Home Authors
Sight Unseen x Bower for 29Rooms
09.22.16

Interiors

We Outfitted Fashion Week’s Coolest Pop-Up With This Painted-Plywood Furniture

Refinery29's 29Rooms event is basically a funhouse of art and culture, where each room presents its own mega-Instagrammable moment. But what if you need a teeny tiny break from all that selfie-ing? That's where we came in. When Refinery asked Sight Unseen to curate the 29Rooms lounge area, we turned immediately to Bower, who came back at us just a few hours later with a sketch for this amazing collection.
More
Calico Wallpaper's Red Hook Loft: A Brooklyn Home Tour
09.20.16

At Home With

Calico Wallpaper’s Envy-Inducing Airy Red Hook Loft

In hindsight, it feels almost like fate that Nick and Rachel Cope would end up in the sprawling, historic Red Hook loft they now call home. After all, where else in New York City could they have found the room to showcase not one but six of the wallpaper collections they've created since 2012 as partners in the Brooklyn-based Calico?
More
09.19.16

Graphic Design

A New Photographic Series Channels All Our Favorite Trends

When we first met our frequent collaborator Pippa Drummond, it was via a series drawn from her personal portfolio: Using beauty-salon staples, in collaboration with a prop-stylist friend, she created beautiful assemblages with a fair amount of optical trickery. (The fake nails and brushes, disassociated from their typical use, became almost random, abstract shapes.) Her latest work employs an optical-illusion effect as well, but the Barbara Kasten-y aesthetic here is more sophisticated, drawn as it is from a series of high-brow influences.
More
09.16.16

Excerpt: Book

Inside Jonas Wood’s Perspective-Bending Interior World

The LA artist Jonas Wood currently has a new exhibition on view at Anton Kern Gallery; called Portraits, it depicts various loved ones — his family on the occasion of his Bar Mitzvah; his wife, Shio Kusaka, with an unruly-haired dog — in Wood's signature colorful, mise-en-abyme–happy style. (We like to think of it as Henri Rousseau, if Rousseau lived in 2016 Culver City). But our favorite Wood era remains Interiors, the 2012 catalogue that's being re-issued this week and that we're excerpting on the site today.
More
Kelly Behun x Barneys
09.13.16

Sighted

Kelly Behun x Barneys: A Patterned Pop-Up, Where Maximalism Prevails

For Barneys New York, Kelly Behun and her team have created an immersive pop-up and capsule collection, on view through October 31st, that translates the studio's super graphic design aesthetic into a collection of items for the home. Called A Kook Milieu, the pop-up was inspired in part by the pattern and decoration–obsessed 1970s New York gallerist Holly Solomon, who was known for blurring the line between art and design.
More
09.10.16

Saturday Selects

Week of September 5, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: highlights from our trip to Oslo, an internet wormhole that led us to a Modernist jewelry icon, and a trio of store interiors that are the very definition of "warm minimalism."
More
Dropbox mural by New York graphic designers Aaron Robbs and Alex Proba
09.07.16

Graphic Design

A Tech-Office Mural is the Ultimate Canvas for These Graphic Designers

By now, the large-scale mural has become something of a familiar, de rigueur decoration for tech HQs — the past few years have seen everything from Trek Matthews for Dolby Labs, to Serena Mitnik-Miller for Facebook, Ian Ross for Lyft, Camille Walala (also for Facebook) and more. But this latest might be our favorite yet: Commissioned for Dropbox's 26,000-square-foot Flatiron office in New York, the mural we're featuring today is a collaboration between New York graphic designers and former Kickstarter co-workers Aaron Robbs and Alex Proba of Studio Proba.
More
Sam Amoia New York interior designer
09.06.16

At Home With

Inside the Zen-like Space of One of New York’s Top Interior Designers

Walk into any number of chic boutiques in the world —the Calvin Klein flagship on Madison Avenue, Dior in London, Dover Street Market in New York — and you're bound to see the work of Samuel Amoia, the interior designer–turned–furniture phenom who's shot to stardom in the last few years making pieces that mix high and low materials, and incorporate healing minerals and crystals such as amethyst, malachite, pyrite, onyx, and agate. But there's one place you won't find many examples of Amoia's work — in the spare, textural one-bedroom Chelsea apartment he's shared for five years with his boyfriend, Enrique, and two dogs, Pig and Bruno.
More
08.22.16

Excerpt: Book

Two Lost Donald Judd Interviews, Part II: On Color and Defining ‘Modernism’

Earlier this summer, when we happened to come across not one but two vibrant, late-'80s interviews with Donald Judd in the same week, we decided it was fate telling us to designate today Judd day here on the site, where we'd excerpt text from both. The second interview we're posting today comes from New York New Art, a 1989 tome that Monica unearthed at an antique mall in Nashville. The interview, with John Griffiths, took place at a Judd exhibition where the artist was showing new pieces in metal and perspex. It covers everything from why Judd began using color to whether the term "Modernism" actually means anything. Read on for more after the jump!
More
08.22.16

Excerpt: Book

Two Lost Donald Judd Interviews, Part I: On Cor-Ten Steel and the Scourge of Handiwork

Earlier this summer, when we happened to come across not one but two vibrant, late-’80s interviews with Donald Judd in the same week, we decided it was fate telling us to designate today Judd day here on the site, where we’d excerpt text and photos from both. The first interview we’re posting today comes from Donald Judd Cor-Ten, the 72-page volume that accompanied a David Zwirner exhibition of the same name last winter. Here he speaks with curator and art critic Claudia Jolles about his friendship with Richard Serra, his aversion to public commissions, and why we should never refer to his furniture as art.
More
08.20.16

Saturday Selects

Week of August 15, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, it's all about the upgrade: chic, elemental sculptures to brighten up your desk; a perfectly patterned Poäng; and a bathing suit that'll make your design friends green with envy at the beach.
More
Seattle design studio Grain
08.18.16

Sighted

An Experimental Collection by a Studio at the Forefront of Seattle’s Design Scene

For their textile pieces, the Seattle-based studio Grain has been known to travel far and wide, working primarily with women artisans in Guatemala — after all, that's where founders James and Chelsea Minola first met and fell in love. But for their newest collection, the two stuck a bit closer to home: a rug woven by a textile mill near their alma mater, RISD; wooden trays and benches made in their Bainbridge Island studio; bottle openers cast in a Pacific Northwest foundry; and a glass series made in collaboration with John Hogan.
More