Soft Baroque’s New Furniture Series is the Ultimate Trompe L’Oeil

One of the most clever and delightful projects on view this week at Design Miami/Basel was Soft/Hard, an installation by Soft Baroque commissioned by the Copenhagen gallery Étage Projects, which presented a series of trompe l'oeil domestic objects pairing materials like granite, OSB and bublinga wood with their digital simulacra printed onto soft silk textiles.
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Furniture That Nails This Year’s Coolest Shapes

Last year, it was Memphis-inspired patterns and mobile-like lamps. This year, it's ziggurats and arches. Anna Karlin — the prolific New York designer who's practically her own department store — somehow always has her finger on the pulse of whatever it is we happen to be feeling at the moment. Today we're excerpting our favorite pieces from her third collection, launched at ICFF last month.
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A New Program Turns Your Walls Into a Work of Art

The brand-new Designtex Bespoke Surfaces line taps more than 30 contemporary artists — many of whom are up-and-coming talents who live near Designtex's Portland, Maine, manufacturing headquarters — to create imagery for custom surfaces in the built environment. In other words, to turn your walls in the ultimate work of art.
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We May Have Just Found the Holy Grail of Rugs

Launched at Matter during New York Design Week, these gorgeously sophisticated rugs designed by Studio Proba and Aelfie Oudghiri strike a much-sought-after — but rarely achieved — aesthetic balance: They're basic enough to go with almost anything, but stylish enough to anchor a well-designed room. The holy grail of rugs.
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Kathleen Whitaker Just Took Her Simple, Geometric Jewelry Up a Notch

Nearly a year ago, we profiled the Los Angeles jewelry designer Kathleen Whitaker, known for starting the whole staple and dot stud earring trend that went viral a couple years back, and previewed the limited-edition project she was starting in parallel to her base collection — one that would elevate those designs into more rarefied territory by adding semiprecious stones to their simple, minimalist geometries. Earlier this spring, she officially debuted the results in the form of the Stone Collection, and we are coveting every. single. piece.
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Sneak a Peek at our Collaboration with Designtex, Debuting at Collective Design!

When Collective Design invited Sight Unseen to create a special installation for the second year in a row, spotlighting new work by five independent American design studios on the rise, we knew we wanted a visual thread that might tie the collections together and add an extra dimension to the presentation. Enter Designtex, the Steelcase-owned manufacturer of textiles and wallcoverings, whose genius Made to Measure program we'd been eyeing a while, partnering as it does with some of our favorite artists, illustrators, and designers to create a totally customizable wallcoverings or textiles. For Collective Design, opening tomorrow, our five designers — Only Love Is Real, Chris Wolston, Studio Proba x Bower, and Fort Makers — will debut a collection of furniture and lighting set against a backdrop of custom wallpaper they’ve developed with Designtex especially for this show.
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The Architectural Ceramics of Andrew Molleur

Ceramicist Andrew Molleur — who's based in upstate New York and will be participating in our shoppable ceramics bar at this year's Sight Unseen OFFSITE — makes slip-cast vessels and tableware that draw on his interests in the formal language of buildings, and in Japanese and Scandinavian design aesthetics.
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Elisa Strozyk’s Ceramic Mirrors Are Simplicity at its Best

We love a crazy design experiment as much as the next guy, but lately we've been appreciating the pleasures of simplicity. There's something so nice about an understated yet surprising approach to an ordinary technique. Enter this collection of mirrors by Berlin designer Elisa Strozyk, which are accented with panels of swirly glazed ceramic. No tricks here, unless you count rotating and blowing on the clay discs to accentuate the marbling.
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The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today: Day 5

The Eindhoven-based Studio Mieke Meijer has been on our radar since way back in 2010, when the very first Dutch Invertuals exhibit in Milan showed the studio's amazing Bernd and Hilla Becher–inspired Gravel Plant, an architectural unit for storage and display. But this year's Space Frames installation in Ventura Lambrate was the most show-stopping the studio has ever put on, and in fact seems like a spiritual heir to that original project.
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