It's easy to understand why beds aren't a typology that's attempted by most designers; there are pain points at nearly every step in the process. Beds are hard to ship, they're hard to store, and they're limited in their form. Plus, beds are expensive, big-ticket items that only get purchased once in a blue moon. Luckily, we're sensing a shift in the cosmos. Earlier this year, we were introduced to the Copenhagen-based brand ReFramed, whose colorful, easy-to-ship frame is made from 82% post-c...| Sight Unseen
When you work for yourself, as we have for the past 16 years, it can be hard to turn off your work brain entirely. When we travel, we're constantly noticing architectural details and furniture vignettes that could be content; when a furniture order comes in late at night, it's imperative to address in a timely fashion. However, what we *are* able to do, considering our lack of a corporate overlord, is to suddenly say: "Hey, should we take the summer off?" We eased into this glam-leaning Europ...| Sight Unseen
When I first got wind of Piscina, the shared workshop and showroom run by designer Natalie Shook out of a 20,000-square-foot space in Red Hook, Brooklyn, my first thought was of other similar, collective design spaces we've known and loved over the years, Okay Studio and Atelierdorp among them. But after spending the better part of a day at the Piscina space this fall and chatting with both Shook and the other designers who work there — including Luke Malaney, Jenna Graziano, Charles Granth...| Sight Unseen
World-blending forms the core of the Mr. Larkin vibe — what founder Casey Larkin Blond describes as “a strange little universe” where her Southern roots, West Coast ideals, and Scandinavian influences all converge. It’s also visible in the apartment she shares with her husband, Danish fashion exec Alan Blond, and their two children, in a leafy district of Copenhagen that was once the city’s impoverished countryside and is now home to some of its most quietly historic buildings. The ...| Sight Unseen
How many new things should we actually be making? This is the question that plagues so many designers now as the issues facing our planet continue to worsen. “I find the design industry very troubling in a lot of ways, and I do feel the tension of creating new pieces in a world of excess, with the majority of furniture and lighting ending up in landfill. It’s really hard to reconcile sometimes,” says Kate Stokes, co-founder for Melbourne studio Coco Flip.| Sight Unseen
Copenhagen's 3 Days of Design festival has made an uncanny ascent to the top of the ranks of global design fairs in the past couple of years. Soon after we started reeling over the number of non-professionals going to Milan for pleasure rather than business, we started hearing the same about 3 Days, which we had only ever personally experienced (as recently as 2021) as a tiny event with mostly local participants. To be fair, it owes a part of its popularity explosion to the fact that it takes...| Sight Unseen
Despite a wane in the curated "Instagram aesthetic," hotels and restaurants still often must rely on vignettes that guests will be inclined to photograph, post, and tag as part of their organic — and free — marketing strategies. But for New York-based Islyn Studio, the aim is to lift these guests out of their digitally oriented lives entirely, and — even if for a brief spell — focus on the sensorial value of the space they’re in. “We reject trends and ‘Instagram moments’ in fa...| Sight Unseen
A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a renovated 1920s mansion available for rent in Paris, the latest in stained glass as a furniture material, and one Brooklyn designer's attempt to bring back flatware manufacturing in America.| Sight Unseen
In many bedrooms, it’s often what goes on the bed that adds personality to a space. Bold-patterned sheets, colorful comforters, punchy pillows — all of these are used as aesthetic signifiers while the bed itself often falls into the background. But, as we saw in Milan this year, there’s a resurging trend for fun iterations of headboards, bases, and frames — whether they’re unusually shaped, exaggeratedly oversized, expressively crafted, or just pretty to look at. While exciting expe...| Sight Unseen
This week: A sexy dentist's office in France, a swoony neon interior in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and a reconsideration of the piano as a vehicle for design.| Sight Unseen
A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: new jewelry based on Superstudio sketches from the '70s, a new BDDW housewares line based in the middle of nowhere, and a tropical photoshoot by Studiopepe that basically makes us want to jump on a plane immediately and fly south.| Sight Unseen
For Marta, Minjae Kim plays with his own preconceptions about Western culture, having lived in the US most of his adult life after growing up in Korea.| Sight Unseen
Truly memorable hotel design isn’t just about seamless check-ins, good sheets, and moody lighting (though we’ll happily take them all). It’s about spaces that linger in your brain long after you’ve hopped on your return flight. Now that summer is in full swing, we’ve found three new spots that hit that sweet spot — a chef-owned escape in the French countryside, a five-star retreat on the Cap d’Antibes waterfront, and a bold newcomer in Houston, steps away from the Museum District.| Sight Unseen
Interior and landscape designer Nick Spain creates spaces that feel evocative of a certain period and yet out of time, never bound to an era in a retro or kitschy way. For a 1960s lakehouse in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Spain — based in the Berkshires and Brooklyn — recently combined various references that nod to the past but live fully in the present. It’s more challenging than it looks, of course, and we wanted to know how he pulls it off.| Sight Unseen
A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a book that dives into the modernist architecture of Fire Island, wooden vases embroidered with delicate blooms, and a Wong Kar-Wai–inspired interior in LA's Silver Lake neighborhood.| Sight Unseen
In New Hampshire-based artist Danielle Fretwell’s still life paintings, what is visible is often just as important as what is obscured. Fretwell’s work first caught our eye at NADA New York last month; presented by London-based Alice Amati gallery, Fretwell’s seductive, hyperrealistic oil on canvas works featuring fruit, fish, candles, vases, and other tableware stood out among the over 120 booths at the bustling art fair. Depicting these items on what appears to be silken table linens ...| Sight Unseen
This week: Formafantasma's first US solo show, a new housewares line that pairs Greek art with Swedish craftsmanship, and two new design shops in Brooklyn.| Sight Unseen
When the Ace Hotel opened in Manhattan in 2009, it established a blueprint for the idea of a hotel lobby as a living room for the city. With its Stumptown Coffee, Opening Ceremony outpost, April Bloomfield-helmed restaurant, rows of laptop-friendly desks (in an era before WeWork, no less), vintage-inspired photo booth, and a bustling events calendar, the Ace was as much a hangout for locals as it was a haven for travelers. Ace continued to imprint this model as it opened in cities around the ...| Sight Unseen
You could say that moving into furniture design was something of a pandemic project for Ben Willett. At the start of the shutdown, he and his wife, chef and cookbook author Molly Baz, were on vacation in California and decided to stay there, eventually making a permanent move from a 700-square-foot New York City apartment to a house on the far east side of Los Angeles. With space came the need to fill it, along with a new West Coast perspective; the result is a collection still in the works b...| Sight Unseen
Over the past decade — in case you missed it — minimalist interior design has drastically shifted gears. Once a cold, sterile, and frankly boring style, it’s gradually warmed up and become imbued with all sorts of textures and depth. The latest convert to this pared-back but incredibly rich style is London interior designer Hollie Bowden, who recently designed the new showroom for British jewelry and ceramics brand Completedworks.| Sight Unseen
Since 2021, Lisa Mayock — former co-founder of the beloved aughts fashion label Vena Cava — has been bringing her eye for shapes, proportion, pattern, and texture to interior design with Monogram. Mayock’s Altadena-based studio recently refreshed an 1890s Craftsman home in Pasadena for a family of five, and Mayock wanted the interior to reflect the “vibrant and high energy” way the family lives. While previous iterations of the space before its current residents moved in skewed more...| Sight Unseen
A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the best launches from Melbourne Design Week, another super-sleek USM collab — this time in pink! — plus a special edition Gaetano Pesce vase debuting at the Philip Johnson Glass House.| Sight Unseen
If you're heading to the 3 Days of Design festival in Copenhagen soon, we're guessing your schedule is already packed with exhibition visits and design aperitivos. But there's also a good chance that, if you're anything like us, you always carve out at least a little time for mandatory design sightseeing, too? With Scandinavia being a goldmine for mid-century anything, it's definitely folly to go to a place like Copenhagen without digging for architectural gems, and this year, we're making it...| Sight Unseen
Here is a list of things I do not particularly like: surfaces designed to look as if they were tattooed, ceramics bound by chains or ropes, almost anything with spikes. Part of the reason I don't like these things is that, as a child of the '90s, they often feel a little poser-y to me — like the designer thought that by using the signifiers of toughness that they could take a shortcut to actually being that thing. But you know what I do like? When designers use materials or processes that a...| Sight Unseen
This past month, Love House founders Jared Heinrich and Aric Yeakey debuted a new space just off Dimes Square in New York's Lower East Side; to christen the gallery, they curated their first group show ever — 60 brand-new works from the deep bench of contemporary design talent they've spent years fostering. The exhibition was titled, appropriately, The Family Show, and each artist or designer was asked to contribute a piece that represented their own interpretation of the theme.| Sight Unseen
One of our favorites launches at NYCxDesign was Hundō by Emily Thurman, an interior and product designer based in Salt Lake City. Thurman’s debut collection of furniture, lighting, and sculptural objects takes its name from the proto-Italic word for “pour out” — fitting as it gestures towards the fluidity that characterizes these pieces as well as the way in which some of them were made using the art of lost wax casting. The idea and process of “pouring out” also evokes the commu...| Sight Unseen
At this year's New York design week/month, opportunities were everywhere for showing new work, from an incredibly solid debut for the new trade fair Shelter, to the Hello Human–curated showcase at Public Records, to yes, the OG mothership that is now ICFF/Wanted. We found excellent work by ex-RISD kids in a Chinatown basement, design pieces mingling with fashion at boutiques like Colbo and Knickerbocker, and, a true sign of the times, quite of bit of great work in extremely expensive new re...| Sight Unseen
At this year's New York design week/month, opportunities were everywhere for showing new work, from an incredibly solid debut for the new trade fair Shelter, to the Hello Human–curated showcase at Public Records, to yes, the OG mothership that is now ICFF/Wanted. We found excellent work by ex-RISD kids in a Chinatown basement, design pieces mingling with fashion at boutiques like Colbo and Knickerbocker, and, a true sign of the times, quite of bit of great work in extremely expensive new re...| Sight Unseen
When the founders of the hospitality design firm AvroKo, who have been friends of ours for more than a decade, invited us to take over their Soho showroom and events space, Host on Howard, we in turn invited a group of our favorite designers to exhibit their work with us, not to mention co-host a few really fun parties along the way. Four studios trotted out their latest contributions to our Sight Unseen Collection — the furniture and lighting we represent direct to the trade — including ...| Sight Unseen
A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: limited-edition Gaudí chairs, a cathedral-like eyewear store, and a boutique that’s part Milanese cafe, part Lower East Side laundromat.| Sight Unseen
Who else is obsessed with wild animals who become celebrities — living, as they often do, in the thick of human society? In 2023, I was gripped by the news about Flaco, the owl who escaped the Central Park Zoo and flew free in Manhattan for a full year. For Korean-born, New York–based artist Minjae Kim, it was P-22, the mountain lion who famously lived in LA’s Griffith Park from 2012 to until his death in 2022, who triggered the concept for Kim's latest exhibition at Marta gallery. Call...| Sight Unseen
Harnessing tree sap to bind wood is a technique that dates back more than 45,000 years — a fact that fascinated Catskills-based studio Earth to People enough to revive the age-old process, using nature's glue to assemble furniture pieces crafted from reclaimed cedar and aluminum. Founders Jordan and Brittany Weller are “driven by a love of ancient stewardship and the handmade,” and for the past two years, they've dedicated their practice to reviving historic furniture-making traditions ...| Sight Unseen
In this world, there are two types of travelers: those who prefer to relax, and those who prefer to explore. But within that second group, there are those who will go to extreme lengths to acquire secret intel, especially in regards to one of our favorite subjects — peeping Modernist architecture around the world. The person we know who's best at this is Adam Štěch, the architecture photographer behind the popular Instagram account @okolo_architecture, who has visited almost 50 countries ...| Sight Unseen
This week: an Art Deco– and Frank Lloyd Wright–inspired textile collab between Block Shop and Sunbrella, two new design hotels for escaping into nature this summer, and a new series of lamps in wicker by Workstead.| Sight Unseen
When we founded Sight Unseen more than 15 years ago, our goal was to invite readers into the minds and studios of designers, in order to help readers understand how things are actually made. Though the site is about so much more now, we still get a perpetual thrill from learning how some of our favorite furniture pieces go from the wisp of a concept to a fully fleshed-out product. Much has changed within the actual design process in those 15 years as well, as new tools have completely transfo...| Sight Unseen
Rio Kobayashi and Luke Malaney each make sculptural furniture that exists somewhere between art, design, and carpentry. They're pieces that serve a function but at the same time question function: What should an object actually do? Where does its purpose lie? It’s a blurry line — or maybe not even a line at all. While they come from different backgrounds — Malaney is originally a Long Islander who lives in Brooklyn, while Kobayashi grew up in Japan and is currently based in London — t...| Sight Unseen
A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: textiles galore, including new Madeline Weinrib rugs in dialogue with Rene Ricard at Emma Scully Gallery, a Su Wu–curated tapestry exhibition in Dallas, and woven paintings on view in Brooklyn.| Sight Unseen
I'm slightly wary of what I'm about to write. After all, the last time I talked about a design trend reflecting our collective desire to escape, we plunged, not a month later, into the pandemic — which was certainly an exit from contemporary life of sorts. But while scrolling through Instagram during this month's Milan furniture fair, I began to notice an inescapable trend along those same lines: Beds were absolutely everywhere.| Sight Unseen
There’s a creative tension that animates the work of Anna Jewsbury, founder and artistic director of Completedworks in London. It centers on the push and pull between “ornament and practicality,” as she puts it, exploring a balance of function and frivolity. What often results are pieces, loaded with character, that make you look twice — if not again and again — trying to figure them out. Completedworks began in 2013, with jewelry, before delving into ceramics and homewares. But mos...| Sight Unseen
A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: stainless-steel urinal sculptures, a coral-colored house balanced on a steep site, and fruit-decorated furniture that aims to tackle the stigma of eating disorders.| Sight Unseen
We're rounding out our coverage of this year's Milan fair with a post dedicated to the best exhibitions, interiors, and projects. In our case, focusing primarily on those produced by independent designers and galleries.| Sight Unseen
What resonated with us most this year in Milan was, as it often is, collections by independent designers who have been in their studios, often for months or even years, toiling to bring these products to market.| Sight Unseen
Erstwhile journalist and lifelong tastemaker JJ Martin was way ahead of the game on maximalism. Back in 2015, the Milan-based American expat was founding her housewares and clothing company La Double J, and though her target audience at the time was rather different from ours — Europe's social set — she built a colorful, joyful brand that has since won over pattern-lovers of all stripes, including yours truly. To mark La Double J's ascension into fashion and design's popular vernacular, a...| Sight Unseen
During the 2025 Milan furniture fair, Italian accessories brand Marsèll invited Objects of Common Interest two create a two-floor installation called Adaptive Ground that "explores the relationship between space and material."| Sight Unseen
A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a major new art talent on view in Los Angeles, a new Scandinavian vintage design showroom in Chelsea, and the print version of a satirical newsletter on the intersection of dating and design.| Sight Unseen
Studio Hagen Hall, an architecture and design firm in London founded by Louis Hagen-Hall, has a talent for creating spaces that are striking yet serene — making them look effortless while also paying meticulous attention to detail. For Pine Heath, a townhome that’s part of a series originally designed by South African architect Ted Levy, Benjamin & Partners in the late 1960s, Hagen Hall brings California mid-century modern to North London’s Hampstead Conservation Area.| Sight Unseen
A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the tiled cabinet of our dreams, an exhibition featuring 99 artists riffing on the piggy bank, and a sale of studio furniture either made or owned by the legendary Garry Knox Bennett.| Sight Unseen
Marimekko has long been a go-to for those seeking joyful bursts of color and pattern in their clothing and home décor, from the oft-searched 1980s-era Dan River Tulip bedding to the ever-stylish (and, frankly, ahead of its time) gender-neutral shirting of the 1953 Jokapoika. Over the last few years, the Finnish design brand has expanded that vision with its Marimekko Artist Series, a collaborative opportunity “to provide artists with a canvas — in the shape of Marimekko products — to p...| Sight Unseen
In Shape of Land, the Chicago-based designer Sung Jang evokes locations that have personal meaning for him and abstracts them into dream places. Finding a deep resonance in cartography, Jang knows maps aren’t simply navigational tools, but more metaphorically, help us situate ourselves and understand our histories. At the city’s Volume Gallery, Jang’s show of objects and paintings — a six-panel screen and wall works of acrylic on linen, textured with inked sand — draws on his Korean...| Sight Unseen
This week: the sky blue laptop of our dreams, our top picks from this month's 2025 Collectible fair in Brussels, and two exhibitions of paintings that explore and elevate domestic spaces.| Sight Unseen
A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an NYC design showroom decorated in the next “it” color, a set of desk accessories to improve any workspace, and a chic ceramic bowl for design-conscious cat owners (like myself!).| Sight Unseen
I got married a few months ago, and while it was by no means a traditional affair, there were of course moments and objects we incorporated into the ceremony that held historical meaning and significance. Something we didn’t include? (Admittedly because we’d never heard of it before?) The Loving Cup, a decorative vessel historically used at wedding banquets to commemorate a union, with two handles — one for each partner — and an inscription with the date and names of the couple. This ...| Sight Unseen
The LA wildfire tragedy a cast a somber mood over LA's 2025 Frieze Week, but didn't stop the show. Here are 8 of our favorite art and design moments.| Sight Unseen
At the Stockholm Furniture Fair earlier this winter, we found the thing we're always searching for at these things: a designer whose work is so sophisticated and ready for the market that they're bound to be in the conversation for years to come. (A booth full of bangers, if you will.) And so our Best in Show at Greenhouse award this year went to Tobias Berg, a Norwegian designer with one of the most assured debuts we've seen in years.| Sight Unseen
How do you hold absence? How do you embody something that's missing, or give shape and weight to a fleeting phantom? The six limited-edition pieces in Grace Prince’s new furniture collection — called Held Absence and made exclusively for London's Béton Brut gallery, where it's currently on view — all explore this paradox. The themes of absence and fragility that color this collection invoke their seeming opposites, presence and strength, while also raising the question: Are they so op...| Sight Unseen
A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an art fair lounge formed from flesh-toned inflatables, a dentist’s office that miraculously doesn’t make our skin crawl, and the ongoing rehabilitation of the great American diner.| Sight Unseen
Whoever said “nice guys finish last” clearly never met designers Sacha Leong and Simone McEwan. Since they started their London-based studio, Nice Projects, five years ago, the duo has completed a string of hospitality interiors that each has a distinctly expressive identity rooted in context, a strong focus on natural materials and local craft, and a touch of magic that has helped the dining spots soar in popularity.| Sight Unseen
Armando Cabral has entwined the expressive elements of his West African heritage with the strict Swiss parameters of USM Haller in a new collection.| Sight Unseen
A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an exhibition of sherbet-colored interior fantasy paintings; some sexy furniture on show in Luxembourg; highly desirable knitted cactus lights; and a preview of some wild rugs coming to Milan in April.| Sight Unseen
In my general round-up of the Stockholm Furniture Fair last week, I noted how ably Scandinavians seem to grapple with the realities of our culture of waste. Nowhere at the fair is this more evident than at Greenhouse, the emerging design section that mixes independent designer showcases with group installations by design schools and curated projects.| Sight Unseen
Following a storm, there’s a moment when surfaces are left covered with beautiful, randomly dispersed droplets that glisten until they evaporate. In his new series — appropriately titled After the Rain —Parisian designer Quentin Vuong has been able to recreate this effect with startling accuracy across a series of blackened oak furniture pieces, upon which he painstakingly hand-applies black epoxy resin. Currently on show at Galerie Gastou, the series is the latest example of Vuong’s ...| Sight Unseen
A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the sweetest new English-language bookshop in Lisbon; a pattern-heavy, T Magazine–approved Tivoli farmhouse; and a collection of furniture made from slabs of olive tree roots and finished with olive oil.| Sight Unseen
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 wi...| Sight Unseen
A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: part two of In Common With’s inaugural furniture collection, an Art Deco and Vienna Secession–inspired Brooklyn showhouse (above), and the unveiling of Aesop’s new Parisian store.| Sight Unseen
Who’s ready to get cozy? Fall travel is about walking through the park with crisp leaves underfoot, wandering the streets dressed chicly in layers, and staying in hotels that encourage snuggling up with a book by the fire. There’s something nostalgic about this season, too, as we look back on the summer that was while digging out our favorite unmothballed sweaters. And what do you know — nostalgia is a common theme across a trio of newly reopened hotels we’re recommending for your nex...| Sight Unseen
Big-box furniture stores doing high-profile collabs has long been one of the surest bets for those who yearn for a collection of beautiful things by internationally renowned designers — but who can't necessarily afford the luxury price tags that typically accompany such items. CB2 has long been at the top of our list when it comes to products with a point of view, hand-picking many designers we know and love — from Kara Mann to Luam Melake to Studio Anansi and Farrah Sit — to offer coll...| Sight Unseen
