07.01.24

Sight Unseen Presents

Want to Have Your Work Judged by Sight Unseen in Stockholm Next Year? Apply to Greenhouse Today!

I've now been to Stockholm in the dead of winter, when the ground is often covered in ice, on four different occasions. I've visited in the throes of summer — season of archipelago-hopping, 10PM sunsets, and simple but chic country houses — a grand total of zero times. But there's a non-masochistic reason why I keep returning: The Stockholm Furniture Fair, which in 2025 runs from February 4-8, is one our longtime favorites, and it's become even moreso in the last couple of years as we've developed our partnership with the fair's organizers, adding a Sight Unseen Best in Show award to the fair’s emerging design showcase, Greenhouse. We're excited to announce we'll be returning to the fair in 2025 — having bestowed last year's honor on the exciting up-and-coming duo Bursell/Svedborg — and we're hoping to convince more than a few of you today to submit your work to the jury in the hopes of being selected for next year's fair.

03.14.24

Sight Unseen Presents

Ask the Experts: How Do I Get Started With PR?

Whether you’ve been in the business for years or are just launching your studio, PR can be a powerful tool for boosting your reputation and visibility as a designer. But, as an independent creative or small business, we know your daily to-do list can seem insurmountable. Is doing PR on your own worth the effort? What can PR really offer, and how do you get started? As design fair season ramps up, Sight Unseen has partnered with Hello Human, a PR company for creative entrepreneurs, for a new series that breaks down some of the most common questions about the often nebulous world of public relations. Here, we’ll introduce you to the basics.

06.22.23

Sight Unseen Presents

Sight Unseen is Launching a Best in Show Award at Greenhouse, Stockholm’s Emerging Design Showcase: Apply Today!

If you're a longtime reader of Sight Unseen, you probably have some idea about our hierarchy of design fairs — and, as such, you may know that the Stockholm Furniture Fair ranks, year after year, at the very top of our list. We've been attending Stockholm off and on since 2008, and we've long been fans of the fair's emerging design showcase, called Greenhouse, which launched in 2003 and functions like a more curated version of Milan's Salone Satellite, open as it is to designers around the world. We've scouted major talents there in the past, it's certainly the place to be if you're at all interested in catching the eye of tastemakers, journalists, and — not least of all — potential manufacturers for your products and interior designers who might like to spec your work. That's why we are thrilled to announce that in 2024, we will be launching a partnership with the Stockholm Furniture Fair, running February 6-10: A Sight Unseen x Greenhouse Best in Show award, judged by yours truly, that will offer even more visibility and a greater platform for your practice.

05.02.23

Sight Unseen Presents

New York Design Week, Did You Miss Us? We’re Back, With a Show of Work by 23 Designers

Predictably, the question we always get around this time of year is: Are you bringing back Offsite?! Alas, our much-loved New York design week show, which ran in some form or another from 2010-2020, is on indefinite hiatus. But this year we'll be bringing a piece of its spirit back to life: From May 18-24, Sight Unseen will host an exhibition featuring the newest additions to the Sight Unseen Collection, which comprises furniture, lighting, and objects from a stable of emerging and mid-career designers from around the world, all orderable directly through Sight Unseen. The exhibition — taking place at Voltz Clarke gallery on the Lower East Side — will feature new work by 23 designers and studios, displayed alongside the paintings of France-based artist Heather Chontos.

01.10.23

Sight Unseen Presents

For West Elm’s Design Challenge, We Show You How to Personalize Your Living Room With Objects, Sight Unseen-Style

When West Elm approached us last fall to participate in their ongoing Design Challenge series — in which subjects start with a blank canvas and create a room entirely from scratch — we immediately said yes. After all, what better way to show people how to live with objects than to demonstrate it ourselves? The project would bring to life some of the big ideas from our recently published book, and it would give us the opportunity to flex our design muscles, which we don't always get the chance to do. The result is a four-minute video that delves into our philosophy of objects, and how they can bring a major dose of personality to any interior.

11.02.22

Sight Unseen Presents

At Phillips’s New Los Angeles Outpost, Our Curated Selection of California Designers is On View — And Available for Purchase

When we first began selling furniture online via our 1stDibs storefront back in 2018, we wondered if there was much of a market for buying things, well, sight unseen, as it were. Turns out there was, but after nearly five years, we still longed for a physical space in which our clients could actually see and feel and sit on the pieces in question. So when Phillips approached us earlier this year, asking if we might be interested in curating a rotating selection of contemporary California-based designers at the auction house's newly opened Los Angeles gallery space, we couldn't say yes fast enough.

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!

Sight Unseen Furniture Collection Bestcase

05.12.22

Sight Unseen Presents

Cool Chromes and Candy-Colored Resin: Introducing the First Sight Unseen Furniture Collection, Created in Collaboration With Bestcase

As an editorial platform and sometimes-IRL design show, Sight Unseen has been showcasing furniture and accessories by talented designers for almost thirteen years. But it wasn't until nearly a decade in, when our old friend Charles Constantine went to co-found a metal manufacturing facility called Bestcase, that we began to wonder — wait, shouldn't we also be making furniture ourselves? After figuring out the possibilities and constraints of designing with metal, creating a '70s-inspired mood board with references to how we wanted the collection to feel — at once icy and warm, vintage-inspired, yet of the moment — and reaching out to a handful of designers who could absolutely nail this look, the resulting six-piece collection launches today, both on Sight Unseen's 1stDibs storefront and through Bestcase’s distributor network.

02.09.22

Sight Unseen Presents

We’re Putting 500+ of Our Favorite Products Into One Printed Magazine. Here’s How to Get a Copy.

The Sight Unseen Yearbook comes out next month, and features more than 500 of 2021’s best residential products and furnishings. It's primarily meant to serve as a comprehensive yet curated resource for interior designers and architects looking for pieces to source and designers and brands to earmark. If you're currently practicing as an interior designer or architect, you can get a copy for free by signing up for a Sight Unseen trade subscription. Read on to find out how!

12.20.21

Sight Unseen Presents

See you in 2022!

Today marks the last day of our 2021 coverage, as we hunker down for another COVID winter and try to get some relaxation in before starting fresh in the new year. We'll be leaving you, as in previous years, with a review of our top stories from the past 12 months, ICYMI. What can we learn from the fact that these 8 stories were so popular? Here are our totally subjective speculations.

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.

07.08.21

Sight Unseen Presents

Our 2021 Collection Launches Today on 1stDibs — With New Work From 16 International Designers

The pandemic may have prevented us from hosting our Offsite show this year, but we didn't want to entirely abandon our role as a platform for supporting the work of independent designers — especially since they haven't let it stop them from coming up with brilliant new ideas, even without a physical fair to debut them at. So for 2021, we decided to curate a special collection of furniture and accessories by 16 contemporary designers and launch it for sale exclusively on 1stDibs, starting today.