At the London Design Festival, Part IV

Less than a week after we left the London Design Festival, it already feels like a distant memory — mostly because as of yesterday, we've already shifted our focus to making plans for the next edition of our own design showcase, the 2013 Noho Design District. And yet to some degree, we're also already drawing on what we saw at the LDF for inspiration: While we may not have access, in the middle of downtown Manhattan, to the kind of stunning 150,000-sqft. former mail-sorting facility that Designjunction had the luxury of spreading out in last week (incorporating multiple cafes and a pop-up version of the new online shop FAO, pictured above), we do have a few new talents on our hit list, a few schemes cooked up over drinks with old friends, and a few programming strategies to mull over. Meanwhile, we're offering you one last chance to see what we saw at the festival, which though it was by no means everything, will hopefully give you something to mull over, too.
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Jo Meesters, Designer

Old or discarded objects may leave their mark on many a designer’s practice these days, but few so literally as Jo Meesters’s: Peer inside any one of the Pulp vessels or lamps he sculpts from a self-engineered slurry of newspaper and glue, and odds are you’ll see the imprint of whatever busted-up thrift store find he used as its mold. In fact, whatever time Meesters doesn’t spend designing, he tends to spend combing through second-hand shops, searching for abandoned items with intriguing materialities or archetypal forms. “When I’m developing new products, they’re always the forms I come back to, because they’re recognizable for most people,” says the Philippines-born, Eindhoven-based talent. Once he co-opts those historical influences into one of his own objects, “it becomes this weird sensation; you’ve never seen it before, and yet you can also relate it.”
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Marije Vogelzang of Proef, Designer and Restaurateur

Back in 2000, when Marije Vogelzang had graduated from Eindhoven with a product-design degree and begun turning a school project — a funeral table set with all-white cuisine — into fodder for her nascent career, food design was still a relatively unknown discipline. Martí Guixé was already making experimental tapas and rice wine bottles with edible corks, but Arabeschi di Latte didn't exist yet, Jennifer Rubell's first art-brunch was still eight years away, and other young would-be practitioners like Franke Elshout, Annelies Hermsen, Katja Gruijters, and Janina Loeve were still just a twinkle in Li Edelkoort's eye. By the time Vogelzang founded Proef, her Amsterdam restaurant and food lab, in 2004, she was at the leading edge of a movement that aimed to use creativity and critical thinking to heighten the sensory and emotional experience of eating. Ten years, countless interactive food events, one book, and a TED Talk later, her ideas are a constant source of curiosity for those both within the design world and beyond. We at Sight Unseen have personally been fans of Vogelzang's work since we first took a hammer to her clay-baked vegetables at the London Design Festival in 2008 — an opinion only reinforced as we sipped artisanal cocktails laced with edible flowers at Proef this past winter — so we tracked her down to find out more about her own personal adventures in eating.
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Lukas and Oskar Peet, Product Designers

There's a reason why one of the first questions we always ask Sight Unseen subjects is "What did your parents do?" In the nearly two years we've been producing this site, it's become apparent that the ideas and habits of ultra-creative people usually germinate in childhood, and that the environments in which they were raised tend to have played a part — whether their formative years resembled those of Kiki van Eijk, whose father competed on the 1976 Dutch Olympic field hockey team but also taught her to paint, or Lauren Kovin, whose parents filled the house with Ettore Sottsass furniture. The more designers and artists in a given family, the more interesting things tend to get, which is why we decided to start this new Related column. In it, we'll periodically ask creative talents who are related to interview one another about their respective practices and what it was like growing up in close proximity. First up are brothers Lukas Peet, 24, and Oskar Peet, 27, up-and-coming designers who were born and raised in the Canadian mountain resort town of Banff, attended the Design Academy Eindhoven together, and whose Dutch-born father Rudi Peet immigrated to Banff in 1974 and has since established himself as a successful jewelry designer there.
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Dokter and Misses, Furniture and Fashion Designers

There’s a lot that’s hard for Westerners to understand about Adriaan Hugo and Katy Taplin, the husband and wife who make up the South African furniture and fashion duo Dokter and Misses. First, there’s the fact that they hail from Johannesburg, a city whose art scene has held sway in the international market for years but whose few industrial designers are hardly household names. Then there are their references, which remain resolutely sub-equatorial: In our interview, we talked about game reserves, braais (the South African term for barbecue), a Nigerian dancehall/reggae musician named Dr. Alban, and an artist who uses the techniques of the Ndebele tribe, from the Mpumalanga region of the country. Perhaps most confounding is their name, which mixes English and Dutch honorifics and calls to mind everything from sci-fi movies to secretaries — and which the two refuse to explain. It’s lucky, then, that their work is so instantly likable and wonderfully easy to grasp.
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Union of Striped Yarns by Dienke Dekker

People always ask us which design fair is on our can't-miss list, and though we've never been able to make it there ourselves, we're inclined at this point to say Dutch Design Week. The work on show there is consistently kind of epic, with future design superstars springing almost fully formed each year from the Design Academy Eindhoven (see Formafantasma, Julien Carretero, and Nacho Carbonell, to name a few). Next on that list might be Dienke Dekker, a 2012 graduate whose material explorations we're featuring today. For her project the Union of Striped Yarns, which debuted at last year's DDW, Dekker used a variety of yarns — hand-dyed, industrial-printed and even non-traditional "threads" like caution tape — to explore striped patterning in textiles. Different colored and white spaces, combined with a variety of weaving methods, created the gorgeous effects on view here.
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10 Things We’re Looking Forward To at This Year’s Stockholm Furniture Fair

Stockholm functions in many ways like a mini-Milan, which comes, in part, from being a city with an incredibly high baseline of appreciation for design: There's a predictably excellent emerging design showcase at the fair; there are exhibitions around town in the most wonderful and surprising locations (see this year's new experimental showcase at Älvsjö Gard, a never-before-used 16th-century manor on the fairgrounds); there are exciting launches from local talents, such as Fredrik Paulsen and Note Design Studio; and there is, if you can squeeze it in, an abundance of studio visits and sightseeing field trips you can take to round out your design education while you're there. (Let this be the year I finally make it to the Ragnar Östberg–designed City Hall!) Here are 10 of the things we're most looking forward to at Stockholm Design Week, which this year runs from February 6-12.
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Five Rooms, Five Ways: From ’80s Brushstrokes to Meditative Minimalism

Hundreds of design lovers will find themselves in Provence this week on the occasion of the Villa Noailles Design Parade. But one of the coolest things can actually be found a scenic, 90-minute drive from Hyères in the small town of Grasse. There, in a 300-year-old farmhouse owned by design patron Silvia Fiorucci-Roman, is the 5Rooms project at Moulin Des Ribes, for which five design studios were each asked to create a bedroom with ensuite bathroom, with every detail inspired by the colors, crafts, and traditions of the surrounding region.
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Our 10 Most Popular Posts of 2017

It always feels a little strange for us to look back at the previous year each December; when you run a publication, not to mention a major annual event, your mind is always, always fully consumed by thoughts of what's ahead. And yet it's now a Sight Unseen tradition to spend the final week of December reflecting back on the prior year, and so we've taken time out to do just that, starting with our top 10 most popular posts of 2017.
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OS ∆ OOS’s Syzygy Lamps

Credit where credit is due: The idea for Sight Unseen's newest column, Self Portrait, came from a chat we had recently with Pin-Up editor Felix Burrichter, over lunch in Soho. "Why don't you feature more products?" he asked us, to which we replied that our site is really about process — not products. Felix suggested we ask designers to pose with their latest works, something more personal than just reporting the news. The notion rattled around in our brains for a few months until it evolved into something even more exciting, at least we think so: A series inviting designers and artists to visually present their creations to us in a unique way, photographing them firsthand in a setting or setup that somehow illuminates the ideas behind the object. Our first submission comes from Oskar Peet, who with his partner Sophie Mensen founded the Eindhoven-based firm OS ∆ OOS this fall, launching with a trio of lamps so beautiful and intriguing that we actually feel grateful to Burrichter for inspiring the perfect platform with which to share them. Check out Peet and Mensen's submission above, then read below about how — and why — they got the shot.
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Meet (and Win!) Sunne: A Solar-Powered Lamp That Color-Shifts to Mimic the Moods of the Sun

Dutch designer Marjan van Aubel — whom we interviewed yesterday to mark the debut of her new collaboration with Lexus — is a fervent proponent of solar energy, and specifically of using design to make the technology more appealing and accessible. Today, we're offering you the chance to win her solar-powered Sunne lamp, a statement piece for the home that can, with a tap on its frame, cycle through three different vibrant color spectrums meant to evoke sunrise (pale yellow) and sunset (fiery red or purple-y pink). Head to our Instagram to enter, or if you can't wait, head to our shop to purchase one!
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See What 7 Top Vintage Dealers Found at This Year’s Brimfield Flea Market

Every year in Brimfield, Massachusetts, dealers get to the famed mile-long flea market at 5AM, flashlights in hand, long before the public is allowed in, and often do this for 5 or 6 days in a row before heading home at the end of the week with trucks full of objects bound for their galleries, Instagrams, and private clients. This year, after getting a personal peek at the Brimfield finds of Lorca Cohen, who co-founded The Window in Los Angeles — that's her epic haul in the photo above — we decided to reach out to a few other top dealers to see if we could show you the market through their eyes.
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