04.15.14

Fair Report

At the 2014 Milan Furniture Fair, Part III

The fairgrounds at the Milan Furniture Fair are a great place to see attainable designs by established companies and talents, but typically it's not the place to go when you're scouting for new names (though this year's Satellite show, as demonstrated in yesterday's post, happened to be a surprise goldmine). For that, you have to brave the long walks, aching feet, and lack of taxis that come along with trying to get to all the shows around town, from Rossana Orlandi gallery to the far-flung Lambrate district. We say this every year, but we barely saw half of what was on offer; that said, we saw a lot of nice things.

04.14.14

Fair Report

At the 2014 Milan Furniture Fair, Part II

Though we're back from Milan and already knee-deep in planning for our own design fair next month (eek!), we'll be bringing you highlights from the Italian capital all this week. Today we're focusing on our favorites from the fairgrounds, like Front's beautiful chairs for Moroso (above). The fair this year was visually quite strong, with last year's obsessive booth styling taken to even greater heights. (We actually begged the Arper folks to put some of their styling pieces into production!). The fair is also where the trends we'd been thinking about began to seriously take shape. What was in this year? Though everyone still loves that pastel mint and pink palette, we saw tons of putty — yes, putty — and other assorted non-hues (most of which didn't make it into this round-up, since we're suckers for color). For more of our take, read on, then click through to our Facebook album and come back tomorrow for more from the offsite shows.

04.10.14

Fair Report

The Tortoise Shell Trend is Back, And We’ve Got the Proof

We've been in Milan at the furniture fair all week, and though we'll be posting more extensive coverage over the next few days, we wanted to begin by featuring a duo that's fast becoming an old favorite of ours, despite hardly being out of school. We've featured the work of ÉCAL alumni Josephine Choquet and Virgile Thévoz twice before, but when we saw them with a booth at this year's Salone Satellite — the Milan fair's showcase of up-and-coming talents — we knew we had to share their new work. The brass and acetate Acapulco lights at the top of this post employ the same materials as their sunglasses to fantastic effect, while their new mirrors play with something that was a major trend at this year's fair — iridescence. Inspired by a bubble’s prismatic surface, the mirrors are available in three colors that change according to your point of view. The London-bound duo are certainly ones to watch.

Oeuffice Milanes collection Piero Portaluppi

04.09.14

Excerpt: Magazine

Oeuffice’s Milanes Collection, from PIN-UP No. 16

Now that Seattle Week on Sight Unseen is over, we're turning our attention to another northwestern capital — Milan, Italy, home of the Salone del Mobile, where Jill and I are on serious scouting duty this week. Before we begin posting our annual eyewitness dispatches from the fair, though, we wanted to start our coverage with a small paean to our temporary digs: an article I contributed to the forthcoming Milan-themed spring/summer issue of PIN–UP magazine, which features the work of one of our favorite local design firms (Oeuffice) photographed inside the foundation of one of our favorite local architects (Piero Portoluppi). Click through to learn more about Oeuffice's Milanes collection of tabletop items and the impetus behind these gorgeous images, plus how you can snag the PIN–UP No. 16 when it goes on sale next month.

04.05.14

Saturday Selects

Week of March 31, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. Today, we temporarily interrupt Seattle Week to bring yo far-reaching news from places like Sweden (clocks and tables made from rejected furniture), Milan (a preview of novelties launching at the upcoming Salone del Mobile, where we'll be reporting from next week), and the Internets (a rash of color-field abstraction on Instagram).

02.15.14

Saturday Selects

Week of February 10, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: sculptures made from deconstructed window blinds and laminate floors, a book on vintage corporate identity design manuals, a series of fake Cuban shop windows (pictured above), and the most excitement we've ever experienced over a bar of soap.

05.06.13

Up and Coming

Poetic Lab & Studio Shikai, Designers

As anyone who’s spent even a passing amount of time with us knows, one of our favorite games is playing “spot the next design star.” There are lots of places to look, of course — our most recent obsession being the treasure trove that is Instagram — but the granddaddy of them all is Salone Satellite, the young designers showcase that sets up shop on the edge of Milan’s fairgrounds each year. Before blogs, before ICFF Studio, before the London Design Festival even existed, there was Satellite, which in the past has been a launching pad for designers like Front, Nendo, Paul Loebach, Jonah Takagi, and Matali Crasset, to name a few.

04.12.13

Fair Report

The Best of the 2013 Milan Furniture Fair, Part I

Greetings from Milano! Between all the Negronis and risottos, the late-night parties and the trips to Bar Basso, the Sight Unseen team has spent the past week treasure-hunting at the annual Salone del Mobile, and we’re excited to share with you our first batch of finds. This post includes our favorite photos from days 1 and 2 of our trip, but there are many, many more in our Facebook album — click here to check it out! And stay tuned for more! (Above: new copper oxidized True Colours vessels by Lex Pott.) Painted plywood furniture by Schemata Architects / Jo Nagasaki, which we spotted at Rossana Orlandi gallery. Nagasaka is the one who made that amazing fluoro epoxy table a few years back.Bertjan Pot lamp for DHPH at Rossana OrlandiArtist Maurizio Cattelan was hanging in his Toiletpaper for Seletti booth at Rossana Orlandi, playing pranks on passersbyMinale-Maeda mirrors at Rossana OrlandiScene from Nomadismi, an exhibition in Brera curated Li Edelkoort, with Stephen Burks Man-Made totem in the centerNomadismiAnton Alvarez wrapped chairs at NomadismiPierre Favresse table and Nathalie du Pasquier rug at La ChanceSebastian Herkner’s Salut tables at La ChanceSurrealist sculpture in BreraIceland Whale Bones project by ECAL students Brass-based lamps by Be Plus HaveAmazing architectural details abound in MilanBrose Fogale coat rack at DesignjunctionUpstairs at Fritz Hansen, visitors could sit in the new Ro Chair by Jaime Hayon and have their picture taken in front of a green screen. Um, yes please! The resulting photos placed us in 7 iconic cityscapes. We thought this one, in the center of Milan, fit the bill quite nicely! Stay tuned for more Milan coverage, coming soon!

11.12.12

Fair Report

At the 2012 Dutch Design Week

It's been a tough two years for Dutch design. First a newly elected right-wing government slashed the tiny country's legendary arts funding, causing seemingly irreparable damage to its institutions and grant programs, and then a series of high-profile resignations called into question the inner workings of Eindhoven's hallowed Design Academy. But even if there are signs that the fairy-tale may not last — that creativity and experimentalism can't elude the death-grip of capitalism forever, even in a place where designers still benefit from squatters' rights — we still look forward to Dutch Design Week as a reminder of the happier consequences of those values. While we couldn't attend this year ourselves, we asked our faithful contributor Marco Tabasso, who's second-in-command at Rossana Orlandi gallery in Milan, to report back on his experiences at the festival — from his mixed feelings about the Design Academy show to the paella dinner he and Rossana shared with Nacho Carbonell in the designer's studio, above.

04.26.12

Fair Report

The Best of the 2012 Milan Furniture Fair, Part III

To quote Pilar Viladas in her roundup on The Moment this week, "Another year, another Milan Furniture Fair." Seriously. The Salone always seems so crazy and exciting while you're actually there — if not important, depending on whether any offerings managed to impress — but looking back on it a week later, it inevitably melts into one big blur of chairs and tables that probably already existed, in one form or another, the year before. With today's album of snapshots, some taken by Future Perfect owner and intrepid reporter Dave Alhadeff and some by the Eindhoven-based designer Max Lipsey, we offer you one last chance to relive the experience of the 2012 fair, up close and personal, before it gets written into the great furniture catalog in the sky. Maybe next year we'll go back ourselves, and remember what the fuss is about all over again. Until then...

04.16.12

Sighted

Balanced by Mischer’Traxler at Wait and See

Two years ago, we went to Milan for the annual furniture fair and noticed, to our delight, a very Sight Unseen–appropriate theme: Rather than just presenting their work, designers were using their Salone exhibitions to showcase their process alongside their finished products. Last year was no exception to the trend, and this year, one of the most promising Milan preview emails to come across the transom at Sight Unseen HQ saw the Vienna-based duo mischer'traxler poised to create a new piece from the tools and inspirations used to develop their old ones. For Balanced, an installation opening tomorrow at the Milanese concept shop Wait and See — a kind of next-gen 10 Corso Como tucked inside a former monastery — the machine-obsessed couple dug up artifacts from the creation of four of their most popular projects and envisioned them laid out perfectly on either side of four gigantic homemade scales. Mischer'traxler gave Sight Unseen an exclusive first look at the show, by way of images they shot in their studio earlier this month, and told us a bit more about its genesis.

05.10.11

Sighted

Matteo Thun on Memphis’s 30-Year History

Sighted on Wallpaper.com, an interview with architect Mattheo Thun marking the 30th anniversary of the Memphis group: the loose collective of Italian designers founded by the late Ettore Sottsass in 1981 and dedicated to shaking the shackles of Modernism. Thun talks to Wallpaper's Emma O'Kelly about what it was really like to be on the front lines of the movement, whose risk-taking objects must have seemed tacky as hell to all but the most die-hard Italian design fans at the time — no more worthy of a museum collection than, say, the opening credits of Saved By the Bell — but whose influence on the history of contemporary design has since become indisputable.