Home emerging designers
07.08.21

Sight Unseen Presents

Our 2021 Collection Launches Today on 1stDibs — With New Work From 16 International Designers

The pandemic may have prevented us from hosting our Offsite show this year, but we didn't want to entirely abandon our role as a platform for supporting the work of independent designers — especially since they haven't let it stop them from coming up with brilliant new ideas, even without a physical fair to debut them at. So for 2021, we decided to curate a special collection of furniture and accessories by 16 contemporary designers and launch it for sale exclusively on 1stDibs, starting today.
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06.12.21

Saturday Selects

Week of June 7, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: two truly excellent uses of glass blocks in interiors, a reissue of Tobia Scarpa's first-ever product design, a foot-shaped glass vase we're obsessing over, and a sinuous new table by Erik Olovsson, above.
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Atelier Malak
03.22.21

Up and Coming

This French Designer’s Spidery, Sculptural Furniture Evokes a Sense of Poetry

Before he started taming metal, Malacou Lefebvre juggled numbers for a company. A chance romantic stroll turned him into a maker. The self-taught founder of Atelier Malak, Lefebvre's steel chairs, tables, and lightings — designed in a former factory near Lyon, France — adopt spider-like shapes in which the initial sketch, lying as it is on the paper, fully imprints the force of its expression.
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03.19.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

For Its Second Fully Virtual Outing, This Danish Design Exhibition Gets Personal

Mindcraft's interactive website includes individual designer pages, video interviews with the 10 Danish designers and studios, an AR component, and a 3D experience. Of course, as with any exhibition like this, the bells and whistles don't add up to much unless the quality of the work is there to support it, and in this case, thankfully, that is true. But while the AR component is interesting, it's the videos that provide both context and emotional heft.
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03.16.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

16 Talents to Watch From This Year’s Stockholm Design Week

Stockholm was one of the few design fairs that slid in under the wire, early in 2020 before the world shut down. So it makes even more sense that the fair's organizers decided to exercise prudence and call this year's edition off. Greenhouse, the section of the fair that's typically home to design schools and talents to watch, was presented digitally, while some of the schools — including Konstfack and Beckmans — banded together for a group show in town.
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01.22.21

Q+A

Meet Cara\Davide, The South African-Italian Duo Making Waves in Milan

One of Cara Judd and Davide Gramatica of Cara\Davide’s most memorable projects quite literally started in a scrap heap. “We were visiting an artisan who works with metal for another project and we came across a piece of leftover iron with an interesting patina,” says Gramatica of the offcut that would inspire their Calandra collection. “For them, it was rubbish, but between us, we said, why not?”
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01.21.21

Sighted

Meet the Site Helping You Discover New Designers and Artists — Starting With These 14

When it launched, Wescover was an index of places and spaces — the Ace Hotels, De Maria restaurant in New York, Hauser & Wirth in LA — annotated with the names of artists and designers whose work they contained. Now its goal is to foster the discovery of independent talents within its pages, primarily through contextual interior photography that helps bring their work to life. To give you a jumping off point for exploring the site, we've rounded up 14 of our favorite creators, both familiar and new.
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12.21.20

Up and Coming

Meet the Lithuanian Designer Making Anthropomorphic Furniture Inspired by Klee and Miro

Lithuanian-born newcomer Barbora Žilinskaite, who felt so stifled by her highly technical and traditional design education at the Vilnius Academy of Arts that her first collection as a new graduate flew WAY in the opposite direction. In this case, though, it was a good thing — that collection, called Roommates, is bizarre in the most delightful and sophisticated of ways, featuring a foot-shaped table, hand-shaped magazine rack, and face-shaped table inspired in part by the paintings of Paul Klee and Joan Miró.
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11.24.20

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Group Exhibition in Detroit Celebrates the Design Scene of a City That Was ‘Never Normal’

Never Normal — a timely group exhibition by the Detroit gallery Wasserman Projects, in collaboration with the local collective Form&Seek — examines how, post-pandemic, our relationships with our domestic spaces are transforming in ways we might not even be able to fully understand yet. But it also celebrates a city that in many ways has long considered itself an outlier.
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11.03.20

Up and Coming

In Lucas Morten’s Hands, Scandinavian Design Becomes Something Much Darker

Swedish designer Lucas Morten’s Klot chair is sculpted from Styrofoam and his Skal vases are formed from stiffened burlap cloth. These improbable materials are the result of his general curiosity about life and his constant search for beauty. “The whole philosophy behind my objects revolves around breaking the Swedish heritage of ‘functionality first’,” he says. “I’m really inspired by the total beauty that can be found beyond practical aspects and interested in what that kind of beauty means to the human being.”
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10.22.20

Up and Coming

This Swiss Designer’s Unfussy Furniture is Inspired By the Sunshine of His New Spanish Home

When Antonius Dreier moved from Switzerland to Madrid just over a year ago, the light and lifestyle in the Spanish city inspired a debut furniture collection from Studio Drei that’s most at home in the spots where the sunshine spills inside. “I think the move has had a great impact on my pieces,” he says. “The culture of this country and its craftwork are very present in my first catalogue.”
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