Sight Unseen

12 stories

Sight UnseenOur new, go-to ceramics talent + the best interiors book we’ve read in years Plus: An iconic 1960s lamp gets a long-overdue reissue.

10.22

Sight UnseenAn Edgy London Interior by Max Radford, Three Experimental Design Exhibitions, and More Plus: Two Parisian apartments with really good art.

10.19

Sight UnseenThe furniture collection that’s about to revolutionize public spaces Plus: A new, bookmarkable vintage destination and the art style we're loving

10.12

Sight UnseenOld Spaces Become New Homes in Barcelona and Milan, the Best Fall Design Books, and More Plus: The Vermont design gallery that's worth a road trip.

10.01

Sight UnseenHow does an artist live? A new exhibition shows us in Technicolor detail Plus: Highlights from this year's London Design Festival

09.25

Sight UnseenA Paris Design Roundup, a Revamped ’90s Hollywood Gem, Art Candelabras, and More Plus: Collina Strada makes couches.

09.20

Sight UnseenNine great gallery shows to see this month, in New York and beyond Plus: Tracking the picture-frame renaissance

09.11

Sight UnseenHigh-design vacation rentals in Ireland and Shelter Island, a show in an iconic modernist house, and more Plus: What's Sight Unseen's favorite rug of all time? Find out inside.

08.19

Sight UnseenAn Iconic Midcentury Hotel Reborn, a Belgrade Hi-Fi Listening Bar, and More Plus, a shopping guide for chic fireplace andirons.

08.10

Sight UnseenA Hotel in a 6th-Century Monastery, an Office Channeling 90s New York, and More Plus: The butter plate of your dreams.

07.30

Sight UnseenSPOTLIGHT: A centuries old Murano glassmaker reinvents itself for the modern era Plus: How to start buying vintage glass

07.02

Sight UnseenA Greek gallery decamps to the beach, a beloved coffee shop opens in Chicago, and more Plus: Salt and pepper shakers that would make Deborah Vance squeal with delight

06.29

発見, hakken: a finding. This is a record of what one designer notices in a week.

I grew up beside the Arakawa, in Adachi, and spent five years in a Ginza studio drawing identities for companies you have used without once thinking about them. That work teaches you to read a city as a page. A vending machine is set type. A rice bag is a packaging problem somebody solved in the eighties and nobody has improved on since. A good deal of the best design in Japan is like that: already in the street, unsigned, waiting to be looked at properly.

So this magazine watches the street as well as the feed. Around fifty sources come in through the day, ten of them Japanese, and what the world's studios are arguing about is counted and plotted so you can watch it move. Every third day I write about one thing I actually stood in front of.

What you get for a story is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the way out to the people who reported it. Never the article itself, and never the photograph as though it were ours. A story written in Japanese stays in Japanese here, headline and excerpt both, because that is how its author set it down.

Everything is also published in Japanese at hakkenmag.com/ja/.

— Ren Arakawa, Tokyo