03.28.23

Shopping

With Our New Furniture and Lighting Collection, You Can Put Sight Unseen Into Your Projects (Or Your Home)

(Re-)Launching today, shop.sightunseen.com is now an online gallery of our full furniture and lighting collection, available either for easy online check-out, or to use as a living lookbook for your projects, with our dedicated sales person ready to work with you on trade orders and customizations. Our offerings will be constantly updated as we discover and write about new design series, and will always run the gamut from simpler staples to statement pieces that can add a megadose of personality to any interior.

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03.27.23

Current Obsession

Revisiting the Poetic Work of Japanese-Born, Italian-By-Choice Designer Kazuhide Takahama

If there's one chair most design enthusiasts know by Kazuhide Takahama, it’s the Tulu. You’re likely familiar with its sled base composed of slim, welded-steel rods and its square upholstered backrest that seems to be floating independently in the center of a metal frame. It’s popping up more and more — from eBay listings to frescoed palazzos in Italy — and it’s no wonder. It’s a beautiful piece — subtle, minimal, and formally innovative for the late 1960s when it was designed — but despite the Tulu’s popularity, the rest of Takahama’s work is not nearly as recognizable. But as the casual collector becomes more and more aware of his work, we’ve decided it’s high time to take a deep dive into the work of Kazuhide Takahama.

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03.26.23

Saturday Selects

Week of March 20, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: layered neutrals in a classic Haussmann apartment in Paris, an all-female design exhibition in New York, and the best Wright design auction we've seen in years.

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03.22.23

Sighted

This Textured, Minimalist Jewelry Showroom Was Once a London Pub

Over the past decade — in case you missed it — minimalist interior design has drastically shifted gears. Once a cold, sterile, and frankly boring style, it’s gradually warmed up and become imbued with all sorts of textures and depth. The latest convert to this pared-back but incredibly rich style is London interior designer Hollie Bowden, who recently designed the new showroom for British jewelry and ceramics brand ​​Completedworks.

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03.20.23

Interiors

The Moody Textures — and Glass Blocks — of This California Restaurant Set the Vibe

Los Angeles-based designer and 2023 American Design Hot List-er Jialun Xiong has a strong background in interiors, architecture, and furniture design, all of which is on full display at her latest project, the new City of Industry restaurant 19 Town. Xiong went for “lavish restraint” in this 4,200-square-foot space, divided into dining and lounge areas that are each subtly well-defined yet work together as a whole.

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11.03.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

Jonathan Muecke’s New Works Are a Familiar Enigma

Jonathan Muecke doesn't seem particularly interested in siting his work on the spectrum between design, art, and architecture, so we won't do it for him either. But the interesting thing about his new works for Volume Gallery is that they're described in the exhibition materials as "unknowable" but also "open to ongoing interpretation" — which, in some paradoxical way, makes them more knowable?

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03.18.23

Saturday Selects

Week of March 13, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: essential spring attire from Marimekko, a tonal terracotta Asian diner in Byron Bay, and a lamp that looks like a stack of giant Malteasers.

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03.16.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

These Mysterious Glass Assemblages, On View at Marta, Were Inspired By Modernist Buildings and Corporate Architecture

Over the years, Jonah Takagi has worked with all kinds of materials, but it's glass that has preoccupied him throughout five summer residencies in the south of France, at the International Glass and Visual Arts Research Center, or CIRVA, in Marseilles. For Takagi, the experience yielded not only an unexpected love for Marseilles but also an ever-evolving series of mesmerizing angular vessels that reference, in their shape and in their texture, the Brutalist architecture of Kenzo Tange or Le Corbusier. His latest selection, a series of dusky, painterly assemblages, is on view through April 22 at Marta gallery in Los Angeles in a solo show called "Brut Vessels."

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03.15.23

Sighted

The New Hennepin Made x Victoria Sass Lighting Collection Wants You to Experience the Full Spectrum of Emotion

When two longstanding Minneapolis creative forces — Jackson Schwartz, head of the lighting company Hennepin Made and Victoria Sass, founder of interior design studio Prospect Refuge — team up to create a new lighting collection, you can expect the results to be thoughtful conversation starters. Not simply in the obvious way of getting your attention and eliciting a reaction, of course — though their Ontologia series does just that, with one-of-a-kind, handblown glass globes in various sculptural permutations composed of cords, metal, and mahogany spheres. But there’s a deeper form of conversation that Sass envisioned for her first foray into lighting design, and that Schwartz made a reality: a sort of ongoing dialogue, a two-way relationship between the people living with these lights and the lights themselves, which really do seem to have distinct personalities and moods.

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03.14.23

Fair Report

A Barbie Pink Living Room, A Patchwork Metal Cabinet: Everything We Loved From the 2023 Collectible Fair in Brussels

Consistently one of our favorite fairs on the design circuit, the sixth edition of Collectible opened last week in a new venue in Brussels, and even from afar we were struck by the fair's continued push towards experimentation. In a new section called Dialogue, galleries were invited to show works from the '80s and '90s in conversation with more contemporary pieces (probably our favorite exhibition trope, tbh); another new section, called Architect <=> Designer, showcased only work by architects and interior designers, while a third, called New Garde, featured the best recently launched galleries and collectives.

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03.11.23

Saturday Selects

Week of March 6, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a show of more than 50 lamps by up-and-coming artists and designers in Brooklyn, the "most Instagrammable" restaurant interior in Tbilisi, and a home in Australia that makes the case for green-on-green-on-green (above).

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03.08.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

Nadia Yaron Embraced Chaos — In the Form of Chainsaws — To Create This Tranquil Exhibition

In a new show at Francis Gallery in Los Angeles, Nadia Yaron presents the body of work that emerged from a burgeoning love affair with her natural surroundings in Hudson, New York. “I work mostly outside from spring to autumn and am immersed in nature,” she shares. “This show is a tribute, a way to say thank you to these elements for their beauty and wisdom and all the joy they bring to our lives.” From her studio, a repurposed 19th century barn, Yaron used chainsaws and grinders to produce a series of sculptures of striking tranquility. It is not a peaceful exchange of energy. But, she says, “out of the chaos comes some quiet.”

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03.07.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

The Latest Iconic Italian Sofa Reissue, Bellini’s 1972 Le Mura, Has Arrived in the US

First came the return of conversation pits. Then came the resurgence of that other '70s-era seating mainstay — the ultra-comfortable, oft-squishy, sometimes-modular sofa, conceived by an array of (mostly) Italian designers, and built for conversation, intimacy, and that ephemeral but much sought-after quality of "conviviality." The trend only picked up steam during the pandemic, spurred by our collective desire to entertain at home. Now, alongside a slew of other sofa reissues throughout the industry, comes a Mario Bellini masterpiece back onto the market: The Le Mura sofa, first released in 1972 and reissued last year by Tacchini, will get its U.S. debut this week at the New York design gallery M2L, in a special presentation on view though March 27.

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