Last Month’s Parisian Design Fairs Made Us Feel Open-Hearted and Optimistic About the Future of Design

Paris has been host to a lot of action over the last few months: Fashion Week, the World Rugby Cup, and a certain creepy crawly who shall not be named among them. During the second and third weeks of October, however, a flurry of design people — our people — popped into town for a fair circuit punctuated by the inaugural Paris edition from Design Miami/ as well as Paris+ par Art Basel and two exciting new kids on the block: CONTRIBUTIONS and THEMA.
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A Puzzle-Piece Bed, a Ceramic Peanut, a Mosaic Table: Everything We Loved in Miami This Year

Miami in December is a fairly easy sell for those of us in the art and design industries (despite the fact that, check notes, precisely zero of Sight Unseen's editors attended this year!) Those who weren't book launch mode descended in droves for the city's annual Art Week, as it’s become known since the number of exhibitions put on around Art Basel Miami Beach and Design Miami ballooned somewhat out of control. Today we're featuring a few acts from the week's anchor fairs, but between poolside cocktail parties and trips to Twist, our reliably favorite fair is of course Design Miami, which showcased an impressively diverse — and thankfully colorful — range of collectible design during its 18th edition.
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Your Guide to the 40+ Designers Who Made This Year’s Design Miami Great

Whatever anyone's opinion on last week's Design Miami fair, we could all agree on at least one thing — thank God there were no bananas. There were a few cheesy star power moments, to be sure, but compared to the circus at Art Basel, the design fair felt like a bastion of integrity and sound judgment. In our tent, we had lustrous, emerald-green consoles, a sustainably-sourced hairy pink bench, and the coolest hand-sculpted fireplace we've ever seen. In theirs, people were lined up for miles to take a selfie with a piece of fruit.
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Philippe Malouin on How He Created What Just Might Be Basel’s Most Unusual Collection Ever

Every year, it seems like the contemporary work exhibited at the premiere design fairs gets more intricate and labor-intensive, more whimsical and wacky, more conceptual and process-driven. At this week's Design Miami Basel show, however, Salon 94 Design is departing from that convention in an epic way, with a presentation called Industrial Office that draws on basic ideas and questions from Philippe Malouin's work on commercial office furniture, but pushed to extremes in terms of materials, engineering, and fabrication. We spoke with Malouin to find out more.
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Our 30+ Favorite Finds from Design Miami 2018

For Design Miami, the way to announce itself as different from all other design fairs is to, well, embrace the Miami-ness of it all — whether that means an ultra-saturated backdrop (as with Atelier Courbet this year and Demisch Danant last year), an exhibition devoted exclusively to water fountains (Sabine Marcelis x Fendi), or, as with the Chris Wolston light for The Future Perfect at top of this post, an explosion of hyper-colorful flora and fauna.
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A Short List of Everything We Loved At This Year’s Design Miami/Basel

Even if nothing else of interest had launched at last week's Design Miami/Basel, we would have still done this round-up if only to feature Galerie VIVID's Column Paintings by Thomas Trum, seen at the top of this post; nothing about the recent Design Academy Eindhoven's previous two-dimensional work could have prepared us for the awesomeness of these two-toned painted shelving units. Luckily, there was other good stuff at the fair to be found as well.
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Kwangho Lee at Design Miami/Basel 2018

Kwangho Lee On Using a 15th-Century Technique To Make Today’s Coolest Furniture

At Design Miami/Basel this week, Korean designer Kwangho Lee is presenting his latest work with the New York gallery Salon 94 Design — a 25-piece offering, spanning seating, side tables, cabinets, lamps, and planters, that continues Lee’s career-long quest to resuscitate enamel’s old-fashioned image. “Korean people aren’t very interested in it as a traditional material,” he explains of his longtime technique, chilbo, which dates back to the 15th century. “They think it’s something boring and old-fashioned.”
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Soft Baroque’s New Furniture Series is the Ultimate Trompe L’Oeil

One of the most clever and delightful projects on view this week at Design Miami/Basel was Soft/Hard, an installation by Soft Baroque commissioned by the Copenhagen gallery Étage Projects, which presented a series of trompe l'oeil domestic objects pairing materials like granite, OSB and bublinga wood with their digital simulacra printed onto soft silk textiles.
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Design Miami neon lamps

Design Miami Sneak Peek: Sabine Marcelis’s New Resin and Neon Lamps

If there's one thing we've always hated about Miami, aesthetically speaking, it's all the neon signs. Yet they're a big part of the city's visual identity, making it all the more fitting that at this year's Design Miami show, Belgium's Victor Hunt gallery will be exhibiting a brand new edition of Eindhoven grad Sabine Marcelis's neon and cast-resin lamps — the Dawn series — that offers a moment of redemption for those gaudy illuminated tubes.
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At Art Basel and Design Miami 2014

Glancing out the window on this cold, grey, rainy day in New York City, it's hard to believe that just last week we were frolicking in the sunshine in Miami, immersing ourselves in art and design and running into friends like Su Wu and Brent Dzekciorius on the street while flitting between parties and champagne brunches. While the primary purpose of our time there was to launch a new collaboration with Print All Over Me for the shop at the Standard (read all about that here), we managed to squeeze a million other activities into our four-day trip, from a visit to the impeccably curated Untitled art fair to a bizarre slide lecture and fashion show by Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe to a 3AM performance by rapper Rae Sremmurd at a local nightclub that left our ears ringing for three days straight. While you won't find that particular dalliance documented here, we did take plenty of photographs of art and design; some of our favorites are posted after the jump.
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SU x PAOM for The Standard Shop

Last week in Miami, you could go home with art in just about any form — not just on a canvas (Art Basel) but in the form of a vase or a table (Design Miami), a pool toy (Grey Area x FriendsWithYou), a champagne bottle (Ruinart x Georgia Russel), or, if you happened by the shop at The Standard Spa, beach gear courtesy of yours truly. For this year's Miami fair, Sight Unseen teamed up with Print All Over Me to curate a line of warm-weather clothing and accessories sold exclusively at the Standard, featuring prints by Paul Wackers, Ellen Van Dusen of Dusen Dusen, Peter Judson, Rachel Domm, Caitlin Foster, Marta Veludo, Eunice Luk, Branden Collins, and Rafael de Cardenas (who designed the shop's interior a few years back).
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