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10.04.18

Up and Coming

Meet Elisa Ossino, the Milan-Based Designer and Stylist Who’s Suddenly Everywhere

This will come as a shock to no one, but the Milan design scene can be a little insular. Some of the best things don’t make it past the border, or even beyond the chic artery of Via Solferino for that matter. And unless you speak a bit of Italian and are ordering the right magazines from abroad, it’s not always apparent who’s making waves in the city. Take, for example, up and coming Italian designer Elisa Ossino, an architect and stylist who, after more than a decade of working diligently within the Milan design scene, is finally charting international waters.
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06.19.17

Sighted

Looking for a Graphic Rug? This French Brand Makes the Best Ones We’ve Seen

Here at Sight Unseen, summer has traditionally been our quietest season, a time when we process the chaos of the spring and meditate on what our future might hold. This year, that also means unearthing stories that might have fallen by the wayside, like the new collection CC-Tapis unveiled in Milan this April. We found their showroom at the end of an epic day of walking and the cool space inside — designed for the occasion in dark lacquer and raw wool by Faye Toogood — was one of the best things we saw all week.
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Entryways of Milan
04.21.17

Excerpt: Book

A New Book Celebrating the Secret Beauty of Milan

Having just gotten back from Milan, where the foyer of our Airbnb apartment building looked like this, the subject of a new book from Taschen hits awfully close to home: Called Entryways of Milan, the book takes readers inside the heavy wooden doors that often conceal the city's most beautiful thresholds, or ingressi.
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04.14.17

Up and Coming

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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10.28.16

Eye Candy

This New Italian Studio Makes Textiles Inspired by Modern Art

Studio Testo, founded last year in Milan by two Italian art directors and visual researchers, makes work that's easily accessible and understood — cushions, wall textiles, upholstery fabrics, and pouches that are pretty and on-trend, what with their overlapping collages of line and organic shape. But take a deep dive into the two women's Tumblr or Instagram, and you'll see an incredibly wide and varied set of influences that have been synthesized into their current aesthetic.
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Milan design duo Studiopepe for Spotti
07.25.16

Interiors

A Cult Milan Design Destination Gets Its Twice-Yearly Makeover

Here's something we're not sure why more stores aren't doing: Twice a year, the Milanese multi-brand furniture showroom Spotti gives over its entire space to longtime collaborators — and one of our favorite styling duos — Arianna Lelli Mami and Chiara Di Pinto of Studiopepe to remake however they see fit. This summer, the duo has created a interior called Instant Panorama for Spotti's renovated space — inspired, no doubt, by our Instagram-obsessed culture — that's set up in vignettes that are meant to be captured on film.
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04.18.16

Fair Report

The Best of the 2016 Milan Furniture Fair, Part II

The 2016 Salone del Mobile and Fuorisalone — aka the Milan furniture fair — closes today, and we were there on the ground, running around like crazy people trying to absorb a year's worth of new furniture in less than a week's time. According to our iPhones, we walked about 7.5 miles a day in our quest to scout great design. Here's the second of three posts chronicling what we found.
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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.
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10.20.14

Eye Candy

Michele Reginaldi, Architect

Michele Reginaldi is an established Italian architect and visual artist. Born in Teramo in 1958, he has been a partner at Gregotti Associati since 1998. He began working on a series of form studies — what he refers to as constructions — in the late 1980s that have grown to include more than 120 individual pieces. These constructions range in size and shape, but all are made from the same material — brass. Reginaldi classifies his constructions into four categories: studies around the circle, studies in verticality, light structures, and constructions for architecture. These pieces are crucial to his success as an architect; on their own the constructions are beautiful sculptural works, but when put into the context of architecture they become important explorations in scale and proportion. Knowing this, his constructions’ influence is clearly evident when browsing the architectural projects of his practice.
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06.13.14

Excerpt: Exhibition

No Name Design at the Triennale Design Museum

The collecting of anonymous objects — and the subsequent use of those objects in creating a perfectly styled interior — has become such a staple of modern life that it’s hard to remember a time when not everyone loaded up their vans twice a year at places like Brimfield. But Franco Clivio, a former industrial designer and a lecturer at Zurich’s Schule für Gestaltung, has been amassing such objects for more than four decades. His collection — which numbers into the thousands — is on view starting next week at Milan’s Triennale Design Museum in an exhibition called “No Name Design.”
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04.28.14

Q+A

Ferruccio Laviani on his Good Vibrations Series

Partly as a consequence of being based in Italy, one of the biggest furniture-making centers in the world, Ferruccio Laviani does a lot of different work for a lot of different manufacturers, from sleek plastic lamps to futuristic lounge chairs. So when he was invited to collaborate with a manufacturer of baroque furniture founded in 1928 by a craftsman making Louis XV replicas — he accepted the challenge, creating a provocative series called “F* THE CLASSICS!” that puts a contemporary twist on the company’s traditional style. The latest piece in the collection, Good Vibrations — a computer controlled robotic router-carved wooden cabinet that looks like a warped VHS video — is so striking, it went viral on over a dozen design blogs shortly after renderings of it were released in advance of the 2013 Salone del Mobile in Milan (even though it was so difficult to produce that the real cabinet, pictured after the jump, wasn't even exhibited until the 2014 fair that took place a few weeks ago). For the Lincoln Now project that Sight Unseen recently participated in, Laviani took some time to tell us how (and why) he created it.
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