04.14.16

Fair Report

The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today: Day 3

Wallpaper Handmade is always one of our favorite spots on the Milan circuit, and this year was no exception: The London-based magazine again paired up international designers with manufacturers, this time asking each team to reflect on ideas about hotels and travel. At their San Gregorio arcade spot, we swooned over Vera & Kyte's colorful ironing station, Karl Zahn's brass animal keys, Pelle's shapely soaps, and Pettersen Hein's clothing rack. But perhaps our favorite entry was by Léa Padovani and Sébastien Kieffer of the Paris-based studio POOL, who created two sculptural sofas in collaboration with Living Divani.

04.13.16

Fair Report

The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today: Day 2

Virgile Thévoz and Josephine Choquet are no strangers to Sight Unseen, but their latest collection, which is debuting at Rossana Orlandi as part of the "i Dream of Luxury" exhibition in Milan this week, might be our favorite yet. The two London-based designers know from high-end products, having studied in the Design for Luxury and Craftsmanship program at ÉCAL, and their new Cast Brass collection explores the effect of time on the value of an object. The polished brass accessories are half-cast in transparent resin blocs, allowing the exposed metal to oxidize over time and cast half to remain pristine and shiny forever.

04.12.16

Fair Report

The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today, Day 1

Sight Unseen is on the ground at the Milan Furniture Fair this week and we’ll be bringing you loads and loads of coverage later this week! But until our rounds there are done, we’ll be featuring quick hits from some of our favorite things that caught our eye. First up: Ferrosecco, a collection of powder-coated steel vases and cups by Italian designer Federica Elmo, which we spotted at Ladies & Gentlemen, a show in the 5Vie area of Milan curated by Secondome and PS and featuring tons of SU faves like Studiopepe and Giorgia Zanellato. Love these pics, which are like mash-up of Meta Flora and Barbara Kasten.

04.23.15

Fair Report

At the 2015 Milan Furniture Fair, Part II

Yesterday we introduced you — both on our site and in a massive Facebook album — to all the wonderful objects we photographed while design-hunting our way through the Milan furniture fair. But thanks to seriously horrendous lighting (we're looking at you, Rho Fiera), the times we were in a hurry, and the times our camera just couldn't seem to grasp the concept of white balance while in the presence of LEDs, we couldn't possibly capture a great image of everything we saw that deserved coverage. That is where today's post steps in: Here, we bring you the best press images we gathered of all our favorite designs at this year's Salone, with nearly 50 more on offer over on Facebook.

04.22.15

Fair Report

At the 2015 Milan Furniture Fair, Part I

Another year, another Milan. Every year we attend the behemoth furniture fair known as Salone expecting to come away with something smart to say about the current state of design. But the truth is, you spend the week bombarded with so much stuff that you're often left with just a few fleeting mental images of your favorite things, whether it's a colorful chair sheathed in Flyknit-esque sneaker material or a particularly delicious gnocchi you nearly licked off the plate. Luckily, that's what cameras are for. We shot nearly everything we saw this year, whether it was for an immediate Instagram, a file-away-for-later trend, or to share with you here, in our best of the best round-up from last week.

04.21.15

Fair Report

Thévoz-Choquet’s New Marble Accessories Collection For Bloc Studios

Over four days spent in Milan last week at the annual furniture fair, we saw dozens of exhibitions, spent 9 hours at the fairgrounds, and shot more than 800 photos. Pretty overwhelming. While we take a moment to regroup and put together our official coverage, which starts tomorrow, we figured we'd share with you one of the few projects that we didn't photograph in Milan, but didn't need to — SU alums Josephine Choquet and Virgil Thévoz launched an extensive new collection of marble tables and housewares with the Italian marble producer Bloc Studios, and thanks to the duo's superior art directing skills, it came complete with the perfectly styled set of images you'll see after the jump.

04.15.14

Fair Report

At the 2014 Milan Furniture Fair, Part III

The fairgrounds at the Milan Furniture Fair are a great place to see attainable designs by established companies and talents, but typically it's not the place to go when you're scouting for new names (though this year's Satellite show, as demonstrated in yesterday's post, happened to be a surprise goldmine). For that, you have to brave the long walks, aching feet, and lack of taxis that come along with trying to get to all the shows around town, from Rossana Orlandi gallery to the far-flung Lambrate district. We say this every year, but we barely saw half of what was on offer; that said, we saw a lot of nice things.

04.14.14

Fair Report

At the 2014 Milan Furniture Fair, Part II

Though we're back from Milan and already knee-deep in planning for our own design fair next month (eek!), we'll be bringing you highlights from the Italian capital all this week. Today we're focusing on our favorites from the fairgrounds, like Front's beautiful chairs for Moroso (above). The fair this year was visually quite strong, with last year's obsessive booth styling taken to even greater heights. (We actually begged the Arper folks to put some of their styling pieces into production!). The fair is also where the trends we'd been thinking about began to seriously take shape. What was in this year? Though everyone still loves that pastel mint and pink palette, we saw tons of putty — yes, putty — and other assorted non-hues (most of which didn't make it into this round-up, since we're suckers for color). For more of our take, read on, then click through to our Facebook album and come back tomorrow for more from the offsite shows.

04.11.14

Fair Report

At The 2014 Milan Furniture Fair, Part I

There were two huge advantages to spring's early arrival in Milan this year, which has blessed us with 70-degree weather and constant blue skies as we've been scouting the city's annual furniture fair all week. First, it made it much easier and more enjoyable to hit up dozens of shows in a row each day, walking miles and burning off all those carbohydrates and sprawling multi-course dinners (we're looking at you, Swedish Design Goes Milan). Second, it provided the optimal lighting conditions for taking photographs of all the incredible objects we saw along the way — more than 500 of them, at last count (including a cute vignette from the Discipline party, above). We'll be sharing as many of them as we can with you over the next few days, both here and on our Facebook page, but in the meantime we wanted to take a break from all the pavement-pounding to give you a quick sampling of some of our observations.

04.23.12

Fair Report

The Best of the 2012 Milan Furniture Fair, Part II

We'd scarcely pressed "Post" on last week's Milan Furniture Fair recap when another round of photos arrived in our inbox, this one featuring the jaw-droppingly amazing Sedimentation vases pictured above, which could be our favorite thing to emerge from the weeklong festivities. The fact that they're the work of a student — the Swedish-born Royal College of Art up-and-comer Hilda Hellström — makes them even more exciting, especially when the fair can sometimes seem dominated by glitzy launches from the megabrands. "I am OBSESSED with these," wrote The Future Perfect's Dave Alhadeff. "The forms feel well beyond student work and the 'on-trend' marbling technique." We couldn't agree more, and Hellström's urns were just one of the products we fell in love with by proxy; as the weekend wore on, we received picks from Mary Wallis, a designer at Lindsey Adelman's studio, and the American designer Jonah Takagi to round out our second wrap-up from the year's biggest furniture event. Mirrored crates, portable terrariums and zinc-coated screens are now tops on our wish lists. What's on yours?

04.19.12

Fair Report

At the 2012 Milan Furniture Fair

While nothing will ever compare to the Great Ash Cloud of 2010 in terms of strange events surrounding the Milan Furniture Fair, there seems to be a fair amount of juju going on with this year's festivities — or at least with the members of our hand-picked street team, who were meant to upload photos from their bases around the Italian metropolis all this week. Pin-Up editor Felix Burrichter reported a suddenly collapsed eardrum, which stranded him in Berlin and prevented him from attending the fair entirely, while designer Sam Baron confessed his attempts to take photos at a dinner for Fiat's Lapo Eklann were sadly thwarted by bodyguards. Lucky for us, then, that we've been able to follow along on Instagram, Twitter, blogs, and a steady stream of photos arriving in our inbox from The Future Perfect's Dave Alhadeff, who's been firing off everything from potential products for his store to OMG moments to jealousy-inducing images of gelato. We'll be bringing you more photos as they roll in, but for now, here's a sampling of the first few days from one of our favorite fairgoers.