07.21.22

Travel

This Renovation of a Montauk Motel Retains Its Seaside Charm Even As It’s Become Eminently Instagrammable

When I heard that longtime friends of Sight Unseen Home Studios were spearheading the renovation of Daunt's Albatross, a 23-room motel in the center of town that's been in the same family since 1977, I was cautiously — but extremely — optimistic. That Home's design for the space would be beautiful was never in question — have you seen what this studio can do with tile? — but could the motel retain the quirky fishing village charm of old Montauk while still being someplace I'd want to obsessively Instagram?

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07.20.22

Sighted

Vaspaar, an Up-and-Coming Digital Design Gallery, Looks at Collecting As an Act of Preservation

For Kaisha Davierwalla and Andrea Grecucci, the Milan-based designers who run the digital gallery Vaspaar, the art of collecting amounts to more than simple acquisition. It’s not merely about possessing a beautiful material object — though Vaspaar offers plenty of those — but an act of preservation. Whether that’s preserving “something from the passing of time, or as a token of memory, a symbolic representation of an era, or the significance of an object and the emotions involved,” they explain, “we look at the act of collecting from both a deeply academic viewpoint and also from how personally we tend to get attached to these pieces.”

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07.17.22

Saturday Selects

Week of July 11, 2022

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an entirely blue exhibition, an absolutely wild daybed, and a strong contender for bathroom vanity of the year.

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07.14.22

Q+A

Axel Chay Channels Man Ray Through His Erotic Bent Metal Designs

“Not a bit phallic, a lot phallic!” laughs French designer Axel Chay when I suggest his lamp slightly resembles a penis. Based on a 1920s sculpture by Surrealist artist Man Ray, the playful pink design — which I later found out is actually called Phallus — and a sconce shaped like a nipple are the most blatantly erotic and humorous of Chay’s designs. Others more subtly exude sensuality through their curves or elements entangled with one another, but are finished in bright greens, yellows, and blues so could also be interpreted in a completely different way. 

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07.12.22

Q+A

Aimee McLaughlin On Starting a Ceramics Podcast (Pot-cast?) and Why Ceramics is Like Therapy

Though Aimee McLaughlin, of Objet Aimée, is drawn to the shapes, proportions, and details of antiquity, there’s nothing dusty about her ceramics. With a voracious curiosity and thoughtfulness, she re-contextualizes and refreshes classical forms: She’ll make the earthy naturalism of a speckled stoneware pot more romantic with twisted handles; render a pitcher that evokes fluted Greek columns in a satisfyingly deep, glossy green; or achieve a beautifully tonal black-on-black pattern of snake scales for the serpent-shaped arms that adorn a sinuous, double-headed vessel.

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08.24.20

Giveaway

Donate $10 For a Chance to Win a Chair, a Palm Springs Stay, and more in Our Design For Progress Fundraiser

This week, while we take a much-needed summer break on this site, we're harnessing the power of our platform on Instagram for a summer 2020 Design for Progress fundraiser, which will take the form of a series of five raffles raising money for five non-profits. Now through August 31, each $10 donation you make buys you one "ticket" to win a floor lamp donated by FLOS USA, a chair donated by Hay, a floor lamp donated by Lightology, a table lamp donated by ANDlight, or a two-night stay at a stunning mid-century house in Palm Springs.

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07.11.22

Q+A

Meet the Duo Making Psychedelic-Patterned Ceramic Tiles With a Machine They Built Themselves

Back in 2017, best friends Gilles de Brock and Jaap Giesen decided they wanted to make patterned ceramic tiles. They knew nothing about tiles or ceramics, but driven blindly by passion for the idea, they spent more than three years developing their own CNC glaze-printer — and accommodating its peculiarities within their design process — until they were finally able to launch Palet tiles earlier this year, offering an array of customizable tiles in bold colors that feature a signature psychedelic ombré look.

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07.10.22

Saturday Selects

Week of July 4, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a new line of tiles from a New York ceramic darling, design born from stormy weather, and a coffee table that gets serious with our incense habit.

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07.08.22

Shopping

From Ceramic Hair to Luncheon Meats to Sleek, Simple Porcelain, Tissue Box Covers Are Having a Renaissance

In a world where nearly every product has been upgraded and rendered hip through new, Gen-Z-approved packaging — from toilet paper to tampons to breakfast cereal — you'd think there would no further need for a throwback like the tissue box cover, which is meant to cloak your drugstore eyesores in a mantle better suited to your decor. And yet at the moment, in part because tissue boxes haven't really been redesigned and in part because they're usually kept out very much in public view, the tissue box cover seems to be having a tiny renaissance.

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07.07.22

Sighted

This Berlin-Based Furniture Brand Has All Your Color-Blocked Essentials Covered

Block colors, wavy pastels, and geometric glassware? Say no more. (Haaaave you seen our Pinterest?) Four years after founding his eponymous design brand, Berlin-based Moritz Bannach is expanding with a quartet of new offerings that build upon the bold simplicity of his first product: the Uno collection of dining/conference tables, which launched in 2018 and featured in our Saturday Selects. Bannach's latest design mimics Uno's strikingly simple planes of color and recalls the best of Memphis Design.

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07.05.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

Hanna Dis Whitehead’s Colorful, Constantly Mutating Objects Are On View in Iceland

An amalgamation of materials and what she refers to as “drawer ideas,” Icelandic artist and designer Hanna Dís Whitehead’s latest exhibition, "Spin," turns experimental objects on their head while bringing lost thoughts from her school years back to life. Presented by the Gerðarsafn Art Museum in Kópavogur, Iceland, the exhibition showcases a selection of colorful and exuberant pieces, from a wonderfully offbeat lamp adorned with geometric, hand-cut tiles and pine, to ecstatic, slumping goblets.

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07.02.22

Saturday Selects

Week of June 27, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a chair cast from a dried palm leaf, a series of lamps that affirm our suspicions that '60s Pop might be trending, and two can't-miss art exhibitions, including Erin Shirreff's digital take on mid-century abstraction (above).

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07.01.22

Fair Report

Europe’s Newest Design Fair Is In a Small City With a Big Focus on Locality and Sustainability

We were meant to attend and cover the second edition of Southern Sweden Design Days in Malmö last month, but since COVID had other plans for us, we had to catch up with the fair's program from afar instead, which included projects by studios like Malmö Upcycling Service, Lab La Bla, and Andréason & Leibel. In addition to being aesthetically pleasing, many of them featured a focus on local manufacturing, local crafts, and/or locally sourced recycled materials, which not every design fair can claim.

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