Farrah Sit’s Work — Including Her Best-Selling Serpentine Sconce — Feels Both Effortlessly Current and Like a Prehistoric Artifact

Equilibrium and harmony: They’re difficult to achieve in life and maybe only slightly easier in design. But the search for balance, especially a desire for balance with nature, has lately been driving New York designer Farrah Sit — in a stylistic sense, but also in the way she produces the lighting and furniture for her eponymous line. Sit makes pieces that embody substantial and even existential concerns but wear their heaviness lightly; they’d look really great in your living room but they’re also meant to do more than that. “Part of what we’re trying to do as designers,” she says, “is create awareness between you and your environment.” Her aesthetic has largely hewn to neutral colors and natural materials and a dedication to elegant, mysterious forms ­— like Sit's best-selling Serpentine sconce, which debuted as part of Sight Unseen Offsite in 2020 and is now part of the Sight Unseen Collection. A ceramic wall sconce, Serpentine seems both effortlessly current and like an unearthed artifact — a relatively simple form that wordlessly conveys a whole world of feeling.
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Designed in Australia and Woven in Argentina, These Rugs Reinvigorate Three Classic Patterns

The Australian textiles and homeware brand Pampa was founded in 2013 and quickly became a favorite of interior designers around the world. So it makes sense that for their first collaboration, Pampa teamed up with one of Australia's most beloved interior design studios: We Are Triibe, the Byron Bay firm founded by Christina Symes and Jessica D’Abadie. The two studios began toying with the idea of a collaborative rug collection at the beginning of 2020, born from a mutual desire to use textiles to introduce more warmth, depth, and texture into the home. The result of their collaboration, FORMA — newly available in olive and camel — takes three classic geometric patterns, a checkerboard, an offset stripe, and stripes of varying widths, and reimagined them with soft edges, imperfect squares, and an earthy color palette that's achieved using natural pigments.
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This Cross-Cultural Couple is Carving Out a Space for Contemplation — And Furniture Production — in San Miguel de Allende

Part of what motivates designers Giulia Zink and Mat Trumbull of OHLA Studio is a question: “How do we build within the traditions of the past as new challenges loom?” The answer for OHLA, based in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and Los Angeles, is to balance a contemporary aesthetic with a respect for the region’s vernacular design and historic motifs, while turning to local and not-too-far-away artisans and resources to realize their projects.
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Marcin Rusak Manufacture

Liquefied Metal, Applied Like Spray Paint, Creates Texture in a New Collection

The London-based, Polish-born designer Marcin Rusak first rose to prominence a few years ago exploring how natural materials — and, in many cases, live ones, like flowers and bacteria — could be harnessed and transformed into a wholly new aesthetic. Now, Rusak is developing a more industrial-based offshoot called MRM (or Marcin Rusak Manufacture), and the brand's first collection takes as its starting point a similar urge to recast commonly found natural elements as something otherworldly.
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The Design Trends We’re Predicting Will Be Big in 2018

Where do trends come from, and how do forecasters like ourselves know which ones will rise to the top? Why does a movement like Memphis come into vogue only to be replaced by something like Art Deco? Why is rust trending? These are the questions we ask ourselves every day, whether we're walking the halls of a design fair, scrolling through endless runway presentations, or simply trying to make sense of what's coming through our inboxes. Here, we've compiled six of the design trends we predict will most influence interior design and objects in the coming year.
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Maniera Gallery for the Operae design fair

Fake Wood, Real Stone, and Imagined Foam: Our Favorite Collection from the Operae Design Fair

This year's Operae show was curated by Alice Stori Lichtenstein and the fair, always notable for its mix of designers and galleries, featured Sight Unseen favorites like Campbell Rey, Carwan Gallery, and Maniera. It was the latter gallery who hosted our favorite presentation: a series of layered particle-board furniture developed by the Belgium firm aDVVT as well as a newer series called "Light Conversation Pieces," by the Italian architecture firm Piovenefabi.
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In a New Show, Hilda Hellström Blurs the Line Between What is Real and What is Fake

When we first interviewed Swedish designer Hilda Hellström back in 2012, just two weeks after her graduation from London's Royal College of Art, the designer drew an interesting distinction between her work and that of her peers: While so many Hellström's age were obsessed with the properties of different materials, she was more interested in the possibilities of narrative. But a funny thing happened in the five years that have elapsed since then: Hellström hasn't been able shake her fascination with pigmented Jesmonite, the acrylic-based plaster she originally used in her breakout Sedimentation vases.
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