Home objects
03.28.23

Shopping

With Our New Furniture and Lighting Collection, You Can Put Sight Unseen Into Your Projects (Or Your Home)

(Re-)Launching today, shop.sightunseen.com is now an online gallery of our full furniture and lighting collection, available either for easy online check-out, or to use as a living lookbook for your projects, with our dedicated sales person ready to work with you on trade orders and customizations. Our offerings will be constantly updated as we discover and write about new design series, and will always run the gamut from simpler staples to statement pieces that can add a megadose of personality to any interior.
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02.07.23

Up and Coming

The Istanbul-Based Animate Objects Makes Statement Objects, With a Surrealist Touch

We often talk about objects that have a life of their own, that shape the space around them and affect the atmosphere and tone of a room. The limited-edition décor and collectible furniture from Animate Objects – an apt name – not only seem to live and breathe, like characters in a story, but they emote, they perform. Zeynep Satik, an Istanbul-based designer, launched Animate Objects a few months ago, with the idea of creating “theatrical environments.” Think statement pieces, with a Surrealist touch, that are as functional as they are distinctive and playfully attention-getting.
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01.10.23

Sight Unseen Presents

For West Elm’s Design Challenge, We Show You How to Personalize Your Living Room With Objects, Sight Unseen-Style

When West Elm approached us last fall to participate in their ongoing Design Challenge series — in which subjects start with a blank canvas and create a room entirely from scratch — we immediately said yes. After all, what better way to show people how to live with objects than to demonstrate it ourselves? The project would bring to life some of the big ideas from our recently published book, and it would give us the opportunity to flex our design muscles, which we don't always get the chance to do. The result is a four-minute video that delves into our philosophy of objects, and how they can bring a major dose of personality to any interior.
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12.14.22

Q+A

Sophie Lou Jacobsen Gets Emotional About Objects

For Brooklyn-based designer Sophie Lou Jacobsen, objects have a life of their own. “I firmly believe that objects have their own energy, and that what they bring to your environment and daily experience is almost spiritual,” she says. “I’m not religious by any means, but I do believe in the interconnectedness of our world, and that there should be this sort of mutual relationship between us and our things — one of respect, care, and thoughtfulness. I think in my mind I live in a very Beauty and the Beast-like world!” It's not just in her mind, though — we can easily see the likes of Mrs. Potts interacting with Jacobsen’s curving, almost animate vases, intricate stainless steel candleholders, and draping glass lamps.
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12.13.22

Sighted

Ben Wolf Noam’s Mushroom Menorahs Were Inspired By the Intersection of Judaism and Psychedelia

Encapsulated in a school of thought called the Kabbalah, the Jewish belief in biblical mysticism isn't shared by everyone, but its theories can be compelling — and in the case of L.A. artist Ben Wolf Noam, inspiring, too. He recently launched a collection of one-of-a-kind ceramic mushroom menorahs with The Future Perfect that reference the intersection of Judaism and psychedelia, not to mention making for wildly colorful centerpieces for your holiday table. We recently chatted with him about the series and its origins.
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12.09.22

Sighted

Ferm Living’s New Collection Subverts the Typical Scandinavian Simplicity With a Subtle Dose of Cool

In Ferm Living's newest collection, organic shapes meet cooler textures and materials, and the typical Scandinavian simplicity is subverted by the subtlest dose of cool, so that wine glasses become brown ceramic goblets and coat racks look like mid-century sculpture. Everything has a little bit of personality, which is what we advocate for in our new book, and what helps render something a "personal treasure" rather than a utilitarian staple.
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12.07.22

Gift Guides

Chunky Cups and Oyster Placemats: The 2022 Gift Guide, Part II

If you asked us what our absolute top gift recommendation would be for 2022, you probably already know by now what we'd answer: our new book, How to Live With Objects. But in case you need a few other ideas, don't worry, we've also compiled 100 best-gift-of-2022 runners-up: Today, it's Jill's 50 picks, including brutish bar carts and vases, chunky cutting boards and cups, and her favorite CBD gummies — which just happen to look great, too — for dealing with publishing-a-book–related insomnia.
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12.06.22

Gift Guides

Latke Candles and LP Stands: The 2022 Gift Guide, Part I

If you asked us what our absolute top gift recommendation would be for 2022, you probably already know by now what we'd answer: our new book, How to Live With Objects. But in case you need a few other ideas, don't worry, we've also compiled 100 best-gift-of-2022 runners-up, starting with Monica's 50 picks, including a colorful under-$200 drinks cart, a rhinestone-encrusted hand sanitizer pouch, and a pair of hand-shaped wooden salad servers.
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12.01.22

How to Live With Objects

A 1920s Brooklyn Brownstone Offers the Perfect Backdrop for Kim Mupangilai’s Collection of Vintage Handmade Objects

Born and raised in Belgium, Kim Mupangilaï is a Belgian-Congolese interior architect, furniture designer, and graphic designer who lives with her boyfriend in a 1920s brownstone in Brooklyn. Its original period details offer the perfect backdrop for her extensive collection of vintage handmade objects, which she also sells through her side project, the online shop En la Mésá.
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11.28.22

How to Live With Objects

Kathryn Bentley Hand-Painted Her Restoration Hardware Sofa, and So Can You

Kathryn Bentley has one of the best contemporary object collections we've seen to date, from Roger Herman ceramics, to a Waka Waka coffee table (designer Shin Okuda is a longtime collaborator), to the BZIPPY urn she jokes she wants for her eternal life. One of our favorite homes from How to Live With Objects, we're excerpting images of her colorful house tour — including the incredible Restoration Hardware sofa the hand-painted with sponges — today.
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11.17.22

How to Live With Objects

16 Incredible Vintage Objects You Should Know From Our Book

When it comes to a visual wow factor, vintage objects reign supreme — they're often the most expressive, unusual, and unexpected, not to mention the most accessible, if you get lucky at a flea market or have time to kill on eBay. As such, a copious amount of real estate in our new book, How to Live With Objects, is devoted to the discussion of how to shop for vintage and what makes a vintage object worth buying, which means that we had plenty of pages to illustrate with images of absolutely incredible bygone designs, from a circa-1900 Swedish candelabra to some epic Postmodern gems. In today's book excerpt, we're spotlighting 16 of the vintage objects we included that, if you didn't already know them, we're sure you'll be pleased to get to know them now.
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11.16.22

How to Live With Objects

This London Townhouse Makes the Case for Painting Your Bedroom — Ceilings Included — Gold

Tatjana von Stein and Gayle Noonan cofounded the full-service creative studio Sella Concept in 2016, with von Stein in charge of interior architecture and furniture design and Noonan handling branding and identity. We had covered several of the pair's projects on the site before — including a gorgeous Mediterranean-hued bar in London, and a Hackney flat with a next-level tortoise-shell headboard — but we'd never gotten a glimpse inside their own home until we reached out during our book research. Boy, were we glad we did.
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