Monica Khemsurov and Jill Singer are the co-founders of Sight Unseen, an online magazine where designers and tastemakers go to find what’s new and next in design and the visual arts. They join to share insights and secrets unveiled in their new book, “How to Live With Objects: A Guide to More Meaningful Interiors.”
Debbie Millman:
If you plug the phrase sight unseen into your search engine, it will lead you to an array of places. There are several movies with that title and some books. But there is only one website that will rise to the top of your search and it’s an online magazine about design, art and the objects in our lives. Sightunseen.com is where a lot of designers and taste makers go to find what’s new and interesting and utterly unique at our visual culture. Now the founders and editors of sightunseen.com have decided to write a book and its title is How to Live With Objects: A Guide to More Meaningful Interiors. As you can imagine, it’s big, bold, and beautiful just like their site. Today, co-writers, Monica Khemsurov and Jill Singer join me to talk about their popular website, their new book, and about how to make a house into a home. Monica and Jill, welcome to Design Matters.
Jill Singer:
Hi, thank you for having us.
Monica Khemsurov:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, absolutely. Monica, I read that you are magically drawn to swimming pools. And Jill, I understand that you’re attracted to pictures of massive bodies of water, whether it be pools, oceans, fjords, beaches, you name it. What is it about water that you both love so much?
Jill Singer:
Well, I was a swimmer actually growing up. It’s the only sport I was really ever any good at. But really anytime I’m in a bad mood, if I’m at the beach, if I just walk to the water and stare at the water, I kind of just feel better. So for me, that’s what that is.
Debbie Millman:
Monica, what about you?
Monica Khemsurov:
It’s funny that you ask because I sometimes think about this. I’ll sit there and ponder it when I’m either at the beach or at a pool. And the conclusion that I’ve come to is that I think it has to do with the color of the water, that turquoise sort of vibrant turquoise hue. Something about it, I think that color somehow just is so beautiful and touches some sort of primal thing in me.
Debbie Millman:
I love that similarity was something that you only discovered after meeting and starting your business relationship and collegial relationship. It’s such a nice thing to have in common. Before I talk to you about your brand new book, I’d love to take a little bit of a deep dive into your backgrounds and talk about how you got to this particular moment in time. And I want to start with Jill, if you’re both okay with that. Your dad was a journalist. Your mom was an English teacher. Was there a lot of reading in your house as you were growing up?
Jill Singer:
Yes. There was a lot of reading. There were a lot of books. I have a lot of memories of kind of sitting in the armchair next to the record player kind of listening to records and reading books. And then when my sister and I were a little bit older, we had this thing, my parents gave it a really dorky title, they called it, I grew up in the ’80s when the Soviet Union was a thing. So they were like, we’re going to have USSR, stood for United Sustained Silent Reading, which I guess was where we would all sit in the living room together. And I think they were just trying to make a game of having us be quiet and read.
Debbie Millman:
Right. Let’s see who can be quietest the longest and you win.
Jill Singer:
It’s a really ’80s version of the quiet game.
Debbie Millman:
Yep. I read that you were in love within the 1983 popup anatomy book by Jonathan Miller and David Pelham. What did you love so much about it?
Jill Singer:
It’s a really good question. I am not the most scientifically-minded person, but I think I just really like knowing everything about certain things. I really like going deep obviously into design and arts and stuff. I really like burrowing into my music fandom. And this pop-up book, it made feel like you really understood how the human body worked, even though the pop-up things were so rudimentary in regards to how the body actually works. It made me feel kind of powerful knowing all this about the human body.
Debbie Millman:
What were you imagining you wanted to do professionally at that point in your life?
Jill Singer:
I kind of knew I wanted to be a journalist from a pretty young age. I think I just was following in my dad’s footsteps to a certain extent, even though he was more of a reporter. When I was a kid, actually, he used to work for the paper in St. Louis, the St. Louis Post Dispatch. And when I was a kid, we basically pitched the Post that we would go to Disney World as I was, I think 14, and write an article together, a co-bylined article on what it was like to bring a teenager to Disney World. So I had my first byline at 14, which was definitely a nepotism thing, but it planted the seed for definitely wanting to be a journalist. And I took some magazine journalism classes in college. I didn’t study journalism at all. But I think it was always in my head that that’s what I wanted it to do.
Debbie Millman:
You were accepted to Stanford University, but I understand your parents tried to bribe you with a car if you would go to Washington University instead? Why didn’t they want you to go to one of the best schools in the world?
Jill Singer:
I think for money. I think they were like, “Okay, well we won’t go bankrupt if we send you to Stanford, but it’s definitely more money.” And then I think it was just because they wanted to be close. California just seemed like a whole other world away, and I was a very difficult teenager. I think I said to them, “But what if I see you when I’m out?” So I really was not interested. I was not interested in going to Wash U.
Debbie Millman:
You decided to go to Stanford where you majored in English. I understand you had Tobias Wolff as a professor. But you’ve said that Stanford wasn’t the right school for you academically. Why not?
Jill Singer:
Well, I actually don’t know if it was the right school for me academically because I’ve never been to another one. But I felt a little bit like I was floundering a little bit. I really enjoyed being an English major, but I didn’t really feel like there was necessarily a hand on my shoulder kind of guiding me towards things that would interest me a little bit more within that topic. And then also just trying to figure out what else might compliment that. I look back and I think, well, why didn’t I ever take an art history class if that’s something that is obviously so interesting to me.
Debbie Millman:
After college, you moved to New York City and got a job at Entertainment Weekly as an intern. How did you get that job and what was that experience like for you?
Jill Singer:
I just blindly applied actually. I only applied to one job in New York and that was it. I think the rest I applied in California because that’s where most of my friends were going to be. I applied to some movie studios in Los Angeles and I applied to some magazines maybe there, too. I don’t even know if there were any there based at the time. I remember everyone, all of my friends were staying in San Francisco and they were all getting an apartment together and I kind of had to decide whether to stick it out and see if I got this New York internship or just kind of abandon it. And I did stick it out and I got this phone call that I got in the internship. I was driving down the 101 and I pulled over and I started crying.
Debbie Millman:
That’s a big deal to get an internship at a major national magazine like that at that point in your life is a very big deal.
Jill Singer:
Yeah h.I was crying in part because I was so excited and I was crying in part because it was such a huge change. My sister lived in New York, so I had been a couple of times before. But wasn’t one of those people who from birth was like, I’m moving to New York. It was just something I was like, well that could be interesting and seems like a good place to be if I want to be a writer. But yeah, I’ve been here now for 22 years, so it was a good choice.
Debbie Millman:
You ultimately didn’t get a permanent job at Entertainment Weekly, so you temped for a while and then you worked at a medical journal. Were you upset about not getting the full-time job at Entertainment Weekly?
Jill Singer:
Yeah. I was. There’s an internship program. It was actually really funny. There’s kind of like this hierarchy of interns at Entertainment Weekly and I don’t think the magazine even exists anymore. And even if it did, I don’t know how long this hierarchy lasted. But the summer interns were kind of the golden children. They got taken on this press junket to Puerto Rico or something like that. And then I came in in the fall and I was lucky because it was supposed to be a three month internship and it did get extended to six. But everyone who’s an intern there wants to be an editorial assistant and there’s only so many positions. So I did not get it.
And I was upset because I liked working there and I was also upset because that first year of anyone’s life in New York is such upheaval for everything. So I think I didn’t even have an apartment to live in yet. I was still kind of bopping from place to place and ended up, I didn’t get the internship six months before 9/11. So ended up temping for 18 months because the job market was not really happening in those 18 months.
Debbie Millman:
You ended up at mediabistro.com and became the deputy editor. That job is what ultimately led you to ID Magazine. What was the media business at this time? And it was sort of the halcyon days of magazines and the whole business, the whole publication business. It’s changed so much since then, but it also was beginning to change right at that moment.
Jill Singer:
Yeah, it was an interesting place to be, I would say. Blogging was fairly new at the point. At that point. I think Gawker had started maybe the year or two before I joined Media Bistro. I didn’t even think about the fact that I was at a startup at the time. And then only in hindsight I was like, oh yeah, that was a startup basically. Yeah, it was definitely those days of we would do these things, write articles on who was power lynching at Michael’s and these things that you don’t even think about anymore because they’re so irrelevant. But everything was kind of Wild Wild West. You didn’t know what was happening. But magazines were still such a thing that there was a huge business apparently in trying to help people get published in them, which is basically what we did. And then at the same time, I was eventually looking for a job for myself, which I was able to do because of the job I had.
Debbie Millman:
So talk a little bit about how your job at Media Bistro led you to the opportunity at ID Magazine.
Jill Singer:
Well, I ran this column called Revolving Door, which basically anyone who was leaving their job would email me and say, “This is [inaudible 00:11:26]. I’m leaving, this is where I’m going.” And then we would publish all the comings and goings. And then a friend of mine actually wrote in, a woman named Ruth [inaudible 00:11:34]. And she said, “I’m leaving my job at ID.” She had ostensibly written in to have it be published in Revolving Door. But I wrote her back and I said, “Oh my god. Would you maybe put in a good word for me there, because that seems like something I’d be interested in doing.” I liked media, but I was really more interested in doing kind of arts and culture reporting. I thought maybe I would be a book critic or I thought maybe I would be a music critic. And design was not something I particularly knew anything about, but I had read ID before and I thought that that would be an interesting place for me to work, basically. So she did. And I applied and got it four months later. It was a while.
Debbie Millman:
Before we talk about how you met Monica, I want to talk with her about her background before she met you. So Monica, I understand you spent your childhood putting bugs under a children’s microscope and ended up at the head of your high school calculus class. Did you want to be a scientist when you were growing up?
Monica Khemsurov:
I did actually. Yeah, I thought I was going to be a scientist basically right up until I started applying for college. Granted, when I was young, I also went through phases of wanting to be an architect and an interior designer, which I probably didn’t even really know what that meant at the time. But yeah, most of it, it was science for me. I was a science and math person.
Debbie Millman:
And is it true you decided to switch to journalism so you wouldn’t have to work in a lab full of what you called dorky guys?
Monica Khemsurov:
That’s how I think it went. Of course now I’m not quite sure. But I remember that I was looking at colleges in science, and it must have been, gosh, my junior year or as I was starting that process that my journalism teacher in high school where I also did the newspaper, she was the one who was sort of like, “Wait a minute. You’re going to throw this writing talent away? What are you doing? You should be a writer. You should be a journalist.” And I’m thinking,” What? No, I’m going to be a scientist.” And then I think somewhere between those two things, both that and also realizing that the lifestyle that scientists lead was maybe not the most exciting to me. I think between those two things, that’s how I ended up pivoting. I mean, I think I had shadowed a microbiologist at some point.
I don’t remember how old I was, but there was a day where you were supposed to shadow someone who was a professional in something you were interested in. And I spent the day in the lab and it was so fascinating. I remember being so fascinated by the machines and the processes and the work they were doing and the experiments and the research. But it was definitely, you’re in a lab under artificial lighting. It’s quiet. It’s a bunch of people who are not sort of interested in culture. And I mean, this is a very stereotypical viewpoint that I had when I was young. But it wasn’t kind of the same as the exciting life as of a journalist where you’re out meeting people and seeing things and doing things and living this what, at the time, seemed like a more glamorous lifestyle to me.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, absolutely. Whenever I was younger and thought about what it was like to be a journalist, I either thought of Brenda Starr or Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. That was sort of the way I envisioned this fantasy world. You attended the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. And at that point, was there a specific segment of journalism you were looking to pursue? Did you want to work in newspapers? Or did you always know you wanted to go into more of the magazine world?
Monica Khemsurov:
Yeah, I was fully a magazine person. In fact, when I took classes in the journalism school, it was magazine focused. And then I also, I don’t know if you’re going to ask me about this, but I worked on an online magazine during college as well.
Debbie Millman:
Yes. Well actually I was going to go into your experience at Surface, but if you want to talk about the online magazine during college, I’d love to hear more.
Monica Khemsurov:
Yeah. So that was kind of my formative experience because it was very early to have an online magazine. It was 90, what? I graduated high school in ’97, so it was ’98 to 2001, and I think I started in ’99 maybe. And my friends had an online music magazine called Rocket Fuel, and I worked on that with them. So it was only three or four of us and then a bunch of contributors. But we kind of had online meetings on, I don’t remember what we were using AOL or something. And we interviewed bands and we reviewed albums and we posted it all online and it was very early and very weird thing to be doing. But that was kind of my first taste of working at a “magazine”.
Debbie Millman:
In 2004, you got a freelance writing assignment at the design and culture publication, Surface Magazine. And yes, I read that because you at the time knew nothing about design, but so needed the money, you read a textbook about design and then went for it. Do you remember which textbook? I was trying desperately to find more information about this. It was like what textbook was it? Bet people would be starting to read it right away.
Monica Khemsurov:
I don’t remember. It was very dry though. It was basically, here’s the history of the decorative arts. And I was just cramming basically.
Debbie Millman:
How did the article end up coming out? Were you happy with it?
Monica Khemsurov:
Well, that’s also a funny story because my first article for Surface was interviewing Fabio Novembre in a Q&A for the magazine. And I was so nervous and I research and I wrote all these questions out and I was very excited about this interview. And I guess I must have done it by email because then I remember that the answers came back and I was mortified because they were all not really answers to my questions. They were these nonsequitors and these bizarre chairs are life and emotion. It was this ridiculous, ridiculous response. And I was so afraid. I wrote my editor thinking I was going to get in trouble. And I was like, I don’t know what to do. I can’t write a story based on these answers. I’m in over my head. And I sent them the Q&A which I think I must have been meaning to write into an actual article. And they wrote back and they were like, “Are you kidding? This is genius.” They’re like, “We love it. We’re publishing it word for word is a Q&A. It’s hilarious and thank you.”
Debbie Millman:
And they printed every word. I don’t think they changed anything.
Monica Khemsurov:
No. They printed it exactly as is. And it was really funny because it was this kind of very eccentric, very Italian kind of romance take on the very straightforward interview.
Debbie Millman:
You also worked as a reporter and writer at New York Magazine and as the senior associate editor at Seventeen Magazine. And this also similar to what I was asking Jill, you worked at both publications during a time of profound changes in the media business. What was that like for you at that time?
Monica Khemsurov:
Well, so New York Magazine, I started at during college because Northwestern has an internship program where you spend one quarter of school actually interning in the field. So I worked at New York Magazine my junior year for three months or whatever it was. And this was in 2000 I think. So that was especially a wild time in magazines. I mean, I remember I got to New York having maybe only been there once before. And I plunged into this world of New York Magazine being this green, Midwestern naive person who didn’t know anything. I mean, I was sort of cool. I knew culture and music and stuff. I was focusing on music even at New York Magazine trying to write about music. But I was thrown into this media world of complete debauchery and hedonism and partying. People were doing drugs at parties. It was just a total glamorous moment of New York media life and of New York Magazine in particular.
And I was going to dinners and clubs and it was hilarious because it was just completely alien to me. I was this hipster emo kid from Ohio, and I was trying to dress up in short skirts and go to clubs with my friends being like, where am I? But it was really fun. I mean, it definitely made me fall in love with New York and with working in that part of the media. That all started to change later on. But at the time, I did my internship and at the time I graduated and worked at New York Mag, it was definitely a vibe.
And when I ended up at Seventeen, that was really just because I had been a fact checker at New York. And it was a little bit hard to go from fact checker to editor at the time. Fact checkers usually were fact checkers because they had other jobs on the side. They were a novelist or working on something else. And fact checking was just kind something they did for money. So I was really committed to becoming a career editor. And Seventeen had a title that I wanted and my boss there I really loved. So I met with her for the first interview and I was like, “Oh, you’re amazing. I just want to work with you.” So it was sort of weird that I ended up at Seventeen. And in the end I really hated it and it made me hate teenagers forever.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Enough said.
Monica Khemsurov:
It was just completely nothing I was interested in. And teenagers, the ones who wrote us letters and interacted with us, I just were like, “Oh, you’re gross. Stop.”
Debbie Millman:
Well, you ended up meeting. You both ended up quite serendipitously at ID Magazine in 2005. Do you remember your first meeting? What was that like?
Monica Khemsurov:
My first memory is just no more of being in the office and you sitting at your desk. But it was a very small team. It was just Julie Lasky, Cliff Quang and me. And then Jill joined and we had two art directors. So it was a very intimate staff. So we all spent a lot of time together and we all got along for the most part. I mean, it was really fun working there. It didn’t feel like work.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I mean that’s one of the things about doing something that you love. It just feels like it’s just life and not laborious at all. But you’ve said, and I’m not sure who said this, so I’m just going to say you’ve is in the sort of more rhetorical sense, that ID was a really weird magazine, a prestige magazine owned by a Midwest company that also owned hobby and genealogy and firearms magazines. And I had just started in 2005 I think, or maybe 2006, I started writing for PRINT Magazine and then later joined the editorial staff. It was well after you left ID, but I had a lot of the same experiences working with the same kind of bizarre publishing company in the middle of the country. How were you able to make work as long as you did? You lasted a lot longer than I was able to.
Jill Singer:
I think it was a blessing and a curse, their interaction. In some ways, they really didn’t know what to do with us. And I was like, we’re the New Yorker of F&W publications. We won a national magazine award. And on the one hand, because they didn’t know what to do with us, there was maybe a little bit more freedom. I don’t know. We did some crazy things. I convinced them to let me go to the south of France to go to design camp for a week so that I could cover this design studio. But then on the other hand, I just remember always wrangling for budgets and because they didn’t understand what we did, they didn’t understand why the cost cutting measures that they were applying to other magazines wouldn’t apply to us. And it was a mess in many ways, but it was a fun mess for a while.
Debbie Millman:
Well, it was a great team. I mean, look at what you’ve all done, Cliff and Julie. I mean, it’s just extraordinary, the careers you’ve had. You worked there for four years with this teeny tiny staff. You produced a stunning magazine month after month with very, very few resources. And as somebody that was working on PRINT Magazine, again, more on the sidelines as a writer than a staff member, but then later as a staff member, I was privy to a lot of the cost cutting. And you both left together seven months before the magazine actually folded. Why did you leave at the time that you did?
Monica Khemsurov:
Well, Julie left before us, so it all was precipitated by Julie leaving because what happened was that the magazine passed into new hands. We had two guys who were kind of running it at that point. Julie did not… I mean, I don’t want to put words in her mouth, but she was not happy working under those circumstances. And she left first. So once she left us, we had lost our buffer to the heads of the magazine. And I think that was really difficult for us because Julie was always the one managing the relationship with them. And it was very strained and I think contentious even at points. So once she left and it was just us, we were so committed to the magazine, even though it was difficult working with the people in charge that we did push to them a vision of us taking over.
So we were the two of us saying, “Hey, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to relaunch the website, we’re going to completely re-envision it. We’re going to breed new life into the magazine. Put us in charge, will co-run it essentially, and give us a big raise,” because we were being paid peanuts. So we came to them with this plan, but at the same time, our relationship with them was kind of souring. And they kept us kind of in limbo for so long, letting us run the magazine without giving us raises and without telling us, “Yes, here’s your promotion.” That we started getting really frustrated and we sort of felt that something was going on. So we actually went out and got another job offer, the two of us, which was insane. Another magazine offered both of us a job together.
Debbie Millman:
Incredible.
Monica Khemsurov:
Yeah. And when we went back to them saying-
Debbie Millman:
That’s boss. I love this.
Monica Khemsurov:
I know. And we went back to them saying, “Hey look, we have a job offer, both of us. And we really need you guys to make a decision. We’ve had interviews with you. We’ve been working here for three years, four years. It’s now or never.” They’re like, “Okay, don’t take the job. We’re committed to you. So in good faith, we’re going to give you, I think it was a pittance of a raise and let’s just get through the next issue of the magazine.” And so we turned down the job offer. And all the while we’re hearing warnings from the publisher who’s secretly whispering in our ear that the people who run the magazine or what did they say, that we were being too aggressive or something?
Jill Singer:
We were being too aggressive. Yeah.
Monica Khemsurov:
It was something insanely sexist and horrible. And he was hearing them sort of talk trash about us. And then we actually closed the issue. And the day after, we were fired.
Debbie Millman:
I remember when the word came out that you both were fired and the shock waves through the design industry and the magazine industry. I don’t know how many people knew that you’d turned down this other opportunity, but because of the Herculean role that you had in resurrecting that magazine was just unthinkable that that happened. And ultimately, when the magazine closed, it was actually the first time and only time in my life that I ever went to a funeral for a magazine-
Jill Singer:
Yeah. It was sad
Debbie Millman:
… where we all cried and commiserated and sort of pulled our hair out because we couldn’t believe that this magazine that had really influenced so much thinking about design between the two of you, Cliff and Julie, it was just unthinkable.
Jill Singer:
Yeah. I didn’t actually even go to the wake because I was so angry. I was so angry that they had run this 54-year-old property into the ground. And I was so angry at the way we had been treated and I was just like, I can’t do it.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. You both left. You started your business together the day after you left. You already had tickets to go to the Milan Furniture Fair that upcoming Monday. You decided to go anyway. You immediately brainstormed a name, printed up super basic business cards, which I can hardly believe were basic knowing the two of you. And you bought your domain and that was it. Business started. How did you come up with the name Site Unseen? It’s such a good name. And how did you do that in 48 hours?
Monica Khemsurov:
Well, first I should say that the business cards were so basic that they only had follow us on Twitter. That was it because we didn’t know-
Debbie Millman:
[inaudible 00:28:45] calling cards.
Monica Khemsurov:
We didn’t know we were going to do yet. So we’re like, just follow us on Twitter. Here’s the business name. It was very intentionally mysterious. And people were, afterwards, they were laughing because they thought when we passed these cards out that we had a business already to go. And we were just teasing it and we’re like, no, we literally didn’t know what we were doing. We just wanted to make it look intentional. But then, yeah, the name, Jill.
Jill Singer:
The name. Okay. I will start out by saying we really did not have a firm concept the weekend we left. But we had a big lunch after we left. And we talked about before, what are the things that were kind of most interesting to us about ID? And one of the things for me especially, and Monica as well, I’m sure was going into people’s studios and seeing how they worked, seeing how things were actually made. That was how I got my design education. And I loved translating that for readers. And I think that’s partly why ID was successful under us is because we were good at translating that kind of stuff for just anyone, for obviously ID had a very industry-specific audience, but there were people who read it who didn’t have any connection to design.
So we wanted to “pull back the curtain” on design. And we were just trying to do some, I remember reading, I think T Magazine had a super rudimentary website at that point. And we were just reading a bunch of stuff, looking for words that jumped out at us. And I think we’re like, “Okay, well what about unseen?”
Monica Khemsurov:
Yeah, we were exchanging emails that were literally lists of words. And I think Jill sent a list that included unseen. And then it just sparked.
Debbie Millman:
You mentioned you felt that it might be the right time to pull back the curtain on how things were made. And it seemed as if you were very intentionally trying to demystify the process of design, which at the time was not the way things were being done. What gave you the sense that the cultural moment was right for that type of demystification, that people wanted that?
Jill Singer:
Well, it was very much at, this is 2009, right around the time of the slow food movement and just kind of artisanal everything. And the aesthetic that was coming into play was, I went to a barn and I brought all this stuff home and I decorated my restaurant. I don’t think we were ever consciously like, oh, well let’s take these lessons that we’ve learned from the slow food movement and apply them to design. But it really was the same kind of interest. If you were going to buy something, well, wouldn’t it be better if you understood the life cycle that surrounded it and the context in which it was made? And what does the person look like who made it? And what does their studio look like? And what are the weird things they collect? And what are the things they keep around their studio for inspiration? And these were the super rudimentary things that went into all of our initial interviews.
And then we took the summer to figure out what we were going to do Sight Unseen. And that eventually spun out into us taking these scouting trips to Europe where we would visit people’s studios. We went to some factories. We literally went to a pasta and ice cream factory to figure out how those kinds of things were made. We were really committed.
Monica Khemsurov:
Well, it had nice packaging. Don’t forget.
Jill Singer:
Yeah. We were [inaudible 00:32:11] into this idea.
Debbie Millman:
How did you fund this? Was it all your own money?
Monica Khemsurov:
Oh, we did a Kickstarter.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, wonderful.
Monica Khemsurov:
I knew someone who knew the founder of Kickstarter. So Kickstarter had just begun and it was a friend of the founder who was like, “Hey, my friend started this thing. Why don’t you try it?” And we raised, I think $4,000. And a lot of the premiums for that Kickstarter we got as gifts from people who knew we were trying to start over and we were struggling a little bit. So some brands and restaurants gave us gifts to offer. And that paid for both some of these trips as well as the cost of developing the site.
Debbie Millman:
13 years later, Sight Unseen is way more than just an online magazine. It’s grown to be a shop, a design fair, a creative consultancy. It’s a globally recognized brand with an extremely distinct point of view. Initially, I read that you decided when you first started that you were going to try a million different things and see what stuck. With all of this success that you have now, did you have stumbles along the way? Did you have failures? Did you start things that you stopped? Did you rework things that weren’t working but you still believed in?
Monica Khemsurov:
Yeah.
Jill Singer:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
Talk a little bit about that if you can.
Monica Khemsurov:
So I will have to say, personally, I want to just mention this, is that the way that I tend to do things, and I don’t know if Jill’s just been dragged along by me or if this is the same for her, but I tend to get very excited about projects. And rather than planning them out like 100% to a T, which often I find for other people, makes them take longer, makes them second guess themselves, makes them stress out about things, sometimes slows them down or they get scared and they quit. For me, I’ve always been the opposite where I’ll rush into a project just trying to get momentum and taking everything one step at a time because I don’t want to lose that momentum or lose the nerve to do it. So that’s the approach that I’ve always had within Sight Unseen to our projects and my other business endeavors, which is rather than obsess over everything and try to get it perfect, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Let’s just dive in and try it. And I think a lot of the projects that we’ve done, we’ve done them that way. And I always think it’s a good thing because it means things happen faster. They happen without as much intimidation or hesitation. But it does mean that sometimes we have to quit things or they don’t go as well as we hoped. I mean, OFFSITE has had its ups and downs over the years. It started off as NoHo Design District. And again, this was just us saying, how come New York Design Week isn’t as great as London Design Week or all these other fairs in other cities where you have this ground swell of energy and innovation and experimentation and talent and youth and it’s very localized and you get to see the beating heart of this city’s design scene. Whereas in New York, it just felt like it was a trade fair.
And so I think we just went into it blindly being like, let’s make one. And just started and just started. Literally started walking around the neighborhood approaching landlords of empty storefront to try to find spaces just to insert people’s work into. And everything we did was so grassroots like that where it wasn’t, hey, we’ll go out and raise money and make a business plan and have a whole deck for this project. It was more like, we’re just going to go out there and do it. And I think that meant that with OFFSITE what started as NoHo Design District, we tried to take over NoHo, then we found out that the neighborhood board was like, “What the heck are you doing? You can’t just call something a NoHo Design District. We have a whole business board here. Who are you?” We were like, “Whoops.”
So things like that where it’s just we went into things like a little more naively, which was both the benefit and a drawback, but then NoHo to San eventually became OFFSITE. OFFSITE eventually became, do we really want to do this anymore? It’s been a lot of those kind of being open to evolution and things kind of stopping and starting.
Jill Singer:
Yeah. And I would say definitely I play a lot more devil’s advocate. And I’m a bit maybe more practical about what we have the capacity to manage. But yeah, things have their up and downs. We had an online store for a really long time and that’s kind of just run its course because in terms of money, it’s not a real source of income for us. And because if you’re not going to devote your entire business to selling small goods, you’re not going to be very successful at selling small goods. And I think that was a lesson we eventually learned.
Monica Khemsurov:
It’s also not what we want to spend our time doing.
Jill Singer:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
One thing that I thought was really interesting about the way you sort of delineate your roles in the business, you said that at the beginning of your partnership, you both had similar skill sets and have said that neither of you had a specific head for business. How did you grow and develop and evolve those abilities and then begin to understand what you did best or more uniquely?
Jill Singer:
I think for a long time both of us were doing everything and yeah, it really was not helpful. It was also that, because when we were starting out, it still is just the two of us, but we have a team of freelance writers and stuff like that now. But at the beginning we really were writing every single article and we were kind of committed to the kind of long form journalism that we had come from in print. And it was this insanely time consuming process where every article was a long form piece that would appear in the well of a magazine.
And because we were both doing that for so long, it took a while for us to be like, okay, what if we actually… I think it was maybe five years in when we were like, okay, well what if we really actually split this up? And instead of both of us managing the writers, I’m going to head up editorial and I’m going to hire writers and I’m going to manage them and edit all the pieces and da da da. And Monica was more interested than I was I think in taking on some of the more business-related aspects like the publishing side of finding the money, building partnerships, building brand collaborations, that kind of thing.
Monica Khemsurov:
And it’s important to say that we didn’t make any money for five years, so it didn’t become an issue until five years in. So that was when we started having more interaction with brands and partners and it just was a natural thing. Also, we were stepping on each other’s toes a lot. It was just too crazy. We needed to get out of each other’s hair in order to preserve the relationship. So I think it was a moment of, okay, if I don’t have to split this with you and babysit you on this, then you don’t have to babysit me on that. And we’re just doing our own thing a little bit more. So yeah, when the money came, I started taking care of it.
Debbie Millman:
You seem to have a knack for understanding trends, how they form, how they splinter, how they die, how they define us. How do you keep your finger on the sort of pulse of the cultural zeitgeist in the way that you do?
Monica Khemsurov:
Well, I think part of it’s just innate because I think I’ve been doing that since I was a teenager. In some ways, you just either have the skill or you don’t. Because I think what happens for me is that something will come on my radar and it’ll feel completely intuitive, but I’ll be like, “Oh, that’s going to be huge.” I don’t know why I said that. You know what I mean? I saw it. I think I posted an Instagram post in 2014 where I was looking down at my feet and there was a terrazzo floor and I was calling it terrazzo was the next big trend. And obviously I had seen it around. So it’s not that I was the first one to see terrazzo. There was something happening, but I think it’s some sort of innate skill to be able-
Debbie Millman:
Well, you’re the first one to sort of name it in that moment. You were.
Monica Khemsurov:
Well, yeah, I don’t know if I was. But the point that I think it’s a special innate skill to be able to pick up on something, feel why it’s right just in your bones because of whatever came before or whatever’s happening at the moment. And then for some reason it sets off your spidey sense. And there’s like the scientific side of it and the unscientific side of it. And I think the unscientific side of it is just you’re just born with this ability to kind of know what’s cool right before it hits. And there’s inklings, but you kind of can see this amplification in your mind for some reason. And then the scientific part is just how much time we spend researching and being aware and looking.
Debbie Millman:
I have one more question about your site and then I want to talk about your book, your beautiful book. One thing that I was really struck by when I was doing my research on your history was something that you said about how picky you are and how if you were less picky, you would probably make a lot more money. And you said this.
“There is such an immediate feedback online and it almost always becomes oppressive in a way because you see that the kitschiest, cheesiest stuff often gets the most likes and goes the most viral. And then you’re sort of caught in this dilemma. How do we play to that and publish stuff that we don’t necessarily feel passionate about because we know what will get numbers or do we stick to our instincts and try to keep our standards really high?”
And I can say you have both kept your standards really high. It’s a big temptation, as I look through the analytics of the things that I work on, to want to repeat doing the things that do really well when you know deep inside that that’s compromising your editorial integrity. And you haven’t done that. How have you been able to manage that tension?
Jill Singer:
I think some of it comes from being Gen X. Just like a healthy-
Debbie Millman:
In what way?
Jill Singer:
A healthy distrust of anything being too successful. But I don’t know. Gosh, it’s really complicated actually. I think for both of us it’s like this wouldn’t be worth doing if it was just this basic thing where it didn’t feel special and didn’t mean something to people. And it wouldn’t mean something to people if it was more generic. And especially because it wasn’t particularly financially successful for a long time. It had to be worth “coming to work” for every day. And some of it is maybe we had a little bit more of the freedom to do that. Monica has another business and she does some freelancing. So this isn’t necessarily the only way both of us make money. Part of it was just this refusal to be an entrepreneur if it wasn’t on our own terms. Then you may as well just be working for a company because if somebody else is telling you what to do, then may as well just be working someplace else.
Monica Khemsurov:
I mean, I would say that I think from the minute we started Sight Unseen in 2009, we said that this was going to be basically, we had been so frustrated in our jobs at ID and in the circumstances at ID and what happened at ID that we almost went into Sight Unseen in this rebellious moment of, “Okay, if we’re going to do our own thing, then we’re really going to do our own thing. And screw the man. We’re going to literally be the most self-indulgent editors we could possibly be and really just publish what we’d like, what we’re interested in, and we’re not going to listen to anyone.” And I think that was the spirit that we went into doing it. And I think that that’s persisted. And that’s kind of been part of why we have resisted the temptation to go into basically watering down the content to the degree that it’ll be more mainstream, that we’ll get more likes or we’ll get more traffic.
Those have all been things that we considered doing and it just didn’t seem right to our mission statement, which is just to have this be about our curation and our point of view and what we love and what we deem to be good. And in a way, we’ve never purported to be anything else. You know what I mean? We’ll be totally honest when we do our hot list, our American design hot list, it’s like it’s completely subjective. It’s just what we think is good. And that’s what it is.
Debbie Millman:
Well, that curatorial eye is very evident in your beautiful new book, How to Live with Objects: A Guide to More Meaningful Interiors. And you start the book with a question I’d like to ask you, which is, what is it that defines a home?
Jill Singer:
Well, we argue.
Monica Khemsurov:
Is it the curtains?
Jill Singer:
We argue that-
Monica Khemsurov:
Is it the window treatments?
Jill Singer:
So basically the central argument of the book is you don’t have to hire a professional interior designer. You don’t have to have a decorator. You don’t have to have a ton of money. You don’t have to follow all these rules that have come down from shelter magazines or design books in the past about how to “make your house a home”. What you really need to do is be very intentional and educated about the objects you bring into your house and how each object should really be a reflection of your personality or say something about your life story in some way. Maybe it tells a story about the friend who gave it to you or the period in your life you were at when you got it, or the trip you took when you bought it, how that can just make even the state of being in your home much more meaningful.
Debbie Millman:
In the book, you encourage people to forget about the idea that only expensive status objects are worth having and suggest instead that they buy what they feel drawn to, what feels meaningful or what expresses their personality, whether it’s a vintage teapot found at a garage sale or a dollar or an investment piece made by a younger hot up-and-coming designer. How do you suggest people allow themselves to do this, give themselves permission to start to open up the possibilities of what they can consider style?
Monica Khemsurov:
Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, I think partly when we were writing this book, we assumed that it’s something people were a little bit primed to do anyway. I think most people have had the experience of going to a sale or a garage sale or a thrift store or whatever it may be, and finding themselves drawn to something. I think it was more the idea of having them shift their mindset a little bit into thinking that what the priorities are for decorating your home or making a home might be a little bit different from what they were taught. So I don’t think anyone would feel alien to the idea of bringing in an interesting object. I think it’s more giving them the thought that, oh, you should celebrate this. This should be it. You should do more of it. And you should be shopping all the time and looking all the time and paying attention to or developing your own taste in that way rather than constantly having to rely on outside people to tell you what’s good or tell you what is worthy of being in your home.
So I think it’s more not sort of a change in people’s behavior, but more a change in mindset to feel like, yeah, I am going to give myself permission to be the driver of my own style and my own space. And that’s kind of where the book is meant to come in, to give them another view on how things can be done and encourage them to spend more time thinking about shopping or looking and collecting in a way that maybe they didn’t really understand was valid.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I mean, one thing that I came away from the book feeling and it sort of builds a little bit on what I learned from Marie Kondo, does this spark joy? And yes, I do ask myself that question now with nearly everything that I acquire. But what I think I learned from your book was how do I curate a collection of things that are amplified by joy together in a way that I hadn’t thought about before? How do I create this sort of sense of singularity in a collection or even just in my home, on my bedroom night table, what do I want to put there? How do I want it to make me feel collectively, not just individually? Which is something I hadn’t really thought about as much before.
Jill Singer:
Yeah. And it’s funny. We really actually don’t address that idea in the book of throwing your stuff away. And because I feel like you’re going to be able to make it work. Bring more pieces in that maybe are the result of this kind of switch in your mindset. Marie Kondo’s a bit of a mind fuck sometimes.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I mean, it’s not about waste and throwing things away. Actually, I think you’re encouraging readers to acquire things slowly, more serendipitously so that they never are in a position where they’re staring at this sort of mountain of choice and things. And so in that vein, are there any best practices that you can share or one or two on how to choose things if you find you like a lot of things? Because I tend to a lot of things and are there questions that people should ask themselves when confronted with this sort of plethora of choice?
Monica Khemsurov:
Well, so first of all, a good thing to do to ask yourself if you’re wavering on a piece or you’re worried that you don’t have space for it, is I always ask myself, can I just take a photo of this and post it and will that scratch the same itch? You know what I mean? Is it that I really need to have this? Or is it that I just want to affirm the fact that I found it interesting and want people to know that I had this moment with my eye that I’m proud of. So I think taking a picture is always the first question. And then it’s like, okay, if a picture’s not going to be enough, if I really need to have this. One of the interview subjects in our book, Linda and John Meyers from Maine, they do a company called Wary Meyers where they make candles and soaps, but they’re also major collectors and estate salers and garage salers.
Linda said that she always says to herself, “If it doesn’t have a home, it’s not allowed to roam.” And that’s just a cute way of saying, if you can’t think of anywhere you would put it in your house, maybe you need to take a moment and sleep on it. And I think it’s just simple things like that. I also feel like if you run out of space, can you build more shelves? Personally as an object lover, I’m like, “Well, maybe I just need more shelf space.” There’s nothing wrong with that. If you want to display more things and keep collecting, if you can find a way to do it in your home where it’s organized and you’re not being cluttered out of your own space, then why not? Just make yourself happy. I feel like I don’t think people need to overthink it so much.
Jill Singer:
And also we talk in the book about how you should build your home slowly. And obviously there are certain things that you need at the very beginning. You need your bed or some place to sit. But especially the decorative objects, we really encourage just taking your time and knowing, we don’t want you to work from a list, I need this mug, I need this da da da. But sometimes knowing those categories, you can be like, Oh, well I actually have nine million candlesticks right now. I don’t need another candlestick. I’m kind of keeping myself more open to this other category that I need.
Monica Khemsurov:
Yeah. Because if you rush also, sometimes you fill all the slots before you discovered the thing that you really, really love.
Jill Singer:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
And for me, it’s the really, really loved part of what you just said, which is something that I think is a common denominator between the types of articles and the types of coverage that you include on your site and what you include in the book. And I was talking to somebody yesterday about your editorial choices and how it feels like you only write about what you love. And that sort of criteria feels like it is extended now into the book as well.
Jill Singer:
Yeah. It’s really funny because I feel like there is this conversation where people are like, why isn’t there more criticism in design? And on occasion people have asked us, why isn’t there more criticism on Sight Unseen? And I’m like, that’s not my role. My role is to write about the things I love and I’m in a community with all these people who are trying to make a living. It’s really not what I want to be spending my life on, to tear someone down.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I agree. I agree. I tried to do the same thing with this podcast. People have sometimes asked me, “Oh, what should I expect coming on the show?” I’m like, “I’m not Barbara Walters. This is not going to be an investigative piece. This is a celebration of who you are and what people can learn most from you.”
Monica Khemsurov:
Yeah. Well I’ve always told people, if your project doesn’t end up on the site, there’s your criticism.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Monica Khemsurov:
We didn’t like it. Sorry.
Jill Singer:
Or it fell at the bottom of our inbox.
Monica Khemsurov:
No.
Debbie Millman:
I have a couple more questions for you. You extend a popular category of the Sight Unseen website into the book, the At Home With section. How did you find and then get so much access to so many remarkable homes? Who are your friends?
Monica Khemsurov:
Oh dear.
Jill Singer:
Well, with some difficulty, because we wrote this basically last year, it was still pandemic times. And we really did email everyone we knew. We emailed people saying, “Do you have a house? Can you send us scouting shots? Do you have a friend who has a cool house? Can they send us scouting shots?” We looked through design publications to see who else had been shot. We’re like maybe we could do the same home, but with our own spin on it. It was a gargantuan research task. But we do have very cool friends, so that is helpful. Some of the homes we already kind of knew we wanted to feature. Su Wu is a friend of ours who lives in Mexico City. Her house has popped up a couple of times and her whole ethos is so in line with the idea of the book. We knew we wanted to include her.
Monica Khemsurov:
She’s an object-obsessed person. She’s totally obsessed with objects. She’ll find a tiny stone or a hunk of metal and all of a sudden it’s like this thing of wonder. And that’s sort of the spirit of the book. But yeah, I think it was hard to find homes too, because we were looking for something extremely specific.
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Monica Khemsurov:
Which is not just this perfectly appointed beautiful interior that an interior designer poured over and made perfect, but something that is beautiful and will shoot well and look beautiful in a book, but also has a ton of objects. And honestly, that’s exactly what we look for At Home With Sight Unseen. And what we’ve always looked for is this moment of you walk into a space and you’re like, “Oh, what’s that? What’s that? What’s that? What’s that? That’s so cool.” That’s sort of always been the vibe with our house tours on the site. And we’ve always, before we shot someone’s home, we’ve told them, “You don’t have to clean up. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t matter.” We’re just there to see your possessions. We’re just there to see what cool stuff you have. Relax. It’s like, that’s really all we’re looking for. So it definitely a through line from what we’ve been doing for the past 10 years.
Debbie Millman:
And that’s, I think, what is so special about the book, the humanness that is expressed on really every page of the book. I have one last question for you both. And then I have a final question for Monica. Here’s the question for you both. When designing a home, one of the biggest issues that people fear is that they’re going to make a mistake. What advice do you have to help people conquer that mentality?
Jill Singer:
Well, one thing we say in the book is, what do you think a vintage object is? It’s something that somebody gave away. So you don’t have to keep everything you have. Please don’t throw it in the landfill. But you can maybe give it to a friend who could use it more, or whose taste it fits better. Or you can use one of these kind of secondary market sites, or even Craigslist or Facebook marketplace.
Debbie Millman:
Or just put it out on the curb. Somebody’s going to take it.
Jill Singer:
Yeah. Freecycle it.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Monica Khemsurov:
I feel like worrying about making mistake is silly because how do you know if you’re going to make a mistake? How do you know if you made a mistake? It’s so vague and subjective. It’s just like in the book, the whole thing about the book is following your instincts and following what you love and just trying to connect with something. And that is a process. It’s something that you’ll learn to do better over time to figure out what you like. Maybe you think you’re obsessed with something one day, and then a week later you’re like, “Oh my god, why did I buy that? I don’t like it at all.” And that’s fine. That is definitely not something to worry about. It’s a process. It’s all part of the same process. And it’s the idea of making a mistake in a home is so weird. Who’s saying you made a mistake? Is it you? Can’t you fix it?
Jill Singer:
Well, it’s like what’s the worst thing that happens? Okay, you post it on social media and somebody’s like, “Ew, what’s that?” I mean, it’s just, there’s really no real consequence. So that’s kind of what’s funny, too. And then at the end of the day, you should be trying to buy things for forever, but your taste is going to change. You can’t help it. Doing what I said before, making sure that it kind of stays in the market is helpful. But yeah, it’s kind of no fun if everything is exactly the same in your house forever. You do want to move stuff around in your own house and give it to friends and bring other things in. And that’s what makes it very fun and meaningful.
Monica Khemsurov:
Yeah. If it’s a living thing, if it changes and evolves and nothing has to say the same. And obviously if you’re buying a sofa, you will worry about making a mistake if you’re spending $4,000. But hey, just do some research.
Jill Singer:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Monica, I have one last question. Many years ago I read that you were toying with the idea of teaming up with an interior designer friend to curate and style something you wanted to call The Ugly Dollhouse wherein you purchased hideous dollhouse furniture from around the web and turned it into a kind of pint size house of design horrors. Did you ever do it? And if so, where can we see it?
Monica Khemsurov:
So I’ve had a lot of crazy ideas over the years because I’m a kind of crazy idea factory as a person in general. So I never did it. Not for any specific reason, I think just the opportunity never came up. But I think someone did a dollhouse since then and I got really upset. But what they did was they had designers create dollhouse furniture, I believe, which I still felt was some sort of a encroachment on that idea. But anyways, I just became obsessed with miniatures a long time ago. And this was just a wacky notion. And I also had an idea about, which I haven’t done, about doing ugly comfort furniture, reinventing the comfort furniture of our youth.
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Monica Khemsurov:
Doing a show-
Debbie Millman:
Ugly lawn chairs.
Monica Khemsurov:
And this was a long time ago, too. Yeah, doing the papasan, the husband, the beanbag chair, the La-Z-Boy. And funny enough, I never did it. But along the way, there have been examples of those things that have come out individually from designers, which I always think is funny because I’m like, “Gosh, that should have been my show.”
Debbie Millman:
Well, further proof that nothing’s really a mistake. Right?
Monica Khemsurov:
No. Gosh, no.
Debbie Millman:
Monica Khemsurov, Jill Singer, thank you so much, so much for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Jill Singer:
Thank you so much. This was fun.
Monica Khemsurov:
Thank you for the conversation. It was really fun.
Debbie Millman:
Monica Khemsurov and Jill Singer are the editors of the website, sightunseen.com, and the authors of the stunning new book, How to Live With Objects: A Guide to More Meaningful Interiors. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference. We can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.