10.23.21

Saturday Selects

Week of October 18, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an affordable(ish) amorphous plaster mirror, new chairs by Moroccan Renaissance woman LRNCE, lamps that are like little paintings, and a dreamy Kips Bay room by Michael Hilal (above).

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10.21.21

Interiors

Tour “The Bae,” A 250 Square-Foot Airbnb Whose Functions Are Hidden in Its Walls

In 2017, Tasmanian architects Alex Neilsen and Liz Walsh bought a 250 square-foot apartment and rebuilt it into their vision of a perfect “micro-luxury” home. Their intent was to create something amazing enough that it could set an example for small-space living, and by renting it out on Airbnb, help open other people’s eyes to its possibilities. The apartment became “The Bae,” and guests who enter it are often nervous at first about its small footprint — but ultimately fall in love.

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10.19.21

Fair Report

Highlights From the First Fair to Showcase Contemporary Greek Design in a Historical Context

Despite a canonical place in the annals of art and architecture history, Greece has been quiet on the contemporary design scene. Earlier this month, though, the inaugural Athens Design Forum offered a confident counter-narrative — one that asserts the country's creative relevancy and seeks to “mark Athens as both an emerging and historically established center of creative production.”

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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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10.05.21

Interiors

13 Incredible Mid-Century Lobbies in Turin Featuring Mosaic Walls, Sculptural Murals, and Other Avant-Garde Motifs

During the 1940s and 50s, a group of highly unorthodox and original designers and architects working in Turin, Italy, were known for their organic and sensual forms, their eclectic inspirations and rich decorations, and their utopian ideas — a Turinese avant-garde. Many interiors reflecting this style remain in tact in the city today, including extraordinary artistic entryways which, hidden from public view, reflect the enduring wildness of the city’s architectural elite.

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The Standard Room at The Sunseeker, Byron Bay; Sarah Harvey flag; Jack Fearon red CHUB bed-side table (photo credit. James Tolic)

07.02.21

Travel

Four New Design Hotels Across the Globe to Fuel Your Summer-Travel Fantasies

Travel took on a whole new meaning — and existential desperation — this summer, both for lockdown-weary regular people and for a travel industry that endured forced dormancy for the better part of a year. While not all of us have the privilege of much mobility over the next few months, we've put together another roundup of four recent design-hotel openings for both the doers and the dreamers among us: The Sunseeker, White Water, Maslina Resort, and Hotel Ami.

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06.30.21

Interiors

You’ll Want to Move In to the Hovey Sisters Latest Styling Project — And That’s Kind of the Point

If you're not one of the 12.5K people who follow sisters and expert home stagers and stylists Hollister and Porter Hovey on Instagram, what are you waiting for? We've long been fans of the Hoveys style, which mixes big-box basics (like a double-cushioned white West Elm sofa that pops up in many of their projects) with vintage Italian and French midcentury pieces picked up at auction and accessories that were, at least pre-pandemic, often brought home from the sisters' travels to places like Mexico City, Los Angeles, and Madrid.

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06.22.21

At Home With

A Vintage-Loving Stylist Takes Neutral Hues to a Whole New Level in This Salt Lake City Rental

Stylist Logan Reulet’s hyperminimal, clean-lined, über-serene rental home in Salt Lake City is like a living piece of art, subtly infused with meaning and character. From the crisp ivory bed linens, to the cream Nordic Knots rug, to the miraculously pristine white furnishings — like Urbana’s shapely Centipede Bench, which dominates the living room — not one surface is darker than the soft touch of ecru or the odd coffee tone.

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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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06.11.21

Sighted

Want to Travel the World Living in Airbnbs for a Year? Here’s Your Chance!

For many of us, our careers no longer require us to be chained to cities like New York and San Francisco. That means we can live out all kinds of unconventional fantasies, like buying a house in Maine, or going nomadic and changing locales with every Zoom meeting. It's in the spirit of the latter that Airbnb has launched an insanely good opportunity for those of us with the travel bug: Live Anywhere, a campaign in which 12 people will get to spend 10 months living for free in various Airbnbs, pretty much anywhere they choose. Keep reading to find out how to apply!

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05.18.21

Q+A

In Her Paintings, Becky Suss Creates Real or Imagined Interiors From Memory

Because we don't cover art as our primary discipline here at Sight Unseen, we typically discover artists a bit more slowly than we do designers, and usually by way of gallery shows, art fairs, or Instagram wormholes. But I discovered Philadelphia-born painter Becky Suss in perhaps the most Sight Unseen — or at least the most me — way possible: Her 2016 painting, August (above), adorns the cover of LA harpist Mary Lattimore's Hundreds of Days, one of the many albums that helped propel me through the emotional black hole that was 2020.

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04.26.21

At Home With

Sara Rydberg Nilsson on the Perks and Pitfalls of Turning Your Home Into a Gallery

It may sound like some sort of aesthetic fever dream to live full time in a design gallery but, in practice, it’s not without its hazards. After a show at her flat-turned-exhibition space in Stockholm, interior designer Sara Rydberg Nilsson, aka Studio Hilda, left a pink ceramic raku sculpture by Swedish artist Bo Arenander in a corner of one of the apartment’s rooms. “My son Max accidentally knocked it over,” she says, recalling her horror. Though the sculpture ultimately survived the trauma, it was left with a deep crack, threatening the integrity of its delicate structure. The upside? She had an excuse to keep it for herself.

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