Best of Design Miami Paris 2026

'What a relief to see the Americans showed up,' murmured a Parisian art dealer at the opening of Design Miami Paris 2026, just days after rioting shook the capital. Indeed, both the fair organisers themselves and a number of deep-pocketed collectors came, undaunted, for the fourth edition at L'Hôtel de Maisons, displaying 140 years of design and decorative arts from around the world.

Take a tour of Design Miami Paris 2026

The show starts in the courtyard with a huge bronze bear by François-Xavier Lalanne from Galerie Mitterrand, a delightful wooden pavilion with three faces designed by Volumnia's Michele De Lucchi, and 'Arabesque', Pierre Renart's monumental bench crafted from a 17m-long twisted ribbon of weather-resistant moabi wood, winner of the Best Design at Large Presentation award (from Maison Parisienne Gallery).

In the vast gardens behind the 18th-century mansion where Karl Lagerfeld once lived, visitors marvel at the 1944 6x6 Demountable House by Jean Prouvé, clad in timber and decorated like a Japanese tea house, presented by Galerie Patrick Seguin.

This year's Best Gallery Presentation award went to Salon 94 Design, which juxtaposes sculptural works by Alberto and Diego Giacometti with antler stools and other brutalist furniture by contemporary designer Rick Owens.

Director Jackie Greenberg says, 'We knew we were bringing the Giacometti, and we've worked with Rick for a very long time, so it just seemed obvious for them to coexist in the space together.'

'It came out beautifully,' said Owens of the stand as he wandered through the fair with his wife, Michèle Lamy. 'They're opening the Giacometti Foundation next to our house. I always thought, Alberto Giacometti – he lived in squalor, in that artist's studio, and that's what I want our house to look like.'

Italians are prominent at this year's fair. Milan's Nilufar is showing a mix of vintage pieces by the likes of Carlo Bugatti and Gabriella Crespi, alongside contemporary collectible design. Hanging above their stand is the newest version of an annual favourite, a sinuous ceiling lamp in bronze and coloured Murano glass by Christian Pellizzari, this year with seashells at the tips rather than flowers.

Nearby, StudioDanielK's paravent in white parchment and solid bronze opens to reveal a bar in high-gloss Brazilian rosewood. 'It has a little table so you can prepare your cocktail here,' says designer Daniel Kolodziejczak. First shown at Salone del Mobile, it comes in a limited edition of six, customisable with different parchments and woods.

The Paris-based Galerie Pron, formerly Galerie Italienne, is presenting a colourful and eclectic assortment, including a cabinet with a signature tartan pattern by contemporary ceramic artist Alice Gavalet, and a hammock woven in Nicaragua in 1974, based on an Alexander Calder design. 'This is one of the few in very, very good condition,' says director Matteo Da Dalt.

Scandinavians are well represented, too. Galerie Maria Wettergren brought a new wall installation called ‘Jade’ by Norwegian fibre artist Gjertrud Hals, woven in green and turquoise threads, like jellyfish attached to the wall. Nearby, Mathias Bengtsson's cast and polished stainless steel ‘Membrane’ chair won the fair's award for Best Contemporary Work. 'He conceived it by using a computer program where a digital seed makes the form grow as a living organism,' says Wettegren. 'So it's no longer an imitation of an organic form, it's actually a simulation.'

The New York gallery Hostler Burrows is showing an oversized hand-tufted carpet by Louise Hederström, ‘September’, a tapestry in autumnal shades with various layers of pile. It was woven at the venerable Kasthall mill in Sweden, using materials from the archives of its former lead designer, Gunilla Lagerhem Ullberg.

The Stockholm gallery Modernity makes its fair debut in a spacious pale blue room that happened to be the perfect size for a seven-metre-long knotted pile rug in forest and river shades, crafted in 1952 by Swedish artist Margareta Sundbom-Eichenholtz.

The stand also brought Uno Åhrén's high-backed easy chair with sweeping mahogany lines, first shown at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels (the centenary of which was celebrated last year). 'The exhibition in Paris was Sweden's breakthrough in design,' says Andrew Duncanson. 'Sweden won 26 prizes there, only second to France.'

Of course, French 20th-century design is also plentiful, with exceptional pieces by masters from Robert Mallet-Stevens to Le Corbusier, along with Thomas Fritsch's impressive collection of post-war ceramics. At the Galerie Scène Ouverte, a contemporary French ceramicist, Adélie Ducasse, is showing her first piece in glass, a spherical dark blue lamp made with Venini in Murano.

The one-year old Dubai gallery The A/P Room stops visitors in their tracks with Rogan Gregory's furry biomorphic chandelier and floor lamps, mixing goat fur or horsehair with bronze, ceramic and alabaster, light peeking through the strands of hair. 'It's like a creature. I love the ambiguity between the object and a living thing,' says the gallery's founder, Christelle Basilla, who contrasted the lamps with Brazilian modernism.

Meanwhile, a French-American trio of veteran dealers, Oscar Graf, Robert Kaplan and James Zemaitis, have joined forces to present masterworks of modern design from the 1870s to the 1960s. Their stand is small but packs a punch, with a Joseph Hoffman chair designed for the dining room of the Purkersdorf Sanatorium in Vienna, De Stijl architect Gerrit Rietveld's asymmetrical ‘Berlin’ chair (which belonged to artist Donald Judd), and a Frank Lloyd Wright living room chair from the Ward W Willits house in Highland Park, Illinois.

The Wright chair won the fair's award for Best Work of Historical Design. 'The house was considered Wright's first masterwork of Prairie School design, and he did almost all the furniture,' says Kaplan, adding that most of the pieces are now in museum collections, aside from this one, which formerly belonged to the visionary collector Daniel Wolf. 'It was one chair, not repeated in the house, and not repeated in another commission, so it is truly unique.

Artists' jewellery is another important theme. Elisabetta Cipriani Wearable Art brought new pieces from the Cosmic Jewelry collaboration with renowned textile artist Sheila Hicks, first presented earlier this year at the Venice Biennale. Hicks, who often works at architectural scale, shrank her weavings down to wearable size, wrapping precious stones, vintage pearls, fossils and coral from Cipriani's own collection in colourful silk and wool threads, for round Boules brooches and loom-shaped pendants.

MiniMasterpiece deals in jewellery made by artists, designers and architects; recently, owner Esther de Beaucé convinced the 85-year-old German minimalist artist Franz Erhard Walther to try his hand. The result is a stunning ladder of three half-circles in gold-plated brass, in a limited series of 50. The gallery also has a rare pair of necklaces by Argentine sculptor Luis Quesada, layered from slices of precious woods in the 1960s and 1970s. 'He never made them before or after,' says de Beaucé, who acquired these from the artist's daughter.

This is the second year for the initiative Designers of Tomorrow, sponsored by Apple to spotlight emerging design studios. While the four projects here used a certain amount of tech to produce, they all revealed an astonishing quantity (and quality) of handiwork, from Isabel Rower hand-rolling hundreds of ceramic beads to Yoonjeong Lee meticulously layering 5,000 thin sheets of wood veneer.

Even in our fast-paced, tech-fuelled world, it's evidence that young designers are firmly wedded to the idea of craftsmanship, for pieces that may one day be vintage collectibles in their own right.

Design Miami Paris is on view until 25 October 2026, L'hôtel de Maisons, 51 Rue de l'Université, 75007 Paris