Week of January 4, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: The coolest yoga studio in Berlin, a 70s-inspired Paris apartment where the wall-to-wall carpeting actually goes up the wall, and the best of Picasso-inspired ceramics.
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Alessandro Moriconi doctor's office interior

This Parisian Doctor’s Office is More Chic Than Almost Any Apartment We’ve Seen

Designer Alessandro Moriconi — who cut his teeth working as an artistic director for luxury brands as well as a creative director for the indubitably chic studio Humbert & Poyet — conceived the space as something like a Milanese apartment, combining terrazzo, walnut paneling, and Murano glass, graphic rugs, marble tables, and accents like Greco-Roman sculptures and "woven" glass door handles.
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10 Low-Slung Floor Chairs That Epitomize Our Current Obsession With Coziness

When it comes to seating — in the realm of Instagram influencers, at least — 2020 was the year of the Togo, the iconic beanbag-y modular sofa designed in the '70s by Michel Ducaroy for Ligne Roset. But it wasn't the only comfy floor seat we found ourselves drawn to last year; we'd been tracking the typology since before COVID hit, and this week, as winter (and the maelstrom on the news) keeps us more supine than ever, we thought it was as good a time as ever to share our picks with you.
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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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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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Visit the 200-Year-Old Portuguese Vineyard That Pierre Yovanovich Turned Into a Chic New Hotel

When the French winemaker Philippe Austruy purchased the Quinta da Corte vineyard in 2012, the 200-year-old property was in a state of utter neglect and disrepair. But by this past July, when I drove two hours from Porto to reach its perch in the hills of Portugal's Douro Valley, it had been completely transformed — turned into a luxe country inn by the buzzy French architect Pierre Yovanovich.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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