Punk and Playfulness Co-Exist in Nice Condo’s Monumental Furniture

Combining influences from Brutalism and Memphis with traditional wood craft, Nice Condo’s Chris Held and Sara Graham create monumental designs that — while often statement-making in some way, from the off-kilter color palette of a dining table to a cabinet with sawtooth hardware — are each intended to anchor a space and fit with a variety of interior styles. "Challenging the expectations of a client in formal ways quickly veers into sculpture, and I'm not interested in making sculpture," Held says. "I'm interested in making things people put in their homes and spill drinks on — live life on and around."
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Introducing the All-New Sight Unseen, Launching This Week

When we first started Sight Unseen back in 2009, we’d spent nearly a decade working in traditional print journalism. Despite launching shortly after the rise of blog culture, we insisted that Sight Unseen be called an online magazine, doubling down on our commitment to long-form feature stories and our hallowed idea of what respectable journalism ought to be. But at the same time, right from the beginning, we thought of our site as a forum for indulging our own interests and obsessions, publishing things that were only tangentially related to the news of the day. As the years went by and our status as design authorities grew, we shifted away from interviewing our inner circle about their weird collections or the books they drew inspiration from and took a more expansive approach, covering of-the-moment exhibitions, interiors, and talents. And yet Sight Unseen still always felt curated — fundamentally a reflection of our personal point of view. It’s what people love so much about the site. As we approach our 17th year in business, that curated sensibility is what we want to double down on.
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Goodbye for Now… We’ll Be Back in the Fall!

When you work for yourself, as we have for the past 16 years, it can be hard to turn off your work brain entirely. When we travel, we're constantly noticing architectural details and furniture vignettes that could be content; when a furniture order comes in late at night, it's imperative to address in a timely fashion. However, what we *are* able to do, considering our lack of a corporate overlord, is to suddenly say: "Hey, should we take the summer off?" We eased into this glam-leaning European way of doing things back in 2021, when we were writing How to Live With Objects, and we've deployed it to varying degrees ever since when the temperature start to rise. This summer marks our longest hiatus yet. We'll be back online after Labor Day. Now, we will be working behind the scenes to some extent — tinkering with our editorial vision, working on personal projects, Instagramming, and, most important, running the Sight Unseen Collection, business as usual. But you won't see any editorial content on the site until we return in September. See you then!
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This Red Hook Studio and Woodshop is Redefining What a Design Community Can Look Like

When I first got wind of Piscina, the shared workshop and showroom run by designer Natalie Shook out of a 20,000-square-foot space in Red Hook, Brooklyn, my first thought was of other similar, collective design spaces we've known and loved over the years, Okay Studio and Atelierdorp among them. But after spending the better part of a day at the Piscina space this fall and chatting with both Shook and the other designers who work there — including Luke Malaney, Jenna Graziano, Charles Grantham, Ford Bostwick, Chuck VanDyck, and Giovanni Valdeavellano of Studio POA, who has since moved his studio upstate — a clearer picture emerged of how different Piscina is from its predecessors.
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Inside the Copenhagen Home (and Store) of Texan Fashion Designer Casey Larkin Blond, Who Merges Southern and Scandinavian Influences

World-blending forms the core of the Mr. Larkin vibe — what founder Casey Larkin Blond describes as “a strange little universe” where her Southern roots, West Coast ideals, and Scandinavian influences all converge. It’s also visible in the apartment she shares with her husband, Danish fashion exec Alan Blond, and their two children, in a leafy district of Copenhagen that was once the city’s impoverished countryside and is now home to some of its most quietly historic buildings. The space isn’t dissimilar to her store interiors — spare but colorful, with a curated mix of contemporary handmade design objects and vintage finds.
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The Melbourne Design Studio Creating “Soft-Spoken” Objects

How many new things should we actually be making? This is the question that plagues so many designers now as the issues facing our planet continue to worsen. “I find the design industry very troubling in a lot of ways, and I do feel the tension of creating new pieces in a world of excess, with the majority of furniture and lighting ending up in landfill. It’s really hard to reconcile sometimes,” says Kate Stokes, co-founder for Melbourne studio Coco Flip.
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