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03.13.14

Sighted

Totokaelo Art—Objects’s Spring Campaigns

The cult Seattle boutique Totokaelo already carries clothing and objects so beautiful that each new season wreaks havoc on the wallets of aesthetes around the country. The only way the store could possibly improve on that game? By shooting those new collections in scenarios designed to make said aesthetes even crazier. To promote its spring Art—Object catalog, the store's creative director Ashley Helvey masterminded two such campaigns: a photo shoot shot by Robin Stein and styled by Margaret Macmillan Jones in the technicolor plaza of Seattle's King County Correctional Center (designed in the '80s by Martha Schwartz and Benson Shaw), and a video, also in collaboration with Stein, that features Cameron Mesirow of Glasser along with music from her latest album, Interiors.
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03.01.14

Saturday Selects

Week of February 24, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: furniture worthy of a "French Fries Party," super-minimalist $99 lamps, candy-colored stools by Jeff Martin (above), and incredibly styled images by the likes of Gemma Tickle and the Bouroullec brothers.
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02.27.14

Sighted

Last, a New Swedish Design Trio

No pun intended, but we had to share one last find from this month’s Stockholm Design Week: Last, a new arena for selling one-of-a-kind products by Swedish design trio Åsa Jungnelius, Gustaf Nordenskiöld, and Fredrik Paulsen. They are, respectively, a glass designer working with glass, a potter with clay and a furniture designer with wood. All share a common desire for not only producing sustainable products, but also to promote a kind of design that is slower, more considered, and intended to stand the test of time (i.e. the last spoon you might ever buy).
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01.20.14

Sighted

Joanna Williams of Kneeland Mercado on Sous Style

There are a lot of reasons we've been reading Sous Style since former Elle photo director Pippa Lord first launched it in 2011: the casual, contemporary feel of the food photography, the glimpses into the homes and private lives of some amazingly cool women, and of course, all those incredibly gorgeous men(!). But we also love when Lord surprises us with different types of approaches to mixing food with fashion, design, and culture, including a post she did recently on textile-sourcing maven Joanna Williams of Kneeland Co. Mercado — in it, Williams reveals both the stories behind some of the items she's brought back from various cities to sell in her Los Angeles shop, as well as all of her favorite things to eat while visiting those places. Check out an excerpt from the story after the jump!
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01.18.14

Saturday Selects

Week of January 13, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: vintage Brooklyn hipster interiors, shelves inspired by Venetian bridges, a new website for Josef and Anni Albers, Sottsass Bacterio bookends (above), and more.
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01.16.14

Q+A

Dario Buzzini and Barbara Busatta on Machine Series

For all the excitement around the game-changing rise of rapid prototyping, it's always felt a little abstract to us — mostly limited to actual prototyping, MakerBot-style tinkering, and a few crazy, high-end projects meant above all to flaunt the capabilities of the technology. Yet with the launch of Machine Series, a new brand of housewares made using fused deposition modeling (FDM), co-founders Dario Buzzini and Barbara Busatta are attempting to make a case for the potential of 3-D printing to create a commercially viable line of attractive and functional everyday objects. "The focus of this exploration has been to elevate 3-D printing, a technology that is very much talked about but is relegated to either cumbersome, amateurish results or over-expensive artistic applications," write the Italian-born, New York–based pair in the brand's press release. "We believe that by exploring the full potential of FDM, we are able to create items that are as simple as they are sophisticated and as elegant as they are innovative." The designs are also fully open-source, so all the files used to produce them are available online. Buzzini and Busatta took some time to tell us more about the project, after the jump.
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12.13.13

Gift Guides

50 Gifts We’re Coveting

Introducing the first annual Sight Unseen holiday gift guide! We've been scouring our favorite shops, both here and abroad, and starting yesterday we've been featuring 25 items per editor. Today's picks come from Monica, whose taste runs more towards all things monochromatic, graphic, and geometric.
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12.12.13

Gift Guides

50 Gifts We’re Coveting

Introducing the first annual Sight Unseen holiday gift guide! We've been scouring our favorite shops, both here and abroad, and over the next two days we’ll be featuring 25 items per editor. Today's picks come from Jill, whose taste runs more towards all things pretty, colorful, and mid-century.
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12.07.13

Saturday Selects

Week of December 2, 2013

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, and events from the past seven or so days. This week: a slam-dunk stocking stuffer for your graphic designer friends, a furniture collection inspired by Palm Springs, a better way to crack a nut, and more
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12.02.13

Invitation

Shop Sight Unseen on Print All Over Me

In April, we introduced you to BYCO, a production platform and online shop for custom clothing designs submitted by up-and-coming fashion talents. But BYCO also had a small section for housewares, where designers could apply imagery to a standardized selection of pillows, duvets, and curtains — an idea that co-founders Jesse and Meredith Finkelstein have taken one step further with their new spinoff project, Print All Over Me. The site harnesses the same overseas manufacturing capabilities the pair utilize for BYCO, but instead of producing custom pieces, it offers designers a choice of eight blanks onto which they can apply any image file — think CafePress, but with shirts, sweatpants, hats, pillows, totes, and scarfs that are actually fashion-forward (Jesse's also the designer behind the New York label JF&Son). Print All Over Me is technically still in beta, but we were so excited about its possibilities that we invited a few friends — Will Bryant, Mel Nguyen, New Friends, Clay Hickson, and Tim Colmant —to post a few items just for us. Read on to check out and shop their mini-collections, or create and sell your own designs.
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11.21.13

Travel

Kiosk in Athens, Greece

There were several reasons Alisa Grifo wanted to take her Kiosk co-founder Marco Romeny to Greece for their newest themed collection of everyday objects, which launches today. But the most pressing was the fact that Greece's ongoing economic woes have shuttered scores of small businesses, and continue to do so the longer they persist. "It felt like half of Athens was closed," says Grifo, who traveled there with Romeny in early October. "We would find something and try to contact the manufacturer and their phone would be disconnected. We felt an urgency to go now before more and more disappeared." The irony is that Greece is also the last collection for the couple before they're forced to pull their own disappearing act of sorts, thanks to economics of an entirely different kind.
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11.11.13

Fair Report

Hammer Museum’s Arts ReSTORE

For all of the handwringing about art being inaccessible, there’s no city planning theory that has gained more traction in this century than the idea of creative people driving neighborhood revitalization. Which means that the descriptively titled “Arts ReSTORE: LA” project isn’t just loftily ambitious. The month-long residency program, which began last week, might actually work at creating a less sterile West Los Angeles, not least because it is supported by the powerhouse Hammer Museum, whose three-story compound anchors one end of the street. On a stretch of Westwood Ave., better known for chain sandwich shops and fluorescent interiors, the Hammer offered a half-dozen empty storefronts to local artists and makers, with the idea that even a temporary infusion would upend the retail mood of the area. If the packed opening night was any indication, this time the theory holds. Here’s what we saw.
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