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Please upgrade your browser or activate Google Chrome Frame to improve your experience. -- 8 Things American Design Hot List An Afternoon With At Home With Current Obsession Editor's Note Excerpt: Book Excerpt: Exhibition Excerpt: Magazine Eye Candy Factory Tour Fair Report From the Archives From the Library Of Gift Guides Giveaway Graphic Design How To Interiors Inventory Invitation Material Offsite Online Q+A Saturday Selects Self Portrait Shopping Sight Unseen OFFSITE Sight Unseen Presents Sight Unseen Projects Sighted Studio Visit The Essentials The Making of Travel Guide Up and Coming What It's Like What They Bought What We Saw Where They've Been Departments Spaces Objects Library Shop -- Offsite SU Projects The Hot List Shop -- Departments 8 Things American Design Hot List An Afternoon With At Home With Current Obsession Editor's Note Excerpt: Book Excerpt: Exhibition Excerpt: Magazine Eye Candy Factory Tour Fair Report From the Archives From the Library Of Gift Guides Giveaway Graphic Design How To Interiors Inventory Invitation Material Offsite Online Q+A Saturday Selects Self Portrait Shopping Sight Unseen OFFSITE Sight Unseen Presents Sight Unseen Projects Sighted Studio Visit The Essentials The Making of Travel Guide Up and Coming What It's Like What They Bought What We Saw Where They've Been Spaces Objects Library Offsite SU Projects The Hot List Shop 06.02.21 Interiors This Milanese Apartment Bridges the Gap Between a Memphis Aesthetic and Old-School Italian Glamour When the Spanish firm Puntofilipino set out to design this apartment in Milan, the goal was not only to find a style that somehow bridged the divide between period interiors and a more contemporary, Memphis-inspired aesthetic, but also to serve as a kind of rebuke to the austerity of mid-century modernism. We'd say they hit the mark. More Linear Grid Shop Eye Candy Ariele Alasko’s New Work Has Taken a Decidedly Adventurous Turn Pinterest 06.01.21 Up and Coming A New Lighting Collection Inspired By the 1960s Modernism of Fire Island Pines “Growing up, I always love stained glass,” recalls Peter B. Staples, discussing the early design experiments that would eventually lead to the launch of his lighting brand Blue Green Works. “I grew up in a Craftsman-style home, and one summer, my dad and I found the plans for the original stained glass lanterns. We taught ourselves how to fix and recreate them. I was probably 12 at the time and that experience really stayed with me.” But while the exercise was clearly formative, Staples would have to take a circuitous path through the New York design scene before returning to lighting. Having previously worked at The Future Perfect and Apparatus, Blue Green Works marks the first time Staples has designed a collection himself — which you would never guess just by looking at it. More 05.28.21 Fair Report 8 Must-See Projects From This Year’s Venice Design Biennial After a year of visiting virtual exhibitions, it’s a joy to finally start venturing out IRL again. Where I am here in Italy, things really began to pick up speed last week with the opening of the Venice Biennale, which always brings with it a slew of contemporaneous projects — one of which being the Venice Design Biennial, now in its third year. Curated by Venice Art Factory’s Luca Berta and Francesca Giubilei, this year’s theme was "Design as a Self Portrait" and featured work that spoke, loosely, to the notion of self-representation in design. More 05.27.21 Current Obsession Take a Moment With Us to Appreciate the Work of This Famed Danish Cubist Vilhelm Lundstrøm may be among the most famous Danish painters (or Modernist painters, at least), credited for being the country's first and foremost Cubist, but he's not on most people's radar. Yet if this story is the first you're hearing of him, you'll probably be seeing his work everywhere as soon as you close this page. More 05.26.21 Fair Report A Sneak Peek at Collectible Design’s First Fully Digital Fair, Happening This Weekend in Brussels Collectible, the long-running design fair in Brussels, was one of the last fairs to slip under the wire last year just as COVID was beginning; we remember having a phone call with our solo exhibitors, Ben & Aja Blanc, asking if they felt safe enough to go. But though the fair went off without a hitch last March, due to changing restrictions in Europe, organizers Clélie Debehault and Liv Vaisberg decided to take the fair fully digital this year, introducing a new platform called Collectible Salon, which runs online from May 28-30 and concurrently with events around town. More 09.16.19 Excerpt: Exhibition For LDF, 20 Designers Made Masks Representing How They See Themselves, And the Results Are Hilarious Having been invited to curate an LDF exhibition for SEEDS gallery on the theme of Nature/Nurture, the design studio M-L-XL decided to focus on human nature, and one of its darkest facets in particular — the masks we put on in order to present an idealized version of ourselves to the world, especially in the image-obsessed age of social media. The resulting show, however, is one of the wittiest, most playful LDF presentations we've seen in awhile, with 20 designers representing their identities through handmade masks ranging from the beautiful to the hilariously grotesque. More 05.24.21 Up and Coming Belgian Artist Ann Vincent’s Sculptural Candles Are Making Waves In Wax There is something so pleasing about the organic wax shapes Ann Vincent comes up with, which resemble strings of beads or slightly off-kilter blocks in shades of white and taupe and crimson. Trained as a photographer, she credits an education in image making for her clear sense of composition. More 05.22.21 Saturday Selects Week of May 17, 2021 A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a Swedish furniture brand focused on sustainability, a show that explores the healing powers of color, and the coolest swing set you've ever seen. More 05.21.21 Up and Coming The Dutch Designer Making Colorful, Jewel-Like Cocktail Glasses For years, de Beijer designed purely ornamental vessels made from synthetic and non-traditional materials like resin and pigmented polyurethane cast by hand. "People have frequently asked me why I didn't make these vessels in 'real' glass,” he said. And so he did. Designing out of his father’s studio and working in close collaboration with the renowned glassblowers at Van Tetterode Glass Studio in Amsterdam, de Beijer has created his first series of glassware made exclusively for Side Gallery. More 05.19.21 Eye Candy Using Stone That’s Destined for the Dump, Matthew Byrd Creates These Interlocking, Noguchi-Inspired Sculptures As a sculptor and stonemason, artist Matthew Byrd spends a lot of time driving around his hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina. Much of that time is spent looking at old buildings for inspiration, noticing how one intersects with the roof of another, trying to figure out how he can translate those moments into his stacked stone sculptures. But his travels often have a more practical purpose as well — late at night, Byrd drives around scoping out abandoned lots or construction sites from which he can gather raw material that would otherwise be destined for the dump. More 05.18.21 Q+A In Her Paintings, Becky Suss Creates Real or Imagined Interiors From Memory Because we don't cover art as our primary discipline here at Sight Unseen, we typically discover artists a bit more slowly than we do designers, and usually by way of gallery shows, art fairs, or Instagram wormholes. But I discovered Philadelphia-born painter Becky Suss in perhaps the most Sight Unseen — or at least the most me — way possible: Her 2016 painting, August (above), adorns the cover of LA harpist Mary Lattimore's Hundreds of Days, one of the many albums that helped propel me through the emotional blac...