This Month’s Festivities Cemented Tribeca as the Epicenter of the New York Design World

At this point, everyone agrees that we need a new name for what happens in New York during the month of May. NYCxDesign, always a slightly clumsy sobriquet, refers only to a specific set of dates and activities; New York Design Week has, over the past few years, ballooned into New York Design Month — another moniker that lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. But while no one can quite find consensus on a naming convention, everyone seems to agree on the new neighborhood hub: Tribeca, everyone's favorite up-and-coming zip code cemented itself this year as the epicenter of the New York design world.
More

An Interview With Formafantasma, Whose Queer-Coded, Modernism-Inspired Solo Show Was the Best Thing We Saw at This Year’s Milan Fair

In the whirlwind of this year’s Salone, Formafantasma’s perfect solo show, La Casa Dentro — presented on the quiet second floor of the Fondazione ICA Milano — made us stop and catch our breath. La Casa Dentro (meaning The Home Within) is as much a collection of furniture and lighting as it is a meditation on design, memory, the familiar, and the uncanny. It conjures a dream state where the clinical feel of a medical office gives way to the comforts of an old family home (if your grandparents were the kind with an eye for stylish detail). Bent tubular metal forms are combined with embroideries and embellishments painted on wood, floral patterns, and silky decorative fabric. It's work that takes certain signifiers of the past and reanimates them in a new moment. Attempting to “queer the codes of Modernist design,” as the designers put it, the collection is as conceptually charged as it is materially stunning, and its theoretical considerations can’t be unraveled from personal and emotional ones.
More

Week of March 25, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a sizeable exhibition of furniture and art in Rome by the now-solo Ronan Bouroullec, (yet another) newcomer South Korean furniture studio we've got our eye on, and three interiors in France and New York with a warm, vintage-heavy appeal, including the eclectic project above by Corpus Studio.
More

Ask the Experts: How Do I Get Started With PR?

Whether you’ve been in the business for years or are just launching your studio, PR can be a powerful tool for boosting your reputation and visibility as a designer. But, as an independent creative or small business, we know your daily to-do list can seem insurmountable. Is doing PR on your own worth the effort? What can PR really offer, and how do you get started? As design fair season ramps up, Sight Unseen has partnered with Hello Human, a PR company for creative entrepreneurs, for a new series that breaks down some of the most common questions about the often nebulous world of public relations. Here, we’ll introduce you to the basics. 
More

The 2023 American Design Hot List, Part II

This week we announced our 11th annual American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s editorial award for the names to know now in American design. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the second group of Hot List designers here (including Little Wing Lee, whose graphic rug for the most recent Black Folks in Design exhibition is pictured above).
More

The 2023 American Design Hot List, Part I

This week we announced our 11th annual American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s editorial award for the names to know now in American design. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the first group of Hot List designers here (including Charlap Hyman & Herrero, whose baby blue Brooklyn bedroom is pictured above).
More

Week of November 27, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a med spa so chic we'd live in it, three unmissable group exhibitions in New York and San Francisco, and pretty new photos of a standout Italian furniture collection (above).
More

EDITORS’ LIST

Jill and Monica share their October picks, including an iconic Swedish textile artist, Modernist beds rescued from a palace in India, an epic Anthroposophical desk, and possibly the coolest ugly sweaters we've ever seen.
More

Week of October 16, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a bucolic design exhibition hosted on a farm in Germany, mesmerizing wood and aluminum furniture, a new furniture collection featuring four buzzy New York designers, and chairs upholstered with a patchwork of reclaimed hospital sheets. 
More

Sabine Marcelis on Her Newest Collaboration, Her Material Research, and Her Complicated Feelings About the Color Blue

Sabine Marcelis has become a design breakout star, her minimal-yet-colorful work in glass and resin having penetrated the worlds of architecture, fashion, music, and TikTok. Now she’s conquered yet another realm of wider culture — beauty — through a major collaboration with the Swiss skincare brand La Prairie, with whom she’s just launched a vanity tray that marries her signature use of resin with the brand’s signature shade of cobalt. We decided it was a good moment to catch up with Marcelis, and talk to her not only about this project, but also about what materials she’s been experimenting with lately, how she feels in the wake of all the social media hype, and why she — cobalt excluded, of course — doesn’t actually like the color blue.
More

These Three Studios are Redefining Cool Outdoor Furniture for a New Generation

Until the middle of last century, most outdoor furniture was serving Period Piece, “with stamped-out metal, bunches of flowers and leaves,” as the late designer Richard Schultz wrote in an essay reprinted in his 2019 book, Form Follows Technique: A Design Manifesto. But lately, we’ve been clocking a growing number of contemporary designers taking up the torch of inventive outdoor furniture design. It tracks alongside the growing collective awareness that nature is precious and that cultivating our feelings of belonging within nature is more important than ever. We caught up with three exciting talents on the scene.
More

Week of June 26, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Reconsidering the color purple, delving into reincarnation (we promise it's design-related), and wondering about the economics of small-scale independent design brands in the face of Amazon-esque retailers. 
More