Home objects
03.17.22

Giveaway

Win a $2,000 Huggy Chair from Sarah Ellison, Whose Furniture Is Now Available in the US

When the Australian designer Sarah Ellison released her Huggy chair two years ago, it blew up. There was only one problem: If you weren't a big-name designer with a bottomless budget, it just wasn't that easy to get one. But that all changed this winter, when Ellison partnered with Design Within Reach to make her work readily available in the US; together, they're offering one lucky Sight Unseen reader the chance to win a $2,295 Huggy chair in a choice of upholsteries. Click through to enter!
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03.03.22

Sighted

This Italian Furniture Brand Made a Clever Trompe L’Oeil Table, Then Shot It in a Carlo Mollino Masterpiece

January saw the introduction of an interesting new expression of trompe l'oeil, in the form of Saba Italia’s Teatro Magico table by 967 Arch, a dining table whose sinuous polyurethane base echoes the form of theater curtains and can part like them, too. The brand coincided the launch with the reopening, after a two-year renovation, of Turin’s Teatro Regio, whose Carlo Mollino–designed interior contains its own multitude of visual illusions.
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Shane Gabier ceramics
02.01.22

Up and Coming

A New York Fashion Designer Reinvents Himself With Clay

You may know Shane Gabier as the designer behind the fashion label Creatures of the Wind, where, since 2008, he has been churning out sharply tailored avant-garde collections for New York Fashion Week and earning accolades like an LVMH prize shortlist. But if you’ve kept up with his work more recently, you would know that fashion isn’t Gabier's only talent — he’s also a budding ceramicist.
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01.31.22

Sighted

The Mexican Studio Reinventing Everyday Objects

Algo Studio’s products — made from ceramics, cast concrete, resin, or terrazzo they fabricate themselves — are everyday objects that founder Diego Garza has thoughtfully reimagined with their ultimate function in mind. The results are attractive and original pieces in unusual shapes and commanding colors. “I’m trying to subvert or alter a little bit whatever is expected in an object,” he says.
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12.16.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

Get Good Vibes Only From this Show of Grandma-Inspired Lamps and Balloon-Like Chairs

Sister-Sister, Léa Mestres's new show at the Paris gallery Scene Ouverte, is a highly photogenic pairing of two sides of the up-and-coming French designer's practice. One the one hand, there are her puffy, balloon-like chairs, benches, and tables. On the other hand, there are her colorful stucco lamps. "I see them as old ladies," she says. "They each have a names and personality. That's why I called the show 'sisters sisters' — it’s an old ladies' gang."
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12.15.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

Sculpture or Furniture? Supaform’s New Collection Puts Feeling Before Function

In Russian designer Maxim Scherbakov's new furniture exhibition at Rome's Contemporary Cluster gallery, he asks the question: What if design could be all about emotion, and little else? His barely functional pieces, and his general conceit, feel uncomfortable at first — we're not sure we want to live in a world where design is purely an aesthetic indulgence — but in an era when furniture is increasingly difficult to distinguish from art, it does feel in some ways like we already are.
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12.01.21

Gift Guides

Pom Pom Pillows and Hand Rugs: The Sight Unseen Gift Guide, Part III

For those of you who would rather give your partner a hand-thrown ceramic vase than a mass-manufactured one, or are more into gifting your sibling a carved-wood ice bucket than the latest iPad, this guide is for you: Click through to see and shop our top 14 handmade gifts from Wescover's stable of independent makers — including Maja Dlugolecki, Christopher Norman, Esque Studio, and more.
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11.29.21

Gift Guides

Foot Vases and Artichoke Plates: The 2021 Sight Unseen Gift Guide, Part I

We always look forward to putting together our annual gift guides, where we get to turn our brains off, scour our favorite stores for wishlist-worthy objects, and focus on sheer indulgence for a minute. What's our favorite candle this year, our favorite wine glass? Which books are we dying to have on our coffee table now, and in the case of Monica (whose guide is featured today), which foot-shaped vase? We hope you can get some inspiration from these lists — particularly when it comes to supporting small businesses and talented independent makers.
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11.11.21

Shopping

Yes, Watches and Clocks Are Still a Thing — Here Are 50 of Our Favorite Designs, Sourced on eBay

By all reasonable logic, watches and clocks should have gone the way of the fax machine, or the VCR. Yet luxury watch sales are at an all-time high, and designers continue to release new wall and table clocks as if the past 20 years never happened. We love coming across amazing watches and clocks when we're shopping, especially for vintage, so we decided to devote a post to cataloguing our favorite examples, sourced from one of our favorite shopping platforms, eBay — which happens to be ground zero for watch lovers.
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11.02.21

Sighted

A Tacchini Reissue Proves Tobia Scarpa’s Very First Chair Is Still One of His Best

As a designer, you may have been taught to always explore beyond your initial hunch — that, not unlike the "bad pancake" theory of dating, your first idea will never be your best. And yet history offers a wealth of exceptions to that rule, including Tobia Scarpa's iconic 1959 Pigreco chair, the first furniture piece he ever designed that, having recently been reissued by Tacchini, endures to this day.
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10.08.21

Sight Unseen Presents

We Paired 9 Norwegian Designers With 9 American Brands — Two Years Later, Here Are the Results!

For the fourth edition of our curatorial project Norway x New York, we paired nine Norwegian designers with nine US design brands, who worked together closely for a year to develop a product for the brand's catalog. The first prototypes are on view now at Matter in New York, displayed inside a colorful landscape designed by Office of Tangible Space and built by Thirdkind Studio.
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09.15.21

Up and Coming

Three New Collections in Metal That Get Creative With Industrial Parts

We recently noticed a fascination, shared among three up-and-coming designers from two different parts of the globe — Sebastian Kommer, Jinyeong Yeon, and Nice Workshop — with using off-the-shelf metal materials in new, more beautiful ways. The concept itself is nothing new, but it underscores just how much endless versatility can be found in industrial parts and profiles — and how they offer emerging designers access to industrial fabrication without the expensive factory tooling and MOQs.
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