The Best of Milan Design Week 2018, Part I

This year marked our tenth anniversary of attending the Salone del Mobile in Milan, and this year's fair felt a bit... different. The showrooms were more crowded (sometimes uncomfortably so), the brands were more lavish (Hermes's installation employing 150,000 Moroccan tiles rivaled only Flos's poured concrete last year in terms of sheer material costs), and the trends felt less obvious (we're living in such maximalist times that it can feel like all colors are suddenly trending at once). Here’s the first of our posts chronicling all the wonderful things we found.
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The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today, Day 5

Created by the Berlin-based Studio Greiling for Kinnasand's Toyo Ito–designed Milan showroom, the STRUCTURES series uses powder-coated, architectural steel tubes to lift the Swedish textiles company's knotted or woven wool rugs to a new height, elevating the formerly flat surfaces into a new dimension: furniture.
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The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today, Day 4

We’ve never seen any shame in a finish fetish, and at this week’s Milan fair the Amsterdam-based studio Odd Matter did the art movement proud with a project called Guise. Developed for a brand new contemporary/experimental arm of Nilufar Gallery called Far — which also had its official launch this week — Guise consists of three benches and a console made from carved foam that’s been coated in either iridescent car lacquer, or a classical faux-marble painting technique called Scagliola.
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The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today, Day 3

In the 5Vie district, in an old flat that's been used for a couple of years as an exhibition space, we found the show Unsighted, curated by our friend Nicolas Bellevance-LeCompte of Carwan Gallery. For the brief he asked eight designers to create a collection not knowing who, what, or where it was bound for; our favorite of the collections was by a young designer named Roberto Sironi, who created Ruins, a series of benches, stools, mirrors and tables that juxtapose elements of the classical and industrial eras.
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The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today, Day 2

One of the first projects we saw this week was a new collection by Bloc Studios, for which the Carrara-based studio collaborated with three of our favorite designers: Nick Ross, Valentina Camarenesi Sgroi, and Objects of Common Interest.
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The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today, Day 1

Sight Unseen is on the ground at the Milan Furniture Fair this week and we’ll be bringing you loads of coverage next week! But until our rounds here are done, we’ll be featuring quick hits from some of our favorite things that caught our eye. First up, the brand-new lighting collection from Vancouver-based brand ANDLight, featuring new work by co-founders Lukas Peet and Caine Heintzman, and launching at Venture Future.
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The Best Things We Saw at NADA, The Armory, and Independent

Design is ingrained in us so deeply, it even affects our taste in art; at this week's art fairs in New York, we were consistently drawn to things like plywood sculptures, powder-coated metal wall hangings, antiquity-inspired ceramics, degradé textile panels, the fact that fave artist Mattea Perrotta TURNED A PAINTING INTO A RUG, and, of course, Katie Stout lamps — i.e. things that wouldn't be totally out of place at a design show.
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10 Things We Loved at the 2018 Collective Design Fair

There were, to say the least, a lot of changes at Collective Design this year — the largest, of course, being the week in which it was held. But ironically, the year that Collective broke from NYCxDesign's May calendar and moved to coincide with the Armory, Independent, and NADA, is the year it featured the most instances of contemporary furniture yet.
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Note Design Studio Stockholm Furniture Fair

The Coolest Booth in Stockholm Was for a Vinyl Flooring Company

While it's not exactly news that formerly uncool materials can be made to look beautiful and sophisticated, it's perhaps never been done as well or on as large a scale as it was this week at the Stockholm Furniture Fair, in a booth Note Design Studio created for the French flooring company Tarkett. Called the Lookout, the booth was made from a mix of wood, textiles, linoleum and a vinyl flooring material called iQ Megalit; the trick was in employing Note's frequent use of geometry and a tight, tonal color palette of rust, coral, apricot, moss green, and mint.
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IMM Cologne and Maison & Objet 2018

45 Key Designs We Spotted At IMM Cologne and Maison & Objet 2018

While IMM Cologne and Maison et Objet aren't the most outwardly exciting fairs on the design calendar, they can be particularly fun for us to cover. The reason has to do with why we love antique shopping so much: It can be more gratifying to make small, triumphant discoveries amidst a sea of less-relevant items than to be surrounded by perfection at every turn. The thrill of the hunt, if you will. Here are 45+ of our biggest finds.
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The 40+ Best Things We Saw at Design Miami 2017

The design side of things seemed particularly strong this year, from the so-weird-it's-genius idea to recreate Muller Van Severen's Ghent living room from scratch in an installation for Airbnb, to Chris Schanck's shimmering, Little Mermaid–colored cabinet for Friedman Benda, to Christopher Prinz's wrinkled, oil-slick benches for Patrick Parrish.
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