In Milan, Objects of Common Interest and Marsèll Team Up on an Exhibition That Uses Materials as Spatial Interventions

When the Italian boutique leather brand Marsèll opened its showroom a year and a half ago on Via Spiga, Milan's luxury shopping street, it was an exercise in restraint — similar to the shoes and bags on offer, the interior, by Berlin's Lotto Studio, took a minimal approach to form, with almost all the emphasis on the interplay of high-end natural materials like glass, stone, stainless steel, and walnut. That elegant spareness has made it not only the perfect visual expression of the brand, but also the perfect neutral backdrop against which to stage designer interventions during the Milan furniture fair. Last year Marsèll welcomed Gonzalez Haase AAS into the space, and this year, Objects of Common Interest — the New York– and Athens–based practice of Eleni Petaloti and Leonidas Trampoukis — did the honors, with a two-floor installation called Adaptive Ground that "explores the relationship between space and material."
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Week of April 7, 2025

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a major new art talent on view in Los Angeles, a new Scandinavian vintage design showroom in Chelsea, and the print version of a satirical newsletter on the intersection of dating and design. 
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Think of This London Renovation As Mid-Century, Modernized

Studio Hagen Hall, an architecture and design firm in London founded by Louis Hagen-Hall, has a talent for creating spaces that are striking yet serene — making them look effortless while also paying meticulous attention to detail. For Pine Heath, a townhome that’s part of a series originally designed by South African architect Ted Levy, Benjamin & Partners in the late 1960s, Hagen Hall brings California mid-century modern to North London’s Hampstead Conservation Area.
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This Designer’s Interior Design Secret? Make It a Little Bit Weird

During a career spanning almost two decades, Julia King has worked for several of the interior design world’s heavy hitters — from Kelly Wearstler to Michael Smith to Charles DeLisle — and absorbed a little of each of their dramatically disparate design styles along the way. Now, after setting up her own business, Studio Roene, this aesthetic mash-up is delightfully evident in her first wave completed projects, which borrow a little of their resident’s personalities, and blend King’s eye for color and compositions of vintage and contemporary furniture. “I always try to think: ‘How can we make it a little bit weird?’” King says. “It doesn't have to be in your face, but let's just add one thing in each room that gives it a bit of funkiness.”
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Week of March 24, 2025

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the tiled cabinet of our dreams, an exhibition featuring 99 artists riffing on the piggy bank, and a sale of studio furniture either made or owned by the legendary Garry Knox Bennett. 
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A Swedish Artist Known for Her Vibrant Florals and Seductive Line Drawings is a Perfect Match for Marimekko

Marimekko has long been a go-to for those seeking joyful bursts of color and pattern in their clothing and home décor, from the oft-searched 1980s-era Dan River Tulip bedding to the ever-stylish (and, frankly, ahead of its time) gender-neutral shirting of the 1953 Jokapoika. Over the last few years, the Finnish design brand has expanded that vision with its Marimekko Artist Series, a collaborative opportunity “to provide artists with a canvas — in the shape of Marimekko products — to present their work,” as Marimekko’s creative director Rebekka Bay puts it. The series makes artwork accessible to a broader public while paying homage to an era when Marimekko’s founder Armi Ratia would invite artists and other creatives to design prints, Bay adds. The theme of this year’s series, the Anatomy of a Flower, was a perfect fit for Petra Börner, a Swedish artist who lives in London. Börner’s work often nods to floral subjects and motifs, cyclical growth and constant transformation, and this beautifully translates into a capsule collection for the Finnish brand.
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Sung Jang Paints Imperfect Maps of His Memories at Volume Gallery in Chicago

In Shape of Land, the Chicago-based designer Sung Jang evokes locations that have personal meaning for him and abstracts them into dream places. Finding a deep resonance in cartography, Jang knows maps aren’t simply navigational tools, but more metaphorically, help us situate ourselves and understand our histories. At the city’s Volume Gallery, Jang’s show of objects and paintings — a six-panel screen and wall works of acrylic on linen, textured with inked sand — draws on his Korean heritage, with imagery that resembles continents and an imaginary topography of mountains and rivers. Jang was particularly inspired by maps from Korea’s Middle Joseon period — depictions of the world more valuable for their artistic and interpretive quality than their precision and utility.
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Week of March 17, 2025

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the sky blue laptop of our dreams, our top picks from this month's Collectible fair in Brussels, and two exhibitions of paintings that explore and elevate domestic spaces.
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Week of March 10, 2025

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an NYC design showroom decorated in the next “it” color, a set of desk accessories to improve any workspace, and a chic ceramic bowl for design-conscious cat owners (like myself!).
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This New Exhibition Invites Artists and Designers to Reconsider a Classic Wedding Object

I got married a few months ago, and while it was by no means a traditional affair, there were of course moments and objects we incorporated into the ceremony that held historical meaning and significance. Something we didn’t include? (Admittedly because we’d never heard of it before?) The Loving Cup, a decorative vessel historically used at wedding banquets to commemorate a union, with two handles — one for each partner — and an inscription with the date and names of the couple. This endearing symbol of love and good fortune is the subject of an exhibition at New York’s Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery, where contemporary interpretations of these vessels by an interesting selection of artists and design talents are displayed alongside a host of historic artifacts.
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It’s Your Last Chance to Get a Copy of Sight Unseen’s 2024 Yearbook!

Each year, we attend dozens of design fairs and exhibitions, field thousands of pitch emails, and spend hundreds of hours on Instagram getting to know what our favorite brands and makers are making — tracking what new trends are developing, what new materials are being experimented with, and what classic forms and techniques are being reinvented or re-contextualized. And at the end of each year, we spend two months digesting everything we've seen for our annual Sight Unseen Yearbook, in which we choose 500+ of the objects that we found most memorable.
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