01.06.21

Excerpt: Book

The Colorful Vintage Design Book We Return to Again and Again for Inspiration

We know objectively that the start of the year is generally a time of renewal and a time to birth new projects. But to be honest, this is often the time of year when we feel most low and uninspired, which may be why we often turn to books in our own libraries for energy. I often come back to Interiors in Color, a 1983 book translated from Italian that features interiors by many of that era's best-known players.

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01.05.21

Travel

Three New Design Hotels That Have Us Dreaming of Sightseeing in Paris, Surfing in New York, and Skiing in Georgia

While it still remains to be seen whether we'll be able to travel responsibly and safely in 2021 once we and many others are finally vaccinated, that hasn't stopped us from using summer travel fantasies as a crutch to get through our winter lockdown. Currently starring in those fantasies? Three new hotels with a serious design pedigree in three of our favorite places.

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01.04.21

Shopping

36 Extremely On-Trend Face Masks For Wearing Every Time You Leave the House

Remember when the term "masking" conjured visions of an electively low-key Friday night spent with your face cloaked in petrified French clays, dripping honey concoctions, or mildly alarming acids? Today, of course, amidst an ever-expanding backdrop of heartbreak, fear, weirdness, and uncertainty, Mask Life has taken on new meaning. But while removing your mask may no longer reveal a newly glowing visage, it's still possible to view wearing a mask as a form of self care. Even better, it's a way to care for others around you.

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12.23.20

Sight Unseen Presents

Sight Unseen’s 10 Most-Read Stories of 2020

Poor, sweet, prescient us. Remember back in early February when we said, "Hey isn't it weird how everything suddenly looks like a cave you'd like to escape into and shut out the world?" Little did we know that we'd all be spending the rest of the year in the equivalent of an isolation tank. So yeah — no surprise that our most-read story of 2020 was the equivalent of us shutting the bunker doors and saying "See you next year!"

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12.22.20

Sight Unseen Presents

Sight Unseen’s 10 Most Popular Instagrams of 2020

We’ll be offline from Christmas to New Year's, but before we leave, we wanted to honor our annual tradition of looking back at the year that was. 2020, of course, was an unequivocal tragedy, and our list of top 10 Instagrams began with two fitting images: a giant tongue stuck out at the world, and a soft, comforting hole to crawl into.

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03.21.18

Excerpt: Exhibition

An Immersive Interplay of Light and Color at Volume Gallery in Chicago

The Chicago studio Luftwerk have made a career out of exploring the interplay of color, light, and colored light, as so many artists before them have done and so many will continue to do. But the defining factor of their work has always been its interaction with architecture, whether the duo were projection-mapping a light show onto Falling Water or bouncing trippy patterns off Anish Kapoor's bean in Millennial Park. This month, however, they left behind that construct to mount their first solo gallery show, at Chicago's Volume Gallery, where it's their ideas alone that are on display.

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12.21.20

Up and Coming

Meet the Lithuanian Designer Making Anthropomorphic Furniture Inspired by Klee and Miro

Lithuanian-born newcomer Barbora Žilinskaite, who felt so stifled by her highly technical and traditional design education at the Vilnius Academy of Arts that her first collection as a new graduate flew WAY in the opposite direction. In this case, though, it was a good thing — that collection, called Roommates, is bizarre in the most delightful and sophisticated of ways, featuring a foot-shaped table, hand-shaped magazine rack, and face-shaped table inspired in part by the paintings of Paul Klee and Joan Miró.

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12.19.20

Saturday Selects

Week of December 14, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Nest magazine is resurrected in the form of merch, fringe lamps aren't so fringe anymore, and two recently-opened boutiques have us pining for the good old days of searching out a price tag only to recoil in private horror.

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12.18.20

Sighted

These Two New Collections of Art Carpets Started Out As Actual Paintings

Art carpets are usually handmade, are expensive to produce, and aren't necessarily that easy to incorporate into the average interior, which keeps them in the realm of the rarefied. Every time I see a collection I like, I take extra notice. This winter I found two: one being the latest limited-edition collection from my favorite Australian brand Zou Zou, and one being a series of one-of-a-kind client commissions by London designer Sussy Cazalet, which she shot inside the gallery Beton Brut.

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12.17.20

Sighted

The New Lambert & Fils New York Showroom is, Like the Brand Itself, an Incubator for Collaboration

To celebrate Lambert & Fils’s 10th anniversary back in early March, the Montreal-based brand’s founder, Samuel Lambert, traveled to New York City to sign a lease on a 1,500-sq.ft. space on the corner of Hudson and Duane Streets in Tribeca, fulfilling a longtime dream of opening a showroom in Manhattan. Of course, we all know what happens next: Within 24 hours of signing the lease, the city was in lockdown. “It was pretty much inked paper and then total chaos,” laughs Lambert’s brand and marketing director Rory Seydel. “But we took the challenge as a part of the process. What does a showroom even mean in 2021?”

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12.15.20

Sighted

Tiled Furniture is Having a Moment, But These Pieces Are Unlike Anything You’ve Seen

We're certainly not the first people to tell you that tile furniture had something of a moment in 2020. But because of tile's inherent limitations, those pieces tend to have a certain sameness, even as their palettes and patterns change. That's why Tajimi Custom Tiles, a new brand based in the historic center of the Japanese tile industry, feels incredibly novel. To celebrate the launch of their custom-tailored tiles — and to showcase the brand's almost innumerable possibilities —Tajimi commissioned installations from Max Lamb and Kwangho Lee.

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12.14.20

Current Obsession

Rediscovering Pucci De Rossi, the Founding Father of Ugly Furniture

Among the army of designers from the 1980s and '90s plucked from the archive in recent years — Ettore Sottsass, Nathalie du Pasquier, and their Memphis cohort, to name a few — there are still many that remain ripe for rediscovery. Our latest find is Pucci de Rossi, the Italian-born artist and designer who intrigued and confused the Parisian design world with his Brutti Mobili (Ugly Furniture). A clear predecessor to a whole cohort of artist-designers working today — think Misha Kahn’s mixed media chimeras — Pucci de Rossi didn’t invent the concept of functional art, but his work from the 1970s to 1990s certainly laid some groundwork.

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12.12.20

Saturday Selects

Week of December 7, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, more shoppable links than usual just in case you’re still holiday gifting, the most glorious checkered terrazzo flooring we’ve seen in a minute, and a new kaleidoscopic lighting collection that hits like an antidepressant just in the nick of time.

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