Week of January 2, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a gorgeous Helsinki apartment renovation by the queen of minimalism, Katie Lockhart; a portraiture exhibition with no faces; and a showroom whose ethos is "cave-meets-club."
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Mark Grattan’s Mexico City Apartment Oozes a Kind of Sensual Charm

Mark Grattan’s work is moody, smoky, sensual, and chic — all qualities that, a few years back, earned him first prize on the erstwhile TV show Ellen’s Next Great Designer (which also featured longtime SU friend Arielle Assouline-Lichten). Grattan's Mexico City apartment, on the fourth floor of a building by famed architect Luis Barragán — which we photographed for How to Live With Objects but which he has since left for New York City — had a similar vibe, filled with black leather, velvet, wall-to-wall carpeting, and sleek, low pieces designed by Grattan himself.
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Chunky Cups and Oyster Placemats: The 2022 Gift Guide, Part II

If you asked us what our absolute top gift recommendation would be for 2022, you probably already know by now what we'd answer: our new book, How to Live With Objects. But in case you need a few other ideas, don't worry, we've also compiled 100 best-gift-of-2022 runners-up: Today, it's Jill's 50 picks, including brutish bar carts and vases, chunky cutting boards and cups, and her favorite CBD gummies — which just happen to look great, too — for dealing with publishing-a-book–related insomnia.
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A 1920s Brooklyn Brownstone Offers the Perfect Backdrop for Kim Mupangilai’s Collection of Vintage Handmade Objects

Born and raised in Belgium, Kim Mupangilaï is a Belgian-Congolese interior architect, furniture designer, and graphic designer who lives with her boyfriend in a 1920s brownstone in Brooklyn. Its original period details offer the perfect backdrop for her extensive collection of vintage handmade objects, which she also sells through her side project, the online shop En la Mésá.
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Kathryn Bentley Hand-Painted Her Restoration Hardware Sofa, and So Can You

Kathryn Bentley has one of the best contemporary object collections we've seen to date, from Roger Herman ceramics, to a Waka Waka coffee table (designer Shin Okuda is a longtime collaborator), to the BZIPPY urn she jokes she wants for her eternal life. One of our favorite homes from How to Live With Objects, we're excerpting images of her colorful house tour — including the incredible Restoration Hardware sofa the hand-painted with sponges — today.
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Body Parts Are Trending in Design, and Our New Book Proves It

In the last five years — somewhere between the giant nose vase German duo BNAG produced for Felix Burrichter's dollhouse exhibition at Friedman Benda and the butt bookends Marco Braunschweiler made for Marta's In Support of Books — body parts in design became a full-fledged thing. That's why we weren't a bit surprised when we noticed, visiting the 16 homes we photographed for How to Live With Objects, that body parts were popping up seemingly everywhere — from the Nicola L eye lamp in Yoram Heller and Eleanor Wells's living room, to the giant hand sitting at the base of Jonathan Pessin's object-filled bookshelves, to the nose relief on display in the London home of Sadie Perry.
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This London Townhouse Makes the Case for Painting Your Bedroom — Ceilings Included — Gold

Tatjana von Stein and Gayle Noonan cofounded the full-service creative studio Sella Concept in 2016, with von Stein in charge of interior architecture and furniture design and Noonan handling branding and identity. We had covered several of the pair's projects on the site before — including a gorgeous Mediterranean-hued bar in London, and a Hackney flat with a next-level tortoise-shell headboard — but we'd never gotten a glimpse inside their own home until we reached out during our book research. Boy, were we glad we did.
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Week of November 7, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Sophie Lou Jacobsen's new glass menorah, a terrazzo-inspired lounge chair, a '60-inspired floral furniture collab, and Alex Tieghi-Walker's new New York gallery.
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In Celebration of Our New Book, We Asked 18 Tastemakers to Name Their Favorite Objects

In our new book, How to Live With Objects, we try not to play favorites: We selected more than 150 vintage and contemporary objects to appear in its pages, and for the most part, we couldn't believe our luck that we got to be showcasing any of them in a book, much less one that we're absolutely not going to be shy about calling the new "bible of modern home decor and style" (thank you Vanity Fair!) However, god knows we love a list — in fact, there's a whole section of the book devoted to asking people from Alison Roman to Athena Calderone to name their most cherished possessions — so to celebrate the book's launch next week, we widened the circle to include some of our favorite people in design and fashion, sounding off about their favorite objects, both vintage and contemporary.
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For One Night Only at Superhouse, We Paired Works and Personal Mementoes by 16 Designers

To celebrate the upcoming launch of our book, How to Live With Objects, we put on a one-night-only exhibition last week at Superhouse Gallery in Chinatown with a *very* fun concept. To showcase How to Live With Objects' new approach to interiors — simply surrounding yourself with objects you love — we invited 16 designers, eight from our book, and eight from our exhibition partner, Areaware, to display two objects each: one they had made, and one that was meaningful to them. Each pair was displayed on a Duo Object Stand, a new, two-object pedestal designed by Sight Unseen and produced by Bestcase.
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At Phillips’s New Los Angeles Outpost, Our Curated Selection of California Designers is On View — And Available for Purchase

When we first began selling furniture online via our 1stDibs storefront back in 2018, we wondered if there was much of a market for buying things, well, sight unseen, as it were. Turns out there was, but after nearly five years, we still longed for a physical space in which our clients could actually see and feel and sit on the pieces in question. So when Phillips approached us earlier this year, asking if we might be interested in curating a rotating selection of contemporary California-based designers at the auction house's newly opened Los Angeles gallery space, we couldn't say yes fast enough.
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Menu’s New Icons Collection is Betting Big on Reissues

This week, a meme circulated online, contending that home goods had officially supplanted sneakers as "the new flex." Like all memes, there was a certain amount of tongue-in-cheekness about it mixed with a healthy dollop of truth: Over the past few years, we've watched as lamp after lamp, mirror after mirror became the hot new "it" accessory. But, like sneakers, home goods tend to inspire the most fervor when they're a bit more rare and harder to come by. Drop a new (old) design into the marketplace, the thinking seems to go, however, and watch the feeding frenzy begin. I would venture to guess this is a large part of why brands have suddenly decided to reissue their old designs en masse, including MENU, which has relaunched a half-dozen mid-century designs in a collection they're calling Icons.
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