02.15.18

Interiors

A Concrete and Pastel Oasis in Spain

Normally we'd dismiss an all-concrete restaurant as a terrible idea — too Meatpacking District circa Sex and the City, too cold and impersonal — but a submission we received today, from the Spanish architecture firm Lucas y Hernández-Gil, may have just opened our minds a little bit. Their interior for Casaplata restaurant in Seville, Spain, softens the chilly material with saturated colors, pale untreated woods, and tactile materials like velvet and perforated metal.

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08.01.17

Eye Candy

Kelly Behun x Concrete Cat is a Match Made In Heaven

A few weeks ago, we conveyed our excitement over the fact that Concrete Cat was finally making furniture. But it turns out that that was just the first piece of many, and that the Canadian studio had in fact been working under wraps on a collaboration with one of our other favorite designers: Kelly Behun.

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Jezek decided against a sofa in her living area, choosing three chairs — two Mies Van der Rohe and one Brazilian vintage leather piece — to populate the space instead. “I needed furniture that was flexible and portable for when clients come over, so we can gather around my desk,” she says.

05.11.17

At Home With

An LA Interior Designer’s Indoor-Outdoor Silverlake Bungalow — Complete With Chickens

Interior designer Rebecca Jezek applies the guiding tenets of her design practice — a propensity for warmth, an appreciation for architecture, and a deep respect for the classics — to her own Los Angeles home, whose French doors and concrete flooring provide a bright, blank canvas. In many ways, it’s a standing tribute to what’s shaped her: from her own father, an architect influenced by Bauhaus and Dieter Rams (and for whose commercial interior architecture firm Jezek worked as a teenager); to various Czech porcelain artists; to the great designers of Cassina, including Bellini, Magistretti, and Corbusier.

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chic Parisian hotels boutique interior design

08.01.16

Up and Coming

Meet The In-Demand Interior Designer Redefining Parisian Chic

Dorothée Meilichzon had worked in Paris for just five years before she founded her eponymous design studio in 2009 at the age of 27. Since then, she’s become one of the most in-demand interior designers in the French capital — as well as 2015’s designer of the year at Maison & Objet — despite maintaining a full-time staff of only three. Her work focuses on hotels, restaurants, and bars — the “fun places,” as she calls them, done in a style that is decidedly of-the-moment but grounded in color and texture and marked by an exquisite attention to detail and a love for metals, wood, and stone.

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03.28.16

The Essentials

10 Key Designs For Your Bedroom, According to the Guys at TRNK

When the new luxury mattress brand WRIGHT decided to celebrate its launch with a pop-up shop in New York (pictured above), it tapped Tariq Dixon and Nick Nemechek of the popular online retailer TRNK to design it. Even full of revelers at WRIGHT's launch party, the space still looked so chill and lovely that we decided to invite the duo to give us a TRNK-style lesson in how to create the perfect bedroom, complete with the 10 key objects they'd recommend filling it with.

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12.19.15

Saturday Selects

Week of December 14, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: A killer new objects line by a Danish graphic designer, new wall-coverings by two Sight Unseen–approved artists, and a timely primer on James Turrell — for all your Hotline Bling–inspired holiday party chatter needs.

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Spotti Milano, Summer Tales interior project, 2014

03.03.15

8 Things

Studiopepe, Stylists and Set Designers

When describing their sensibility, Arianna Lelli Mami and Chiara Di Pinto of the Milan-based Studiopepe invoke the versatility of classic white shirt: “You can wear it anytime, to go to the supermarket or to a soirée. The same is for design. Good design — whether a masterpiece or anonymous — goes with everything.” Their evocative aesthetic, though, is anything but simple. “Eclecticism and curiosity” are important starting points for them, and their output is rich with visual references, ranging from the harmony of classical forms to the glamour of Italian cinema in the ‘60s. But they don’t merely quote their source material, they transform it.

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02.23.15

Sighted

Hotel Covell in Los Angeles

There was a time, not so long ago, when visitors to New York wouldn't dream of staying anywhere but Manhattan — that all changed, of course, as soon as Brooklyn became an international brand with Williamsburg as its capital, spawning hotels like the Wythe and the Mccarren. Airbnb's rise has also inspired adventurous travelers to fan out to all sorts of peripheral neighborhoods in big cities around the world. And so it's inevitable that a place like Los Feliz, an epicenter of Los Angeles's east-side hipster scene, recently joined the hospitality game, with the opening of the five-room Hotel Covell. Sitting above a popular wine bar of the same name, it pairs a few familiar boutique hotel tropes (thrift-store art, vintage record players) with amazing furnishings by some of our favorite local designers, including Eric Trine, Brendan Ravenhill, and Atelier de Troupe.

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The slopes in Verbier are said to be Switzerland's most challenging; only the most athletic skiers — and their unfathomably fearless skiing prodigy 3-year-olds — vacation here.

02.14.14

What We Saw

At the New W Verbier in Switzerland

If you're a fan of the W Hotels chain, which at the moment comprises nearly 50 properties in more than 25 countries, you probably fall in to one (or both) of the following categories: you're young, wealthy, extroverted, and appreciate things like fire-juggling bartenders, or you really, really love design. It's not that the W's interiors are suited to every taste — especially since half the fun of them is that they're mostly designed by different firms, from Patricia Urquiola (Vieques) to Yabu Pushelberg (Guangzhou) — but you do have to tip your hat to any corporate entity that puts this much investment into our little corner of culture, including the annual W Hotels Designers of the Future awards. The latest W to take cutting-edge design to a novel locale is the new W Verbier by the Amsterdam firm Concrete, which Sight Unseen had the good fortune to visit last month.

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symbolsandrituals by paul barbera for WTC20

06.11.12

Studio Visit

Symbols + Rituals, via Where They Create

We first spotted the collaboration between Nanse Kawashima and Eri Nagasaka on Dossier magazine's website, where the writer noted that "it’s kind of hard to describe what exactly Symbols + Rituals is." To us, it looked like a perfectly curated collection of vintage curios, some sleek and some dark and witchy — Super Normal meets supernatural.

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When de Cardenas mentions he found this black dresser on the street outside his apartment, my eyes widen, but it turns out that it, too, is the work of his refinisher, who lacquered it for free — a job that would typically cost upwards of $3,000. He might get rid of it soon though: “I need something bigger,” he says. “I have a lot of socks.” Next to the dresser is another street find, a black chair that de Cardenas doctored himself. “At one point I had pink tape on the living room walls, which started peeling so I took it off. I used the extra to wrap the chair. I always do little projects here and there.” The photo hanging on the wall is of an explosion, by Reuben Cox.

12.09.10

At Home With

Rafael de Cardenas, Interior Designer

If style is a sore subject for the up-and-coming interior designer Rafael de Cardenas, who bristles at the suggestion that he might have one, a therapist would likely lay the blame on his mother. A Polish-Swiss former fashion PR agent — who with his Cuban father moved the family to New York City when de Cardenas was six — she was constantly redecorating, stripping the house bare every time her tastes changed. “She’s into one thing carried throughout, she can’t mix and match,” says de Cardenas. “So once it’s something new, everything’s gotta go. There was an Armani Casa phase, and now it’s all Native American, with blankets and sand-covered vases from Taos. It scared me away from design to a degree.” After spending most of his childhood wanting to be a doctor, he eventually went to RISD to study fashion and painting, and ended up heading the menswear department at Calvin Klein for three years. But although he admits that interiors were something he never put any thought into back then, design began exerting its slow pull.

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