The Best of Stockholm Design Week 2023, Part I: Alvsjo Gard

After a three-year COVID hiatus, Stockholm Design Week returned in full force last week. And while we'll be covering the fair and its happenings around town tomorrow, today we're putting the spotlight on a new exhibition that also happened to be our favorite. Called Älvsjö Gärd, it was a showcase of experimental, research-driven, and collectible design, set across 13 rooms in one of the oldest manors in Stockholm — basically Sight Unseen catnip.
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The Istanbul-Based Animate Objects Makes Statement Objects, With a Surrealist Touch

We often talk about objects that have a life of their own, that shape the space around them and affect the atmosphere and tone of a room. The limited-edition décor and collectible furniture from Animate Objects – an apt name – not only seem to live and breathe, like characters in a story, but they emote, they perform. Zeynep Satik, an Istanbul-based designer, launched Animate Objects a few months ago, with the idea of creating “theatrical environments.” Think statement pieces, with a Surrealist touch, that are as functional as they are distinctive and playfully attention-getting.
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The 2022 American Design Hot List, Part III

This week we announced our 10th 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 third group of Hot List designers here — Ginger Gordon, Gregory Beson, Ian Collings, In Common With (pictured above), and Jialun Xiong.
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For a New Artist Residency, Five Up-And-Coming Studios Remake a Traditional House in Greece

For 4Rooms, an artist residency on the tiny Greek island of Kastellorizo, Società delle Api’s Silvia Fiorucci, alongside Salone del Mobile editorial director Annalisa Rosso, tapped four up-and-coming designers — Studio Brynjar & Veronika, Phanos Kyriacou, Julie Richoz, and UND.studio — to totally make over one room of the house each, with the French studio Superpoly taking over the common areas (including the excellent kitchen, above).
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“Am I Just Making the Trash of the Future?” And Other Philosophical Questions With Designer Drew Abrahamson

“I always want my work to be fun, not taken too seriously, a point of conversation,” says Australian artist and designer Drew Abrahamson. And while it definitely is, it’s thoughtful, too, and even veers, in a light-hearted way, toward the kinds of philosophical questions anyone who puts anything out into the world ought to probably ask themselves: “Am I just making the trash of the future?” Abrahamson’s answer, in his recent series “We Are All Garbage,” is pretty much yes, but concedes that there’s freedom and liberation in the act of creation, especially when it isn’t so tightly tied to the constraints of marketability. 
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Europe’s Newest Design Fair Is In a Small City With a Big Focus on Locality and Sustainability

We were meant to attend and cover the second edition of Southern Sweden Design Days in Malmö last month, but since COVID had other plans for us, we had to catch up with the fair's program from afar instead, which included projects by studios like Malmö Upcycling Service, Lab La Bla, and Andréason & Leibel. In addition to being aesthetically pleasing, many of them featured a focus on local manufacturing, local crafts, and/or locally sourced recycled materials, which not every design fair can claim.
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The Best of the 2022 Salone Del Mobile – Part V

Today's post — our last from this year's Milan furniture fair — takes a tour of two of our favorite reliable destinations for up-and-coming talent: Alcova, the destination founded in 2018 by Studio Vedèt founder Valentina Ciuffi and Space Caviar's Joseph Grima, and Salone Satellite, always our first stop at the fairgrounds.
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Rasmus Nossbring’s Glass Sculptures Look Like They Were Squeezed Through a Tube of Swedish Caviar

For Swedish glassblower Rasmus Nossbring, it’s the immersive nature of the medium that’s so compelling. "Glass moves like nothing I've ever seen before and to use it demands full attention from your whole body and mind," says the Stockholm-based artist. "It’s like super Zen and an adrenaline rush at the same time. A lot of people describe it as a dance, and I would say that on the best days I feel like I become one with the material."
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A Young, Milan-Based Designer Inspired by the Brutalist Architecture of Eastern Europe

There are two distinct threads that run through the work of Milan-based, Macedonia-born designer Daniel Nikolovski. The first is a penchant for storytelling. His objects and furniture all seem to point to an obscure reference or emerge from a well-thought-out backstory; the forms that make up his EYE Lamps, for example, were inspired by Yugoslavian monuments, like the Brutalist buildings Kenzo Tange constructed in Nikolovski’s hometown of Skopje following an earthquake that decimated the city in 1963. The other major tenet of his work is craftsmanship, which is actually the reason he ended up in Italy at all.
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In Mexico City, An Up-and-Coming Design Studio Inspired by Institutional Aesthetics

The objects and furniture made by the Mexico City–based design studio Panorammma are difficult to pin in one particular box. Their concepts pivot from material focus — such as in their Neolithic Thinker chair, an upturned U-shaped seat made of volcanic tezontle stone — to abstract ideas, like the Sisyphean Table, a glass-topped Vignelli-esque cocktail table inspired by the concept of the absurd. But the thread that connects all of these approaches is a steady preoccupation with narrative and memory.
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Week of December 13, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a reconstructed 1960s apartment by Ettore Sottsass opens in Milan, six London designers exhibit works in glass and metal, and Sweden's David Taylor unveils his latest collection of bent-aluminum furniture and lighting.
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