We Did a Full Styling Makeover of Jill’s House — Courtesy of Lightology and an Epic Vintage Haul

If you're a longtime reader of Sight Unseen, it's possible you've seen some version of my house in East Hampton, from the just-moved-in IKEA-starter-kit vibe of 2014 to the post-renovation feature last year, where I revealed our baby blue kitchen and double-drenched yellow guest bath. Last month, though, Monica and I decided to give my home a new life — a styling makeover we're calling "the Sight Unseen edit," executed as part of our continued collaboration with Lightology, for which we've previously shot two other homes we outfitted with the online retailer's incredibly diverse lighting and furniture offerings. For our third in the series, we paired vintage accessories and art with beautiful, sleek pieces from Lightology's catalog to create a more sophisticated mood for my space, one befitting the vision I've always had of it as a repository for all the design work and knowledge I've collected over my 20-plus-year career.
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With New Lights and a Serene New Showroom in Downtown Manhattan, Danny Kaplan is Cementing His Studio as a Major Creative Force

Danny Kaplan's Facet series is made of slab-built forms in first-time materials for the studio: perforated brass with a patina finish, stainless steel, or white painted steel (though the studio has stayed true to its ceramic roots, hand-sculpting clay models at the start of the production process). Hard, defined edges and angles paradoxically create a mellow mood, an atmosphere that’s serene and soothing. You could say the same thing about the studio’s new 4,000 square foot showroom, located in a pre-war cast iron warehouse building in NoHo; it's a meditative, calming exhalation that both resets and reinvigorates you.
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At This Wood-Clad Seaside Retreat, Iconic Scandinavian Lights Pair Perfectly With California Modernism

The Danish company Louis Poulsen is home to some of the world's most instantly recognizable lighting, designed by the greats. While all distinctively Scandinavian — there’s a certain precision and integrity combined with a playful inventiveness that’s somehow simultaneously cool and warm — these lights also work particularly well in the context of a West Coast golden-hour glow, the interplay of sun and soft shadows. Louis Poulsen's sculptural yet clean aesthetic naturally dovetails with the indoor-outdoor architecture of California modernism — both of which have been captured in a new interiors shoot styled and photographed by Lumens.
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Is Design In an Age of Maximalism, Or Minimalism? The Answer Is Both — and Pelle’s New Collection Offers Proof

Are we currently in an age of maximalism, with wood paneling, hand-painted ceilings, ruffled fabrics, and decorative pillows constituting the reigning aesthetic in design? Or an age of minimalism, when sleek chrome and the High-Tech vibe have never been more popular? The answer, really, is both — the two styles have often happily coexisted in the past, and we've been happily embracing both for awhile now. That might be why the latest collection from the Brooklyn studio Pelle, released a few weeks ago during New York design month, appeals to us: It unabashedly embraces both extremes.
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Anna Karlin’s New Collection is All Sculptural Forms and Sophisticated Whimsy

There was no definitive starting point for Anna Karlin’s new collection, no big moment, but rather a gradual becoming over a stretch of time. “The way that I work is essentially all one long conversation,” Karlin says. Some pieces are the result of an experiment from years back, set on the backburner until it finally makes sense in relation to something else. “I think about pieces in dialogue rather than in isolation, and a language develops.” It’s a call and response: a curve begs for a clean line, a futuristic turn hankers for heritage. And Karlin listens. “Once it gets to a point where every piece has bounced off another and the circle closes, then that's the collection,” she explains. “It sort of decides itself.”
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Dana Arbib’s Vegetable-Themed Murano Glass at TIWA Gallery Has Us In the Mood for Fall

When deciding on the first exhibition for his new TIWA Gallery location in Tribeca, Alex Tieghi-Walker instinctively turned to artist Dana Arbib, whose second collection of Murano glass — this time in the form of both lighting and vessels — were a perfect fit to activate the space, a former manufacturing workshop for electrical parts. Titled Vetro Orto, which translates from Italian as “the glass vegetable garden,” Arbib's pieces are modeled on the forms of gourds, cabbages, and root vegetables.
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Farrah Sit’s Work — Including Her Best-Selling Serpentine Sconce — Feels Both Effortlessly Current and Like a Prehistoric Artifact

Equilibrium and harmony: They’re difficult to achieve in life and maybe only slightly easier in design. But the search for balance, especially a desire for balance with nature, has lately been driving New York designer Farrah Sit — in a stylistic sense, but also in the way she produces the lighting and furniture for her eponymous line. Sit makes pieces that embody substantial and even existential concerns but wear their heaviness lightly; they’d look really great in your living room but they’re also meant to do more than that. “Part of what we’re trying to do as designers,” she says, “is create awareness between you and your environment.” Her aesthetic has largely hewn to neutral colors and natural materials and a dedication to elegant, mysterious forms ­— like Sit's best-selling Serpentine sconce, which debuted as part of Sight Unseen Offsite in 2020 and is now part of the Sight Unseen Collection. A ceramic wall sconce, Serpentine seems both effortlessly current and like an unearthed artifact — a relatively simple form that wordlessly conveys a whole world of feeling.
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This Spiky, Globular Blown-Glass Lighting Benefits Marginalized Communities

When your cute, blown-glass cups, vessels, plates, and ornaments start to catch the eye of designers like Kelly Wearstler, there’s really only one thing to do: Go bigger. So that’s exactly what Grace Whiteside of the New York design brand Sticky recently did, creating a collection of larger pieces using the same glass-blowing techniques that have defined the studio's signature sculptural style, and opting to turn the pieces into a range of lighting designs that are just as whimsical as Sticky's selection of smaller works.
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Inspired by a Children’s Poem, Giopato & Coombes’ Milan Exhibition Took Visitors on a Journey Through Memory

The children’s poem Il Cosario describes finding forgotten small items collected in pockets and looking at them with fresh eyes. Italian-British design duo Giopato & Coombes initially bought this poem for their son, but they kept a copy at their workstation because they found it so inspiring. When the time came, they used the process outlined in the poem's verses to guide 18 Pockets, an exhibition during the recent Milan Design Week that presented reimagined pieces from the pair’s back catalog and ideas that had yet to be realized, combined in multiple ways to help tell the designers’ personal stories. A journey through their own memories, you could say.
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Atelier Areti’s New Lighting Collection Embraces Romance

For their 2022 lighting collection, Elements, the sisters behind Atelier Areti set a challenge for themselves: to create something innovative using only the simplest composition of a light (base + arm + illuminating element). Their latest collection, Reflections — which debuted last month as part of Alcova in Milan — was a kind of response to working within those parameters. Embracing their freedom from a restrictive framework, the collection welcomes romance: While Reflections is still distinctly within Areti's visual vocabulary, the collection also includes a series of lights inspired by the shape of tulips, one that features filigreed trees sprouting from its base, and a piece, designed by Alberto Gaiotto, inspired by the elegant neck of a swan.
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Danny Kaplan Wants His New Furniture Collection, Made From Clay and Oak, to Appear Built By Nature

Danny Kaplan is a ceramicist, but he’s also a bit of a wizard, conjuring pieces that somehow manage to feel earthy and ancient — as if they’ve always existed — yet also exceedingly current and fresh. “A lot of my forms were born from looking at Etruscan ceramics and thinking about midcentury ones as well,” says the New York–based designer. “I love the idea of blending these things in an organic way where it feels like my pieces are almost built by nature,” their geometry and angles always slightly relaxed or imperfect. This especially applies to his latest collection, Brick, which is launching as part of our Sight Unseen Collection today, both online and in NYC through May 25 at Voltz Clarke Gallery on the Lower East Side.
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Frangere stained glass lighting

Each Item in This Stained Glass Lighting Collection is Like a Piece of Jewelry for Your Home

Carina Webb’s parents built the house she grew up in close to the sea in a small suburb of Auckland, New Zealand. Her dad, an engineer, believed that every home should have a small workshop in which to make things, so naturally the house was filled with handmade objects alongside those collected or inherited over the years. “From a young age I was taught the value of handmade, quality craftsmanship, and the sentimentality of objects,” she says. These are the values on which she bases her Auckland design studio Frangere, whose debut Fun Guy collection we fell in love with earlier this year — and which we'll be launching a piece of at our Sight Unseen Collection show this Thursday in New York.
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