Week of May 22, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: The newest, coziest addition to Bower's Melt collection, new housewares from a beloved shoe brand, and the first furniture line from one of our favorite London interior designers.
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The Best of New York Design Week 2023, Part II

Part II of our New York Design Week roundup — the second and final in our coverage, though we technically had so much content we could have easily done three — is mostly an accounting of the more straightforward side of design week, from group exhibitions — like the launch of the Mexican and Latin American design–focused retailer Omet and the latest Radiator Show, which upends the idea of comfort at home — to sophisticated new collection presentations by brands like Atelier de Troupe and Orior. Plus, a handful of interesting collabs, and a birds-eye view of ICFF.
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The Best of New York Design Week 2023, Part I

At the beginning of this month's New York design mania, I joked that while I've complained in the past that New York Design Week was too drawn out (it ballooned to nearly a month last year), this year felt too compressed, a kind of karmic retribution for my grumbling. How could we possibly see everything, and so close to Milan when we'd just gone through the same routine? But perhaps that sense of urgency was exactly what New York needed. (And, in truth, the "week" stretched to almost two). Because somewhere along the way, I realized I was having a significant amount of fun. Last year, we all agreed that "New York Design Week was back," etc. etc., and we saw wonderful work in beautiful locations. But this year something else returned to the city. New York got a little weird again — in a good way. After the jump, take a spin through some of our favorites, then come back tomorrow for another round of highlights, including our picks from this year's ICFF!
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On the Hunt for Objects? Shop Our Book IRL at Nordstrom’s Manhattan Flagship

In our book, How to Live With Objects, we talk a lot about how rewarding it is to slowly and thoughtfully surround yourself with unique objects you feel a connection to, hence why we also caution against the department-store mentality of treating your interior as a series of empty spaces you should fill all at once. But when the department store itself becomes the place to find those unique objects, that advice obviously no longer applies — case in point, our new pop-in inside Nordstrom's midtown Manhattan flagship store, where now through June 17, you can shop nearly 100 truly special handmade, one-of-a-kind, and vintage objects from some of the makers and dealers featured in the book (as well as the actual book).
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Two Days Left to See Our Sight Unseen Collection Show, Featuring Work by 23 Designers, in New York City

New York Design Week is in full swing, and while we'll be featuring a round-up of all of the excellent things we've seen later this week, today we're putting a spotlight on our own collection, which is on view in New York through Wednesday. The show features 23 designers and studios from our newly launched Sight Unseen Collection, for which we chose furniture, lighting, and objects from a stable of emerging and mid-career designers from around the world — all of which can be ordered directly through Sight Unseen.
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Caroline Denervaud’s Paintings Are a Dialogue Between Art and Dance

It was French artist Yves Klein who, in 1960, first used women’s bodies as canvases, covering them in blue paint to study the impressions they made on paper, while an orchestra played on. Swiss-born multi-disciplinary artist Caroline Denervaud’s vibrant, abstract artworks recall Klein's pioneering performative work, and also comprise the emotionally raw, humanistic approach to movement as seen in the works of visionary German dance choreographer Pina Bausch. “She was the first person who inspired me,” recalls Denervaud.
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Ben Willett Joins the Sight Unseen Collection With Warm Wood Furniture That Channels 1970s and 80s Europe

You could say that moving into furniture design was something of a pandemic project for Ben Willett. At the start of the shutdown, he and his wife, chef and cookbook author Molly Baz, were on vacation in California and decided to stay there, eventually making a permanent move from a 700-square-foot New York City apartment to a house on the far east side of Los Angeles. With space came the need to fill it, along with a new West Coast perspective; the result is a collection still in the works but previewed in the images here, with pieces like the WS-Shorty credenza, a beauty in Douglas fir that debuted last night at our Sight Unseen Collection show in New York.
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Danny Kaplan Wants His New Furniture Collection, Made From Clay and Oak, to Appear Built By Nature

Danny Kaplan is a ceramicist, but he’s also a bit of a wizard, conjuring pieces that somehow manage to feel earthy and ancient — as if they’ve always existed — yet also exceedingly current and fresh. “A lot of my forms were born from looking at Etruscan ceramics and thinking about midcentury ones as well,” says the New York–based designer. “I love the idea of blending these things in an organic way where it feels like my pieces are almost built by nature,” their geometry and angles always slightly relaxed or imperfect. This especially applies to his latest collection, Brick, which is launching as part of our Sight Unseen Collection today, both online and in NYC through May 25 at Voltz Clarke Gallery on the Lower East Side.
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Frangere stained glass lighting

Each Item in This Stained Glass Lighting Collection is Like a Piece of Jewelry for Your Home

Carina Webb’s parents built the house she grew up in close to the sea in a small suburb of Auckland, New Zealand. Her dad, an engineer, believed that every home should have a small workshop in which to make things, so naturally the house was filled with handmade objects alongside those collected or inherited over the years. “From a young age I was taught the value of handmade, quality craftsmanship, and the sentimentality of objects,” she says. These are the values on which she bases her Auckland design studio Frangere, whose debut Fun Guy collection we fell in love with earlier this year — and which we'll be launching a piece of at our Sight Unseen Collection show this Thursday in New York.
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Week of May 8, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: New York’s buzziest new restaurant, a book about Noguchi’s love for Greece, more “Neolithic-core,” and an amazing ring with a famous designer’s nose on it.
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Meet the NYC Art Collective Who Brought Their Explorations of “Vaguely Asian” Identities to Milan

Comprising four New York City–based artists, the collective CFGNY employs an unruly creative output to assert their own lived experience of being what they call “vaguely Asian” in America. The group recently staged an exhibition called Emporium during last month’s Milan furniture fair — presented by Italian leather brand Marséll and curated by PIN-UP magazine’s Felix Burrichter — that employs cardboard, porcelain, and leather to further complicate this idea of a blurry Asian-ness. The sculptures created with Marséll especially for the show, like leather-wrapped replicas of architectural details from Milan’s Chinatown, elucidate contact points between cultures and identity groups.
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This London Exhibition Highlights the Particular Pleasure of Mixing New and Historical Works

If you've read our book, you probably know by now that mixing vintage and contemporary pieces is one of the many keys to our heart. So we were excited last month to see that the East London–based gallery and design shop Spazio Leone — who we know primarily as a purveyor of wonderfully Postmodern and classic collectible pieces — was presenting new works by the Eindhoven-based Italian designer Francesco Pace of Tellurico, alongside some of the more delightful objects drawn from Spazio Leone's collection.
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Meet the Belgian Designer Pushing the Limits of Stained Glass

The Stained Glass Lights collection from Belgian designer Maarten de Ceulaer — in which illuminated sheets or cylinders of handmade, mouth-blown glass essentially become three-dimensional abstract paintings — is a beautiful balance of control and chaos. While the colors are deliberately chosen and it’s possible to guide the fabrication process to some extent, there’s no way to wholly calibrate the outcome with this material; each piece is a bit of an experiment.
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