09.05.24

Interiors

This Victorian Home in Melbourne is a Love Letter to Tile and Stained Glass

For its latest project, a full renovation and extension of a Victorian weatherboard residence in Melbourne, Australia, the team at YSG Studio — based in Sydney and founded in 2020 by Yasmine Saleh Ghoniem —was tasked with a distinct challenge. At the head of the client's family were two spouses with divergent styles: one Egyptian-Australian and drawn to the pattern, color, and shapes of Middle Eastern design; the other Danish and partial to Scandinavian minimalism. Even more? Both partners have a kind of color-blindness that makes neutral tones appear washed out. In addition to melding these two aesthetic tastes, YSG needed to make an older house complement and connect with a newer addition — the first built project to be completed by YSG’s in-house architectural team since its addition to the team in 2022. See the results after the jump!

08.20.24

Top Ten

The 10 Things You Should Have in Your Bedroom, According to Charlap Hyman & Herrero

Most of us spend the majority of our time and money perfecting the look and feel of our living rooms, and then fail to offer the same attention to the space where we spend more than 1/4 of our lives: our bedrooms. Granted we're unconscious for many of those hours, but it's hard to overestimate the impact that good design can have on our mood and thus, ultimately, the quality of our rest. Today, Adam Charlap, co-founder of the bi-coastal architecture and interiors firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero, shares the ten objects you'd find in his fantasy bedroom, from midcentury lighting to a set of faux bois sheets his grandparents slept in that are still on the market today.

07.16.24

Interiors

This London Cafe Proves There’s No Color Butter Yellow Can’t Elevate

A new cafe at London's Somerset House, run by acclaimed chef Rishim Sachdeva and designed by the London- and Milan-based studio Duelle, seems to prove a rule that people keep forgetting: that any color or trend can feel fresh again depending on the context in which it's placed. Seeing Café Petiole's cafe tables and 1930s bentwood chairs doused in a layer of antique rose and set against a backdrop of butter yellow and blue, made me feel like I was seeing Millennial Pink for the first time all over again.

07.03.24

Interiors

A Tour Through the London Architectural Marvel The Cosmic House, Charles Jencks’s Postmodern Masterpiece

Located in London’s ultra-wealthy Holland Park, architect Charles Jencks's London home, The Cosmic House, doesn’t particularly stand out at first glance from the classic row of Victorian brick houses. But a closer look reveals unorthodox details, including circular windows and a metal gate that’s a collage of historical styles — telltale signs of Postmodernism. Adam Štěch revisits the 1983 masterpiece, now a museum and art foundation open to the public.

06.27.24

Travel

Four Incredible Designer Villas You Can Rent This Summer in Europe, Or Just Admire From Afar

Every winter, when I start fantasizing about summer vacations I might go on that year, there's one form the daydreams always take: the enduring paradigm of the verdant country villa shared with family and friends, something straight out of a French or Danish film. But once you try to actually book a villa like that, the grounds may be picturesque, and the building pretty enough, but the interiors usually leave a lot to be desired. That's why we've been so happy to get to know the high-end home-sharing platform Boutique. Their offerings are geared towards design-forward properties rented by and for creatives, so your vacation can be both idyllic and aesthetic. We went hunting on Boutique's site for some of our favorite villas for rent across Europe and the UK that are lovely to look at, inside and out.

05.14.24

Shopping

Meet Petra: Your New One-Stop-Shop For Designer-Made Statement Hardware

If you're an interior designer whose client has non-traditional tastes. If you're a renter who's tired of looking at a tired kitchen but can't renovate. If you bought a beautiful storage cabinet years ago and want to fall back in love with it. If you own a house in Connecticut or L.A. but want its front door to look like a villa in Italy. If you just need one perfect little weirdo bauble for your nightstand. Basically if you want to make a small change, anywhere in a home, that makes a big visual impact: You're going to want to bookmark Petra. Petra is my new showroom for artistic hardware, and it launched last week with drawer pulls, cabinet knobs, door handles, furniture pulls, appliance handles, and more by 27 international designers.

03.18.24

Interiors

In Her Debut Interior, Tabitha Organ Uses Texture To Create the Illusion of Time

In 2023, after a decade of working in the industry — most notably with that subject of eternal Sight Unseen fascination, Sella Concept — Tabitha Organ founded her own interior design studio, Tabitha Isobel. Its first residential project, a five-floor Victorian townhouse in London, predictably wows. A previous renovation left the space devoid of character, so the goal was to restore some of its former glory while speaking to the current moment and anticipating the future. The studio achieved this with a mix of vintage and new elements and a contrast throughout between hits of reflective, shiny chrome surfaces and the warmth and richness of wood.

01.17.24

Interiors

This Holiday Rental in London is a Treasure Trove of 1970s and ’80s Furniture

Have you ever found the perfect piece of furniture, only to realize that you can’t fit it into your apartment because the pass-throughs are too narrow? For Hollie Bowden, access was particularly problematic during her renovation of a one-bedroom holiday rental apartment in London, which is located on the fifth and sixth floors of a Victorian building in Covent Garden and reached via a narrow and winding staircase. Which items could she bring up safely, without having to first hack them to bits? Luckily, she found a modular leather sofa bed by De Sede, one of many vintage finds from the '70s and '80s that give the sunny yellow space a retro-futurist feel, in a vibe we're calling High-Tech Country Kitchen.

12.21.23

Interiors

The Sight Unseen Art Kitchen, Plus Nine Other Incredible Rooms We Created For the SU x Lightology Country House

Upstate New York is one of our favorite places — close in proximity to one of the world's greatest cities, but so very far away in every other respect. In September, we rented a truck and drove up there, to a picturesque town outside Hudson, excited to do something we love doing almost as much as all of those other activities: styling a photo shoot inside a gorgeous home. For our second collaboration with the online lighting and furniture retailer Lightology, we traded the sleek minimalism and desert sun of Palm Springs for the charm of a (recently renovated) 1980s woodland escape — one whose blue floors, vaulted ceilings, and circular windows served as the perfect backdrop for the Sight Unseen x Lightology take on a country home.

10.19.23

Interiors

The Latest Interior We’re Coveting is… a Film Production Office?

We've been thinking a lot lately about the flattening of visual culture and what gets lost when everything looks the same. In design, this is most prevalent in furniture and small goods like ceramics, but we have begun to notice a crushing sameness in interiors as well, with each new office or co-working space aspiring to look like the ground floor of a Brooklyn brownstone or a Parisian flat. Which is why we thought it might be useful to analyze the latest project by New York–based studio Civilian, which, despite featuring many pieces that I'd like to have in my own home, somehow avoids these pitfalls and still firmly reads "office." The space is a multifunctional home base for a documentary production company called Sandbox Films, and what we actually love about this project is how it walks right up to the line between public and private space without crossing it. Let's go over the building blocks.

10.03.23

Interiors

These Three Historic Properties Have Been Reimagined As Our New Favorite Design Hotels

Designing the interior for a hotel these days can be a tricky thing. Most hotels aren't ground-up builds, so there needs to be a certain amount of sensitivity towards the building's past while still imagining a place that a 21st-century traveler — who is constantly bombarded with other people's vision of what makes the perfect vacay — might actually want to stay. In our fall hotel round-up, we look at three projects who have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. How about a reimagined historic English country manor from the 17th century? A ‘50s-inspired guest house in Marseille above a famed restaurant? Or a renovated functionalist building that’s the talk of Brussels? Take your pick after the jump.

09.20.23

Q+A

It’s Colin King’s Tastefully Curated, Beige-Hued, Branch-Forward World. We’re Just Living In It.

If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed Colin King's slow creep towards ubiquity over the last five years. First came the styling credits for unabashedly chic interiors, like Giancarlo Valle's New York apartment in Architectural Digest, or any number of the exactingly produced homes for Athena Calderone's, Live Beautiful. Then came the brand work — styling for the likes of Anthropologie, Hay, and B&B Italia — and the collabs: a collection of small goods for the Danish brand Audo, a rug series for Beni, and a collection for West Elm, among others. But things really began to ramp up when King's book, Arranging Things — a lavishly illustrated how-to guide to his own particular style — announced its 2023 release. By all accounts, a book by a stylist — normally a solidly behind-the-scenes job — is somewhat of a novelty. While those on the inside may be well-versed in the who’s who of creatives realizing magazine editorials and brand campaigns, rarely does someone break out and make themselves known in the mainstream. But King has achieved just that.