Southern California's Laguna Beach.

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12.16.24

Sighted

Bower’s Moody, Mystical Showroom — And Their New Moongate Mirrors — Channel Someplace Far From Brooklyn

When you’re in a mystical frame of mind — cue the winter solstice — mirrors really do start to feel like portals. And the Moongate series, the latest from Bower Studios, seems to offer entry into another realm. Inspired by outdoor passageways originally found in traditional Chinese gardens, these large wall mirrors  would add a sense of mystery and quiet adventure to any interior. And they do just that in Bower’s newly redone showroom, complementing and contrasting with the studio’s classic collections and transporting you somewhere far from Brooklyn.

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12.10.24

Interiors

A Teal and Tobacco Study, a Pistachio Bedroom — David Lucido’s Sophisticated Sense of Color Makes Him One of our Favorite Interior Designers to Watch

David Lucido has a gift for combining proportion, shape, and color in ways that are sophisticated and refined but not at all stuffy. His interiors, whether residential, commercial, or in hospitality, are never overdone but also never boring; they’re just right. It’s a challenge he makes look easy, but effortlessness almost always requires a lot of effort. Lucido, who currently splits his time between Palm Beach and New York City, pulls it off by balancing a strong work ethic and meticulous attention to detail with a lack of personal pretension. “I’m not a very serious person,” he says. “It’s not surgery, so why not be a little more expressive with things?"

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09.12.23

Travel

A New Design Hotel in Porto for Everyone Going to Portugal Right Now

Situated on the Douro river, The Rebello hotel in Porto features 103 rooms, a full-service restaurant, two bars, and a luxurious yet unfussy spa. But it’s the design, of course, that we’re most taken with. Outside, local architecture firm Metrourbe transformed a disused, 19th-century factory for kitchen utensils into four thoroughly modernized yet character-rich buildings, two of which were newly constructed to connect the original stone structures. Inside, Spanish designer and founder of Lisbon’s Quiet Studios Daniela Francheschini has woven together four central elements that reference Porto: water, wine, wood, and industry.

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12.09.24

Sighted

Interni Venosta’s Surprise Debut in a Milanese Plaster Workshop Was One of the Best Design Moments of 2024. The Collection Keeps Getting Better.

Interni Venosta wowed us when their debut collection launched earlier this year in a plaster workshop in Milan — it was one of our favorite collections from 2024 — and the collection's latest additions continue to impress. An independent project from Milan darlings Emiliano Salci and Britt Moran, who founded their architectural and design studio Dimorestudio over twenty years ago, Interni Venosta exudes an Italian — specifically Milanese — refinement that’s at once avant-garde and classic. Striking in its elegant proportions, this is furniture that stands out in an interior but also feels as if it were always at home there.

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12.07.24

Saturday Selects

Week of December 2, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: two new hospitality offerings in Milan that lean into the city’s design heritage in different ways, plus a Stine Goya–curated exhibition (above), the perfect rugs for cozy ski chalets, and a comfy task chair that’s on this writer’s Christmas list.

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12.05.24

Interiors

We Did a Full Styling Makeover of Jill’s House — Courtesy of Lightology and an Epic Vintage Haul

If you're a longtime reader of Sight Unseen, it's possible you've seen some version of my house in East Hampton, from the just-moved-in IKEA-starter-kit vibe of 2014 to the post-renovation feature last year, where I revealed our baby blue kitchen and double-drenched yellow guest bath. Last month, though, Monica and I decided to give my home a new life — a styling makeover we're calling "the Sight Unseen edit," executed as part of our continued collaboration with Lightology, for which we've previously shot two other homes we outfitted with the online retailer's incredibly diverse lighting and furniture offerings. For our third in the series, we paired vintage accessories and art with beautiful, sleek pieces from Lightology's catalog to create a more sophisticated mood for my space, one befitting the vision I've always had of it as a repository for all the design work and knowledge I've collected over my 20-plus-year career.

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12.03.24

Excerpt: Book

A Full Repudiation of Beige-on-Beige, an Ode to Citrus, an Appreciation of an Undersung Finnish Designer: What We’re Reading, Fall 2024 Edition

Gift-giving season is in full swing, and while a big, beautiful coffee table is a uniformly welcome present, we wanted to deep dive into a few particularly inspiring ones we've been living with lately. In the second edition of our new column, What We're Reading, we're looking at two excellent new interiors books, an archival look at the life and work of a beloved Finnish designer, and an ode to the humble lemon. 

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12.02.24

Up and Coming

Jorge Kilzi Wants You to Make Friends With His Furniture

Many designers talk about imbuing their work with character, whether that means giving them anthropomorphic features, unusual shapes, or textures that reveal the hand of their maker. But Jorge Kilzi takes this concept a step further: His furniture and lighting designs really do resemble animate beings. It’s not that Kilzi’s designs are overtly human; it’s that the forms he’s achieved somehow conjure movement, emotional expression, and personal connection all at once, as though they could have been alive and talking while you were out of the room, then froze just before you entered — a kind of domestic Toy Story.

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11.25.24

Sighted

Jermaine Gallacher Helped Pull This Celestial-Themed 1990s Textile Collection From the Archives

As a lover of all things vintage and archival, there are few things that excite me more than a project that plumbs the historical trove of a company or design movement and resurfaces its forgotten gems; it’s the same thrill I get shopping a flea market or antique mall and discovering something incredible that had previously gone unnoticed or been cast aside. Which is why I felt a pang of envy when I saw the launch earlier this month of Torch, for which TON magazine editor and interior designer Jermaine Gallacher got to help pull a collection of rugs and textiles out of a 90s time capsule and reimagine it for contemporary use. Originally titled Elements and Beyond, the celestial-themed series was the work of the seminal textile designer Christine Van Der Hurd, who celebrated 50 years in the business last year, and who spent 18 months working with Gallacher to revisit and refine her original vision.

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11.21.24

Gift Guides

Lace Pants and Stone-Encrusted Pillboxes: Jill’s 2024 Sight Unseen Gift Guide

Part II of our annual gift guide! A reminder: whether you’d actually buy these things is, to a certain extent, beside the point; it’s how enjoyable it can be to dig into a well-curated list and imagine a future when your home might be full of incredible things, and the world might just be a better place. Today’s gift guide comes from Jill, who tends to make personalized hats on Etsy for her loved ones but here is coveting a hefty glass catchall by an up-and-coming studio, the mixed-metal ring JB Blunk made for his wife, a semi-precious stone-adorned pillbox, a menorah that reminds us of a lazy Susan, and more. See — and shop — her full list below!

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