07.05.23

Interiors

This Kelly Wearstler–Designed Cocktail Bar Boasts an Enviable Art Collection

With additions like Hauser + Wirth and the Ace hotel, downtown Los Angeles long ago ascended from commercial wasteland to must-visit destination. But this status was perhaps fully cemented when the Proper hotel chain opened its Kelly Wearstler–designed property in the neighborhood in October 2021. Her fourth hotel for the brand — and her second in LA, following the Santa Monica Proper, with its epic and oft-Instagrammed chair porn lobby — the hotel recently added an intimate cocktail bar, called Dahlia, to its offering — and, whoo, it’s a stunner.

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07.01.23

Saturday Selects

Week of June 26, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Reconsidering the color purple, delving into reincarnation (we promise it's design-related), and wondering about the economics of small-scale independent design brands in the face of Amazon-esque retailers. 

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06.30.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Design Gallery in Berlin Gives a Long-Overdue Platform to Up-and-Coming German Studios

Despite being a longtime haven for artists and creatives — with its (formerly) cheap rents and surplus of accessible studio and exhibition spaces — Berlin never really made any sort of cohesive mark on the contemporary furniture-design world. That's why I got so excited recently when I heard about Forma, a new pop-up design gallery on the Spree river showing mostly contemporary work by mostly German or Germany-based designers like Nazara Lazaro, Carsten in der Elst, and Haus Otto — as well as why its founder, Vanessa Heepen, almost didn’t go through with it.

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06.29.23

Sight Unseen Collection

This Design Duo Makes the Understated Furniture They Couldn’t Find Anywhere Else

“The pursuit of approachable everyday objects, put together using readily available materials and simple fabrication techniques,” is, it turns out, much harder than it sounds. For visual designer Masha Osorio and architect Christian Kotzamanis, the search was, in the end, futile. So they decided as the newly-formed Mock Studio to design and produce the simple, reductionist pieces they’d been looking for themselves. 

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06.28.23

Interiors

Heard of Quiet Luxury? This Newly Renovated French Riviera Hotel Epitomizes the Trend

The French Riviera, long a playground for the rich and famous, is undeniably chic, both in its physical structures and its natural beauty. And perched atop Cap d’Antibes, a rocky promontory between Cannes and Nice that was used as a backdrop in both Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief and Jacques Deray’s La Piscine, is a hotel that embodies that elegance in the most nonchalant way: The Cap D’Antibes Beach Hotel, recently reimagined by Belgian architect Bernard Dubois, a frequent collaborator with Brussels’ Maniera Gallery, who is known for his beautiful, brutally efficient approach to interiors.

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10.06.20

Q+A

DS & Durga Set Themselves Apart By Appealing to More Than Just Our Sense of Smell

"Perfume is armchair travel." This year, as we find ourselves collectively and forcibly grounded, DS & Durga’s tagline has taken on a new significance: Fragrance’s transporting ability, whether it be to carry us back in time to a familiar place or offer a portal to a destination we’ve never experienced, is more powerful and desirable than ever.

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06.26.23

Fair Report

15 Things We Loved From Copenhagen’s 3 Days of Design

3 Days of Design in Copenhagen is a growing fixture on the design calendar — so much so that we recently heard murmurings that the show is considering changing its name to expand beyond its temporal limitations. But for now, let's look back on the ninth edition, which took place over three days in June and pointed to the event becoming an even bigger spectacle in years to come.

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06.24.23

Saturday Selects

Week of June 19, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: 12 designers reinterpret the classic piggy bank, Martino Gamper floods a New York gallery with 700 hooks and vases, and a South African designer interprets 1920s glamour through the lens of a classic TV period drama (above).

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06.22.23

Sight Unseen Presents

Sight Unseen is Launching a Best in Show Award at Greenhouse, Stockholm’s Emerging Design Showcase: Apply Today!

If you're a longtime reader of Sight Unseen, you probably have some idea about our hierarchy of design fairs — and, as such, you may know that the Stockholm Furniture Fair ranks, year after year, at the very top of our list. We've been attending Stockholm off and on since 2008, and we've long been fans of the fair's emerging design showcase, called Greenhouse, which launched in 2003 and functions like a more curated version of Milan's Salone Satellite, open as it is to designers around the world. We've scouted major talents there in the past, it's certainly the place to be if you're at all interested in catching the eye of tastemakers, journalists, and — not least of all — potential manufacturers for your products and interior designers who might like to spec your work. That's why we are thrilled to announce that in 2024, we will be launching a partnership with the Stockholm Furniture Fair, running February 6-10: A Sight Unseen x Greenhouse Best in Show award, judged by yours truly, that will offer even more visibility and a greater platform for your practice.

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06.21.23

Sighted

This Campaign for a Sailboat-Inspired Sofa Transports You to a 100-Year-Old Sailing School in Venice

The Vela, designed for Saba Italia by Zanellato/Bortotto, is an interesting take on the puffy sofa: It's soft and cushy yet somehow still crisp, with arms that taper to a subtle point and striking diagonal tufting seams that gently reign in its voluminousness. That contrast is intentional, reflecting the inspiration for the sofa, which also lent it its name ("sail" in English): "We both love the sea and have always been fascinated by the unfurled sails blown by the wind near the Venice lagoon," says Daniele Bortotto. For its new campaign, Saba sent photographer Mattia Balsamini to photograph it at the Compagnia della Vela, a nautical school founded in 1911 on the island of San Giorgio.

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06.20.23

Sighted

This Spiky, Globular Blown-Glass Lighting Benefits Marginalized Communities

When your cute, blown-glass cups, vessels, plates, and ornaments start to catch the eye of designers like Kelly Wearstler, there’s really only one thing to do: Go bigger. So that’s exactly what Grace Whiteside of the New York design brand Sticky recently did, creating a collection of larger pieces using the same glass-blowing techniques that have defined the studio's signature sculptural style, and opting to turn the pieces into a range of lighting designs that are just as whimsical as Sticky's selection of smaller works.

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06.19.23

How to Live With Objects

“The Willingness For Something to be Imperfect” — Inside the Mexico City Home of Rodman Primack & Rudy Weissenberg

Rodman Primack and Rudy Weissenberg are all over the map, both literally—with houses in Guatemala, Mexico City, and New York—and figuratively, with multiple professional interests that ultimately converge around contemporary design. Primack is a former director of Design Miami and currently runs the textile and interiors studio RP Miller, while Weissenberg, a former television exec, now works in real estate development. Together, the pair founded the design gallery AGO Projects, which is just a short drive from their colorful Mexico City apartment, featured here.

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06.17.23

Saturday Selects

Week of June 12, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: acid-house Victorian-floral bedding by Jonathan Saunders, a fun new striped bench from Spain, and lots of summer travel porn in the form of two restaurants and two hotels in four different sun-soaked locales.

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