01.25.24

Sighted

Technology and Craft Meet in Tino Seubert’s New Aluminum and Glass Works

London-based designer Tino Seubert has a way of juxtaposing the industrial and the natural to create a coherent whole — even, or perhaps especially, as these elements clash and contrast. He’s been working in this vein, mixing traditional craftwork with technological sleekness and using unexpected combinations of materials and forms, since 2014, when we first spotted him at London's Royal College of Art, lacquering galvanized steel to brilliant effect. Different iterations have followed, as have pieces like a side table of bent rattan and brushed aluminum and his Corrugation lights, which combine ash veneer and aluminum tubes into rippling yet static sine curves. With Ferric Glass and Cosmos, his two new collections exhibited at in BAM Practice in Berlin this past November, Seubert has pushed these juxtapositions even further.
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01.23.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

An Exhibition of 100 Hooks Has Us Totally Rethinking Our Wall-Mounting Game

The humble coat hook might be the most simple and effective design humans ever invented. It solves the problem so well that it’s often taken for granted (as most genius inventions are) and little attention is paid to its ingenuity, because it just works. Well, humble no more — the hook is celebrated in all its weird and wonderful variations in an exhibition called 100 Hooks presented by the estate of American sculptor JB Blunk. A hundred versions — by names like Jasper Morrison and Ilse Crawford as well as young artists and designers from across the US, UK, Europe, Mexico, and Japan — are all designed, at least nominally, for hanging clothing, towels, bags, hats, art, or whatever else needs storing or displaying. 
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01.22.24

Interiors

Steal This Tip: Rich Velvet Curtains to Give Your Interior a Boudoir-Like Vibe

When it comes to curtains, the bigger the statement, the better. (See pretty much every photo shoot Sight Unseen has ever done.) Bold and heavy textiles might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but they can undeniably make a space more dramatic, cozy, and welcoming. And at Locke am Platz, a newly opened aparthotel in Zurich, they’re everywhere: ruby red drapes framing the headboards; Modernist-patterned fabric wrapping the guest-room living area walls; warm terracotta textiles encircling the lobby; and honey yellow portières dividing stations in the restaurant. The effect, created by London-based Sella Concept, is one of instant warm fuzziness in every space, encouraging guests who’ve booked two nights — or two weeks — to feel right at home.
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01.20.24

Saturday Selects

Week of January 15, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a Paris apartment with a stellar stainless-steel kitchen (again!), a hotel with rooms by 14 different designers, aluminum furniture cast from waste polystyrene, and a few early highlights from Maison & Objet and IMM Cologne.
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01.17.24

Interiors

This Holiday Rental in London is a Treasure Trove of 1970s and ’80s Furniture

Have you ever found the perfect piece of furniture, only to realize that you can’t fit it into your apartment because the pass-throughs are too narrow? For Hollie Bowden, access was particularly problematic during her renovation of a one-bedroom holiday rental apartment in London, which is located on the fifth and sixth floors of a Victorian building in Covent Garden and reached via a narrow and winding staircase. Which items could she bring up safely, without having to first hack them to bits? Luckily, she found a modular leather sofa bed by De Sede, one of many vintage finds from the '70s and '80s that give the sunny yellow space a retro-futurist feel, in a vibe we're calling High-Tech Country Kitchen.
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01.15.24

Up and Coming

Born in Philly and Based in London, Andrew Pierce Scott Has a Knack for Turning Discards Into Drama

Metamorphosis is at the heart of what Andrew Pierce Scott does. The London-based American designer has a talent for taking leftovers and discards and turning them into sculptural metal furniture and objects or an evocative textile still-life. In Scott’s hands, recycled sheet steel becomes a lamp with a darkened yet almost iridescent finish; fabric scraps become a plate of oysters and glasses of wine that make you immediately wish for the pleasures of good company and a good meal.
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01.13.24

Saturday Selects

Week of January 8, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Tim Teven's excellent iridescent furniture, Meaghan Roddy's inspiring textile exhibition at Volume Gallery in Chicago, and did anyone else not know about Greta Garbo's ties to Swedish design?! 
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01.11.24

Interiors

An Important New Residential Building in Philly — With Plans for Other Locales — Focuses On Community and the Arts

If you’re an artist who’s tired of schlepping to your studio, why not move into this new Philadelphia residential building — designed by architecture firm Leong Leong — rent one of the six studios available downstairs, and shorten your commute to a mere elevator ride? Called Ray, the building is part of a new initiative by Garage magazine founder Dasha Zhukova to, as the building's founders put it, "make art and design a part of everyday life."
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01.09.24

Interiors

Tapestries and Textiles Give This Madrid Apartment a Modern Moorish Flavor

"Just renovated, but with no charm or personality” — judging from the time we've spent browsing Zillow, this is the precise way we'd describe so many homes that have hit the market in recent years. So it was for this 2,000-square-foot holiday apartment in Madrid, which was recently refreshed by local studio Casa Josephine for a young American-Kuwaiti businesswoman — who owns Ecru, a lifestyle brand based in Kuwait and India — and her family. Throughout the home, the designers have deftly blended a mix of influences, from Moorish to the Middle Eastern, to create a space filled with rich, contemporary textiles in colors that are unmistakably Spanish.
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01.08.24

Travel

At Three Design Hotels, A Sense of Place Rooted in the Local Environment

Hotels are often transitory, sometimes liminal, spaces. But three recently opened or newly renovated ones are rooted in their local environments, taking design cues from their surroundings and creating a distinctive atmosphere. You’re not just anywhere, or even in-between, you’re there: in Fukuoka City, Japan at Hotel Il Palazzo, in Tomales Bay, California at Lodge at Marconi (above), and at Otro Oaxaca, you’re firmly in the southern Mexican city.
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12.21.23

Interiors

The Sight Unseen Art Kitchen, Plus Nine Other Incredible Rooms We Created For the SU x Lightology Country House

Upstate New York is one of our favorite places — close in proximity to one of the world's greatest cities, but so very far away in every other respect. In September, we rented a truck and drove up there, to a picturesque town outside Hudson, excited to do something we love doing almost as much as all of those other activities: styling a photo shoot inside a gorgeous home. For our second collaboration with the online lighting and furniture retailer Lightology, we traded the sleek minimalism and desert sun of Palm Springs for the charm of a (recently renovated) 1980s woodland escape — one whose blue floors, vaulted ceilings, and circular windows served as the perfect backdrop for the Sight Unseen x Lightology take on a country home.
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