Week of May 31, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an Israeli furniture showroom with a Barragán-inspired look, a French housewares company with a stellar line-up, and — stay with us here — a very sexy new slidable door system.
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A New Lighting Collection Inspired By the 1960s Modernism of Fire Island Pines

“Growing up, I always love stained glass,” recalls Peter B. Staples, discussing the early design experiments that would eventually lead to the launch of his lighting brand Blue Green Works. “I grew up in a Craftsman-style home, and one summer, my dad and I found the plans for the original stained glass lanterns. We taught ourselves how to fix and recreate them. I was probably 12 at the time and that experience really stayed with me.” But while the exercise was clearly formative, Staples would have to take a circuitous path through the New York design scene before returning to lighting. Having previously worked at The Future Perfect and Apparatus, Blue Green Works marks the first time Staples has designed a collection himself — which you would never guess just by looking at it.
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8 Must-See Projects From This Year’s Venice Design Biennial

After a year of visiting virtual exhibitions, it’s a joy to finally start venturing out IRL again. Where I am here in Italy, things really began to pick up speed last week with the opening of the Venice Biennale, which always brings with it a slew of contemporaneous projects — one of which being the Venice Design Biennial, now in its third year. Curated by Venice Art Factory’s Luca Berta and Francesca Giubilei, this year’s theme was "Design as a Self Portrait" and featured work that spoke, loosely, to the notion of self-representation in design.
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Meet Elisa Ossino, the Milan-Based Designer and Stylist Who’s Suddenly Everywhere

This will come as a shock to no one, but the Milan design scene can be a little insular. Some of the best things don’t make it past the border, or even beyond the chic artery of Via Solferino for that matter. And unless you speak a bit of Italian and are ordering the right magazines from abroad, it’s not always apparent who’s making waves in the city. Take, for example, up and coming Italian designer Elisa Ossino, an architect and stylist who, after more than a decade of working diligently within the Milan design scene, is finally charting international waters.
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A Sneak Peek at Collectible Design’s First Fully Digital Fair, Happening This Weekend in Brussels

Collectible, the long-running design fair in Brussels, was one of the last fairs to slip under the wire last year just as COVID was beginning; we remember having a phone call with our solo exhibitors, Ben & Aja Blanc, asking if they felt safe enough to go. But though the fair went off without a hitch last March, due to changing restrictions in Europe, organizers Clélie Debehault and Liv Vaisberg decided to take the fair fully digital this year, introducing a new platform called Collectible Salon, which runs online from May 28-30 and concurrently with events around town.
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Week of May 17, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a Swedish furniture brand focused on sustainability, a show that explores the healing powers of color, and the coolest swing set you've ever seen.
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The Dutch Designer Making Colorful, Jewel-Like Cocktail Glasses

For years, de Beijer designed purely ornamental vessels made from synthetic and non-traditional materials like resin and pigmented polyurethane cast by hand. "People have frequently asked me why I didn't make these vessels in 'real' glass,” he said. And so he did. Designing out of his father’s studio and working in close collaboration with the renowned glassblowers at Van Tetterode Glass Studio in Amsterdam, de Beijer has created his first series of glassware made exclusively for Side Gallery.
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Matthew Byrd Noguchi stone sculptures

Using Stone That’s Destined for the Dump, Matthew Byrd Creates These Interlocking, Noguchi-Inspired Sculptures

As a sculptor and stonemason, artist Matthew Byrd spends a lot of time driving around his hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina. Much of that time is spent looking at old buildings for inspiration, noticing how one intersects with the roof of another, trying to figure out how he can translate those moments into his stacked stone sculptures. But his travels often have a more practical purpose as well — late at night, Byrd drives around scoping out abandoned lots or construction sites from which he can gather raw material that would otherwise be destined for the dump.
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In Her Paintings, Becky Suss Creates Real or Imagined Interiors From Memory

Because we don't cover art as our primary discipline here at Sight Unseen, we typically discover artists a bit more slowly than we do designers, and usually by way of gallery shows, art fairs, or Instagram wormholes. But I discovered Philadelphia-born painter Becky Suss in perhaps the most Sight Unseen — or at least the most me — way possible: Her 2016 painting, August (above), adorns the cover of LA harpist Mary Lattimore's Hundreds of Days, one of the many albums that helped propel me through the emotional black hole that was 2020.
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