05.27.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Lambert & Fils’ New Collection Was Inspired By Airport Floodlights and Vintage French Mopeds

Riding high on the buzz from their installation at last year’s Salone del Mobile, Lambert & Fils had planned to open their first New York showroom and launch a monograph detailing the brand’s first 10 years. But, as we are all well aware, the universe had other ideas. With their grand plans shifted to the back burner, the studio is instead focusing their energy in a new direction: Expanding the Dorval lighting system, which was first unveiled in 2018 in collaboration with Paris-based SCMP Design Office.
More
Atelier de Troupe Offsite Online
05.26.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Atelier de Troupe’s Latest Collection is the Sun and Sand Infusion We Need Right Now

Gabriel Abraham is nostalgic: for childhood summers spent between the rocks of Cassis and the beaches of St. Tropez, for glass bottles found washed up on the beach, maybe even for squinting up at a sun that shines a little less harshly. His reveries are made manifest in Dérive D'Été, Atelier de Troupe’s new collection of lighting and furniture, inspired at turns by “drifting tides, the cyclical shades of light, and the long shadows of summer.”
More
05.25.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Christopher Norman is Turning the Castoff Urban Trees of Los Angeles Into Art

Los Angeles–based architect and designer Christopher Norman’s new collection of hand-machined minimal forms resists standardization. His untitled “extrusions” in ash and cedar and pine riff on a hardware aesthetic, while maintaining the organic ethos seen in much of his other, more fluidly-shaped work. Forgoing pre-cut lumber, Norman uses wood from freshly cut trees. “If you’re working with commercial wood, you get a very normalized look and set of proportions. It’s basically highly mediated,” he explains.
More
05.23.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

From Lava Stone to Hempcrete: The First of Our Offsite Selects Round-Ups

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 the next three Saturdays. View the first one here.
More
05.22.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

JUMBO’s Founders on the Science of Cuteness — And Why They’re Endlessly Inspired By the Emoji

Trained as architects, Donnelly and Lee design objects that seem seamless, almost immaterial, just arrangements of color and form. Working in this gap between representation and object could be no less prescient — as if we weren’t experiencing much of the world mediated by screens already, social distancing due to the pandemic has only increased our reliance on digital intermediaries.
More
Sabrina De Sousa Sonos home tour
10.15.18

At Home With

In a New York Apartment, Dimes Co-Founder Sabrina De Sousa Lives With What She Makes

Like her restaurant, Dimes, Sabrina De Sousa's impeccably appointed Chinatown apartment is filled with objects she created herself, which is why we’ve been begging her for ages to photograph it — a feat we've finally pulled off thanks to our editorial collaboration with Sonos. We've teamed up with the smart speaker brand for a new storytelling series called Creative Women at Home, in which we’ll visit the homes of four influential women and find out how they live, work, relax, and listen.
More
Supaform Offsite Online
05.21.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Supaform’s New Collection Goes Neutral, Removing What He Calls the “Fancy Husk” of Color

Supaform’s latest collection — a shelf, chair, coffee table, bench, and lamp called Fancy-Routine and debuting at Offsite Online — possess similar characteristics to those in his imagined renderings: clean, curvy lines; off-kilter forms; and a resistance to revealing how exactly they come together. Composed of what he calls "rusty metal", Maxim Scherbakov says his starting point for the collection was the idea of degradation — how even a shiny chrome surface can be eaten away if it’s left long enough.
More
Tantuvi Travertine Collection Offsite Online
05.20.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Tantuvi’s New Rugs Were Inspired By the Travertine Quarries of India and the Spanish Steps of Rome

On car journeys throughout India, Tantuvi's founder Arati Rao and Adam Sipe often pass through cities and villages set against a dramatic landscape of marble and quartz quarries, mountains, sand dunes, magical desert lakes, and jungles. “The sandstone color that permeates all these landscapes is always on my mind,” Rao says. “Travertine quarries are all over the region and the earth changes from beige to ochre then deep ruby as you move throughout.” These colors were the inspiration behind Tantuvi’s latest collection, fittingly called Travertine.
More
BZIPPY Offsite Online
05.19.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

BZIPPY’s Outsized Ceramic Works Are the Statement in the Room — Not the Accent

If you’re lucky enough to ever see one of LA-based artist and sculptor Bari Ziperstein’s outsized ceramic works in person, the combination of scale, texture, and hue might stop you in your tracks. Her design studio, BZIPPY, creates striking, often Brutalist-inspired ceramic vases, lamps, and furniture, while within her complementary fine art practice, Ziperstein has been known to explore meticulously manicured fingers, dimensionality, or the aesthetics of Soviet propaganda. With her robust dual practice, Ziperstein welcomes decorative ceramics into the fine art conversation, and vice versa.
More
05.18.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Welcome to Our First Digital Offsite Show! Here’s How — and Why — We Did It.

When our 2020 Offsite fair, scheduled to take place in May at Skylight Modern in Manhattan, was put on indefinite hold, we decided to pivot to a digital exhibition model instead — harnessing the visibility of our existing platform to create a much-needed creative and commercial outlet for the design community, as well as redefining what a fair can be in the digital age. Welcome to Offsite Online.
More
05.15.20

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Match Made in Murano — Mattia Bonetti Fuses with Famed Glassmakers for His Latest Collection

As often as Swiss-born, Paris-based Mattia Bonetti’s singular, one-of-a-kind furniture and design pieces are described as whimsical, it would make sense that they are created, well, on a whim. The designer doesn’t release work in cohesive collections, preferring to design fantastical one-off pieces whenever inspiration strikes. Bonetti’s newest pieces, handmade in collaboration with the famed glass artisans of Murano, Italy and presented by London gallery David Gill in an online exhibition, is surprisingly subdued but no less virtuosic.
More
05.14.20

Sight Unseen Projects

With Our New Membership Program, You Can Support Sight Unseen — and Get MAJOR PERKS in Return

Today we're launching SU Friends, our first official membership program, which lets you become an ongoing supporter of Sight Unseen for as little as $3 a month, while receiving a TON of special perks in return. Help ensure that Sight Unseen, which has provided a support system for contemporary designers for the past decade, can continue that support well into the next one.
More