02.11.14

Sighted

Eskayel’s Watercolor-Like New Wallpaper Collection

You know those Instagram feeds where it seems like the person is always off on some fantastic holiday in a remote locale? In our feed, that person is Shanan Campanaro, the multitalented artist and designer behind Eskayel. The San Diego native calls Brooklyn home, but in the past year, she's been to Bali, Belize, Nicaragua, Vail... the list goes on. But in Campanaro's case, all that travel isn't necessarily just for fun — it provides inspiration as well for the watercolors that will eventually become bleached, beautiful patterns for her wallpapers and fabrics. Eskayel's newest collection, which we're featuring today, is called “Jangala” which means jungle in Sanskrit. The new collection is a bit of a departure from her signature aesthetic, in that some of the colorways are more highly saturated than in the past, but the effect is the same. We love these styled shots Campanaro shared with us, with their overflowing greenery and little totems picked up on travel — not to mention their cute product loans from Rich Brilliant Willing! See more of our favorites after the jum, and then go to Eskayel's site to view the full collection.

01.27.14

At Home With

Laure Joliet, photographer

You could say that photographer Laure Joliet is in the image business, but her work is about depth as much as surface. She has a way with spaces, rendering them intimate and mysterious at the same time, capturing the revealing detail you notice out of the corner of your eye. Though her subject is often interiors, a large part of her job involves getting to know people. “I spend the day with them and find out things I don’t know that you would normally get to find out, what they’re passionate about. It feels really satisfying to have that experience.”

01.25.14

Saturday Selects

Week of January 20, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an art installation inspired by Facebook, a refined furniture collection by a Danish design student (above), and a mirror you could get lost in.

01.10.14

At Home With

Rebecca Bartoshesky, prop stylist

Prop styling is a little bit like industrial design only in that some of its best practitioners never even realized it was a career until after they’d finished school. Such was the case with Rebecca Bartoshesky, an up-and-coming New York prop stylist who studied interior design at FIT.

01.02.14

At Home With

Kay Wang, The Things We Keep

If you only knew Kay Wang through her Instagram — and chances are you might, considering her 33,000 followers — you wouldn’t necessarily immediately know what she does for a living. She could easily be a baker, a stylist, a ceramicist, or a woodworker; in December alone, she posted pictures from her Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, apartment of the frangipane tart she’d baked, the cherry cutting boards she’d sanded and oiled, the canvas bags she’d dyed with onion skin, and the silk cord necklaces she’d strung with hand-carved brass pendants. (And you’d certainly never guess that she spent nine years before moving to Brooklyn as an online marketer in Los Angeles and Seattle.) What she is, very clearly, is a restless creative spirit; so much so that even though her main focus right now is as a jewelry designer who crafts under the moniker The Things We Keep, she has trouble pinning herself with a specific label.

12.09.13

Excerpt: Exhibition

Martino Gamper’s “Tu Casa, Mi Casa” at The Modern Institute

I can think of plenty of designers whose works I’ve never even seen, or those I’ve only seen from afar, either raised on some plinth or sheltered under a vitrine. I’ve had the lucky opportunity, though, to not only see but experience the work of London designer Martino Gamper: walking under his colorful Chair Arch in the courtyard of London’s V&A museum, or digging my feet into the hand-knotted wool Houseplan Carpet he designed for Nilufar gallery in 2009. It’s especially nice to experience a designer like Gamper’s work in person because there’s always the possibility that the piece you’re seeing is the only one of its kind that will ever exist. Gamper has always maintained that he prefers to create either pieces for unlimited production, like his lopsided Arnold Circus stool, or one-offs — with no middle ground between the two. Most of the work on view at Gamper’s new exhibition, “Tu Casa, Mi Casa” at Glasgow’s Modern Institute, falls into the latter category. The majority of the 69 designs created for the exhibition are wholly unique:

11.26.13

Sighted

George Nelson’s Kirkpatrick House on WHY

It’s hard to say, looking at the image above —with its freestanding kiln-like fireplace, its red-palette Persian rug, and its chic indoor garden — whether the interior featured is genuinely vintage or simply one of the excellent contemporary facsimiles that populate board after Pinterest board these days. But in some ways, that’s precisely the point. The interior above, featured this week on Herman Miller’s excellent WHY blog, was designed in the 1950s by George Nelson, and like many of Nelson’s designs, it is as usable and contemporary today as it was half a century ago.

11.01.13

Sighted

Sebastian Herkner’s Pulpo Containers

You might not recognize it at first glance, but Sebastian Herkner's new ultra-shiny glass Containers for the German brand Pulpo have a serious high-low thing going on — and not just in one sense, but two. Not only are they inspired by the cheap plastic containers normally used to store things like distilled water and Cheez-Balls, they're also made using a technique that's gone from rags to riches in recent history. "Mercury glass was once used as a substitute for real silverware, which was too expensive for poor people to afford," says Herkner. "Nowadays, though, it's thought of as unique and rare; there's one company in Czech Republic which specializes in mercury glass, and Pulpo produces the Containers there." Like most of our favorite tastemakers, Herkner's appreciation of both the lowly and the luxurious extends to his personal style, too, which is why we thought it fitting that he should photograph his Containers for us amidst the landscape of his own home, just outside Frankfurt. He told us more about his process and his possessions below.

09.16.13

At Home With

Erin Considine, textile and jewelry designer

Midway through our visit to Erin Considine’s Greenpoint, Brooklyn apartment earlier this summer, we began talking about her parents, who — no surprise here — are interior designers. She told us a story about her father being on a job site in Connecticut in the 1980s, where a company was giving away all of its Knoll furniture. A set of Mies van der Rohe Brno chairs here, a Saarinen Tulip table there — these are sorts the things the Brooklyn jewelry designer grew up with. When my jaw dropped, she shrugged. “It’s just being in the right place at the right time,” she says.

07.30.13

Sighted

Ben Medansky Studio Visit on Los Angeles, I’m Yours

It's a quiet summer week here at Sight Unseen HQ. August is approaching, we're spending more and more weekends out of the city, and the time in between them is becoming increasingly shorter and less productive. But that doesn't mean we don't know from hard work — we've spent the last four years pouring inordinate amounts of time and effort into the stories on this site, and so we're all the more sympathetic when we see other blogs doing the same. Case in point: the ridiculously extensive, print mag–worthy interview with ceramicist Ben Medansky we spotted recently on the blog Los Angeles, I'm Yours, a city-centric cultural resource founded in 2011 by The Fox Is Black's Bobby Solomon with editor Kyle Fitzpatrick. We've excerpted part of it here, along with a selection of the accompanying studio photos.

07.15.13

Travel

Sight Unseen at the Brimfield Antique Show, Summer 2013

If you tell people you’re going to Brimfield — the massive, thrice-yearly outdoor antique fair in central Massachusetts that famously lures the country’s best vintage pickers as well as interiors teams from stores like Ralph Lauren and J. Crew — you start getting loads of conflicting advice: what day to arrive, which of the 21 fields has the best merch, and even whether you should go for the ribs or the lobster roll (or something kind of amazing we discovered this time called the Pilgrim Sandwich. Seriously, get it.) But the one thing everyone agrees on? Don’t go in July.

07.03.13

At Home With

Annie Larson, knitwear designer

If you follow Annie Lee Larson’s Instagram — and chances are good that you do, considering the New York knitwear designer’s followers almost tip into the five digits — you might envision that she lives in some Peter Halley-meets-Memphis–inspired fantasyland, all primary colors, geometric patterns, and kitschy throwback accessories (hello Bananagrams!) But the truth is, Larson’s 5th-floor East Village walk-up doesn’t appear all that crazy upon first glance. A pretty but small, light-filled, plant-friendly apartment, the place is largely decorated in black and white, save for a trio of painted shelves where Larson keeps her most prized possessions, and a one-two punch of colorful striped and polka-dot bedding. It’s only upon closer inspection (and I mean, really close, considering Larson’s love of miniatures) that her oft-photographed influences begin to reveal themselves — dice, Swatch watches, Japanese toys, and ’80s electronics among them.