Week of August 3, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a ceramic kitchen collection perfect for your cottagecore tablescape, a single statement earring we'll soon be rocking on our Zoom calls, and yet another interior that visualizes our collective desire to crawl into a cave and pretend that 2020 never happened.
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Each Piece By French Designer Baptiste Lanne is an Ode to Nature, His Biggest Inspiration

After almost 10 years working for acclaimed studios like Habitat and Philippe Starck in Paris, French designer Baptiste Lanne felt a longing to get away from the screen and 3D modelling software. It was a trip to Japan to visit some woodworkers’ workshops that influenced his decision to make a living out of his personal affinities. Today he hand-carves impossibly refined design objects out of rough hunks of wood as if they’re as malleable as clay.
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Tired of Hearing About Masks? Not Once You See this Antwerp Duo’s Incredible Creations

Clouds blowing swirls of wind, gentlemen with fin-de-siècle mustaches, finely dressed generals with elaborate headpieces — such are the lost-in-time characters depicted in "An Entrance to Mention: the Park Pardon Principles," a 52-page book about a fictional park and its inhabitants that Dutch illustrators Bloeme van Bon and Geran Knol created together in 2014. Last year Knol and van Bon began turning the characters into one-of-a-kind papier-mâché masks, and today they've launched the latest edition in the ongoing (and consistently sold-out) series.
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Week of May 21, 2018

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: fresh renderings from Barcelona’s OFFF Festival, a gallery exhibition of a design-world darling, and the 80’s-inspired HQ Of a cute candle company.
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Week of July 27, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an unsung ceramicist gets his due at David Kordansky, Cold Picnic releases American Gigolo-inspired rugs, and ZZ Driggs makes the case for never buying furniture again.
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These Blocky Pastel Pieces By Studio Nucleo Will Make You Do a Double Take

When we first saw these pieces by the Turin-based collective Studio Nucleo, we thought they were miniatures. Between the pastel colors and the blocky Tetris aesthetic, we understood them, at first, to be maquettes, studies for a larger project. But after looking twice, judging them by the details of the garage they were photographed in (and, more recently, seeing the pieces with a human for scale) we realized they were the real deal — called Primitive, the pieces represent the 10th anniversary of a collection originally created in all white and now re-imagined in color for an ongoing exhibition at Nilufar Gallery in Milan.
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Harvey Bouterse’s New Ceramic Lamp is a Study in Contrasting Textures

It's basically our job here at Sight Unseen to follow the career trajectory of up-and-coming designers, and in our professional capacity, we've come to realize that most ceramicists follow a certain path: First come the smalls, like cups and mugs and plates and vases. The next step is usually lamps — think of Natalie Weinberger's pleated clay shades, Workaday Handmade's listing table lamps, and BZIPPY's pyramid-shaped bases. Today, we're featuring one of the first lamps by Belgium-based Harvey Bouterse.
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A Former Dancer, Virginie Hucher Uses Her Whole Body to Sketch Out Paintings in the Earth

French artist Virginie Hucher’s paintings begin in the middle of nowhere. Through a meeting of performance and land art, she uses her whole body to carve large symbols into the sand, the snow, or the clay alongside a river bed with a stick as her only tool. She then documents her process in film and photographs, so she can appropriate the gestures when she begins to recreate the forms in paint back in her studio.
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Week of July 20, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week was all about organic curves, from a scallop-backed sofa reminiscent of Axel Einar Hjorth, to an artistic shelving unit by an Australian up-and-comer, to a new series of plaster tables, to a chic lamp with wavy handles (above).
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A New Independent Design Label Launches in the South of France

The tiny town of Hyères in the South of France is only 50 square miles, but has long had an outsized presence on the contemporary design map as the home of the arts foundation Villa Noailles and its annual Design Parade festival. The festival was canceled this year due to the pandemic — more on that next week! — but two young Parisians have managed to fill in the gap with an exhibition called Été Super, which is serving as the launch of their independent design brand 13Desserts and its permanent showroom in a former Hyères skate shop.
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