50 Pieces and Presentations We Loved at The 2024 Milan Furniture Fair

Rather than seeing the ever-spiraling array of events at Salone as a source of FOMO and a series of missed opportunities a journalist could never hope to comprehensively cover, we began to look at Milan in a new light this year, and you'll see that reflected in our coverage. We'll be devoting longer stories to particular favorites, or to things that maybe passed under your radar, rather than doing roundups of every single thing we saw and liked. We'll be focusing as much as possible on independent designers. We'll be shining a light on smaller, non-newsy things we saw, like the wonderful Cini Boeri archive exhibit at a library in Parco Sempione we never knew existed? For now, though, here is our one roundup of 50 favorites.
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An Interview With Formafantasma, Whose Queer-Coded, Modernism-Inspired Solo Show Was the Best Thing We Saw at This Year’s Milan Fair

In the whirlwind of this year’s Salone, Formafantasma’s perfect solo show, La Casa Dentro — presented on the quiet second floor of the Fondazione ICA Milano — made us stop and catch our breath. La Casa Dentro (meaning The Home Within) is as much a collection of furniture and lighting as it is a meditation on design, memory, the familiar, and the uncanny. It conjures a dream state where the clinical feel of a medical office gives way to the comforts of an old family home (if your grandparents were the kind with an eye for stylish detail). Bent tubular metal forms are combined with embroideries and embellishments painted on wood, floral patterns, and silky decorative fabric. It's work that takes certain signifiers of the past and reanimates them in a new moment. Attempting to “queer the codes of Modernist design,” as the designers put it, the collection is as conceptually charged as it is materially stunning, and its theoretical considerations can’t be unraveled from personal and emotional ones.
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The Best of Salone Del Mobile 2023, Part II

Today we're focusing on brands: We loved the collection at Cassina — though it was hard to see through the throngs — and the brand's iMaestri exhibition, in a former bank vault, curated by Patricia Urquiola against a backdrop of blood red. Other standouts included a quiet presentation of lovely geometric rugs by Ruckstuhl at Assab One, Studiopepe's shock of lime green coffee table for Sancal, the addition of two friends of SU to the Tacchini stable (Umberto Bellardi Ricci and Brian Thoreen), Phillippe Malouin's cheeky magnetic lamp for Flos, Knoll's desert jungle pavilion, Acerbis's 1970s throwback in the form of a John Chamberlain-esque sofa system by Claudio Salocchi, and the debut of one of our favorite lamps — Mangiarotti's Lari lamp for Karakter — in a new, tiny, USB-charged portable size. 
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The Best of the 2023 Salone Del Mobile — Part I

While Salone del Mobile has often felt too sprawling for one person to take in, this was the year it seemed to fracture entirely. Scrolling through other people's Instagram Stories, seeing exhibitions that hadn't even made it onto my radar, much less my extensive Google doc, made me stop and wonder: "Are we even at the same fair?" The exhibition we loved the most though — and heard uniformly wonderful things about — was by Objects of Common Interest, who developed their experiments in opalescent resin into a full-fledged collection for Nilufar Depot, so we'll kick off our Milan recaps with that!
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The Best of the 2022 Salone del Mobile — Part VI

Remember when we said that it was impossible to actually see all of the good things that launched during this month's Milan Furniture Fair? Well, apparently it's equally impossible to actually capture all of those launches in digital form, because the hits just keep coming into our inbox. So today, we're devoting an extra post to some of our favorites from a week that already seems like a lifetime ago. (Please, take us back to risotto and martinis!)
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The Best of the 2022 Salone Del Mobile – Part V

Today's post — our last from this year's Milan furniture fair — takes a tour of two of our favorite reliable destinations for up-and-coming talent: Alcova, the destination founded in 2018 by Studio Vedèt founder Valentina Ciuffi and Space Caviar's Joseph Grima, and Salone Satellite, always our first stop at the fairgrounds.
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50 Products We Loved at The 2021 Salone del Mobile

Last week we attended the 2021 Salone del Mobile fair — postponed to September this year because of the pandemic — and we're documenting our favorite finds in two stories, today and tomorrow. Today it's new releases by brands and studios, from a Muller Van Severen carpet to a Teklan kitchen.
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Our 10 Most Popular Stories of 2018

It’s now a Sight Unseen tradition to spend the final week of December reflecting back on the prior year, so we’ve taken time out to do just that. First we're reviewing Sight Unseen’s greatest hits of 2018, which — no huge surprise here — are mostly interiors, from a wicker-filled studio in Marrakech to a peach-walled house in upstate New York to a London flat filled with colorful concrete tiles.
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The Best of Milan Design Week 2018 — Part III

In the third of our posts chronicling our Milan design week finds, we're focusing on the Salone Satellite. It's definitely the most high-stakes event for us during each year's fair, the place where we either strike gold with a ton of new studio discoveries or feel let down by a lack of collections that really manage to turn our heads. The projects we did get excited about this year are catalogued below, and if we're lucky, the best of these names will continue to appear on this site for years to come.
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A Studio Aiming to Bring More Curves and Coziness to Finnish Design

In the U.S., we look at the rich, enduring design history of Scandinavian countries like Finland and feel nothing but blind envy. But those who have grown up amidst it often have a more nuanced view, like Anni Pitkäjärvi and Hanna-Kaarina Heikkilä of the emerging Helsinki outfit Studio Finna: "The Finnish design world is very much masculine," they say. "The key aspect is functionality. The design language is edgy and square. The colors used are black, white, and grey." They're trying to take a different tack.
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