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London interior designer vintage objects
08.03.22

Sighted

In a New Gallery Space, Hollie Bowden Shows Off Her Talent for Sourcing Minimal Maximalist Vintage Objects

London-based interior designer Hollie Bowden is a self-described “minimal maximalist.” Think bare walls and airy, earth-toned environments accented and brought together with a touch of dramatic surrealism. She has a way of adding the surprising elements that wind up feeling completely necessary to any given project. After working as a stylist, florist, and set designer, Bowden launched her own studio in 2013 and has spent the past decade conceiving of dreamy domestic and retail spaces. As an extension and natural progression of her studio work, earlier this summer she opened The Gallery, an appointment-only shop located next to her Shoreditch headquarters.
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07.26.22

Current Obsession

This Is One 1980s Trend Revival We Didn’t See Coming

We're not sure if it's a comfort thing or a style thing, and we're not sure if it reminds anyone else of the La-Z-Boys of yore, but if you've been watching carefully the past few years, you may have noticed that furniture designers — most particularly when it comes to beds and sofas — have been embracing a very specific aesthetic with roots in the 1980s.
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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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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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07.08.22

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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Hanna Dis Whitehead ceramics
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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Sight Unseen Book How to Live With Objects
06.02.22

Sight Unseen Presents

We Wrote a Book! And You’re Going to Want to Drop Everything and Pre-Order It *Immediately*

We've written a lot over the past two years about people's pandemic projects — the creative things they holed up doing while the world was temporarily shut down — but you know what? We were secretly working on one, too, and it's a big one. Introducing How to Live With Objects, the first-ever Sight Unseen book: an absolutely gorgeous, 320-page coffee-table book, published by Clarkson Potter this fall, that champions a new approach to interiors — simply surrounding yourself with the objects you love. It comes out November 15, but it's available for pre-order now and we're doing our big cover reveal in the hopes that you'll do just that!
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05.23.22

Fair Report

25 Projects We Loved at This Weekend’s 2022 Collectible Design Fair in Brussels

This past weekend marked the fifth edition of the Brussels design fair Collectible, and while our schedules failed to align with an IRL visit, we did our best to round up our favorite participants from afar, everything from old favorites like Maarten de Ceulaer's stained glass lamp series — which got a few new additions this month — to exciting new discoveries like Sarah Becchio and Paolo Borghino of Errante Architetture, who debuted a series of hardware-free MDF coffee tables. Browse our finds after the jump!
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05.11.22

Sighted

Obsessed With Materials? This Italian Brand Is Turning Them Into Wall Art

Most object designers — and object-lovers too, ourselves included — have an unusually heightened appreciation for materials. We can feel moved simply by the surface texture of clay, or by the way a piece of glass reflects light, or by the curious reaction of metal to certain chemicals or industrial processes. That notion is at the heart of Design Editions, a novel new project making its debut at Suite NY that treats materials like paintings, framing them so they can be hung on the wall and admired.
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04.07.22

Q+A

This Housewares Brand Thinks the Future of Design Lies in Uniting 3D Printing With Contemporary Talents — and Traditional Artisans

In recent years, 3D printing technology has finally started to come into its own, making the dream of an on-demand manufacturing industry — one that yields products people might actually want — feel closer at hand than ever. That's the realization that inspired cousins Ismail and Adnane Tazi, who founded the Parisian housewares brand Trame in early 2020, to rethink their entire approach to production just two years later, culminating in the launch of their new Alhambra.gcode collection.
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04.01.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

In His First Gallery Show, Ryan Preciado Combines His Love of Wood, the 80s, and High-Gloss Finishes

L.A. designer Ryan Preciado traffics heavily in nostalgia, particularly for his own Cali upbringing: "When I was a kid, my grandpa would give me five bucks to buff and polish his cars; I bet that’s why I’m attracted to the glossy finish," he told us back in 2019. He also cited his grandmother's garden chairs, and his uncle's car-show habit, as formative design influences. All of those influences were on display in his first gallery show, A Cliff to Climb, at Canada gallery in New York earlier this month — including via a new, ultra-polished green cabinet that he created at his friend’s autobody shop. 
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