At Three Design Hotels, A Sense of Place Rooted in the Local Environment

Hotels are often transitory, sometimes liminal, spaces. But three recently opened or newly renovated ones are rooted in their local environments, taking design cues from their surroundings and creating a distinctive atmosphere. You’re not just anywhere, or even in-between, you’re there: in Fukuoka City, Japan at Hotel Il Palazzo, in Tomales Bay, California at Lodge at Marconi (above), and at Otro Oaxaca, you’re firmly in the southern Mexican city.

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07.21.22

Travel

This Renovation of a Montauk Motel Retains Its Seaside Charm Even As It’s Become Eminently Instagrammable

When I heard that longtime friends of Sight Unseen Home Studios were spearheading the renovation of Daunt's Albatross, a 23-room motel in the center of town that's been in the same family since 1977, I was cautiously — but extremely — optimistic. That Home's design for the space would be beautiful was never in question — have you seen what this studio can do with tile? — but could the motel retain the quirky fishing village charm of old Montauk while still being someplace I'd want to obsessively Instagram?

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Sight Unseen Furniture Collection Bestcase

05.12.22

Sight Unseen Presents

Cool Chromes and Candy-Colored Resin: Introducing the First Sight Unseen Furniture Collection, Created in Collaboration With Bestcase

As an editorial platform and sometimes-IRL design show, Sight Unseen has been showcasing furniture and accessories by talented designers for almost thirteen years. But it wasn't until nearly a decade in, when our old friend Charles Constantine went to co-found a metal manufacturing facility called Bestcase, that we began to wonder — wait, shouldn't we also be making furniture ourselves? After figuring out the possibilities and constraints of designing with metal, creating a '70s-inspired mood board with references to how we wanted the collection to feel — at once icy and warm, vintage-inspired, yet of the moment — and reaching out to a handful of designers who could absolutely nail this look, the resulting six-piece collection launches today, both on Sight Unseen's 1stDibs storefront and through Bestcase’s distributor network.

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10.16.21

Saturday Selects

Week of October 11, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: new prints from one of our favorite Instagram accounts, a duo of vases in the best color by Sophie Lou Jacobsen, and a gut renovation from Home Studios peppered with local artists.

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10.15.21

Travel

Three New Design Hotels With Interiors We’d Love to Get Cozy in This Fall

Fall is the best time to enjoy the coziness of having a coffee or a cocktail in a warm, well-designed, moodily lit hotel lobby or bar. If we weren't going to be spending ours finishing up the first Sight Unseen book, we'd be checking into one of these three new properties and settling in with a martini and a good book. As a bonus, they marry the sustainability of using vintage furnishings with the social responsibility of sourcing from local artists. Tour Kanalhuset, the Hotel Grand Stark, and the Alsace LA after the jump.

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11.12.20

Interiors

This New York Residence Deftly Mixes Vintage and Custom — and Tile for Miles

Chances are, if you've eaten out in New York or LA in the past five years, you're familiar with some of the details that recur in this New York residence. After all, its interior design team, Home Studios, is responsible for such cozy elements as the channeled paneling at The Spaniard, the archways and tile at Bibo in LA, the copper accents at Ramona in Greenpoint, and the globular pendants at the sadly shuttered Five Leaves in East Hollywood. This 2,000-square-foot gut renovation in Noho — Home's first residential project in New York — employs all of those details and more.

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11.22.17

Interiors

Memphis Meets Secession in L.A.’s Coolest New Bar Interior

When the New York interiors firm Home Studios presented its first collection of lighting and furniture at our OFFSITE show earlier this year, the pieces were a culmination of an unusually prolific track record of custom design and fabrication. Having seen the firm's newest project, the West Hollywood bar Bibo Ergo Sum, in which Home designed every single element but the chairs, we can only imagine how ridiculously good their second collection is going to be.

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