20 things that positively delighted us in and around Design Miami this year

Since Design Miami first launched in 2005, collectible design has been catapulted onto the global stage. This week’s been proof, with some 80 international exhibitors congregating beneath a sprawling tent in Miami Beach and with international arms of the fair in Paris and, in 2027, Dubai. The theme for the fair, which runs through Sunday 7 December, is ‘Make. Believe.’, a theme that is ‘a celebration of the extraordinary power of design to turn imagination into reality’, said Design Miami CEO Jen Roberts at the opening press conference.

All that creativity means there’s a lot to see, even if you skip the greater hurricane that is Miami Art Week, anchored by Art Basel Miami Beach. We’ve been on the ground all week perusing booths, special installations and galleries, and there have been a few stand-out things that caught our attention. If there’s a common denominator, it’s their ability to ignite the imagination and their sense of fun. How very Miami!

Superhouse’s super booth

Move over Winky the Norwich Terrier: the crown for this year’s ‘Best in Show’ at Design Miami was handily snatched by Superhouse. For its booth, the New York-based gallery teamed up with San Francisco design practice Studio Ahead to create a fun-filled Wunderkammer of American-made furniture designed between 1980 and 1990. Works by Dan Friedman, Forrest Myers and more were interspersed between two towering Ionic columns, whose capitals felt like a squiggly riff on the overall postmodern theme. Wackier works – like an Alex Locadia-designed chair whose back is imprinted with Batman’s abs of steel – added just the right amount of wrong to a booth that felt absolutely right.

Es Devlin’s beach reads

Miami’s sandy shores are typically dotted with beach umbrellas and hard bodies, but this year, something of an anomaly appeared – a bookshelf. Specifically, a 50ft-wide, rotating wedge-shaped bookshelf filled with 2,500 tomes. It’s the handiwork of English artist and set designer Es Devlin. Called ‘Library of Us’, the installation is a follow-up to Devlin’s ‘Library of Light’ unveiled at Salone del Mobile earlier this year. The shelf slowly revolves on a circular platform, where the public is invited to sit and contemplate words on an LED screen – selections from Devlin’s own personal library – and watch the ocean and the seaside towers slowly spin round. ‘You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down,’ read one quip from Toni Morisson’s 1977 novel, Song of Solomon. Amid a week whose raison d'être is centred around exclusivity, this public-facing sculpture felt like a gift.

Kohler’s fishy installation

Why settle for white porcelain when your toilet, bathtub or sink could be iridescent? That was the theme of Kohler’s 2025 fair booth, which showcased Pearlized, a glimmering new rainbow finish created in collaboration with artist David Franklin. Pearlized was the result of a happy creative accident, created when Franklin was figuring out new ways to glaze his signature ceramic fish during an artist residency with the Wisconsin-based company. Kohler liked it so much that it has glazed a sink in it and tapped designer Harry Nuriev of Crosby Studios to design a glowing, meditative installation to celebrate it at the fair. Topped with a swirling school of Franklin’s shimmering fish and clad in mirrors, it made for a meditative moment amid the fair’s buzz.

Gerrit Rietveld’s covetable chairs

When strolling through the halls of a large collectible design fair, a little aesthetic litmus test comes in handy: Would you have it in your own house? The answer is a resounding ‘hell yes’ when it came to these gorgeous Gerrit Rietveld chairs presented by Netherlands-based gallery Mass Modern Design. These beauties are original productions dating to the 1960s, but have been reupholstered in a swirling fabric, designed by Heather Chontos for Pierre Frey. They’ll set you back a cool $40,000 for the pair – chump change compared to the multi-million-dollar transactions across the street at Art Basel.

Fendi’s gilded lilies

Fendi routinely brings some of the most exquisite works to Design Miami – and this year was no different. The Milanese house tapped Argentina-born designer Constanza Vallese, whose scale-spanning work encompasses everything from jewellery to furniture, to create a series of bronze furnishings and objects. Vallese, using lost-wax casting techniques, embellished the resulting chair, screen and bench with exquisite gilded blooms. A particularly delightful detail? Fendi’s signature selleria stitches, wrought in bronze, around the seat of a chair. Grounded on butter-yellow carpets loomed by CC-Tapis, the booth was a moment of understated richness.

Katie Stout’s cast of rotating characters

New York ceramic artist Katie Stout took this year’s Design Miami theme, ‘Make. Believe.’, and ran with it, starting with a whimsical installation of frogs, crabs and other critters (they all function as public benches!) in the heart of Miami’s Design District. But the Design Miami tent held something even more fun – a carousel made from ceramic mermaids. Attendees were even invited to sit on it and take it for a spin.

Sabine Marcelis’ outdoor dining room

SolidNature always has something epic in the works – to wit: the luxury stone company’s recent Alex Proba collaboration alongside the Pyramids of Giza. For this year’s Art Week showing, the company, in collaboration with We Are Ona, tapped Dutch designer Sabine Marcelis to create a dreamy minimalist dining room on the roof of the Andaz Miami Beach hotel. The space is hosting culinary pop-ups all week. When viewed in the blazing Miami sunlight, it casts a rainbow of coloured shadows on the roof.

Gufram’s blooming cactus

Since it was unveiled more than half a century ago by designers Guido Drocco and Franco Mello, Guftam’s polyurethane cactus has been bringing grins to the faces of even the most serious collectors. The icon of Italian Radical Design has undergone many riffs over the years (who could forget Toiletpaper’s eyebrow-raising version?) but at Design Miami, the company revealed a flower-topped version, Fiori di Cactus, to mark a collab with the American real estate company Ray and designer Francesco Vezzoli. Appropriately, the new specimen marks the opening of a new residential project in Phoenix, Arizona, famed for its desert climate.

Bethan Laura Wood's pickle tower

Finding oneself in a pickle is a good thing, if it’s due to Bethan Laura Wood. The British designer teamed up with 1882 Ltd for the reveal of Pickle Tower, a 4.5ft-tall earthenware totem in the shape of – you guessed it – vinegary delights. It’s a continuation of Wood’s Disco Gourds series, an exploration she kicked off in 2022 with the company that riffs on 19th-century tromp l’oeil vessels with a hit of 1960s fantasy. In Miami, we were entranced by the delicate, hand-painted embellishments on these fancy cornichons. Dare we say the effect is a big dill?

A covetable trumeau at Achille Salvagni Atelier

One of the joys of attending a design fair is being able to view rarities of 20th-century design up close. Achille Salvagni Atelier, the international gallery, had plenty of treasures in its booth, but the standout was a stunning 1951 ‘Architettura’ trumeau designed by Gio Ponti and Piero Fornasetti. On the exterior, the lacquered cabinet appears as the façade of a palazzo. Open up its drawers and doors, however, and you’ll discover a series of rooms in addition to a mini paved piazza. The Barbie Dream House has nothing on this masterpiece, which is available to lucky collectors for $800,000.

Victoria Yakusha’s animals

Ukrainian-born designer Victoria Yakusha’s work centres around strength, resilience and the folk symbols of her native country. See: her hand-hammered wallhangings inspired by Ukraine’s painted houses unveiled earlier this year. At Design Miami, she’s revealed a new body of work, Land of Light II – a series of monumental animal sculptures dedicated to leading Ukrainian figures across fashion, art and science. Each of these friendly figures is made from ztista, a plaster-like material she’s developed from recycled paper, clay, flax and more.

Amber Cowan's glass fruits

Fairgoers will be drawn to Miami-based gallery Mindy Solomon’s booth with its vivid sunset-coloured walls. The work on display is similarly colourful and a favourite was that by Philadelphia artist Amber Cowan, whose bright glass cloches of piled-high antique fruits felt like a surreal bit of Victoriana with a very Miami twist.

Harry Nuriev’s mini cinema

British perfumer Clive Christian teamed up with Harry Nuriev on the design of a special installation called Perfume Transformism to promote its new global flagship, set to open in London. Visitors received a paper cinema ticket and were invited to peek into a mini, doll-house-sized cinema, complete with a tiny film and a diminutive audience. A detail not to be missed, though, is the recessed popcorn maker at the back of the booth – quite possibly the world’s most stylish upgrade of the classic cinema snack.

Lasvit’s splashy mirror

The Czech Republic has been producing some of the world’s best glass since the 13th century – and Czech company Lasvit used its booth at Design Miami as an opportunity to show off. For the theme 'Make. Believe.', the company tapped several glass artists to push the technical and artistic boundaries of the medium. A favourite was a glass mirror by designer Martin Gallo that appeared like an exploding water droplet.

Stephen Burks Man Made's homage to Kuba

The Italian company Alpi has been creating luxury wood veneers for three generations and has collaborated with everyone from Ettore Sottsass to Norman Foster along the way. This year, for Design Miami’s 2.0 section, Alpi tapped designers Malika Leiper and Stephen Burks of Stephen Burks Man Made (who recently teamed up on a seating collab in Senegal) to create a special series of furnishings for the company. The pair used the opportunity to reinterpret Kuba cloth – traditional woven textiles created in the Kuba Kingdom, today the Democratic Republic of the Congo – using an Alpi product that richly recreates the texture and colour of endangered tree species. The project, called the Lost Cloth, is both deeply researched and deeply beautiful.

The Future Perfect’s gigantic woodpecker sculpture

Walking into The Future Perfect’s freshly opened Villa Paula in Miami’s little Haiti is like stepping back to an earlier Miami, thanks to century-old architectural details, ornate tile floors and – as rumour has it – its resident (friendly) ghost, the wife of the Cuban Consul and the gallery’s namesake, Paula Milford. Which is why this recent visitor got a complete kick out of a 6ft-tall statue of a pileated woodpecker by local artist Autumn Casey. Called Castle, the delightful mixed-media piece sticks its beak through a doorway, peering inquisitively at visitors.

Misha Kahn’s rug at Friedman Benda

If you go to a design fair, you’re sure to encounter plenty of carpets, rugs and textiles. But you’ve never seen anything like Misha Kahn’s Swatching Space Time, now on view at Friedman Benda’s booth. For the 14ft-long piece, the Brooklyn-based designer mashed up digital drawing and IRL objects (apparently there’s a piece of chewing gum hidden somewhere in this piece) and, working with a South African textile studio, translated it into a sprawling rug. The gallery opted to hang it on a wall instead of laying it on the booth's floor – a move that allows you to get lost in the piece's trippy, post-digital swirls.

Karen Atta at Tuleste Factory

Tuleste Factory’s booth was a corner of pure joy with its candy-coloured display, called Keep It Curious, of furnishings and objects by Facture, Miranda Makaroff and Marina Abramović (which, alas, had shipping delays for the press day). But a favourite was a sprouting sculpture by Lebanese-American designer Karen Atta. Her sculpture, Scale Model Cloudbusting, is crafted from pale-green resin and resembles something like a dandelion seed or an alien spore from The Upside Down. It’s available in an edition of five, but is sure to be snapped up fast.

Alcova adventures

It’s always a treat to go to Alcova, the itinerant design showcase that got its start in Milan. Alcova landed in Miami two years ago and its third edition, at the historic Miami River Inn, did not disappoint. The works – with contributions from Objects of Common Interest, Patricia Urquiola and more – are presented in a series of quaint, pastel-washed timber houses, a nice change of scale from the rest of Art Week’s vacuous tents and convention centres. Beneath the shade of palm trees, it felt like a world away.

Delvis Unlimited’s Trompe l'oeil ceramic furnishings

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this group of furnishings in Delvis Unlimited’s booth were clad in painted ceramic tiles, but upon closer inspection, you’ll realise they’re made of individual cherrywood squares. They’re the handiwork of Rotterdam-based designer Laurids Gallée, and deliver a healthy dose of retro charm with a warm, painterly twist.