05.30.25

Fair Report

13 Group Shows We Loved at New York Design Week 2025

At this year's New York design week/month, opportunities were everywhere for showing new work, from an incredibly solid debut for the new trade fair Shelter, to the Hello Human–curated showcase at Public Records, to yes, the OG mothership that is now ICFF/Wanted. We found excellent work by ex-RISD kids in a Chinatown basement, design pieces mingling with fashion at boutiques like Colbo and Knickerbocker, and, a true sign of the times, quite of bit of great work in extremely expensive new residential developments. Yesterday we featured our favorite independent designers; today, we're focusing on our favorite group exhibitions from the week-turned-month that was.

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05.29.25

Fair Report

20 Designers Whose Launches We Loved at New York Design Week 2025

At this year's New York design week/month, opportunities were everywhere for showing new work, from an incredibly solid debut for the new trade fair Shelter, to the Hello Human–curated showcase at Public Records, to yes, the OG mothership that is now ICFF/Wanted. We found excellent work by ex-RISD kids in a Chinatown basement, design pieces mingling with fashion at boutiques like Colbo and Knickerbocker, and, a true sign of the times, quite of bit of great work in extremely expensive new residential developments. Tomorrow we'll be featuring our favorite group exhibitions, but today we're focusing on our favorite independent designers, collection debuts, and one-offs from the week-turned-month that was.

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05.28.25

Sight Unseen Presents

For New York Design Week, We Surrounded Ourselves With Friends for a Sight Unseen Collection x Petra Exhibition

When the founders of the hospitality design firm AvroKo, who have been friends of ours for more than a decade, invited us to take over their Soho showroom and events space, Host on Howard, we in turn invited a group of our favorite designers to exhibit their work with us, not to mention co-host a few really fun parties along the way. Four studios trotted out their latest contributions to our Sight Unseen Collection — the furniture and lighting we represent direct to the trade — including Sunfish, Sam Klemick, Cultivation Objects, and Known Work, while Monica showcased nearly 20 new pieces from her hardware showroom Petra by friends like Sally Breer, Elyse Graham, Alexis & Ginger, and more.

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05.20.25

Excerpt: Exhibition

Galerie Néotu Was Legendary In Its Heyday. A New Show in NYC Invites You to Experience the Radical Furniture That Put it On the Map.

In 1984, Gérard Dalmon and Pierre Staudenmeyer co-founded Néotù in Paris — a now-legendary project existing somewhere between a gallery and a furniture producer, a home for designers who considered furniture to be a fine art medium, and a mode of emotional expression. Néotù wasn’t beholden to any particular aesthetic, though you could loosely and retrospectively apply the Postmodern descriptor. Rather, they sought to put divergent styles in conversation with one another and provide a singular home for a multiplicity of voices. They also wanted to challenge the then-dominant production and distribution models. The name itself is a phonetic wordplay on “néo-tout” or neo-everything. A new show, Néotù: The Visionary Years, now gives the gallery its due.

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06.21.22

Fair Report

The Best of the 2022 Salone Del Mobile – Part V

Today's post — our last from this year's Milan furniture fair — takes a tour of two of our favorite reliable destinations for up-and-coming talent: Alcova, the destination founded in 2018 by Studio Vedèt founder Valentina Ciuffi and Space Caviar's Joseph Grima, and Salone Satellite, always our first stop at the fairgrounds.

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05.19.25

Saturday Selects

Week of May 12, 2025

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: limited-edition Gaudí chairs, a cathedral-like eyewear store, and a boutique that’s part Milanese cafe, part Lower East Side laundromat.

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05.13.25

Excerpt: Exhibition

In a New Exhibition, Minjae Kim Unpacks Los Angeles Through a Lens of Wild Animals and Silent Film

Who else is obsessed with wild animals who become celebrities — living, as they often do, in the thick of human society? In 2023, I was gripped by the news about Flaco, the owl who escaped the Central Park Zoo and flew free in Manhattan for a full year. For Korean-born, New York–based artist Minjae Kim, it was P-22, the mountain lion who famously lived in LA’s Griffith Park from 2012 to until his death in 2022, who triggered the concept for Kim's latest exhibition at Marta gallery. Called Phantom-22, the show represents the “passage of creatures, ideas, and topographies that define Los Angeles as it continues its constant shift between fantasy and reality,” which Kim examines through this comprehensive body of work playing on several LA tropes. 

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05.09.25

Up and Coming

So Long, Synthetics — This Sustainable Furniture Collection is Bound by Natural Tree Sap

Harnessing tree sap to bind wood is a technique that dates back more than 45,000 years — a fact that fascinated Catskills-based studio Earth to People enough to revive the age-old process, using nature's glue to assemble furniture pieces crafted from reclaimed cedar and aluminum. Founders Jordan and Brittany Weller are “driven by a love of ancient stewardship and the handmade,” and for the past two years, they've dedicated their practice to reviving historic furniture-making traditions — taking things back to basics to create more sustainable, but still beautiful, seating and lighting.

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05.08.25

Excerpt: Book

The Modernist Travel Guide by Adam Štěch — The First Book Edited and Published By Sight Unseen — is Here to Take Your Travel Game to the Next Level

In this world, there are two types of travelers: those who prefer to relax, and those who prefer to explore. But within that second group, there are those who will go to extreme lengths to acquire secret intel, especially in regards to one of our favorite subjects — peeping Modernist architecture around the world. The person we know who's best at this is Adam Štěch, the architecture photographer behind the popular Instagram account @okolo_architecture, who has visited almost 50 countries on five continents to explore nearly 10,000 design landmarks, and today we're launching a project together that's been years in the making: the Modernist Travel Guide, photographed and written by Adam and edited and published by us.

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05.03.25

Saturday Selects

Week of April 28, 2025

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an Art Deco– and Frank Lloyd Wright–inspired textile collab between Block Shop and Sunbrella, two new design hotels for escaping into nature this summer, and a new series of lamps in wicker by Workstead.

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05.01.25

The Making of

Three Up-and-Coming Designers On How They Use the iPad Pro to Bridge the Gap Between Analog and Digital Processes

When we founded Sight Unseen more than 15 years ago, our goal was to invite readers into the minds and studios of designers, in order to help readers understand how things are actually made. Though the site is about so much more now, we still get a perpetual thrill from learning how some of our favorite furniture pieces go from the wisp of a concept to a fully fleshed-out product. Much has changed within the actual design process in those 15 years as well, as new tools have completely transformed the way creatives work, and digital technology has evolved beyond our wildest dreams — icons are still made with a saw, but they're also made on a screen. We checked in with three contemporary designers to see how their process has changed over time, and how they're using tools like the iPhone, iPad Pro, and Apple Pencil Pro to bridge analog design processes and digital technology.

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04.28.25

In Conversation

Two of Our Favorite Woodworkers on Apprenticeships, Supportive Grandmas, and Learning the Rules So You Can Break Them

Rio Kobayashi and Luke Malaney each make sculptural furniture that exists somewhere between art, design, and carpentry. They're pieces that serve a function but at the same time question function: What should an object actually do? Where does its purpose lie? It’s a blurry line — or maybe not even a line at all. While they come from different backgrounds — Malaney is originally a Long Islander who lives in Brooklyn, while Kobayashi grew up in Japan and is currently based in London — they’ve arrived at a distinctively similar style and approach. Their work shares a playful and imaginative spirit, combined with a respect for longevity and integrity — objects that are well-made but also driven by curiosity, inventiveness, and experimentation. We suspected they’d have a lot to talk about — spoiler: they did! — so we wanted to introduce them and see where the conversation led.

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