06.06.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

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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06.05.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

Sarah Burns’s Collection for Marta is Dreamy But Humble — In Other Words, a Little Midwestern

As a designer, New York–based Sarah Burns has a remarkable fluidity when it comes to scale. She can go small and intricate, like the jewelry she creates as co-owner of the Chinatown shop Old Jewelry. But she’s also adept at working with larger, place-defining forms, as with the furniture collection in her first solo show, Prairie’s Edge, now running at Marta in LA through June 10.

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06.04.23

Saturday Selects

Week of May 29, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discovered, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a Wes Anderson-esque LA bottle shop (above), an innovative plant holder, and a majorly chic Stockholm gallery reopening.

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06.01.23

How to Live With Objects

Jonathan Pessin Shops 7 Days a Week to Amass the Collection of Objects He Jokingly Calls “Not For Sale”

A collector with a penchant for the oversized and the absurd, Pessin runs the cheekily named vintage showroom Not For Sale from a giant space next to his (now-former) loft in Los Angeles. When we visited, the boundary between the two spaces was practically nonexistent, cycling in as he does favorite finds like a giant Mr. Goodbar, a papier-mâché Bart Simpson, and, always, French industrial furniture from the 1950s. An excerpt from How to Live With Objects.

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09.03.21

Up and Coming

This Seeded Glass Coffee Table is the Star of Courtney Applebaum’s New Furniture Collection

Inspired by an eclectic range of periods and sources — from the ancient world to Art Deco, antiques to high design — interior designer Courtney Applebaum rarely sources contemporary pieces for her interiors. “We really only use vintage. Everything else, we make,” says Applebaum. So, it only made sense for the designer to finally create her first namesake furniture collection: a series of terracotta and raffia sconces, terracotta lamps, and a glass coffee table, with more pieces on the way.

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05.31.23

Sighted

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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05.30.23

Up and Coming

Caroline Chao Uses Glass, Mirror, Lucite, and Light Itself to Create Optical Illusions in Her Furniture Debut

The nature of furniture is participatory — chairs invite us to sit, tables to gather round — but this holds especially true for the work of New York–based designer Caroline Chao. Her pieces engage our powers of interaction and perception — perhaps because in addition to the glass and Lucite she uses, light itself is a kind of material for her. We recently spoke with her about interiors vs furniture, how to re-contextualize ordinary materials, and her work towards changing the concept of a “good view.”

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05.27.23

Saturday Selects

Week of May 22, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: The newest, coziest addition to Bower's Melt collection, new housewares from a beloved shoe brand, and the first furniture line from one of our favorite London interior designers.

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05.26.23

Fair Report

The Best of New York Design Week 2023, Part II

Part II of our New York Design Week roundup — the second and final in our coverage, though we technically had so much content we could have easily done three — is mostly an accounting of the more straightforward side of design week, from group exhibitions — like the launch of the Mexican and Latin American design–focused retailer Omet and the latest Radiator Show, which upends the idea of comfort at home — to sophisticated new collection presentations by brands like Atelier de Troupe and Orior. Plus, a handful of interesting collabs, and a birds-eye view of ICFF.

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05.25.23

Fair Report

The Best of New York Design Week 2023, Part I

At the beginning of this month's New York design mania, I joked that while I've complained in the past that New York Design Week was too drawn out (it ballooned to nearly a month last year), this year felt too compressed, a kind of karmic retribution for my grumbling. How could we possibly see everything, and so close to Milan when we'd just gone through the same routine? But perhaps that sense of urgency was exactly what New York needed. (And, in truth, the "week" stretched to almost two). Because somewhere along the way, I realized I was having a significant amount of fun. Last year, we all agreed that "New York Design Week was back," etc. etc., and we saw wonderful work in beautiful locations. But this year something else returned to the city. New York got a little weird again — in a good way. After the jump, take a spin through some of our favorites, then come back tomorrow for another round of highlights, including our picks from this year's ICFF!

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05.24.23

How to Live With Objects

On the Hunt for Objects? Shop Our Book IRL at Nordstrom’s Manhattan Flagship

In our book, How to Live With Objects, we talk a lot about how rewarding it is to slowly and thoughtfully surround yourself with unique objects you feel a connection to, hence why we also caution against the department-store mentality of treating your interior as a series of empty spaces you should fill all at once. But when the department store itself becomes the place to find those unique objects, that advice obviously no longer applies — case in point, our new pop-in inside Nordstrom's midtown Manhattan flagship store, where now through June 17, you can shop nearly 100 truly special handmade, one-of-a-kind, and vintage objects from some of the makers and dealers featured in the book (as well as the actual book).

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05.23.23

Sight Unseen Collection

Two Days Left to See Our Sight Unseen Collection Show, Featuring Work by 23 Designers, in New York City

New York Design Week is in full swing, and while we'll be featuring a round-up of all of the excellent things we've seen later this week, today we're putting a spotlight on our own collection, which is on view in New York through Wednesday. The show features 23 designers and studios from our newly launched Sight Unseen Collection, for which we chose furniture, lighting, and objects from a stable of emerging and mid-career designers from around the world — all of which can be ordered directly through Sight Unseen.

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