06.23.20

Q+A

Lex Pott’s Pandemic Pastime: A New Series of Hand-Woven Checker Chairs

Just when we'd almost begun thinking of him as "the candle guy," his pillars and tapers seemingly having colonized every store in New York, Dutch designer Lex Pott posted a photo on his Instagram late last month of a single eye-catching chair wrapped entirely in hand-woven nylon straps. We did a mini interview with Pott to find out more about the project.
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06.22.20

Excerpt: Exhibition

At Villa Cavrois, Muller Van Severen is an Eerily Perfect Match for the Modernist Estate

This month, the Belgian design duo Muller Van Severen begin a four-month intervention at Villa Cavrois, the modernist French estate designed in the late 1920s by Robert Mallet-Stevens. The show is a retrospective of sorts for the husband-and-wife duo, featuring everything from their leather-and-steel Duo Seats to brand-new work like the Alltubes series they launched this spring with Valerie Traan at Collectible and a sofa they've designed specifically in response to the installation site.
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06.20.20

Saturday Selects

Week of June 15, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: limestone-tiled benches inspired by a color system that predates pixels, chairs that reimagine construction materials, and a ceramicist raising funds for a community arts center in the heart of Atlanta.
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06.18.20

Sighted

In This Pride Month Fundraiser, 11 LGBTQ Designers Share Their Experiences and Advice

By focusing on a diverse array of experiences with facial and body hair in its branding, the shaving brand Harry’s has always (in its short history) taken pains to avoid the machismo messaging its competitors rely on to move a product that is, essentially, genderless. For Pride Month, the company is doubling down on that message with a new campaign and fundraiser celebrating a dozen queer designers and artists, Design With Pride.
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Kalon Studios Rugosa Offsite Online
06.17.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Kalon Studios On Their Pared-Down Rugosa Collection and What It Truly Means to Be Essential

The word “perfect” is subjective. It holds within it an individual’s taste and proclivities, needs and non-starters. The search can be elusive, exhausting — but also thrilling and very satisfying. But we'd venture to say the new Rugosa collection from Los Angeles–based Kalon Studios offers a seven-piece slate of perfect living room pieces, for anyone tired of the hunt but also for anyone who’s over the idea of furniture that doesn’t actually get used, sat upon, or well-loved.
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06.17.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

In SAIC’s Whatnot Studio — As in Life — Utopia is an Impossible, But Ultimately Worthwhile, Pursuit

There’s no such thing as utopia. Coined by Thomas Moore in his 1516 book of the same name, the word "utopia" combines the ancient Greek roots for “not” and “place.” It’s a fiction, a nowhere, or at least a not-here-yet. But its perpetual absence — or deferral — shouldn’t leave us discouraged; its inaccessibility is precisely the point. “Utopia is an impossible ideal,” says designer Pete Oyler, “but one that designers continue to pursue. I think it's a testament to the persistence of the imagination and the ongoing quest for something better.” It was with this in mind that Oyler, along with designer Jonah Takagi, taught this year's Whatnot Studio within the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Designed Objects program.
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06.16.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Cuff Studio’s New Collection Explores the Idea of Common Ground

So much of design can be about standing apart from the crowd. But for Cuff Studio, it was commonality that inspired their Offsite collection. For their Common Ground collection Kristi Bender and Wendy Schwartz of the Los Angeles–based studio looked to shared design elements that form not only a foundation within their practice, but in art and design as a whole. What they found was nature, form, shape, negative space, even community.
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06.16.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

A Teddy-Bear Chair, a Tennis-Court Rug: Play is Central to Everything Pieces Makes

In the world of Pieces, a rug can be inspired by a warm clay tennis court and a showroom can be a place you check into for a weekend away. Variations on the items that make up Collection III, which launched at Offsite Online, were first introduced in their shoppable Airbnb house in Kennebunk, Maine. The trio spent the whole of 2019 renovating the house and filling it with design products for guests to live amongst before purchasing.
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06.15.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

“Little Poop Stools” & An Anemone-Shaped Ottoman — Welcome to The Weird World of RISD’s MFA in Furniture Design

Student thesis projects can run the gamut, but this particular collection of them — representing the work of RISD’s 2020 furniture MFA graduates — happens to be much more sophisticated in execution than some of its playful starting points might suggest. Headed by Patty Johnson, the two-year program is co-taught by faculty members Ben Blanc, Lane Myer, Chris Rose and Emily Cornell du Houx. “The program is really focused on hands-on making and process-based learning — helping the students find their creative voice and what they imagine their creative practice to be,” says Blanc.
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06.13.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Acid Camo, Ombré Glass, and Palm Tree Lights: It’s Part III of Our Offsite Selects Round-Up

Ever since we began hosting our Sight Unseen Offsite fair, it has always featured both full collection launches as well as a more gallery-like section called Selects, the latter meant to highlight only a piece or two each by a large, diverse group of designers. Now that our physical show has become Offsite Online, we’ve kept the Selects concept in tact, and we’re presenting those individual works in roundups on our main feed over three Saturdays this month. You can view the third and final group here.
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