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06.04.24

Sighted

Is Design In an Age of Maximalism, Or Minimalism? The Answer Is Both — and Pelle’s New Collection Offers Proof

Are we currently in an age of maximalism, with wood paneling, hand-painted ceilings, ruffled fabrics, and decorative pillows constituting the reigning aesthetic in design? Or an age of minimalism, when sleek chrome and the High-Tech vibe have never been more popular? The answer, really, is both — the two styles have often happily coexisted in the past, and we've been happily embracing both for awhile now. That might be why the latest collection from the Brooklyn studio Pelle, released a few weeks ago during New York design month, appeals to us: It unabashedly embraces both extremes.
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05.24.24

Sight Unseen Collection

Our New York Design Week Launch: 10 Cabinets and Consoles by 10 Designers, All for Sale Through Sight Unseen

There's nothing better than a piece of furniture that simultaneously hides your possessions and, when open, offers them a beautiful backdrop. To celebrate our love of great storage options — and to offer our clients more of them — we presented 10 new pieces from our Sight Unseen Collection during New York Design Week (ahem, Month): casegoods by 10 different designers, some of which are already available to source on our site. Exhibited in the Chinatown showroom of Peter Staples's lighting studio Blue Green Works, the cabinets, consoles, and nightstands were the perfect way to also showcase decorative knobs and pulls from Monica's new project, Petra Hardware, in a collaborative exhibition.⁠
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05.14.24

Shopping

Meet Petra: Your New One-Stop-Shop For Designer-Made Statement Hardware

If you're an interior designer whose client has non-traditional tastes. If you're a renter who's tired of looking at a tired kitchen but can't renovate. If you bought a beautiful storage cabinet years ago and want to fall back in love with it. If you own a house in Connecticut or L.A. but want its front door to look like a villa in Italy. If you just need one perfect little weirdo bauble for your nightstand. Basically if you want to make a small change, anywhere in a home, that makes a big visual impact: You're going to want to bookmark Petra. Petra is my new showroom for artistic hardware, and it launched last week with drawer pulls, cabinet knobs, door handles, furniture pulls, appliance handles, and more by 27 international designers.
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02.07.24

Sighted

At the New Permanent Eames Archive in California, You Can Deep-Dive Into the Design Process of Charles and Ray Through 40,000 Artifacts

From the moment that Charles Eames, formerly an architect and teacher, and Ray Eames, formerly a fine artist, began a shared design practice in 1941, they cultivated an unusually meticulous creative process: in lieu of drawings and schematics, they worked out ideas and solved problems in real-time by creating endless physical models and prototypes. It's no wonder, then, that until the Eames Office closed after Ray's death in 1988, they were able to rack up more than 40,000 artifacts of their design process — and also no wonder that it took the family nearly 25 years to catalog them and finally make them available for public viewing all in one place, at the newly opened Eames Archive in Richmond, California.
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06.21.23

Sighted

This Campaign for a Sailboat-Inspired Sofa Transports You to a 100-Year-Old Sailing School in Venice

The Vela, designed for Saba Italia by Zanellato/Bortotto, is an interesting take on the puffy sofa: It's soft and cushy yet somehow still crisp, with arms that taper to a subtle point and striking diagonal tufting seams that gently reign in its voluminousness. That contrast is intentional, reflecting the inspiration for the sofa, which also lent it its name ("sail" in English): "We both love the sea and have always been fascinated by the unfurled sails blown by the wind near the Venice lagoon," says Daniele Bortotto. For its new campaign, Saba sent photographer Mattia Balsamini to photograph it at the Compagnia della Vela, a nautical school founded in 1911 on the island of San Giorgio.
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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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07.08.22

Shopping

From Ceramic Hair to Luncheon Meats to Sleek, Simple Porcelain, Tissue Box Covers Are Having a Renaissance

In a world where nearly every product has been upgraded and rendered hip through new, Gen-Z-approved packaging — from toilet paper to tampons to breakfast cereal — you'd think there would no further need for a throwback like the tissue box cover, which is meant to cloak your drugstore eyesores in a mantle better suited to your decor. And yet at the moment, in part because tissue boxes haven't really been redesigned and in part because they're usually kept out very much in public view, the tissue box cover seems to be having a tiny renaissance.
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03.03.22

Sighted

This Italian Furniture Brand Made a Clever Trompe L’Oeil Table, Then Shot It in a Carlo Mollino Masterpiece

January saw the introduction of an interesting new expression of trompe l'oeil, in the form of Saba Italia’s Teatro Magico table by 967 Arch, a dining table whose sinuous polyurethane base echoes the form of theater curtains and can part like them, too. The brand coincided the launch with the reopening, after a two-year renovation, of Turin’s Teatro Regio, whose Carlo Mollino–designed interior contains its own multitude of visual illusions.
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11.29.21

Gift Guides

Foot Vases and Artichoke Plates: The 2021 Sight Unseen Gift Guide, Part I

We always look forward to putting together our annual gift guides, where we get to turn our brains off, scour our favorite stores for wishlist-worthy objects, and focus on sheer indulgence for a minute. What's our favorite candle this year, our favorite wine glass? Which books are we dying to have on our coffee table now, and in the case of Monica (whose guide is featured today), which foot-shaped vase? We hope you can get some inspiration from these lists — particularly when it comes to supporting small businesses and talented independent makers.
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09.14.21

Fair Report

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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07.26.21

Sighted

With Prints Inspired By Art-Store Pen-Test Doodles, These Curtains Are ‘Free and Wild’

Sarah Illenberger has a talent for recontextualizing everyday items in ways that are deceptively simple, yet at the same time so clever that there's an irresistible kind of magic in it. The same is true for her new collaboration with Danish textile purveyor Kvadrat, a series of three vibrant curtain panels created by scanning the little pads of paper people test pens on in stationery stores — the unremarkable made remarkable, through little more than a flash of creative inspiration and a change in scale.
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Melbourne Design Week 2021
03.31.21

Fair Report

Our Top Picks from Melbourne Design Week 2021 — An Actual Design Fair Happening Right Now, IRL ?

In Melbourne, there's an honest-to-god IRL design fair going on right now, and we can barely wrap our heads around it. In case you're as excited as we are to live vicariously through the Aussies, we've put together a tour for you of our 7 favorite Melbourne Design Week exhibitions that are currently on view so you, too, can experience it mask-free, from the comfort of your home.
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