05.08.24

Interiors

In San Sabino, New York Gets the Buttery Yellow Restaurant Interior It Needs

After butter yellow's long and winding ascent to the top, finally we get a restaurant interior with that hue as the star. And it was well worth the wait — San Sabino is the next-door sibling to Don Angie, the still-too-hot-for-a-reservation restaurant in the West Village also designed by GRT Architects. But where that space has extremely chic elevated trattoria vibes, San Sabino has elements that read almost like a diner, at least during the daylight hours. There are the round, leather-topped bar stools; the stainless steel accents like a ceiling "crown" and metal-trimmed booth seating; and oh, that laminate.

05.01.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

How Should We Live Now? In Milan, RISD’s Objects May Shift Exhibition Offered a Woozy Vision for Our Domestic Future

As a general rule, Milan thrives on spectacle. Some of the most memorable Salone exhibitions in recent years have relied on elaborate scenography, from Established & Sons in 2010 — when the British furniture brand filled a former Jai Alai court with walled "rooms" made from stacks of untreated tulipwood — to 2018, when Hermès constructed, over the course of three weeks inside a Milanese museum, seven towering pavilions made from thousands of jewel-toned zellige tiles. (Ask me what was inside those pavilions? Zero recollection.) So how is a student-run exhibition, from a newly founded design course exhibiting in Milan for the first time, supposed to compete? That was the conundrum facing 20 Rhode Island School of Design students, who debuted the conceptually-driven show Objects May Shift at Salone Satellite in Milan last month.

04.26.24

Fair Report

50 Pieces and Presentations We Loved at The 2024 Milan Furniture Fair

Rather than seeing the ever-spiraling array of events at Salone as a source of FOMO and a series of missed opportunities a journalist could never hope to comprehensively cover, we began to look at Milan in a new light this year, and you'll see that reflected in our coverage. We'll be devoting longer stories to particular favorites, or to things that maybe passed under your radar, rather than doing roundups of every single thing we saw and liked. We'll be focusing as much as possible on independent designers. We'll be shining a light on smaller, non-newsy things we saw, like the wonderful Cini Boeri archive exhibit at a library in Parco Sempione we never knew existed? For now, though, here is our one roundup of 50 favorites.

04.24.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

These 5 Installations in Milan Turned Materials Into the Main Event

I spent a lot of last week in Milan thinking about innovation in materials; in presentation after presentation, some of the best work to emerge from the fair came from materials companies who had hired A-plus designers to translate their raw product into something almost implausibly beautiful. From recycled aluminum to post-industrial plastic to a company that's asking us to reconsider the humble linoleum tile, here are five of our favorite materials-based projects from the week.

04.04.24

Current Obsession

Gaetano Pesce Influenced the Current Generation of Designers More Than Anyone We Know

Earlier this week, I had the occasion to look back at an article we'd published in 2016, where I referred to Donald Judd as the patron saint of Sight Unseen. I was puzzled, even as I reread my own words: "As our tastes and interests have shifted over the years, we could often point to different historical figures — Ettore Sottsass during our heavy Memphis phase; Bruno Munari during our Shape Shop days." I suppose I felt uneasy in my nearly decade-old declaration because in my mind, as we've watched the design landscape mutate and come together over the past few years, there's been one designer who has remained at the top, inspiring more of the current crop of young designers than anyone else we know: Gaetano Pesce, who the world lost today at the age of 84.

03.29.24

Fair Report

10 Projects We Loved at the 2024 Collectible Fair in Brussels

The biggest news to come out of this month's Collectible fair, now in its seventh year, wasn't about a ground-breaking gallery or a new designer at all but rather the fact that the Brussels-based fair — much beloved in the design community for its rigorous curation and its commitment to highlighting emerging designers in the collectible field — will be debuting a show in New York this fall. From September 4-10, the inaugural US edition will take place inside the enigmatic WSA building in New York's financial district; it follows this year's successful westward expansion of Alcova into Miami. What can we say, we Americans love to shop! If you're the collecting kind, consider our round-up of the most interesting projects to come out of this year's Collectible fair in Brussels a preview of what's to come.

03.09.24

Saturday Selects

Week of March 4, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the spring weather in New York goes hand in hand with a slew of new exhibition openings, including an archival Max Lamb show, a Bushwick gallery meditating on consumer iconography, and the new Latin American "Crafting Modernity" design exhibition at MoMA.

03.05.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Exhibition Featuring Florals in Every Form — And Our New Favorite Table

India Mahdavi's Project Room is where the Iranian-born interior designer puts on freeform exhibitions four times a year, and it occupies just a single storefront below Mahdavi's studio in Paris's 7th arrondissement. Yet the space, now on its 12th curatorial outing, tends to occupy an outsized, Zeitgeist-driven share of the collective design consciousness due to the quality of its exhibitions: so far, one themed "reds and tartans" (both on the upswing, trendwise), one curated by AGO Projects (Mexico City–based gallery, pretty much universally loved), and the most recent, "Foreign Flowers," which is being presented as part of the programming for Matter and Shape, a new, compact fair in the Jardin des Tuileries, designed by Willo Perron. Foreign Flowers is curated by Matter and Shape's artistic director Dan Thawley, and it investigates the unexpected dovetailing of flowers and plants with the disciplines of furniture-making, fine art, craft, and collectible design.

02.23.24

Up and Coming

A Deft Mix of Materials Earned This Swedish Studio Sight Unseen’s Best in Show Award at Greenhouse, the Exhibition for Emerging Design at Stockholm’s Furniture Fair

Adrian Bursell and Siri Svedborg were students at Konstfack back in 2018 when they made the tables that would become the initial studies for their Burn & Turn collection, which debuted at the Stockholm Furniture Fair earlier this month, and which earned them Sight Unseen's Best in Show award at Greenhouse, the fair's up-and-coming designer showcase. At the time, they were studying the Arts & Crafts movement in a degree program for Interior Architecture and Furniture Design, and they agreed to explore a table that might reflect the movement's values — one that could be functional yet decorative, using a kind of stripped-down ornamentalism inspired by the Swedish folk tradition.

02.16.24

Fair Report

18 New Talents We Scouted at Greenhouse, Stockholm’s Showcase for Emerging Design

As an editor, each time I attend a design fair, I'm making snap judgements in my head: Does this designer's collection stand together as a whole? Is there a compelling narrative behind it? Does it use materials in a profound or creative way? Is it formally inventive? Is it pretty? If I had another suitcase, would I want to take a piece home with me? But before last week, I had never in my life had to choose my number one, absolute, hands-down favorite. And yet, at the Stockholm Furniture Fair's Greenhouse exhibition of emerging design, I did just that: For Sight Unseen's inaugural Best in Show award, I chose the Swedish duo Bursell/Svedborg — whose wonderful series of mixed-material pedestals we'll be diving into more in-depth next week — from a pool of 30 international design studios, who had been juried into the fair by a committee of six Stockholm-based designers. Today, though, I'm highlighting *all* of my favorite up-and-coming designers from the week.

02.14.24

Fair Report

30 Projects We Loved at the 2024 Stockholm Furniture Fair

Perhaps no design fair makes me philosophize about the future of trade shows more than Stockholm. A small fair that has become even more compact over the past few years, as Danish brands have increasingly shifted their calendar to coincide with Copenhagen's 3 Days of Design, Stockholm tends to particularly shine in two areas that make a fair worth having in the first place: its curation — not only in booths but also in talks that one might actually care to attend — and the idea that sustainability ought to be baked in at every turn, or else what's the point of making new things?

02.03.24

Saturday Selects

Week of January 29, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: paintings made by a giant squeegee, a perfectly preserved Art Deco hunting lodge outside of Paris, and a Barcelona apartment inspired by the 1992 Olympics.