Sculpture or Furniture? Supaform’s New Collection Puts Feeling Before Function

In Russian designer Maxim Scherbakov's new furniture exhibition at Rome's Contemporary Cluster gallery, he asks the question: What if design could be all about emotion, and little else? His barely functional pieces, and his general conceit, feel uncomfortable at first — we're not sure we want to live in a world where design is purely an aesthetic indulgence — but in an era when furniture is increasingly difficult to distinguish from art, it does feel in some ways like we already are.
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SU Yearbook x Kvadrat, 2021

In 2021, we debuted our annual Yearbook series, a printed publication showcasing our favorite furniture and lighting released in any given year. The inaugural edition was created and presented in partnership with Kvadrat.
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The 2021 American Design Hot List, Part V

This week we announced our ninth annual American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s editorial award for the names to know now in American design. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the fifth group of Hot List designers here: Studio Ahead, Sunshine Thacker, and Umberto Bellardo Ricci.
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The 2021 American Design Hot List, Part IV

This week we announced our ninth annual American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s editorial award for the names to know now in American design. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the fourth group of Hot List designers here: Reinaldo Sanguino, Sean Gerstley, and Serban Ionescu.
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Pom Pom Pillows and Hand Rugs: The Sight Unseen Gift Guide, Part III

For those of you who would rather give your partner a hand-thrown ceramic vase than a mass-manufactured one, or are more into gifting your sibling a carved-wood ice bucket than the latest iPad, this guide is for you: Click through to see and shop our top 14 handmade gifts from Wescover's stable of independent makers — including Maja Dlugolecki, Christopher Norman, Esque Studio, and more.
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Foot Vases and Artichoke Plates: The 2021 Sight Unseen Gift Guide, Part I

We always look forward to putting together our annual gift guides, where we get to turn our brains off, scour our favorite stores for wishlist-worthy objects, and focus on sheer indulgence for a minute. What's our favorite candle this year, our favorite wine glass? Which books are we dying to have on our coffee table now, and in the case of Monica (whose guide is featured today), which foot-shaped vase? We hope you can get some inspiration from these lists — particularly when it comes to supporting small businesses and talented independent makers.
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Win a $2,000 Credit For This Zwirner-Backed Site That Lets You Buy High-End Art in Your Pajamas

By doing away with the inquiries-only model, the new click-to-buy online marketplace Platform makes acquiring high-end art easy and transparent — you don't even need to be a collector, much less a VIP, to shop it (interior designers take note!). Backed by David Zwirner gallery, it offers 100 original works each month, by artists ranging from Lily Stockman to Erin O'Keefe to Kalup Linzy, at prices ranging from $1,500 to $50,000 — and if you win this giveaway, you could have one of them hanging in your living room. Click through to enter!
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Week of November 8, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: two blockbuster exhibitions in Athens by Philippe Malouin and Sigve Knutson, the first Boy Smells store in LA, and the shelving unit of our dreams (above) by Barbora Žilinskaité.
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Yes, Watches and Clocks Are Still a Thing — Here Are 50 of Our Favorite Designs, Sourced on eBay

By all reasonable logic, watches and clocks should have gone the way of the fax machine, or the VCR. Yet luxury watch sales are at an all-time high, and designers continue to release new wall and table clocks as if the past 20 years never happened. We love coming across amazing watches and clocks when we're shopping, especially for vintage, so we decided to devote a post to cataloguing our favorite examples, sourced from one of our favorite shopping platforms, eBay — which happens to be ground zero for watch lovers.
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Meet the Swedish Brand Championing “Bold Minimalism” With Rugs That Are Stylish, but Subtle

When Liza Laserow-Berglund, her husband Fabian Berglund, and his brother Felix Berglund decided to start a business together, the biggest thing they had in common was Sweden, and their desire to share some part of their native country’s vibe with the rest of the world. When they realized that rugs played a huge part in every Swede’s life, they founded Nordic Knots, a rug brand aimed at spreading the Scandinavian design gospel. Their goal? A highly curated brand offering mid-range rugs with a distinct point of view — but not one loud enough to overwhelm a room.
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How Two Sisters Turned Their Childhood Home in Mallorca Into an Artist’s Residency and Coveted Airbnb

Claudia del Olmo and her older sister Isabella got to grow up in a richly decorated villa in Mallorca, playing in the garden and watching their mother host countless parties and dinners. "It was always really magical," she says. So much so that as adults, the sisters wanted to recreate that magic, first channeling their own gift for hosting into a dinner series in London, and ultimately reclaiming their childhood home for themselves, transforming it into an events space, artist's residency, and Airbnb property called Casa Balandra.
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A Tacchini Reissue Proves Tobia Scarpa’s Very First Chair Is Still One of His Best

As a designer, you may have been taught to always explore beyond your initial hunch — that, not unlike the "bad pancake" theory of dating, your first idea will never be your best. And yet history offers a wealth of exceptions to that rule, including Tobia Scarpa's iconic 1959 Pigreco chair, the first furniture piece he ever designed that, having recently been reissued by Tacchini, endures to this day.
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