Home furniture
07.11.23

Up and Coming

Bowen Liu Was Up to the Challenge of Making Furniture in Cast Glass

Without being towering, there’s a heft and monumentality to the cast glass Helle collection by New York designer Bowen Liu. The presence of these pieces is anchoring, a solidity that’s offset by their translucency. Made by glass workers in Brooklyn, the collection includes bookends, a coffee table, floor lamp, mirror, and side table, which debuted at New York Design Week in May. While the mirror and lamp feature white oak details, the coffee and side tables and bookends are made entirely of glass. If you don’t see a lot of cast glass furniture at scale, it's because it demands expertise, skill, and time to produce. But Liu was up for the challenge.
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06.30.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Design Gallery in Berlin Gives a Long-Overdue Platform to Up-and-Coming German Studios

Despite being a longtime haven for artists and creatives — with its (formerly) cheap rents and surplus of accessible studio and exhibition spaces — Berlin never really made any sort of cohesive mark on the contemporary furniture-design world. That's why I got so excited recently when I heard about Forma, a new pop-up design gallery on the Spree river showing mostly contemporary work by mostly German or Germany-based designers like Nazara Lazaro, Carsten in der Elst, and Haus Otto — as well as why its founder, Vanessa Heepen, almost didn’t go through with it.
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06.05.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

Sarah Burns’s Collection for Marta is Dreamy But Humble — In Other Words, a Little Midwestern

As a designer, New York–based Sarah Burns has a remarkable fluidity when it comes to scale. She can go small and intricate, like the jewelry she creates as co-owner of the Chinatown shop Old Jewelry. But she’s also adept at working with larger, place-defining forms, as with the furniture collection in her first solo show, Prairie’s Edge, now running at Marta in LA through June 10.
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05.19.23

Sight Unseen Collection

Ben Willett Joins the Sight Unseen Collection With Warm Wood Furniture That Channels 1970s and 80s Europe

You could say that moving into furniture design was something of a pandemic project for Ben Willett. At the start of the shutdown, he and his wife, chef and cookbook author Molly Baz, were on vacation in California and decided to stay there, eventually making a permanent move from a 700-square-foot New York City apartment to a house on the far east side of Los Angeles. With space came the need to fill it, along with a new West Coast perspective; the result is a collection still in the works but previewed in the images here, with pieces like the WS-Shorty credenza, a beauty in Douglas fir that debuted last night at our Sight Unseen Collection show in New York.
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05.02.23

Sight Unseen Presents

New York Design Week, Did You Miss Us? We’re Back, With a Show of Work by 23 Designers

Predictably, the question we always get around this time of year is: Are you bringing back Offsite?! Alas, our much-loved New York design week show, which ran in some form or another from 2010-2020, is on indefinite hiatus. But this year we'll be bringing a piece of its spirit back to life: From May 18-24, Sight Unseen will host an exhibition featuring the newest additions to the Sight Unseen Collection, which comprises furniture, lighting, and objects from a stable of emerging and mid-career designers from around the world, all orderable directly through Sight Unseen. The exhibition — taking place at Voltz Clarke gallery on the Lower East Side — will feature new work by 23 designers and studios, displayed alongside the paintings of France-based artist Heather Chontos.
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05.01.23

Sighted

Sarah Ellison Gives Bauhaus a Feminine Spin With Her Tubular Chromeo Chair

Are tubular metal chairs back? Almost a century since Marcel Breuer started churning out seating designs formed from sculptural lines of curved stainless steel, like the B5, Wassily, and Cesca models, Australian designer Sarah Ellison has paid homage to these Bauhaus icons with the launch of her Chromeo lounge chair. A more contemporary and feminine spin on the intentionally simple style, with its curvy silhouette and bolstered cushioning, the design offers a fresh approach to the movement’s ethos of combining art, craftsmanship, and mass production.
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04.26.23

Fair Report

The Best of Salone Del Mobile 2023, Part II

Today we're focusing on brands: We loved the collection at Cassina — though it was hard to see through the throngs — and the brand's iMaestri exhibition, in a former bank vault, curated by Patricia Urquiola against a backdrop of blood red. Other standouts included a quiet presentation of lovely geometric rugs by Ruckstuhl at Assab One, Studiopepe's shock of lime green coffee table for Sancal, the addition of two friends of SU to the Tacchini stable (Umberto Bellardi Ricci and Brian Thoreen), Phillippe Malouin's cheeky magnetic lamp for Flos, Knoll's desert jungle pavilion, Acerbis's 1970s throwback in the form of a John Chamberlain-esque sofa system by Claudio Salocchi, and the debut of one of our favorite lamps — Mangiarotti's Lari lamp for Karakter — in a new, tiny, USB-charged portable size. 
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04.24.23

Fair Report

The Best of the 2023 Salone Del Mobile — Part I

While Salone del Mobile has often felt too sprawling for one person to take in, this was the year it seemed to fracture entirely. Scrolling through other people's Instagram Stories, seeing exhibitions that hadn't even made it onto my radar, much less my extensive Google doc, made me stop and wonder: "Are we even at the same fair?" The exhibition we loved the most though — and heard uniformly wonderful things about — was by Objects of Common Interest, who developed their experiments in opalescent resin into a full-fledged collection for Nilufar Depot, so we'll kick off our Milan recaps with that!
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04.18.23

Fair Report

The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today: India Mahdavi for Gebrüder Thonet Vienna

This week we're featuring our favorite quick-hits from this year's Milan Design Week. This is a simple one, but we just felt drawn to the stylish weirdness of India Mahdavi's new Loop dining chair for Gebrüder Thonet Vienna, which takes the heritage brand's historical tubular bent-wood frame style and turns it into something modern, playful but not silly, and with one of the best two-tone color schemes we've seen in awhile.
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04.17.23

Fair Report

The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today: Norwegian Presence

This week we're featuring our favorite quick hits from this year's Milan Design Week. First up is the ninth annual edition of Norwegian Presence, a group exhibition of work by some of the Nordic country's best talents, curated by Design and Architecture Norway (DOGA) and, this year, styled by Kråkvik & D’Orazio and Bjørn van den Berg.
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04.03.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

See Inside Maniera Gallery’s New Home, a Belgian Art Deco Masterpiece

When Belgian design gallery Maniera first opened nearly a decade ago, the works were located inside the loftlike apartment of Maniera's founders, Amaryllis Jacobs and Kwinten Lavigne. The gallery has gone through many incarnations since then — including once popping up in a famed Brutalist house in Ghent — until this spring, when it moved into its new permanent digs: the Hôtel Danckaert, also known as Villa Dewin, a landmarked Art Deco building in Brussels designed in 1922 by architect Jean-Baptiste Dewin. Maniera’s first exhibition in the space, which opened last month, features 15 new designs by artists and architects, all of which were created to respond to the gallery's imposing setting. 
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03.28.23

Shopping

With Our New Furniture and Lighting Collection, You Can Put Sight Unseen Into Your Projects (Or Your Home)

(Re-)Launching today, shop.sightunseen.com is now an online gallery of our full furniture and lighting collection, available either for easy online check-out, or to use as a living lookbook for your projects, with our dedicated sales person ready to work with you on trade orders and customizations. Our offerings will be constantly updated as we discover and write about new design series, and will always run the gamut from simpler staples to statement pieces that can add a megadose of personality to any interior.
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