02.11.25

Sighted

Haddou-Dufourcq’s Debut Furniture Collection Takes Cues From Both Modernist and Classical Architecture

Parisian interior design duo Kim Haddou and Florent Dufourcq, of Studio Haddou-Dufourcq, have a way of evoking the past — formally, materially — to reinvigorate it with a new energy. See: the calming elegance of their design for Hotel Lilou in Hyères, France, or the textured and layered yet airy city residences and retail spaces they’ve envisioned. They've applied that same magic to their debut furniture collection, Trama, which launched this month exclusively for Monde Singulier.

01.16.25

Sighted

The Debut Collection From Studio Hanrahan Melds Ancient Forms and Contemporary Aesthetics

One of the best things about Sight Unseen turning 15 this year is having an archive at our fingertips by which to chart the growth of certain artists who have captured our interest over the years. Take Ryan Hanrahan, an Australian designer whose work we first published more than a decade ago. Hanrahan has been involved in several different ventures since then, including Addition Studios, a ritual-focused wellness brand he sold at the tail end of COVID. But looking at each one — particularly in the context of Text the Sun, the first collection he's releasing under his new studio name, Studio Hanrahan — you see the obvious through lines: the geometric shapes, the love for elemental materials such as marble and metal, the melding of ancient forms and contemporary aesthetics, an abiding interest in waterjet–cut perforations. Hanrahan calls Text the Sun "a playful recalibration" of those interests, and the results are lovely.

01.08.25

American Design Hot List

The 2024 American Design Hot List, Part III

This week we announced our 12th annual American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s editorial award for the names to know now in American design. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the third group of Hot List designers here (including recent RISD grad Michelle Jiaxin Huang, whose futuristic works in steel are pictured above).

01.07.25

American Design Hot List

The 2024 American Design Hot List, Part II

This week we announced our 12th annual American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s editorial award for the names to know now in American design. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the second group of Hot List designers here (including interior designer David Lucido, whose Brooklyn townhouse project is seen above).

12.09.24

Sighted

Interni Venosta’s Surprise Debut in a Milanese Plaster Workshop Was One of the Best Design Moments of 2024. The Collection Keeps Getting Better.

Interni Venosta wowed us when their debut collection launched earlier this year in a plaster workshop in Milan — it was one of our favorite collections from 2024 — and the collection's latest additions continue to impress. An independent project from Milan darlings Emiliano Salci and Britt Moran, who founded their architectural and design studio Dimorestudio over twenty years ago, Interni Venosta exudes an Italian — specifically Milanese — refinement that’s at once avant-garde and classic. Striking in its elegant proportions, this is furniture that stands out in an interior but also feels as if it were always at home there.

10.16.24

Sight Unseen Collection

This California Designer’s Steely Minimalism Was Inspired by Japanese Architecture and the Light & Space Movement

It's a common conundrum for creatives: knowing exactly what you want for your own space, but, more often than not, finding it does not exist. California-based designer Orlando Pippig began producing furniture for this very reason, without any formal training, to create a home filled with pieces he actually loved. Eight years later, something of an accidental furniture designer, he’s amassed a collection of striking minimalist designs — several of which we sell through our own Sight Unseen Collection — and he continues to expand his range of “usable sculptures” through experiments with materials, scale, and proportion.

10.02.24

Fair Report

11 Things We Loved at September’s Paris Design Shows

Earlier this month, at Paris Design Week and its concurrent shows, we were especially drawn toward work that explores material richness and depth — the use of upholstery to add dimensionality, tactility, and coziness, as well as furniture that highlights the grain and various textures of wood. Attention to detail is seasonless but there’s something about the change in the air, the way autumnal light shifts your perspective and what it attunes you to. Below, 11 of our favorite designers, launches, collars, and more from the week.

09.19.24

Sighted

Step Into the World of a Beloved Australian Furniture Brand at Its New Space in Sydney

There’s no denying that Instagram has been a source of inspiration and connection — especially in the design world — but it’s also impossible to escape the flattening quality of the social media scroll. Australia’s Ellison Studios, whose furniture takes the best of the '70s and makes it refreshingly modern, had long been envisioning a move, or an extension, from the digital realm to a physical one, but a traditional showroom didn’t feel quite right. So when an apartment in an iconic Sydney landmark became available, an idea took shape: The Rental. For the next six months, the studio is bringing their atmospheric point of view and the imaginative world-building of a mood board to life, creating a tangible, tactile space you can step into and even inhabit for a time.

09.12.24

Up and Coming

A Speaker That Looks Like a Sculpture, and So Much More, From a New Australian Design Talent

There’s a raw simplicity to Australian designer Tom Fereday’s work that comes from applying simple gestures to great effect. The majority of his pieces are sculpted or constructed from a single material, and have one, carefully considered defining feature. Take his Cor light, a pillar of travertine with fileted corners, from which a curved slice is pared away to reveal a hollow core and a light source that glows from within. Or his Cove Lounge, a chair with a slender metal frame that — rather than wrapping around the backrest — elegantly disappears into the curved panel on one side and reemerges on the other. “I try to add innovation in the pieces from a perspective where we might look, for example, at articulating engineering details with natural materials,” Fereday says. This approach to simplified and sophisticated contemporary form-making is proving to be a hit with design lovers worldwide.

07.25.24

Sighted

This Parisian Studio’s New Collection Turns Grandmotherly Flourishes, Like Tassels and Cords, Into Something Decidedly Modern

Imagine a place in the Mediterranean — where North Africa meets Europe meets the Middle East — and a time that can’t quite be determined, and you’ll get a feel for the latest collection from the Parisian architecture and design studio Ebur. Racha Guttierez and Dahila Hojeij Deleuze, who founded Ebur in 2020, conjure their respective cultures and histories in their designs: The two of them grew up in Côte D’Ivoire — Ebur means ivory in Latin — and the childhood friends spent their summers in Lebanon before going on to study architecture in Paris. Ebur’s first release of furnishings, last year, drew inspiration from their early memories of the seaside. This second act builds on that and continues an elegant exploration of form and material.

05.30.24

Fair Report

Inspired by Italian Modernism, the Opulence of Paris, or a Brutalist Viennese Church, These Three Up-and-Coming Design Studios Wowed in Milan

Before we leave the spring design fair season entirely, we'd be remiss if we didn't call out three of our favorite up-and-coming studios from Milan. Milan Design Week this year was, as usual, awash with global brands whose impressive, big-budget presentations took up the majority of space around the city — not to mention air time on Instagram. But that doesn’t mean that the emerging and independent designers weren’t represented as well — they just required a bit more searching among the noise.

05.01.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

How Should We Live Now? In Milan, RISD’s Objects May Shift Exhibition Offered a Woozy Vision for Our Domestic Future

As a general rule, Milan thrives on spectacle. Some of the most memorable Salone exhibitions in recent years have relied on elaborate scenography, from Established & Sons in 2010 — when the British furniture brand filled a former Jai Alai court with walled "rooms" made from stacks of untreated tulipwood — to 2018, when Hermès constructed, over the course of three weeks inside a Milanese museum, seven towering pavilions made from thousands of jewel-toned zellige tiles. (Ask me what was inside those pavilions? Zero recollection.) So how is a student-run exhibition, from a newly founded design course exhibiting in Milan for the first time, supposed to compete? That was the conundrum facing 20 Rhode Island School of Design students, who debuted the conceptually-driven show Objects May Shift at Salone Satellite in Milan last month.