Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026: Designer of the Year shortlist

This is our shortlist for the Wallpaper* Design Awards Designer of the Year 2026. These multi-hyphenated creatives have reframed the meaning of design in everyday contexts, they have inspired us and brought us immense joy this year. It's been a pleasure to discover their journeys through new projects, ideas and concepts over the past 12 months (and more).

Max Lamb

Max Lamb's work has always been rich with a sense of connection: to his personal history, to craft traditions, to the essence of materials and to the larger design discourse. He has been able to quietly innovate the most traditional of furniture typologies through a well-considered approach – he is one of the few designers we'd forgive if he were to produce many, many more chairs.

And the chair in particular has been key to Lamb's career and central to his work in the past year, as he has kept building on his concern with the seating vernacular through projects such as a collection of ceramic chairs (that you can sit on!) created with Stoke on Trent specialist 1882 Ltd, and a decade of chairs, shown in a former church during London Design Festival, or his collaboration with Potato Head, turning waste from the resort into functional design objects for guests.

The latter is a brilliant example of Lamb's modus operandi, as the designer worked closely with the Bali resort to create a new open-source model that has been scaled into a brand of objects produced on site, where every element of design and production has been considered to minimise waste. ‘I have a sense of responsibility in my practice, I recognise that it’s very difficult to be productive without being destructive,' he told us. 'This is not meant to be good design: I don't want to just adorn or decorate for the sake of it. It's always about the material, and if the form can be as quiet and simple and functional as possible, then the thing that will really shine will be the material.'

Nifemi Marcus-Bello

At Wallpaper*, we will always feel sentimental about Nifemi Marcus Bello's work - his Portable Handwashing Station, which won the Life-Enhancer of the Year at the 2021 Design Awards will forever be impressed in our memories as a beacon of the connection between design, manufacturing and social responsibility. Since then, his work has developed into many directions that have made him one of the most important creative voices of his generation. Working with Lagos workshops and artisans to create objects that merge industrial design and functionality with the visual poetry of collectible design and installations, he has developed a distinctive language that is both global, hyper-local and conceptual.

'The conditions and histories of Africa are my greatest sources of inspiration: the solutions that are found, the histories that are hidden, the ingenuity and resilience that define everyday life,' he told us earlier this year, on the occasion of his solo exhibition at Lagos' Tiwani Contemporary. 'There’s an elegant, elemental beauty in that perseverance.' On that topic, he also collaborated with Wallpaper* contributing photography for our compendium of Lagos market stall typologies, as he helped us chart the ingenuity of Nigerian street vendors through a body of research he has been independently carrying out throughout his career.

2025 also marked Marcus-Bello first Paris presentation, as he was part of the Contributions design festival with a new iteration of his M2 Shelf with an integrated speaker created in collaboration with La Boîte Concept – a design reminiscent of the living room in his family home growing up, scaled up into a listening room with a soundtrack by Brazilian musician Rodrigo Amarante.

Faye Toogood

Over the past several years, Faye Toogood has been crafting a distinctive visual universe where creation, collection and curation coexist without boundaries. Expression is a distinctive trait of Toogood’s. Her work is sculptural with soft edges, inspired by three-dimensional artworks and informed by nature, with a nod to ancient artefacts and folk.

This approach was beautifully evident in the booth she curated for Friedman Benda at the last edition of PAD London: dubbed 'The Magpie's Nest', it included her own work alongside a series of objects and furniture that offer different points of view on the natural world, created by the likes of Misha Kahn, Andrea Branzi and Fernando and Humberto Campana. 'The Magpie’s Nest is not a vitrine of trophies, it’s an uplifting and energetic choir of colliding collective voices,' she said of the project.

Her design work this year casts a similarly wide net: The Magpie Tapestries for Friedman Benda feature an ode to found objects, and the Maquette chairs in wire and paper play with scale and material as a disrupting approach to furniture-making. She surprised with a bold floral series for Japanese ceramic manufacturer Noritake, featuring strong brushstrokes of swirling pinks, from cloudy shades to deeper tones, and layered, coiled, forest green foliage, with a hint of postmodern fairytale, balancing contemporary abstraction with heritage form.

Willo Perron

One simply must take a cursory flip through Willo Perron’s recent portfolio to understand his cultural impact. He’s come up with the concepts for some of the most talked-about live shows of this era — Beyoncé’s 2025 Western-themed Cowboy Carter tour and Rihanna’s floating-stage performance at the 2023 Super Bowl, for instance.

In Perron’s work, he often takes a simple idea and blows it up to its most extreme or even absurd. Like his set design for the Fall–Winter 25/26 Chanel runway show, which placed a giant black ribbon curling skywards towards the glass and wrought-iron ceiling of Paris’s Beaux-Arts-style Grand Palais.

His work for some of popular culture's most celebrated names also informs his furniture design, for leading companies such as Knoll. Like many of Perron’s designs, the Pillo sofa conforms to a singular idea. The base is made up of two cushions stacked one on top of the other, with two more for the armrests, and one for each backrest. The original model was conceived for a private interior project “at a scale four times as big,” but he also produced a smaller prototype for himself to “keep working on,” he says. “I wanted it to be this perfectly modular thing.”

Gabriel Tan

Singaporean designer Gabriel Tan has uniquely placed his practice at the cusp of creative cultures, as he works between Singapore and Portugal to merge ideas, materials and craft into a well-considered design language. Alongside his design work, Tan is the creative director of Japanese furniture brand Ariake and heads Origin Made, the craft-driven brand he founded in Portugal. 'We create furniture and products that honour heritage while embracing contemporary life,' he says of his many ventures.

In the past few years, his work was embraced by the wider industry, as he created collections for Herman Miller and B&B Italia, and among the past year's launches is a portable lamp for Louis Poulsen. The Danish lighting brand nominated him as its inaugural Designer of the Year, and his Rumee Portable Lamp features an organic, emotional design language.

In 2025, Tan released tactile, timeless objects under the Origin Made aegis, including the Weaver’s Chair, featuring a minimalist structure and a Shaker-style woven seat, and the Monumental dining table combining solid thermal oak with a cane mesh in radio weave - both made by craftspeople

Garance Vallée

Former dancer-turned-designer Garance Vallée has established a design language based on quiet but powerful forms, informed by structure and bold materiality. 'As an ex dancer, when I started studying architecture I wrote my master's thesis on the relationships between humans, their body, space and objects, and their connection with domesticity and intimacy,' she said.

The more theatrical aspect of her design fittingly came to life when she created an architectural set for Leo Walk's Maison d'en Face, a dance piece based on domestic spaces explored through dance (she described it as 'my biggest dream come true').

Within the traditional furniture design realm, Vallée created a triangular chair-like display for Maison Alaïa, and a sophisticated take on modular seating for Monde Singulier. For the French editeur, she also created a full suite of furniture, objects and lighting, demonstrating her ability to work across scales to expand her creative approach to a space (something also well reflected in her various interiors projects). And for Monoprix, Vallée imagined a series of small objects, from trays to tableware and cups, proving that there are few limits to what she is capable of achieving.