What does it mean to design a new Africa? Design Week Lagos 2026 explored the topic inside the Nigerian capital’s beret-shaped National Theatre, through a series of exhibitions, installations, launches, talks, showrooms, creative hubs, and design experiences, placing designers at the centre of a wider conversation about the continent’s creative and industrial possibilities.

Running from 18 to 25 October, the event was a reminder that Africa has always designed beautifully and intelligently. From furniture, product design and architecture to textiles and experimental objects, the work on display offered a compelling view of design as both cultural expression and material proposition.

Design Week Lagos 2026: making a new Africa

Under the theme Making a New Africa: From Material to Market, the latest edition of Africa’s leading design festival wasn’t tunnel-visioned about craft alone: it meditated on Africa’s design future and the fostering of manufacturing relationships.

'The next chapter of African design cannot be about visibility alone,' says Titi Ogufere, founder of Design Week Lagos. 'This edition asks what Africa will make next, how we will make it, and how design can become part of a much larger story of enterprise and industrial growth across the continent.'

The festival’s All Roads Lead to Lagos touring programme answered those questions, spotlighting a new generation of Nigerian designers, such as Nicole Adaora Enwonwu and Athanasius Johnson, following showcases in Milan and Paris. The programme also unveiled its first designer-manufacturer collaboration with Italian manufacturer Ombré.

Here, discover the work of seven designers to watch from Design Week Lagos 2026.

Le_Brimet

Le_Brimet’s ‘Mocho’ stool invites spatial attention, turning a seat into a study of mass, balance and negative space. Its four sculptural supports fold outward like a starfish, framing a circular opening beneath the seat; fine, repeated striations make the brown surface feel geological.

Le_Brimet’s Portuguese practice and African roots place the piece within Design Week Lagos’ diasporic understanding of African design, informing an exchange between places.

Ajayi Kehinde Gabriel

Ajayi Kehinde Gabriel’s ‘Ijapa’ chair, from Àjàyí Studio, gives furniture an animated presence. Mimicking the form of a tortoise, the chair’s saturated blue shell probes into an undulating seat, supported by thick, curved legs that make the structure appear playful and grounded.

A side stool echoes the chair’s tapered, sculptural language. Rather than relying on ornament, the design makes silhouette, proportion and colour do the expressive work, presenting contemporary Nigerian furniture as product design with the potential to move from striking exhibition object into everyday use.

Djakou Kassi Nathalie

Created by Cameroonian ceramicist and sculptor Djakou Kassi Nathalie, the ‘Mr and Mrs Karaktar’ chairs for Design Week Lagos are handcrafted from mahogany wood and showcase her signature dense, highly textured style featuring interlocking abstract faces and geometric tribal motifs.

James Brendan Udom

Created by Nigerian architect and designer James Brendan Udom, the ‘Okkyo’ lamp is a striking, anthropomorphic and sculptural lighting piece that is as whimsical as it is functional, demonstrating against the notion that African design objects have to look a certain way.

Nicole Adaora Enwonwu

Nicole Adaora Enwonwu’s ‘Ànyánwụ́’ lamp draws from Igbo cosmology, an exploration of light as a living, emotional force. Its sinuous, looping structure, rendered in warm terracotta with contrasting white detailing, creates a striking interplay of movement, materiality and light.

Athanasius Johnson

For Nigerian designer Athanasius Johnson, his ‘Apo’ lamp (part of a wider series) sits at the philosophical intersection of design and interior utility. Inspired by the structural strength of the arch, the lamp embodies community and interdependence. Its curved glass form connects two grounded points, symbolising how strength emerges through shared support. Within the ‘Apo’ collection, the lamp expresses a simple ethos: stability is collective, and light shines through connection.

Studio Contra

Within the perimeter of the National Theatre was ‘Bloom Against Violence’, a memorial pavilion designed by Lagos-based architectural firm Studio Contra. Serving as a poignant tribute to the children who have tragically lost their lives to violence across Nigeria, the choice of crimson is striking, a visceral reminder of the horrors of violence.

The floral-shaped installation also draws on the African courtyard and the architectural language of breeze-block screens, which isn’t only environmentally intelligent for ventilation, but creates a protective space for visitors for quiet grief and reflection.

Amman Design Week may have been on hiatus since 2019 but when the Jordanian Design Biennial returned earlier in October 2026 for its fourth edition, it was with remarkable verve and confidence, as if the intervening years had almost never happened. Twice as long as the 2019 edition, with almost twice as many participating designers, Amman Design Week consisted of major multi-designer exhibitions in the Ras El Ain, Jabal Al Lweibdeh, Jabal Amman districts of Amman as well as in the beautiful rural setting of Iraq Al Amir, a 45-minute drive west of the city centre.

For the first time the event also had a presence outside Amman with a satellite installation in collaboration with arts organisation Wujud in Aqaba, Jordan’s only coastal city in the south. There was also a vastly expanded talks, tours and workshop programme overseen by architect and curator Khaled Al-Bashir, that ran the gamut from an experimental six-week weaving residency run by Jordanian textile artist, weaver and wool researcher Ishraq Zraikat to guided tours through community-led agroecological projects outside Amman, and talks on the history of printing in Jordan and Palestine to music performances in collaboration with Amman-based Al Balad Theatre.

Amman Design Week 2026: 'Accumulations'

The theme for this year’s event was Accumulations. 'The suggestion here is that the project hasn’t happened for seven years but the practices and designers have been showing up and working hard throughout that time and, to use the word, accumulating knowledge and skills and transferring that knowledge,' says this edition’s exhibitions curator, Faysal Tabbarah. 'So it's an acknowledgement that there has been work in the last seven years but also an acknowledgement that any work that happens here builds on work that came before us,' add the new co-directors of the event, Amman-based architects Bisher Tabbaa and Sarah Hejazin.

Initially, the theme was Accumulation, singular. 'When we added the “s” about three or four months into the work and made it plural, it was a significant moment for us and allowed us to have multiple narratives at the same time,' explains Tabbarah.

The layers and narratives are very evident in the work on display. There is attention to context, to local resources, vernaculars, inherited knowledge and materials, but also to contemporary questions of identity, social issues or geopolitics. A fantastic example of the latter is the research-based video piece by Iraqi and Armenian (respectively) architects and researchers Farah Alkhoury & Tigran Kostandyan that delves into the toxic legacy of US imperialism in the Global South and the environmental violence of poisoning soil, water and air, which has cumulative and devastatingly long-term effects on humans.

There’s also a lot of focus on collaboration, between designers but also between designers and artisans, manufacturers or 'existing regional labour networks' as Tabbaa calls them, who are always explicitly credited. A good example is Syrian-Lebanese graphic designer and visual artist Ranim AlHalaky’s collection of glass vessels in various shades of blue, green and amber whose original forms derive from the fact that the glass was blown into abstracted metal typographic structures representing the designer’s grandmother’s voice.

'It’s a way of translating sound into a visual and spatial language,' explains AlHalaky. The project was made in Damascus in collaboration with one of the last remaining traditional glassblowers, Ahmad AlHalaak. 'He became an essential part of the design and making process and the work developed through our combined presence, knowledge and exchange,' she explains.

The objects and pieces on display in the flagship site of the Ras El Ain Hangar, a beautifully renovated and light-filled 1930s former electricity hangar nestled in a valley surrounded by Amman’s hills, as well as in the more domestic setting of Darat Abu Adnan (see below), cover a range of functionalities, says Tabbarah.

There are the 'explicitly functional' pieces, for example, the highly versatile indoor/outdoor (Dis)Connect 2.0 chairs by local architects Daniel+Qusai that are not only modular but allow the user to select the shape and colour of each component and then assemble them themselves.

There are the 'vaguely functional' pieces, such as the weird and wonderful inflated steel ‘cabinets’ by Studio Sarah Nagawi, which explore ‘concavity’ and create ‘function through deformation’.

Lastly, there are the 'provocatively functional' objects such as Sufra, a tactile ceramic dining table named after the Arabic word for a cloth or table used to serve food. Designed by Raya Shaban, it features 80 ceramic tiles, some of which have been pressed to form receptacles for food. 'It provokes questions about how we eat, how we sit at a table and how we share,' says Tabbarah. 'So there’s a narrative embedded in it.

Outside the Hangar, there are more works both in the courtyard and across the street in Ras El Ain Park. One of the latter is a permanent installation, a colourful 30m-long basketball pitch painted by local graphic designer and illustrator Abeer Anabtawi and adorned with pictures of tomatoes, wheat and chamomile as a tribute to the food that used to be grown in this area thanks to its abundant springs.

Not far from here an existing outdoor space with stepped seating in the Al-Hussain Cultural Centre is transformed and framed with vaulted structures made out of local stone by Syrian architect Wesam Al Asali that function as seating, stage and enclosures. Using a lightweight vaulted technique that has remarkable structural integrity used to be prevalent in the Arab region and 'is an attempt to bring a construction technique back to its natural place,' says Al Asali.

North of Ras El Ain, in the Jabal Al Lweibdeh district, is Darat Abu Adnan, a beautifully preserved 1950s house and one of the few remaining heritage homes in the area, renovated by its new owners, local coffee-making company Al Ameed Coffee, which has been active since the 70s and plans to turn it into a year-round cultural venue.

It was host to most of Amman Design Week’s public programme and also its Student Exhibition, which showcased the work of 47 students, from schools, universities and institutes who were mentored with designers for nine months.

On the roof, where talks and performances took place, Sharjah-based practice Architecture + Other Things had created a colourful backdrop of yellow water tanks as a nod to the roofscapes across the city that are used both for water storage and as communal or family spaces.

'They are also an explicit gesture to the history of water in Paris square, where the house is located,' says Tabbarah. 'Paris Square was once known as Dawar Al Hawuz (The Reservoir’s Roundabout) as it held an overground water tank that distributed water across the neighbourhood.'

After all this urban activity, a reprieve from the city was offered in the rural and lush setting of Iraq Al Amir just west of Amman. Here Palestinian artist Dima Srouji, whose career took off during Amman Design Week’s first outing in 2016, had filled the evocative ruins of a 2nd century BC palace called Qasr Al Abed with 200 glass snails and figs.

Blown by hand in Jaba, Palestine, she calls them the unfinished castle’s 'first residents' and a tribute to the ecological past and present of an area known for its historic relationship to water and the springs, creeks and ecologies that have sustained life here for centuries.

Nearby is a well-known women’s cooperative who, she explains, 'work a lot with ceramics and natural materials'. Because of its aquatic past, the soil in this area is very different from elsewhere in Jordan, and the clay is very special too so 'there’s a strong relationship to craft'.

During Amman Design Week, hikes to the palace included a visit and meal at the women’s cooperative, encapsulating the ambitions, thoughtfulness and scope of the event. Design is nothing if not the people, histories and contexts that make it and this comeback edition of Amman Design Week brought all those intertwined relationships to life beautifully.

You may not know it, but Paris isn't the only City of Light. Eindhoven, the Netherlands' fifth-largest city, also shares the nickname, thanks to its history manufacturing Philips lightbulbs. Even though the bulbs are no longer mass-produced in Eindhoven, the City of Light moniker feels apt during Dutch Design Week, now on view through 25 October, where ideas illuminate every corner of the Dutch metropolis.

For its 26th edition, the festival has chosen the theme Rebel Authentic Worth – or RAW – to celebrate experimental, unpolished and in-progress work. ‘Every year, our theme is not something we invent, it is something we notice,’ says Dutch Design Week director Willem van Zeeland. We recently popped by the celebration to see precisely what van Zeeland is talking about. Here are five things that caught our attention at Dutch Design Week 2026.

Highlights from Dutch Design Week 2026

'Everything Moist Seems Alive' by Maison the Faux and Boris Acket

One particularly shining example of the RAW theme is 'Everything Moist Seems Alive', a collaboration between creative studio Maison the Faux and artist Boris Acket. The installation explores 'hydrofeminism,' a concept that connects all humans through the fact that our bodies are made of about 60 per cent water. As such, 'Everything Moist' is filled with tubes, pipes and pools with water coursing through them. The drips and gurgles of water form a backdrop for both visitors and live performances. Dive in while you're there.

Design Academy Eindhoven's graduate show

If you're looking for next-gen designers and unconventional thinking, Design Academy Eindhoven's graduation show is another highlight. Here, BA and MA student showcase their senior projects, ranging from furniture to material experimentation. The calibre of work is outstanding, with projects addressing contemporary social and environmental challenges. (While you're there, be sure to also check out the related book shop and café)

Piet Hein Eek's pervasive presence

Piet Hein Eek's presence is felt throughout Dutch Design Week, from a shopfront dedicated to his history with Dutch Design Week, to his own complex which hosted the Dutch Design Awards.

As part of an ingenious retail activation titled 'The Archive', in which various storefronts celebrated the designers – including Eek – who have helped shape the festival’s history. ‘Eindhoven isn’t a backdrop; it’s a co-curator, and shop windows are the most democratic display cases a city has,’ explains Miriam van der Lubbe, creative head of Dutch Design Week.

Eek’s own complex, which took 16 years to develop, brings together two restaurants, a shop, showroom and hotel, operating almost as a miniature city. Its architecture incorporates salvaged elements from older industrial buildings from the immediate area, giving materials that might otherwise have been discarded a second life. As former industrial sites increasingly give way to residential development, the project offers a compelling alternative: not preservation for preservation’s sake, but reinvention through reuse.

The Dutch Design Awards

A highlight of the week is Dutch Design Awards, which celebrate emerging talent. Three students from a shortlist of 15 were recognised, with prizes and opportunities to further their careers, including awards worth €10,000. The ceremony felt like a passing of the torch or, given Eindhoven’s identity, the lightbulb. An unusually long table served as both dining surface and stage, with hosts and award recipients standing on it. The gesture was more than a playful piece of staging; boundaries between audience and performer, object and architecture, were called into question. The awards also celebrated the next generation of designers while placing them within a longer tradition, one sustained by the likes of Eek.

'Table of Power' by Show Not Show

The festival’s appetite for rethinking how we occupy space was equally apparent at the 'Table of Power', conceived by Dutch collective Show Not Show for a press dinner. The team not only designed the table but the surrounding environment, creating an immersive setting that questioned the social dynamics of a familiar ritual.

'Parallel Mirror', designed by Aleksandra Adamchyk, was one example of the complementary furniture surrounding said table. Positioned at its far end, the mirror played with light and perspective, appearing to extend the room while drawing attention to the relationships between those congregating around it. What began as a backdrop for a press dinner became part of the wider festival programme, opening the installation up to a broader audience.

'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

The bar develops beyond a gathering place in Max Radford’s latest collaboration. Open for business (and drinks) during the recent Frieze Week in London (and now moving to its next destination in Paris, during the city's Art Basel), the Limen Bar at Oranj was commissioned by the design gallerist and interior designer as a temporary space and designed by CLLC, the newly established Parisian studio led by Charlotte Taylor and Pauline Leprince.

For a week, CLLC’s Limen bar took residence at east London’s Oranj natural wine bar, exploring the communal and social space as the centre of a bigger cultural conversation.

It's a project conceived as a creative collaboration, which expanded into a living space. Eschewing conventional exhibition models, Radford and CLLC opted instead for a design that fulfils a function and creates a conceptual and aesthetic moment where spatial design, furniture, objects, wine, food and sound meet. Aptly, the bar takes its name from the Latin word for threshold, becoming a space of transition, a visual moment between inside and outside.

The bar was created in collaboration with PS Lab for lighting, and sound elements by Mateo Garcia Audio. For the project, CLLC collaborated with Atelier de France, Atelier de la Boiserie and Atelier Mériguet, who helped bring the bar to life.

Also included are satellite objects and furniture from some of Radford's collaborators, among them Lewis Kemmenoe and Eddie Olin. Kemmenoe's timber lamps laid with aluminium elements were a continuation of his explorations in metal and patchwork, while for Olin, the project involved creating a series of bar stools from raw steel I-beams with a black-stained ash seat.

The newly commissioned objects, Radford explains, are imagined to respond to the behaviours and gestures usually associated with a bar: leaning, perching and gathering, serving, cooling, carrying and lighting.

CLLC also created glassware, continuing the geometric language they devised for the bar.

The Limen bar itself features a symmetrical form that nods to a contemporary interpretation of postmodern aesthetics, and its materials were conceived for ease of assembly, disassembly and transport. Appearing solid and hefty, the bar is in fact made of what the designers describe as 'imitation surfaces', reflecting the aesthetic of stone and metal with material lightness. 'Materials conventionally associated with weight and longevity become lighter, thinner and more theatrical,' reads a note accompanying the project.

Thanks to this approach, the bar is conceived to travel to different cities for further activations, following the creative calendar's most crucial moments of the year.

The Limen Bar will next land in Paris, 21-24 October, 10 Villa Riberolle, 75020 Paris

'Good design minds are always, fundamentally, surprising,' says Rodman Primack, who returns as curator for this year's Designers of Tomorrow at Design Miami Paris. 'It’s why we need them: not for the mundane - to find the most efficient choice - but to offer an idea that deviates from the standard.'

Led by Apple in collaboration with Design Miami Paris, the showcase brings together four emerging design practices from around the world to create original works around a theme. This year's topic, Design for Presence, seems particularly pertinent in the era of the attention economy.

Apple's Designers of Tomorrow 2026 explore presence

Displayed across a panelled room in Paris’ Hôtel de Maisons, the thoughtful, highly crafted objects reflect this theme, inviting us to slow our pace – to bask in the soft glow of a lantern by Egyptian-Danish architect Salem S. Charabi, listen to the ceramic beaded fringe on Brooklyn-based designer Isabel Rower’s chair, marvel at the intricacy of Seoul-based artist Yoonjeong Lee’s table and lamp, or share a moment of connection within Mexican design studio Parafernalia’s expandable seating area.

Primack – a designer, curator, former creative director of Design Miami and co-founder of Mexico City gallery AGO Projects – sees a common desire to make something meaningful, despite the four studios’ ‘fundamentally different’ approaches, materials and local contexts.

'I do think designers, not just this years cohort of Designers Of Tomorrow, are seeing that our lives need shape and boundaries and that they can help us by creating objects and circumstances that allow for grounding, for communion with ourselves or each other by inviting contemplation, or the sharing of an experience, or actual presence through physical sensation,' he reflects.

The 2026 cohort was handpicked by a jury made up of figures working across the creative industries – including Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, Fabien Cappello, Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, Minjae Kim, Hun Chung Lee, Marion Mailaender, Nifemi Marcus-Bello, Jennifer Roberts, and Apple’s Molly Anderson. All four of the selected practices used Apple tools and platforms, from iPads to Apple pencils, to develop their pieces.

Wallpaper caught up with each studio to find out how this new generation of designers is thinking about materiality, making and human experience.

Salem S. Charabi, Cairo, Egypt

Charabi's lantern, 'The Emergence of Light', is made from everyday materials found around his Cairo studio, including a limestone base and a banana paper diffuser. The lantern's delicate skeleton frame is made by stacking date palm fronds using a traditional Japanese method.

Wallpaper*: How did the idea for 'The Emergence of Light' emerge?

Salem S. Charabi: Our first point of gathering was around the fire. I wanted to create this totem of light, to celebrate the moment the days turns to night.

W*: Can you tell us about the making process?

SC: Each strand is an octagon in profile – just 3 millimetres wide, split by hand, and carefully drilled. The ends are then sharpened with a chisel to interlock.

For this project, every component had to be mapped out in detail. I sketched and did all the 3D modelling on my MacBook Pro. It was a complex process getting everything to fit just right — from the carving of the stone and the paper moulds, down to the delicate base.

W*: How will it encourage people to slow down?

SC: I think innately, observing light slows us down. The way its reflected on the moon, the way it may hit the crown of a tree. It makes us wonder.

Isabel Rower, New York, USA

The dramatic proportions of Rower's 'The Padded Chair 1860' draw on 18th- and 19th-century papier-mâché furniture and objets d’art. Its high-gloss finish stands in sharp contrast to its ceramic beaded fringe, chosen for the appealing sound it makes when brushed.

W*: How did 'The Padded Chair 1860' begin?

Isabel Rower: A few years ago I took a photograph of a boudoir chair from the 1860s in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. I found the form highly unconventional and I was drawn to its dramatic fringed skirt. When faced with the prompt of ‘Design for Presence’, I felt that this chair was the perfect object to revisit. Ceramics are not simply a medium but a transmission of thought: a way of communicating ideas and variations through touch, and of constantly reworking the material to generate something new.

I was interested in how swapping the textile fringe of the historic object for a skirt of over 1,500 ceramic beads would not only bring it into a contemporary present, but would bring the person sitting into a state of presence.

W*: How do you imagine the piece will encourage people to slow down?

IR: I investigate emulation and the stories of surfaces, drawing from 18th and 19th century papier-mâché furniture and objets d’art. The chair will offer a passage from the surface to interior histories. The sound of the ceramic beaded fringe when brushed against brings awareness to its materiality. It also works to bring the body that is brushing against it into a space of curiosity and presence. It moves sitting from being a passive activity to an activating one.

Yoonjeong Lee, Seoul, South Korea

The base of Lee's 'New Form' – a wooden table with an integrated lamp – is made from roughly 5,000 thin sheets of stacked veneer. Sheets of paper serve as a lampshade held in place by a trio of worn-down pencils that have been given new life as hardware.

W*: How did 'New Form' take shape?

Yoonjeong Lee: I’ve been making nails for a long time. The reason is simple: I wanted to turn something called a 'fitting', a mere part, into something more meaningful and independent. My work is about looking closely at objects that need to be seen differently.

One day, I was looking at a pencil that was almost used up, and I noticed its shape looked like a nail. A pencil doesn’t disappear as it wears down. It stays on in a new form: as a letter, as knowledge, as music. For me, it stayed on as a nail.

I made a nail from the worn-down pencil and used it as hardware. That small piece of hardware became the starting point, and the work took shape step by step from there.


W*: How does the theme, 'Design for Presence', show up in the work?

YL: I approached the future differently. Usually, we set a goal first, picture what the result will look like, and plan the process around it. I stepped back from that and focused on what I was doing right now. I finished the smallest unit in front of me first, and decided the next step based on the result. What we build by focusing on the present adds up to the future. Tomorrow is built on what I did today.

I spend more time looking at what’s around me, and I think that improves my focus on the moment and the quality of my work. This piece was made that way too. It started from one pencil nail. I chose materials that suited it, and used them to decide what the piece would do. I made the wood for the pencil nail from scratch as well.

Instead of carving a log, I stacked thin veneer, one layer at a time. These choices built up one by one, and the piece came together. The finished piece shows the theme, but I think it also matters that I practiced this year’s theme myself, through the process.

W*: How do you imagine people interacting with your piece?

YL: Grand, heavy, epic narratives are certainly important in their own way. But I like a modest ripple. Something moderate, small, slight, yet with an unexpected impact. That’s why I work with familiar objects and prefer physically small ones.

My pencil and nail works are small, so people sometimes walk past them in the exhibition space without noticing. That’s not a problem. If I can share a moment with the person who does find them, that is enough. I think a work made with a focus on something small has a certain pull. At first the overall form catches the eye, but gradually it draws people closer to the small details.

As people look at the pencil nails, each material, and the many layers of the wood, what makes up the whole slowly begins to come into view. When people realise that the pencil nail was originally a pencil, I hope some of them will remember the pencils they used. 


A pencil carries memories that many people share, but within that, everyone has their own personal ones. I can’t predict which memory it will be. But following that memory, even briefly, can be a way of staying in the moment, or with the time that has passed.

Parafernalia, Monterrey and Mexico City, Mexico

Parafernalia founders Genki Matsumura and Sebastián Zorrilla conceived 'MonoAmbiente 1' as an intimate setting, where two people can converse, play chess, or share a drink. When not in use, the expandable seating area – consisting of a table and two stools and featuring acid-etched stainless steel surfaces – can be neatly folded away.

W*: Where did the idea for 'MonoAmbiente 1' come from?

Parafernalia: We interpreted 'Design for Presence' as an invitation to look at the different ways presence can occur: in solitude, in our relationship to our surroundings, and in moments shared with others. This led us to explore an object that could move between these states, from a landscape that invites observation when closed, to a space for conversation and shared activity when deployed.

Conversation is rarely an isolated activity. We talk while we play, eat, drink, walk, or cook. In this piece, the accompanying activities create the conditions for dialogue rather than defining it. The deployment of the piece marks a shift from solitary observation to shared occupation, from looking to participating.

W*: How did the theme ‘Design for Presence’ shape your choice of materials?

Parafernalia: The material selection was mainly based on what we’re personally interested in at the moment, and the decision was cemented once we determined that etched stainless steel could embody different intentions and qualities, from the decorative to the functional, and that these characteristics would be present in the piece. The high contrast graphic nature of the process invites onlookers to observe with a bit more attention, a bit more closely.

W*: How do you imagine people will interact with your piece?

Parafernalia: For starters, we imagine the piece will be difficult to digest at first – there's a lot going on. The piece is deployable, it is a foldout table and 2 stools that nest underneath, completing the landscape etched in the steel. This produces curiosity and invites close inspection. It makes taking your time and slowing down a necessity in order to fully understand the what’s going on.

We hope it will be fully interacted with, and explored with curiosity. A lot of thought was put into the different details in different parts of the piece and we expect the discovery of each one to be an activity in itself.

Design Miami and Apple Designers of Tomorrow is on view at Design Miami Paris, 21-25 October 2026

Hôtel de Maisons, 51, rue de l’Université, 75007 Paris, France

A new, interactive exhibition at MAK in Vienna encourages play beyond the Lego brick. ‘Architectural Construction Kits 1890-1990’ (until 14 March 2027), presented by Deutsches Architekturmuseum, is spread across several of MAK’s rooms, with 70 architectural construction kits formed into fully assembled models to showcase the variety of historical toys.

Discover these vintage architectural construction kits

The foundation of the exhibition is the private collection of graphic designer Claus Krieger. The kits on show, which date from 1880 to 1960, encourage exploration of materials – at play stations around the exhibition – including wood, metal, rubber, and Galalith (an early type of bio-plastic).

‘There is a whole world beyond Lego waiting to be discovered,’ says guest curator Oliver Elser. ‘In our exhibition, you can start playing spontaneously, without having to book in advance. We have eight play stations and a VR installation. You can pick up bricks that look familiar at first glance, only to realise that they are made of rubber. Can you imagine Lego made of rubber? There are so many lovely building pieces to discover that hardly anyone knows anymore. And that makes building with them quite a challenge. Everyone knows Lego, and everyone knows how to build with it. These kits are different.’

One of the main highlights is the cathedral made of 4,000 felt building blocks, on display in the MAK Columned Main Hall.

The kits seem complex and serious, which poses the question that Elser also battled with: Were they aimed at children or adults?

‘The children on the packaging often look highly concentrated – and not particularly happy. Building can be hard work! The building instructions are usually highly complex. So are these toys really for children, or were the boxes actually aimed more at adults?’ Elser muses. ‘And yet the packaging and instructions are clearly addressed to children. They are presented as little adults and encouraged to become “little builders” or “little architects”. With a few exceptions, girls appear only as bystanders. This changed only gradually from the 1960s onwards,’ he says.

‘It is remarkable how [very un-] “educational” these kits often were. Some of the pieces fit together so tightly that playing with them must have been genuinely frustrating. On the other hand, this is understandable. There were around 900 companies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland alone producing this kind of construction toy. That is an incredible number. No wonder that not every product behind those boxes was a really well-functioning toy. Quite simply, these were toys that adults had devised for children, within the possibilities and limitations of what were often very small manufacturing companies.’

On this basis, Elser had to create an exhibition which made these historical kits ‘playable’. ‘Normally you are not allowed to touch things that are old, precious, and therefore kept in a museum. To reactivate the kits for our visitors, we worked closely with Professor Andreas Kretzer from Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences (HFT Stuttgart) and his students. We made replicas of three building systems. The most creative play station is called the Cathedral. We wanted at least one model to be larger than life, so we asked the students what they would build if they had an unlimited supply of building pieces. A childhood dream we all probably share. They came up with a highly sophisticated [replacement] of wooden pieces [with] a recycled material made from old PET bottles that feels almost like felt. We cut more than 4,000 pieces, and voilà: the Cathedral is 2.6m long and 3.2m high.’

The exhibition gives insight into childhood during the previous two centuries. Today, Elser wants to encourage play for all: ‘I would love our visitors to leave the exhibition with a smile on their faces. They will have had so many wonderful experiences with their own hands – at a time when museums tend to appeal primarily to our eyes and our brains. Some of these building pieces are so satisfying to play with that you might want to ask for them for Christmas, if only they weren’t out of production.’

'Architectural Construction Kits 1890-1990 Plenty to Play With!’ is on display from 7 October 2026 until 14 March 2027 at MAK(Museum für angewandte Kunst, Museum of Applied Arts), Stubenring 5 ,1010 Vienna

Opening this week at the Design Museum (and on view until 4 April 2027), 'Es Devlin: Other Worlds' is the multidisciplinary artist and designer's first European retrospective, featuring a close-up view of her practice over the past 30 years.

Having spent much of the past year working alongside Devlin and her team on her Guest Editor contribution to October Wallpaper* (look out for the special-edition concertina cover, available from the museum shop as well as from WallpaperSTORE*), the exhibition felt like a continuation of our conversations, and gave us further insight into a creative universe that feels both incredibly personal and touching upon universal, larger-than-life themes.

The exhibition, taking over the museum's ground-floor gallery, features a reproduction of Devlin's London studio, excerpts from her sketchbooks, an overview of her most celebrated installation, and an experiential, 2,000-book library, covering recurring themes of her career and offering an insight into her creative process.

Intimate and sprawling, 'Es Devlin: Other Worlds' combines moments of calm exploration of some of the more personal elements of her practice, and the grand, immersive creative moments some of the public might be familiar with. Devlin herself guides us through the space: her voice welcomes visitors as a video plays in her ‘studio’ (a faithful reproduction of her London workspace, complete with maquettes, books, and tools).

As the doors open scenographically onto the exhibition itself, visitors walk into a mirrored room with Devlin's Come Home Again, an illuminated composition debuted at Tate Modern in 2022 and featuring her drawings of 240 species, from mammals to insects, fish and birds, all found in London.

From there, the room leads to the ‘30-year desk’, a concept that Devlin has devised for the exhibition and which showcases her career at a glance. Featuring 5,000 objects from her personal archive, the curved structure includes 30 revolving models, maquettes, hundreds of sketches, and is accompanied by two wall installations dubbed The 50-Year Archive (parts I and II), including sketchbooks, drawings and paintings that have supported a life in creativity.

Walking across a bright red tunnel (a near-fluorescent shade that recurs in Devlin's practice, most recently gracing the slipcase to her Concise Atlas), visitors find themselves in yet another immersive, impactful space. On a mirrored platform sits Devlin's Infinite Library, featuring a colour-coded collection of kinetic sculptures featuring over 2,000 books that have informed her practice and worldview.

This path, from studio to practice to library, is not casual, but the exact journey that Devlin intends to offers to visitors. 'The reason I've laid the show out this way, is that when I came here, I noticed there's a lot of young people, designers, practitioners, coming through the space,' Devlin told Wallpaper*. 'People of all ages, perhaps looking for clues as to what they might want to do, how they might want to shape, or begin, their own practice. So I've offered every trace that led me along the way, because I thought it might be helpful for others to just be able to see, step by step, how a practice can evolve over 30 years.'

‘Es Devlin: Other Worlds’ is on view until 4 April 2027

The Design Museum
224-238 Kensington High St, London W8 6AG

When one thinks of European design capitals, a familiar few come to mind — Milan, Paris, Copenhagen — but some of the most interesting things are happening outside of these established centres. In Berlin, new design festival Currents is attempting to highlight the burgeoning creative scene happening within its city limits, usually better associated with politics and partying rather than a cohesive design culture. From 10 to 12 September, exhibitions from fledgling brands, independent designers and universities popped up across the city, taking over abandoned apartment buildings, industrial spaces and shopfronts in the German capital, offering a snapshot of a scene ready to take on the international stage.

Discover our highlights from Currents

The Bocci Foundry

Currents took place during the annual Berlin Art Week, a sprawling initiative that sees galleries and art institutions stage exhibitions and events throughout the city. So it’s no surprise that many of the exhibitions intermingled with the design fair. The Bocci Foundry, part of the massive Wilhelm Hallen — a former industrial complex turned arts hub on the city’s northern fringes — presented an exhibition bringing together the work of 19 artists and designers from around the world.

Titled The Overview Effect, after the profound shift in perspective experienced by astronauts as they stare back at a pinprick-sized Earth, the exhibition underlined the interconnectedness of humanity, the natural world and the materials that surround us. It featured work from some of the industry’s biggest and most exciting names, including Fernando Laposse, who showed a beechwood table inlaid with colourful heirloom corn husks, a cabinet made from thousands of silkworm cocoons by the French experimental designer Marlène Huissoud and crystallised vases by the German designer Lukas Wegwerth beneath the soaring volumes of the venue’s industrial architecture.

Konstantin Grcic & 25KG

Perhaps Berlin’s best-known designer, Konstantin Grcic has produced hundreds of designs, both well known and less familiar. At his exhibition at the Deutsches Design Museum, he showed off a collection of B-sides from his long and prolific career. Pieces like prototypes, mock-ups, damaged models and unused ideas were accompanied by posters written with tongue-in-cheek aphorisms, as if the viewer were privy to these abandoned pieces of furniture’s sentient interior monologues.

Also included in the show were objects from his erstwhile independent label 25kg, composed of industrial seating inspired by the bollards and scaffolding that populate the Berlin streetscape.

Pascal Hien x Tecta

One of Grcic’s former protégés, Pascal Hien, has been making a name for himself as one of the most promising young product designers coming out of Berlin. Hien gave visitors a work-in-progress preview of his upcoming sofa for Tecta, a compact metal-framed seater, which he plans to launch at the Salone del Mobile in Milan in 2027. Conceived around low-energy production, its simple construction uses replaceable, repairable and recyclable components that can be manufactured using standard machinery rather than costly bespoke tooling. Tecta also brought pieces designed by its stable of Berlin-based designers — including Hanne Willmann, Geckeler Michels and Katrin Greiling — which were arranged in the Jalousiefabrik like a domestic living room.

Find Attached

Also located in the Jalousiefabrik — composed of a former residential apartment building and a somewhat spooky 19th-century blinds factory — was the group show Find Attached. Bringing together 14 young designers, the exhibition explored how design might respond to contemporary social and environmental challenges through objects that ranged from the speculative to the highly practical. Among them, Paul Rees presented Futuristic Objects, including a buoyant armchair designed with flooding in mind and a concrete suitcase that gives physical weight to the carbon cost of air travel, while Marie Kurstjens’ Designing Dignity proposed a menstrual-hygiene kit for displaced women, conceived to function even where clean water is scarce.

Richard Lampert

Stuttgart-based furniture brand Richard Lampert took up residence on the ground floor of a former Postbank branch in a residential apartment block designed by Egon Eiermann to show its collection of furniture by the architect himself. The presentation included archival material documenting Eiermann’s life and work set in dialogue with newly relaunched pieces, adding a layer of context to the historic designs. Among them was an updated version of Eiermann’s E1 table, originally designed in 1953, whose famously pared-back frame has been reworked by designer Tim Schütze with a height-adjustable mechanism.

Re:Lokal glass

The unlikely union of glass and porcelain was among the most intriguing exhibitions of the week. Re:Lokal, located in the historic ring-kiln hall of the Royal Porcelain Manufactory Berlin (KPM), brought together students from HBK Saar and the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin. The result was a collection of experimental pieces made from handcrafted glass, yet using techniques and processes more commonly associated with porcelain production. For instance, Sarah Winter cast molten glass into discarded wooden moulds from the Meisenthal glassworks, preserving the cracks, scorch marks and traces of their previous use in the finished pieces.

Loehr

Homegrown furniture brand Loehr used its Currents exhibition to put a celestial spin on one of its most popular products. The brand partnered with art director Marek Polewski to create 12 special editions of its Jazz chair, each depicting Berlin’s star-filled night sky from a different month of the year. The astrological map was carved into the seat of each chair, so that, when lit from above, the constellation is projected onto the ground below. The effect transforms the chair from a functional object into a kind of astrological instrument, bringing a fragment of Berlin’s changing night sky indoors.

A visit to Helsinki Design Week in September should be prescribed to anyone feeling bleak about the future of humanity. Each year, as the light and leaves begin to turn, the Finnish capital reminds its population and a growing number of design advocates from elsewhere, how design makes life better. As with any design week, there are requisite furniture launches here too. But the real strength of Helsinki Design Week is its confident and relaxed demonstration of how design spills into everyday life; how it makes for a better urban habitat; how good design improves with age and use; how technology can hold hands with craft; and how long and short-term thinking work together to implement strategy into action.

Every year we return from Helsinki feeling existentially optimistic and wondering if a life amongst the berries and mushrooms, sauna and salmiakki, might in fact be the answer. This is not escape, it’s engagement. Helsinki’s design community is wielded effectively as a tool for improvement by the city in a way that is so refreshing. It’s no surprise to learn that Helsinki is one of the only cities in the world to have a chief design officer.

Instead of forests of press releases on the eve of Helsinki Design Week’s opening, we are pointed to an 84-page strategic planning document, commissioned by the City of Helsinki’s Economic Development Division within the Culture Department. In it, we are introduced to countless interviews with cultural leaders (Finnish and beyond) and international benchmarking analysis, resulting in nine actions for growing the creative sectors proactively and symbiotically with urban development. It’s not rocket science; it’s much more valuable.

One afternoon, taking a dip in the surprisingly temperate Baltic after a sweat in the transcendental Kulttuurisauna, a calm clarity of mind and body emerged, such that it’s almost impossible to master in our torrid times of cluster crisis. People take note: the Finns do it better.

12 uplifting discoveries from Helsinki Design Week 2026

A new brand of summer house

The Finns love their summer houses or mökki, and Architect Pekka Airaxin launched a new company Kainuu while we were in town, delivering summerhouses made from cross-laminated timber. With Kainuu, Airaxin can bespoke design, ship, construct and deliver turnkey-ready houses for clients. The economic, temporal and stress efficiency of centralising a process that normally spans several parties with ramped-up costs is significant. The environmental boon of CLT, which at Kainuu all comes from managed forests in an 80 km radius from the factory where the timber is processed, is admirable. Kainuu has delivered ten houses already, with 20 in the pipeline. Smart homes indeed.

A properly circular pop-up

Last year we learnt that local architecture behemoths JKMM had won the contract to design the new Architecture & Design Museum in Helsinki, which is scheduled to open its doors in 2030. Until then, a temporary space overlooking the construction site is open for events and gatherings of all scales and flavours. The three-floor building has been designed by Studio Joanna Laajisto with one of the most laudably scrupulous commitments to circularity and reuse that we’ve seen in the interiors industry. Over two decades, Laajisto has worked on sizeable commercial interiors, but felt she needed to put her practice where her mouth was, and use circularity as her definitive lens through which every decision is made. ‘The construction industry is so old-fashioned, we need to unlearn and relearn how we approach what we do,’ Laajisto said. She estimates that 99% of everything in this project is reused, bar the paint and picture frames. Ample proof that beauty is more than skin deep.

Juhanni Pallasmaa’s library

Finnish architect and theorist Juhanni Pallasmaa is a visionary – not a word we use lightly. His seminal work, The Eyes of the Skin (1996), gently held a mirror up to the fallacy of architecture that doesn’t engage the entire sensory realm. Pallasmaa turns 90 this month, and has bequeathed his entire 10,000-strong book collection to Helsinki’s Architecture & Design Museum. At the temporary space, 10% of this collection is on show for reading and reference in a beautiful sitting room area. ‘Have good books around you; they are your best friends,’ Pallasmaa said, rather poignantly.

The Kämp revamp

Hotel Kämp is Helsinki’s grande dame. Built in 1887, for a century it was a cosy safe haven from the bitterly harsh winter and a soothingly dark friend in the oppressive summer daylight. And then suddenly it felt just a little tired and fusty. A painstaking refurbishment and expansion has been undertaken, and we were spoilt to stay in the new bedrooms on the 8^th floor (in the former spa area). All bedrooms have been masterfully designed by Helsinki-based design studio Fyra, who can claim to be shifting the needle on new Nordic interiors. The Kämp’s bedrooms are grown-up in the best sense: comfortable, smart, durable, beautifully lit, money spent cleverly on the materials and details that matter.

Björn Weckström’s villa (and world)

This summer, the Espoo Museum of Modern Art (EMMA) opened Villa Weckström on the Espoo archipelago shoreline to the public by appointment for guided tours. Björn Weckström has had an extraordinary life as a jeweller, sculptor and mixed-media artist. Born in 1935, he still practises today and his villa is part-retrospective show, part-peek into the extraordinary mind and hands of the marvellous virtuoso. His jewellery was worn by Princess Leia in the original Star Wars, but it was the words of his wonderful wife Marja-Liisa as she showed us the basement of the house they share that will stay with us: ‘He’s a rather fantastic guy; I’m always surprised by him. Still.’

Ervin Latimer x Finarte

Helsinki-based fashion designer Ervin Latimer of Latimmier teamed up with local rug supremos at Finarte to design three hand-knotted and hand-tufted, gloriously saturated, three-dimensionally sculpted rugs. ‘They are inspired by my Afro-Nordic heritage, drawing from textile traditions on both sides of my family, from the Siikajoki Valley in Finland to regions of West and West Central Africa,’ Latimer explains. ‘At the same time, they explore what a contemporary design language might look like for people like me, whose family histories span multiple cultures and whose ancestries are not always easy to trace in detail.’

On the power of textiles to hold and tell stories Latimer, also the professor in practice at Aalto University, eloquently expanded: ‘Textiles have an incredible ability to hold stories. They carry them not only through patterns or colours, but through materials, techniques and in the ways they are made and used. After all, much of what we know about past cultures, and what we continue to learn about cultures today, is told through textiles. With this collection, I was interested in textiles as carriers of memory and the past, but also in their ability to create new memories and new futures. When parts of your heritage are impossible to trace, sometimes you have to create a new visual language and, in a way, a new heritage to carry forward.’

Habitare – the fair itself

With so much fun in town you’d be forgiven for thinking the fairground might be a damp squib by comparison. Far from it, in fact. Habitare gets better and better, year on year, with ever-more relevant curation and participators that demonstrate the nation’s strength in new material development and quality, enduring craft. In Finland, these mindsets go hand in hand - the mighty Artek is a portmanteau of ‘art’ and ‘technology’ after all. Habitare’s current success lies in its ability to present a serious and rigorous industry facing event that is as warm and accessible for both commercial and cultural audiences, simultaneously. Here are our highlights from this year’s fair.

Minestrone’s wooden temple

Minestrone Workshop is a collective of nine Helsinki-based designers specialising in material-led, experimental work. And wood. All specialties came together for this pavilion. The task was to create as large a space as possible using as small amount of wood as possible. The reusable frame is clad in a 2mm-thin wood veneer, resulting in 566 cubic metres of space, from just three tree trunks. The space is filled with prototype furniture and lighting made from their workshop materials, in honour of the learning-through-work-in-progress approach of their collective culture.

New Talents

Four new talents are presented each year at Habitare, which always feels refreshingly focused. This year’s crop were notable for their deft skills spanning material, form and narrative. We enjoyed Waltter Mahlberg’s joyful wooden festivities that might be conjured from man’s hands, machine’s motors or computer’s chip. We loved Iina Kettunen’s brooding chainsaw-carved and burnt pine forms. And we were charmed by Carlo Raymann’s naïve fishy forms, fantastical folk objects of devotion from another time.

Wood weaving wonders

A collaboration between interior architecture studio Sistem and circular economy expert Niimaar, has resulted in Tyyne, a series of acoustic panels made from weaving oak strips left over from the manufacture of Finnish Swan sailboats. The oak strips are handwoven in Salo, on Finland’s west coast, while its acoustic performance comes from Aisti Oy’s next-generation acoustic panels, also made from Finnish wood fibre. Tyyne is also available in birch and without the acoustic filling. There is something so exquisitely Finnish about all of this: an interior solution that looks like a work of art, and is healthy in craft, manufacture, function and afterlife.

Extreme carbon negativity

Finnish material technology firm Elementic unveiled MO6 – a carbon tile made from lignin, a by-product of the forestry industry that is usually burned. Elementic claims the carbon tile is the most carbon-negative building material in the world. Transforming the lignin into carbon is a patented process that the team won’t be drawn on, but the resulting material is lightweight, resistant, durable and stores twice the amount of carbon as wood. MO6 was launched as a brand itself at Habitare and tiles already being used in interior design projects in Finland and Europe, with the hope that it will scale and broaden its use imminently.

Furniture for life

Tebian is a small furniture brand, founded by Teppo Lakaniemi in 2011, with studio and showroom in Helsinki and all furniture manufactured in Finland. Tebian today has an extremely covetable collection of beautifully designed and carefully made furniture and home accessories. They are simple, with elegant forms and spare yet confident material use, so as to appear reassuringly robust and charmingly characterful at the same time. Such quality, soulful furniture is a rare find nowadays, where brand and marketing typically stand in the way of form and function, or skill and love. As if to win our hearts yet further, Kia Arpia (Teppo’s partner) baked fresh cinnamon twists for visitors to their stand, veritably drenched in butter with a sprinkling of salt. This is marketing we wholly endorse.

To work with glass is to work with contrasts – precision and spontaneity, fragility and strength. This frisson was on full display earlier this month at the tenth edition of The Venice Glass Week. Dedicated to the art of glass, the festival hosted more than 200 events from both Italian and international participants in a meeting of tradition and innovation, and, most importantly, vision.

Explore 12 chandelier from some the world's most notable creatives

The flagship event was called Murano Illumina il Mondo (Murano Lights Up the World): twelve chandeliers, made in collaboration between leading contemporary creatives and Murano’s finest glassmakers, lit up the Procuratie Vecchie of St Mark’s Square (and will stay up until November 1).

Designed by renowned architect Lord Norman Foster and forged by Salviati, The Hydra Chandelier turns traditional Venetian chandelier design on its head – its 20 arms throw light upwards, eschewing the usual construction’s chiaroscuro so it can illuminate the ancient portico in a red glow.

For Foster’s first time working with the Murano maestri, he chose a frosted glass to showcase the distinctive fine lines of the Rigadin technique (a Salviati signature). It gives the piece a sense of lightness and flow, which in turn emphasises the continuous line of the chandelier – no ornate layering of arms, nor botanical motifs, here.

'It's everything about tradition, and yet it's a reinterpretation in today's terms,' says Lord Foster. 'Instead of the mass being the central spine, the visual elements are arms reaching out, which then gives a very interesting challenge technically in how you support that.'

Salviati is recognised for reviving the Murano glass industry since the late 1850s, and they worked with the Norman Foster Foundation team on significant research and development still. 'All those accumulated years of experience to produce a material which is inherently fragile, then assumes an extraordinary degree of strength. I mean, to see that process and to share it is inspirational and educational,' adds Foster.

Multidisciplinary designer Bethan Laura Wood worked with maestro Matteo Tagliapietra of Gambaro & Tagliapietra on Taiko. Inspired by the traditional Japanese drum, its vibrant barrel forms resound with Murano’s filigree techniques (where thin canne glass rods are embedded inside a crystal-clear glass body to form patterns). From the mosaic-like murrina to the lace-like reticello, Wood is fascinated with how glass behaves under pressure.

'I wouldn't say I understand it completely because I think glass is quite a magical mystery, but it was really exciting to start to try and get a better understanding of how you start to predict what might happen with the behaviour of the glass, and you start to understand the way that different paints can be built or pulled to change the way that they behave when they're worked,' says Wood. 'I also love this mix between solidity and fluidity, especially when you're looking at the murrine and the bubbles that we've produced together.'

Many of the architects, designers and artists involved in Murano Illumina il Mondo are continuing to work with the glassmakers they were paired with to create commercial versions of their chandelier with a 'perfection of the imperfection', as Foster puts it.

A rapid water taxi ride from St Mark's Square, Murano is around one square kilometre, and yet according to a report by Banca Ifis (sponsor of The Venice Glass Week), 160 glass manufacturers operate there. Many are still family-owned, and employ more than 900 people and generate revenues close to €180 million. Despite a volatile energy market, the furnaces keep burning, and the centuries-old craft finds new forms through the suggestion of modern creatives and the gesture of the master glassmakers.

'Glass continues to be a living part of its present and future, melding together art and work, culture and enterprise, tradition and innovation,' says the Mayor of Venice, Simone Venturini. 'Glass perhaps tells the story of Venice better than any other material. It is born from fire, from an incandescent temperature, from a moment when everything is still possible.'

theveniceglassweek.com is on view until November 1 2026

Last week (9-13 September 2026), more than 65 designers, brands and independent studios took over a long-dormant former distillery in Berlin. Staged by emerging design platform Deoron, the five-day exhibition coincided with Berlin Art Week and formed part of Currents, a new design festival that took place across the city.

The setting was Monopol, a 900 sq m former distillery built in 1899 in Reinickendorf, close to several of Berlin Art Week’s northern hubs. Across three floors and a series of naturally lit rooms, furniture, lighting, homeware, technology and lifestyle products were presented as a single, carefully composed environment, rather than separated into the categories of a conventional trade show.

Among the participants were designers working across materials and disciplines, many of them German-born and Germany-based. Recent Camberwell College of Arts graduate Antonia Fischer presented ‘Trauer Tragen’, a chair that explores grief and memory through material and form. Bruges-based Thomas Serruys combines traditional craftsmanship with an experimental sensibility in pieces including his ‘Rollmaster’ library chair, while German designer Naomi Elser, now based in Rotterdam, brings industrial materials into dialogue with delicate craft techniques.

Providing a counterpoint to Elser’s sharp-edged metalwork were the blackened-wood pieces of Marius Holtgreve, whose practice explores the relationship between objects and everyday life. Juliana Maurer, meanwhile, presented glass pieces that appear to have been grown by nature rather than made by hand.

These emerging or more experimental practices were joined by established manufacturers including Danish design brand Hay and Tubes, the Italian company that has been transforming radiators into design objects since 1992.

In an industry overrun with exhibitions and events clamouring for attention, the emergence of Deoron, a platform that began life as an instagram account, is impressive. Its founder, Alberto Pallaoro – then a 26-year-old product design graduate – initially used the account to showcase his own work. It subsequently evolved into a showcase for emerging design, a digital magazine, e-commerce directory and agency, distinguished by Pallaoro’s eye for products and projects that are beautiful, functional and difficult to find – what Deoron calls its ‘instinct for the unexpected’.

Having firmly established itself as a tastemaker in the digital realm, Deoron staged its first physical event during Milan Design Week in 2025, followed by an edition at Copenhagen’s 3 Days of Design 2026. Berlin is its third gathering to date, giving its online community an opportunity to encounter in person the work they would usually scroll through on a screen. It reflects a reversal of the migration from physical to digital that defined the 2000s and 2010s: where the emphasis was once on speeding up, a generation raised on digital discovery increasingly appears to crave slower and more deliberate ways of engaging with design.

Deoron's events occupy architecturally distinctive locations with live sounds and fragrances chosen to shape the atmosphere. Previous editions have included tea tastings, magazine launches, dinners, guided tours, scent rituals, meditation, yoga, vinyl listening sessions and live music. 'This isn't a static exhibition with objects on a floor,' Deoron says. 'It's something that moves, shifts, and develops: no two days are alike.'

At the centre of the Berlin edition was a sculptural sound system developed by Paris- and Muscat-based Atelier d’Ingénierie Fades with German loudspeaker manufacturer New Fidelity. Conceived as a shared study of sound, it hosted listening sessions, live performances and informal gatherings throughout the event. A natural-wine bar run by Nature’s Calling remained open across the five days, establishing the exhibition as a place to spend time rather than hurry through.

The wider line-up included Anoe Melliou, Aoiro, Arkove Studio, Axel Arigato x Termino, Bachner Vessels, Bottone, Céline d’Oultremont, Cezar Moldovan, Clémentine Long, Danidevito, des Fragments, Do_Blok, Dublo Studio, Eenvoud Ontwerp, Radial Studios, Fenna Kosfeld, Forma, Garance Pröbsting, Gast Studio, Geste, Haus of Hart, Houbi, Kieran Feechan and Domenico Di Paolo, Latess, Leon Remmert, LMW Studio, Luis Frey, M85 Studio, Madeleine K. Wieser, Manu Matters, Mati Sipiora, MK Forms, NCForm, NG Design, Noah Livin, Nodi Studio, Omri Sidi, Ostal Studio, Paolo de Castiglioni, Perfume Who, Please Touch, Ray N Ceramics, Re.Pete, Redux Design, Resør, Restless Audio, Sestrá, Shao-Chun Hsu, Sofiia Sytnyk, Stephen Chan, Studio Akuratna, Studio Wak, Szymon Keller, Tylko, Valuarte, Victor Hahner, Worn Studio and Yont.

Hull, in Yorkshire, is a city shaped by water, industrial history and generations of seafaring. For London Design Festival 2026, internationally acclaimed sound artist Chris Watson draws upon this rich maritime heritage in Trent Falls. This immersive spatial installation takes listeners on a sonic journey along northern England’s Humber Estuary.

‘This is a sound voyage that moves with the tide, down the estuary and eventually out into the North Sea,’ explains Watson.

The journey begins at Goole Docks, where the rivers Trent and Ouse converge to form the Humber. Following the ebbing tide, the piece moves through the reeds of Faxfleet Nature Reserve before a freight train rattles past the former Oxmardyke signal box. According to Watson, this sequence draws on the railway and Charles Dickens’ mystery story, The Signal-Man. ‘These sounds connect the industrial landscape with the human story of the estuary.’

The soundscape then passes beneath the Humber Bridge, announced by the thunder of vehicles crossing its expansion joints. Later, it gathers the cries of a local fairground, cathedral bells and the roar of supporters at a Hull Kingston Rovers home game.

Further along the estuary, birds scour the mudflats while their calls mingle with the distant echoes of Saltend Chemicals Park. ‘The piece is a mix of wildlife and industrial sounds constantly interrupting one another,’ states Watson.

The journey eventually reaches Spurn Point, an extraordinary, remote spit of land extending into the North Sea. Here, the haunting calls of grey seals drift across the water alongside the rolling wash of the waves. ‘I regard my work as cinematic. I want it to fire people’s imagination,’ notes Watson.

Created from recordings gathered over nearly two years, Trent Falls compresses time and collapses distance, drawing geography, seasons and memory into a single continuous passage. Originally commissioned as part of Hull’s year as UK City of Culture (in 2017), the work extends beyond the city to capture the wider character of the Humber Estuary.

‘The piece is inspired by Hull, but it’s really about listening to the whole estuary and how it changes as you move through it,’ says Watson.

At its heart, Trent Falls is an invitation to slow down and hear both Hull and its surrounding areas. ‘With my installations, I give people the time to listen. I want them to turn their phones off and allow themselves to be taken somewhere else.’

This exploration of water, infrastructure and industry finds a fitting setting at Wapping Hydraulic Power Station. Built in 1890 and closed to the public for 13 years, the building is hosting its first cultural programme under the custodianship of the Glass Castle Foundation. Here, Trent Falls is presented through L-Acoustics’ immersive sound system as part of The Art of Sound programme for the London Design Festival.

Running until 15 September 2026, The Art of Sound also features work by Max Cooper, alongside Hollie Buhagiar’s Lengua Desollada and Helen Lyon’s A Decade Is a Long Time. Both works were created in collaboration with L-Acoustics and the Alliance for Women Film Composers.

Follow the latest from London Design Festival 2026 with our live blog.

Twenty years ago, en route to his brother’s stag weekend in the country, Ollie Olanipekun watched a barn owl glide past his minibus and experienced a euphoric moment of mental clarity. From then on, looking up at the sky and watching birds became a way to slow down, still his active mind and relieve moments of stress. It was a life-changing moment that would eventually lead him to launch Flock Together, a birdwatching club that organises monthly walks for people of colour.

This month, he forms part of Shoreditch Design Week’s ‘Voices of Shoreditch’, a cohort of local designers and creatives pulled together by Shoreditch Design Week creative director Duncan Riches ‘to reflect the depth and diversity of talent in East London’. Olanipekun joins a distinguished coterie that includes Bethan Laura Wood, Jasper Morrison, Lee Broom and Martino Gamper, and the programme will showcase a selection of representative design pieces as well talks.

Ollie Olanipekun: from multidisciplinary creative to accidental birdwatcher

Having grown up on a Coventry housing estate, Olanipekun says he might have remained oblivious of the joys of nature had it not been for a brief stint in the cub scouts. 'I can thank my parents for that,’ notes Olanipekun. ‘They could see that I might be heading down a wrong path. It wasn’t for me in the end. I was battling with ADHD, and I found the uniform and the activities restrictive, but what it did do was introduce me to the possibilities of the great outdoors and exploring nature.’

Years later, while working in London as a creative director for clients such as Adidas, Burberry and Levis, he found high pressure projects became more manageable if he could step outside for an hour or so to wander in nature and take photos of birds. He began posting the pictures on social media and quickly found an enthusiastic fan base.

In 2020, against the backdrop of a global lockdown and Black Lives Matter protests, the seed of an idea formed and took flight in Olanipekun's mind, with his love for birds and recognition of the power of community to heal in dark times leading him to set up Flock. At the first walk - at Walthamstow Wetlands, in east London - around 15 people turned up. But at the subsequent monthly birdwatching walks, which now cover the four corners of London, as well as further afield (there are chapters in Tokyo, Toronto and New York), the number has been considerably more - one walk in Richmond Park saw around 450 turn up. And it isn’t about being a nature expert or bird fanatic, nor do you need any special equipment (the walks are free but brand partnerships ensure binoculars and the like are provided). It’s about connecting people to the planet and each other through nature – both seeing it and feeling it – with midwalk talk sessions proving unexpectedly cathartic.

Olanipekun is full of energy and his brain is undeniably a hive of activity. The walks aren’t just during the day – there are twilight ones too – and Flock works with schools and youth groups to encourage children to start loving nature too, particularly those from undersupported or historically underrepresented backgrounds. Olanipekun’s OpenArea platform supports artists, architects and performers to create for and within green space, and he has also recently opened gallery Allotment to spotlight work that connects nature and culture. He is constantly juggling ideas for the future, which include weekend nature retreats and collaborations, as well as a current plan to create a nature reserve in his home borough of Hackney.

For his contribution to ‘Voices of Shoreditch’, he chose a pair of binoculars to represent his social philosophy. ‘They are the one piece of equipment that binds everyone involved in birdwatching,’ says Olanipekun. ‘No matter your experience, background or where you come from, binoculars are the shared object that says you are part of this. They are an invitation and an equaliser. But more than that, they represent curiosity itself. They are about choosing to look closer, to lean in, to pay attention to what others might pass by. In my work, that act of looking deeper has been everything. Binoculars have taught me the art of noticing - that when you really see, you gain new perspectives not just on nature, but on ideas, place and possibility. They are a reminder that the more you observe, the more you understand. And that understanding is where real connection begins.’

‘Voices of Shoreditch’ at Shoreditch Design Week is on 15-20 September at House of Icon, Shoreditch Town Hall, London EC1, shoreditchdesignweek.com. flocktogether.world, openarea.live, @allotment_e8

South Asian design is no longer confined by geography; it has become a global language of contemporary expression. This year, it crosses borders with a major London showcase worth adding to every design lover’s itinerary.

India and UK-based Raw Collaborative – a design platform championing craft, material innovation and creative exchange – makes its first major international debut with Design Intelligentsia, a showcase at Shoreditch Town Hall. Part of London Design Festival 2026, the exhibition takes place from 15-17 September, bringing together 25 distinctive studios. 'We have been representing and collaborating with these practices over several years, through our previous showcases as well as our engagement with designers, makers and craft communities across India,' says Fateh Singh Bhatia, programme & curatorial lead at Raw Collaborative UK Ltd. 'For this showcase, we were interested in looking beyond the obvious or singular application of a craft.'

While the showcase spotlights studios advancing traditional craft through sophisticated technologies and digital tools, it resists reducing South Asian design to familiar tropes or viewing it solely through the lens of tradition. 'For us, this is the shift from craft-intensive to design-intensive practices; where craft is not simply an aesthetic or a technique, but a way of thinking,' says Tanvi Karia, founder & director of Raw Collaborative UK Ltd.

Here’s a look at some of the most distinctive names participating in the show.

Raw Collaborative - Design Intelligentsia is on view 15-17 September 2026. Shoreditch Town Hall, 380 Old Street, London EC1V 9LT

South Asian designers to discover at London Design Festival

Baarique

Led by Malika Budhiraj, the predominantly women-run studio has spent the past decade working closely with artisans to create handcrafted and hand-painted objects in brass and bronze, spanning tableware, barware, boxes and urns. For the showcase, they will present a selection of signature pieces alongside a new series of collectible works that pair hand-embroidered Madhubani motifs (a centuries-old folk painting tradition from India and Nepal) with repoussé brass, mounted on handspun Ahimsa silk and developed in collaboration with Madhubani artists.

Ikai Asai

The brand is the brainchild of entrepreneur and artist Ananya Birla. Rooted in material-led storytelling, it places craft communities at the heart of the creative process. At the show, that philosophy comes into sharp focus through objects made using traditions such as papier-mâché, Longpi pottery, brasswork and Channapatna lacquerware, revealing how age-old techniques can find fresh expression in new design.

Khambatta

Founded by Ismet Khambatta in the 1990s, the workshop reinterprets India’s woodworking traditions through a restrained modernist language. Working with timber in its natural form, the practice focuses on the honesty of joints, junctions and material character. At LDF, their presented pieces feel as relevant in a decade as they do today.

Arrti Mansinghka

Her practice began with an exploration of cloth, evolving into richly layered appliqué works in which landscapes, flora, fauna and the human form emerge almost like fragments of memory. At the event, the artist turns to discarded textiles, transforming material once deemed obsolete into deeply evocative compositions.

Wicker Story

Architect Priyanka Narula founded the practice as a way to explore the possibilities of cane and rattan beyond their conventional forms. At the showcase, the studio brings together traditional craft and parametric design methodologies, demonstrating the remarkable adaptability of these natural materials through a modern language.

Latika Nehra

An Indian-born, Berlin-based artist working across ceramics, stone and mixed media, her practice embraces raw surfaces as a counterpoint to the polished aesthetics of digital life. She presents expressive hand-built forms that explore beauty through slowness, materiality and the visible trace of the maker.

The winners of the 2026 London Design Medals have been announced as the London Design Festival prepares to kick off (12-20 September), with Jonathan Anderson, Sir Christopher Frayling, Anab Jain and Solveiga Pakštaitė awarded the annual design accolade. The winners were selected by a jury of global creatives led by the festival’s director Ben Evans, and will be celebrated at RH London, The Gallery, on 14 September.

The winning quartet embodies the breadth of creativity and ingenuity at the heart of London's creative industries. 'This year's medal winners demonstrate the transformative power of design, from Jonathan Anderson’s work blending high fashion, art and craft, to Sir Christopher Frayling’s lifelong dedication to design education and cultural history, Anab Jain’s pioneering work in speculative futures, and Solveiga Pakštaitė’s solutions for intuitive, inclusive and considered design,' comments Evans. 'Each medal recipient exemplifies how creative innovation shapes our culture, industry and shared future.'

LONDON DESIGN MEDALS 2025: MEET THE WINNERS

London Design Medal: Jonathan Anderson

Blending his work in fashion with a lifelong dedication to craft, both historical and contemporary, makes Jonathan Anderson a fitting winner for one of London's most important creative accolades. 'It is a true honour to be recognised by the LDF for my work within the field of craft and design, which have always been a personal passion of mine,' says Anderson.

Throughout his career, and both as a personal pursuit as well as through his work for brands like Loewe and Dior, as well as his eponymous label JW Anderson, Anderson has operated, a note from the festival reads, as a 'creator and curator'. Through projects such as collaborations with The Hepworth Wakefield and the Offer Waterman gallery, and the founding of the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, he transformed the role of creative director with a distinctive cultural perspective.

Lifetime Achievement Medal: Sir Christopher Frayling

British cultural historian, academic, broadcaster and champion of design education, Sir Christopher Frayling represents the festival's belief in the importance of fostering and nurturing the industry's future. Frayling recognises the similar mission the two share: 'Since 2003, the London Design Festival has been drawing the public's attention to the key importance of design in everyday life,' he notes. 'Through my teaching, my publications, my broadcasts – and my leadership of the Royal College of Art (RCA) – I have been on a similar mission.'

Frayling is a former rector of the RCA; among his achievements, he set up the pioneering History of Design postgraduate course with the V&A Museum, contributing to bringing modern and contemporary design at the forefront of the academic discourse. His belief in the accessibility of design education and the industry has led him to write and present programmes for the BBC and Channel 4, and to be a key voice in the crucial conversations surrounding funding for creative education.

Design Innovation Medal: Anab Jain

The co-founder of challenge-facing, future-oriented studio Superflux, Anab Jain is a futurist applying creative thinking to 'the complex and deeply interconnected nature of the challenges we face today'.

Today led by a mission of 'meaningful legacy', Jain was born and raised in India, where she studied filmmaking at the National Institute of Design before moving to London for a master’s at the RCA. Founding Superflux with Jon Ardern in 2009, her work has focused on designing speculative solutions where technology, politics, and nature are considered to confront the increasingly complex challenges facing current and future generations (as seen in the studio’s recent exhibition ‘The Craftocene’ in Venice). 'For us, [the award] is recognition that speculative and future-led design is inherently innovative and entrepreneurial,' she says. 'At Superflux, we have always believed that design’s greatest power lies in making complex, systemic futures viscerally felt, so people can step outside established narratives and find the courage to imagine alternate futures.'

Emerging Design Medal: Solveiga Pakštaitė

This year's Emerging Design Medal winner is chief design officer and founder of tech venture Mimica, and runs a multidisciplinary practice that deals with user-centred and sustainable design. Among her early achievements is Bump, which she developed while attending the Industrial Design & Technology course at Brunel University London: the surface of a temperature-sensitive label is applied to food, and its tactile pattern changes when the food is about to go bad – the mission being to cut food waste and support visually impaired individuals in their everyday life.

'I'm passionate about promoting inclusion and sustainable habits through design, and I think it's wonderful that work that makes the world a little bit better is being recognised,' she says. 'I feel very honoured! I'm proud of what I have worked on so far but I'm even more excited by the design challenges yet to come.’

The language of the hands and the art of making take centre stage once again in Venice with Homo Faber 2026, the fourth edition of the biennial organised by the Michelangelo Foundation for Creativity and Craftsmanship, this year titled ‘An Island of Light’. The vast and international celebration of fine craftsmanship has just opened (read our full Homo Faber 2026 review) and, until 30 September, takes over the space of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore.

Behind the scenes of Giorgetti at Homo Faber 2026

Among the new presences this year, orchestrated by the 2026 edition’s artistic director (and current Wallpaper* guest editor) Es Devlin, is Giorgetti, as the Italian furniture brand’s creative director Giancarlo Bosio explains. ‘For a company like Giorgetti, which for 128 years has built its identity around the dialogue between design, materials and craftsmanship, the desire to become part of it came naturally’, says Bosio. ‘Our conversations with the Michelangelo Foundation began shortly before the summer, when the curatorial concept for the 2026 edition had already been defined. It was our encounter with Es Devlin that opened up a new possibility.’ It was a certain affinity with her own design vision that led Devlin to incorporate the brand into an exhibition narrative that was already well established, Bosio explains.

The choice fell on a series of Giorgetti’s ‘Summa’ poufs, deliberately designed without backrests, which could sit harmoniously within the Fondazione Giorgio Cini’s Palladian Refectory. ‘Their apparent simplicity allows the quality of the detailing and the high level of craftsmanship behind them to emerge with particular clarity,’ explains Bosio. ‘Despite the short timeframe, the collaboration developed very naturally because it grew out of a genuine dialogue. It was never simply a matter of displaying a product, but rather of understanding how Giorgetti’s design language could become an integral part of the curatorial narrative conceived by Es Devlin.’

The resulting, evocative installation within the refectory, titled A Feast of Light – one of 15 conceived by Devlin for the event – celebrates the purity of white. ‘It is a space that naturally invites contemplation and creates a dialogue between architecture, art and human presence. I believe Es Devlin saw precisely this quality as the ideal context in which our contribution could find its most authentic meaning,’ says Bosio. ‘Our role was not to add a scenographic element, but rather to contribute to the experience visitors have within the space. I like to think that this is exactly what the project expresses: a moment in which design steps away from the foreground and instead chooses to enter into a relationship with the artwork, the architecture and the people experiencing them.’

In this sense, ‘Summa’ – which appears as a cylindrical pouf, sliced into separate vertical sections and recomposed in elements upholstered in contrasting fabrics and leathers – stems from an exploration of geometry and the way form is constructed through material, leaving the piece open to interpretation. ‘At first glance, it appears extremely essential, yet it embodies considerable technical complexity and a highly tailored approach to craftsmanship,’ says Bosio. It was precisely this versatility, he adds, that allowed Devlin to reinterpret the design while remaining entirely true to its identity. ‘Rather than adapting “Summa” to the installation, we allowed the installation itself to reveal a different expressive dimension of the piece.’

Paradoxically, the challenge of this project was one of reduction. ‘“Summa” was conceived as a design that celebrates the relationship between different materials and colours. For A Feast of Light, however, we chose to remove colour entirely and allow the materials themselves to carry all the expressive weight.’ Devlin selected two fabrics and one leather, all united by the same shade of white. In this way, Bosio continues, the piece no longer relies on chromatic contrast, but instead comes to life through the depth of its surfaces, the tactile qualities of the materials and the countless nuances revealed by the light.

‘It was a particularly interesting experience because it reminded us just how much narrative richness material can hold, even when it appears visually uniform.’ In this reinterpretation for Homo Faber, colour dissolves, leaving the materiality of the surfaces to take centre stage. ‘My first impression was that I could immediately recognise “Summa” and, at the same time, see it almost disappear. It steps away from being an object to be observed and becomes instead an element that helps shape the experience, actively becoming part of it.’

Ultimately, Giorgetti’s presence in this platform has a broader significance. ‘For us, Homo Faber is not an isolated occasion, but the beginning of a broader journey,’ concludes Bosio. ‘We believe that today a brand like Giorgetti should also engage with contexts where design intersects with art, architecture and contemporary culture. Not in order to seek out new languages, but to continue expressing our own through different perspectives.’

Homo Faber 2026 runs until 30 September 2026.

For more on Es Devlin read her Wallpaper* guest-editor interview and studio tour.

For our full Homo Faber review, read: Es Devlin casts Homo Faber 2026 in a new light

Upon entering this year’s Homo Faber – the fourth edition of the biennial showcase staged on Venice’s San Giorgio Maggiore – visitors find a workshop caught in a moment of pause. Tools and materials lie scattered across benches; illuminated shelves are strewn with models, maquettes, samples and dust, as though the artisans have momentarily stepped outside. Then, from the darkness at the far end of the room, a screen flickers into life with footage of skilled hands at work. Narrated in the soothing voice of British artist and stage designer Es Devlin, the exhibition’s artistic director (and a new Wallpaper* guest editor), the film prepares us for the onward journey.

‘As you meet each piece, you're meeting a pair of hands and a body and a mind – a conduit to place, conditions, culture, weather, ideas and time,' says Devlin. 'Every object was made in a room like this, at a table covered in tools and trash, each found its form from chaos.' A door swings open and we are ushered through.

It is exactly this kind of atmospheric scene-setting – Devlin’s ability to harness light and sound to create an almost spiritual experience – for which she has become globally renowned, from stage designs for Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour and U2’s residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas to the kinetic UK Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai. At Homo Faber, she follows in the footsteps of film director Luca Guadagnino and architect Nicolò Rosmarini, who directed the 2024 edition.

The biennial is produced by the Michelangelo Foundation, a Geneva-based nonprofit established in 2016 by Richemont chairman Johann Rupert and Italian cultural entrepreneur Franco Cologni. Rupert serves as its president, while his daughter Hanneli Rupert, the Foundation’s executive vice-president, has led the development of Homo Faber since 2022. Devlin’s ability to combine large-scale scenography with an emphasis on individual human stories makes her a natural choice.

Across the sequence of 15 spaces that follows, we encounter a potentially overwhelming array of more than 700 objects by over 500 makers from upwards of 70 countries. Using this year’s theme, An Island of Light, as an organising principle, Devlin has structured the exhibition around different ways of perceiving craft: maker, silhouette, material, element, process, translucency, colour and sound. By doing so, she encourages us to slow our pace and look at familiar materials and objects anew.

In An Alphabet of Objects a circular rotating structure that you can walk in and around (something of a Devlin trademark, seen this year in Milan and at Castle Howard, UK) carries more than 100 works across it shelves. Visitors can examine the objects from all angles as they slowly sail past, casting extraordinary shadows on the walls.

Further on, in Fondazione Giorgio Cini’s former 1960s swimming pool, a glowing semicircular shelf laden with rotund vessels emerges from the water like a rising moon, illuminating the darkened space. In the background, Devlin recites Jean Toomer’s Evening Song: ‘Full moon rising on the waters of my heart, / Lakes and moon and fires, / Cloine tires, / Holding her lips apart.’

Called Full Moon Rising, the display pays homage to the Korean moon jar – a centuries-old functional vessel with a moon-like silhouette made of two halves – through specially commissioned interpretations handcrafted in ceramics, paper, glass, metal and other materials displayed in two rows that run along either side of the pool. The effect is hypnotic, encouraging visitors to lose themselves in their surfaces. From the rock-like texture of Patricia Shone’s Earth Jar to the six tentacles and countless eyes of Heidi Tarver’s Moon over the Pacific, each one invites closer inspection.

In A Rooted Ascent, Devlin asked the curators to find objects made exclusively from materials that had 'started as a seed' – including wood, reeds and lacquer. What interests her is the extraordinary variety produced by human hands from this shared organic origin – from the wild, untamed form of pieces like Andrea Mancuso's Silva chair made in collaboration with master carpenter Luciano Tousco, to Heechan Kim’s staggeringly intricate #20 sculpture, in which maple veneer is bent into flawless curves and stitched with copper wire.

In An Atelier Alive guests are given the chance to see the master artisans at work. In a polished studio space surrounded by dozens of completed masterpieces, embroiderer Laura Baverstock told us about the 200 hours she spent creating a watch dial for Vacheron Constantin featuring a prowling tiger, worked in nine-carat yellow- and white-gold embroidery wire, specially developed black ceramic-coated wire and green silk. Across all three editions attended by Wallpaper*, these encounters with makers have consistently proved the exhibition’s most illuminating element.

'The main protagonists of this work are the artisans themselves, they are the rockstars for me,' Devlin stressed, and for much of the exhibition this is overwhelmingly true: their 500 portraits even constitute one of its 15 immersive installations. In some of the more visually stimulating spaces, however, the scenography occasionally threatens to eclipse the work it was designed to illuminate.

Inside the dizzyingly mirrored An Infinite Birdsong, for example, it is easy to become absorbed by the kaleidoscopic experience rather than the individual pieces of bird- and insect-inspired jewellery. It reveals the tightrope Devlin must walk throughout: how to use spectacle to command attention for craft without allowing spectacle to become the principal attraction.

In an era of artificial intelligence, algorithmic sameness and frictionless consumption, it is moving to witness the extraordinary dedication these artisans bring to their work. An Island of Light treats craft as embodied knowledge, illuminating the intimate relationship between human hands, natural materials and time – forms of intelligence that are increasingly at risk of being undervalued.

'When I was a teenager, there was a famous song by Grace Jones called “Slave to the Rhythm”,' remarked Homo Faber’s general director Alberto Cavalli at the opening. 'I’m afraid this new generation is becoming rather slave to the algorithm.' Manual skill, he argued, offers young people a means of affirming their individuality, vision and creativity.

Homo Faber is, in part, an exercise in resisting the digital trend: giving forms of specialist knowledge an international platform and demonstrating that, far from nostalgic, they remain capable of evolution. Here, makers and their work are treated with a degree of theatrical seriousness more commonly reserved for fine art.

Yet the exhibition also advances a particular conception of craft: exceptional, rarefied, exquisitely staged and frequently aligned with the luxury market. That is hardly accidental. Richemont’s maisons depend upon the proposition that hand skill, rarity, time and inherited knowledge imbue an object with value. Supporting the craft ecosystem is therefore not wholly detached philanthropy; it also protects the skills and value system upon which brands including Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels and Vacheron Constantin rely.

This does not make Homo Faber’s mission disingenuous. Rather, it reveals the complexity – and perhaps the effectiveness – of the enterprise: cultural, philanthropic and commercial interests collide in a shared argument for the value of human making. At its best, An Island of Light makes that argument powerfully.

Homo Faber runs until 30 September 2026, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, San Giorgio Maggiore Island, Venice

homofaber.com

LABottega has stood on Viale Apua in the Tuscan town of Pietrasanta since 1920, when art director and curator Serena del Soldato’s great-grandparents opened it as a shop on a bare stretch of the Versilia coast, adding a trattoria under the plane trees and an inn for travellers. The family remade the place in 2011, and it now runs as a restaurant, rooms and a gallery. Del Soldato owns and directs it, and has curated its exhibitions ever since.

Above the town, at Strettoia, del Soldato also runs an organic farm, called La Stellata. It’s home to geese, peacocks and goats, a kitchen garden, and some 300 quercetano olive trees, a variety safeguarded by a Slow Food presidium, across a hectare of hillside. Designers and artists are invited to the farm each year to make work inspired by the location; the pieces are built with artisans in Pietrasanta, and what they make stays, first shown in the gallery and then used to furnish the guest rooms.

Federica Elmo’s ‘Naturamagica’, from 2022, for example, saw the designer work dried acanthus branches into a bedside table, and build another table inspired by the lemons from the grove, with raw terracotta set against powder-coated metal. Her table is still in LABottega’s shared kitchen.

Outsiders residency at La Stellata in Tuscany, by Tableau and LABottega

Outsiders is the location’s latest initiative, conceived with Tableau, the Copenhagen studio and gallery founded by Julius Værnes Iversen in 2018; a floral designer by training, his practice runs from flowers to spatial design, objects and curation.

‘Outsiders grew from a shared belief that the most meaningful creative work happens when it’s rooted in a place rather than simply presented in one. Tableau brings the curatorial framework and invites artists into a dialogue with Pietrasanta’s extraordinary material culture, while Serena [del Soldato] opens the doors to a community that can’t be replicated,’ Iversen says. ‘It’s a project built on trust – fittingly, I was the very first guest at LABottega, long before we imagined creating something like this together.’

‘For me, Outsiders is about making people feel that they belong here,’ says del Soldato. ‘Pietrasanta has an incredible network of artisans, growers, neighbours and makers, and my role is to connect artists with that living community. Julius brings a fresh curatorial perspective from Copenhagen; I bring the local relationships and everyday knowledge of this place. Together we’ve created a residency where hospitality becomes part of the creative process.’

Creatives taking part in the residency work with local waste material. The first of resident, Willem van Hooff, showed an exhibition titled ‘I’m Alone With My Thoughts’ at LABottega throughout July 2026. It featured handmade ceramic vessels, each cut with a line of his own handwriting, sharing private thoughts noted during his residency, such as ‘It’s Been Good, I’ll Cry Too, I See You, Last’.

A second Outsiders residency followed at LABottega, yielding ‘Pietra Counter’, by Berlin studio Yont. It’s a modular listening bar built from marble tile offcuts supplied by Bloc Studios, the tiles lifted from the floor of its founder Sara Ferron Cima’s grandparents’ house.

Currently in residency are Jacob Egeberg and Laurids Gallée, both at work on marble discarded by the quarries above the town. Egeberg is setting thin, reflective surfaces on rough offcuts; Gallée is turning large reclaimed slabs into tabletops, steadied on smaller milled blocks that keep the stone’s irregularity in view.

Vestigia 2026

Egeberg is also showing work at Vestigia 2026 – the latest edition of the design platform, running at Villa Marie in Vorno near Lucca, until 26 September 2026 – where his work ‘Erratic’, a two-sided mirror in stainless steel whose fluid form is interrupted by two rock-like pieces of anodised aluminium, floats above a run of lavender.

The show's location is an 18th-century estate that its owners, Marleen and Luc Van Marcke, spent seven years restoring. Titled ‘Don’t Call Me Collectible!’ and curated by Cosimo Bonciani (founder of the Florence practice Bunker Studio and himself one of the exhibitors), this year’s Vestigia places work throughout the villa’s cultivated gardens, in a Lucchese landscape made muse by those like artist John Singer Sargent, who painted the nearby gardens of Villa di Marlia in watercolour in 1910.

Here, the lake, clipped shade, stone and late Tuscan glare give the pieces a grammar to answer to. Vestigia’s founder, Jonathan Bocca, shows ‘Silenti’, made with lighting specialist Ombre-1; anthropomorphic forms in Geolite, a mineral-based material, are lit from within, inviting visitors to walk beneath.

In a deliberate provocation, Bonciani frames the show against ‘collectible design’, the market category that has attached itself to work sitting between art and craft. His case, which draws from design historian Glenn Adamson, is that such labels exist mainly to sort and sell whatever escapes industrial production; the objects themselves belong to something older and less tidy, that is, studio craft and field research. Bonciani takes licence from Carlo Mollino’s line, ‘Everything is permitted, provided it is fantastic!’, to move across design, craft, sculpture and material research without tidying them into a market category.

‘The protagonist here is nature; we are secondary,’ says designer Costantino Gucci of his work ‘Altera’, a mirrored monolith that emerges from the villa’s lake. A slender oval split into two angled planes, it reflects the water and trees around it, so that whoever stands in front of it finds the surroundings looking back at them, and the sculpture all but dissolves into them.

A fragment of Breccia Medicea, the historic Apuan stone that carries the Medici name, anchors ‘Rudis’, the first work that Francesco Maria Messina has made with Acquasanta Edizioni. Its surface is left much as the stone was found, and reclaimed steel blades run through it, the spent tools of the stone-cutting itself, carrying the horizontal planes of a shelf.

Nèemĕsi’s ‘11.07 Violet’, meanwhile, takes a derelict slab of travertine, its broken edges left as they are, lacquers it in high-gloss violet and stands it on a hand-curved metal base. The studio’s piece is presented here by Movimento, the Milan gallery representing several designers at Vestigia this year, also including Tipstudio.

Tableau is also showing at Vestigia 2026, with Bloc Studios, the Carrara marble studio co-founded by Sara Ferron Cima in 2014. Together they present ‘Isole’, a cluster of vessels in veined marble and translucent onyx designed by Iversen with Elsa De Mori, each carved into an organic form, as if shaped by water and erosion.

At Villa Marie’s entrance, Iversen’s ‘Mikado Bamboo’ hangs white limonium from a bamboo gate, the flowers cut in Pietrasanta. By the pool sits the bronze ‘B-fora’ (a play on ‘amphora’) by IAMMI, the studio of Nicolau dos Santos and Stephanie Blanchard. The curve of a buttock is worked into the piece's feminine body, the metal oxidised with acid to a shifting, gold-toned patina, which Blanchard describes as melting into its surroundings.

Pietrasanta and Vorno make a Tuscan double bill, two projects and one line of research. The category they push against is older than it sounds: furniture collected as art goes back to the ‘art furniture’ of 1870s England, made to blur the line the Royal Academy kept between the fine and the decorative, and to furnish the houses of connoisseurs. What Outsiders does at La Stellata and what Vestigia does in the gardens at Villa Marie is to turn the focus back towards the workshop and the quarry, with objects that are valued for how they came to be and for what they were before. Whatever you call it, ‘collectible’ is the least of it.

There is no single way to be a Black designer, and that thought sits at the heart of ‘The Nue Black Aesthetic’, a major exhibition opening at London’s Design Museum in November 2026. Guest-curated by author and journalist Charlene Prempeh and project curator Tiya Dahyabhai, the exhibition brings together more than 100 objects by 16 contemporary designers, spanning furniture, architecture, tailoring, product design and sculpture.

At its core is the idea that ‘Black design is not a monolith’. The exhibition opens with the question: ‘What does it mean to be a Black designer working today?’ For Prempeh, founder of creative studio and art consultancy A Vibe Called Tech and author of Now You See Me: An Introduction to 100 Years of Black Design, the answer has become more complicated over the years she has spent developing the exhibition.

The designers and their intentions may not have significantly changed, she tells Wallpaper*, though the world in which they are working has. ‘There’s been an erosion of diversity programmes. There’s been a kind of acceptance of, if not racism, then there’s been an acceptance of division. And the practice takes place within that context. And so that’s quite different.’

The exhibition’s title reaches back into history through its references to the Black Aesthetic of the 1960s and the New Black Aesthetic of the 1980s. Prempeh’s ‘Nue’ introduces nuance into the conversation around this particular generation, drawing attention to the individual histories, geographies and ideas behind the work. For Prempeh, the diaspora is central to that thinking.

‘I think the diasporic voice has become stronger and stronger and stronger as part of the Black community over the past ten, 20 years,’ she says. ‘That is an important focus and an important detail because the different countries across Africa, and across the Caribbean have very, very different stories to tell. That’s what’s different about the show. It’s not that these Black designers are different to that generation. It’s that I’m looking at a different type of Black designer.’

The exhibition unfolds across six sections, beginning with the history of Black design before moving through individual practice, community and the wider systems around design. Towards a Nue Black Aesthetic begins with seven decades of Black design and the practitioners and scholarship that have shaped the present, before Identity as Inspiration considers how personal histories and cultural references enter a designer’s work. Among the objects on display is Bianca Saunders’ suit for Usher at the 2023 Met Gala.

Community Building considers design as a means of creating belonging, with Labrum’s Arsenal 2024/25 away kit among the works featured, while Rethinking the System looks at designers challenging established ideas of value, hierarchy and the canon. The final two sections become more personal and contemplative. Black by Design, a new film directed by Samona Olanipekun, follows the featured designers through interviews and studio visits, before Finale, a site-specific commission by Ini Archibong, which brings the exhibition to a close.

Within that wider journey, individual practices reveal the different ways these questions are being approached. Among them is Simone Brewster, whose first museum show, ‘Platform: Simone Brewster’, is also at the Design Museum. For ‘The Nue Black Aesthetic’, she will present new work, placing her practice in conversation with the other designers in the exhibition.

Architect and artist Giles Tettey Nartey will show ‘Strange Notes’, his contemporary take on the balafon, a gourd-resonated xylophone originating in West Africa. The work addresses something Nartey has long been interested in: the way the Western design canon has often treated traditional West African design as though it belongs to the past. ‘Strange Notes’ appears in Rethinking the System, where questions around how design is valued, understood and carried forward come into focus.

The wider group includes Tejumola Adenuga, Taiba Akhuetie, Ini Archibong, Mac Collins, Phoebe Collings-James, Foday Dumbuya, Feben, Nifemi Marcus-Bello, Andu Masebo, Saul Nash, Tosin Oshinowo, Rachel Scott and Samuel Ross. Work by more than 20 additional designers, including Althea McNish and Yinka Ilori, expands the exhibition’s history across the 20th and 21st centuries.

Meet the creatives

Deciding who belonged within that conversation was not straightforward. The exhibition focuses primarily on UK designers, or those with a significant connection to the UK, with shared themes helping Prempeh determine its final shape.

‘At its core, I suppose curation is an act of selecting and organising,’ she says. ‘There are tens and tens of other Black designers whose work I both respect and enjoy who aren’t in this exhibition and that’s because I was looking for shared themes.

‘Making those decisions was difficult, but it came down to asking: what are the key themes that these designers can fall under, themes that make sense to visitors and that can help tell a compelling story about Black design today.’

One assumption Prempeh particularly wanted to address was the idea of Black design as ‘crafty’. ‘I’ve always found that quite difficult to swallow,’ she says. ‘So I wanted to show, I suppose, the level of intellectual rigour and complexity in the making that takes place in Black design. I hope this exhibition achieves that.’

It brings the exhibition to a more difficult question around how Black designers are understood once their work is visible. The designers may be brought together through a shared racial identity, but Prempeh is wary of Blackness becoming the endpoint for how their work is read.

‘It’s possible and useful to recognise shared themes within a community, because I think it allows a framework for deeper analysis,’ she says. ‘And the important part is the deeper analysis.

‘What we’re trying to do with the show is understand the details, systems and thinking that have informed individual designers. In the past, it’s been fairly typical to stop at the Black, and that’s very much not what we’re doing here.’

That analysis inevitably raises another question: who has historically been afforded the authority to decide what enters the design canon?

‘When we’re talking about the canon, we’re really discussing museum collections and established literature,’ Prempeh says. ‘It’s obvious who decides what enters those canons, it’s the directors of the museums and it’s the publishing houses. And so as much as I would like to say that all of the work that is done independently on the fringes is enough, I think it’s equally important to make sure that those often marginalised stories become part of these institutions.’

For Prempeh, challenging those structures can happen from inside established institutions or beyond them.

‘They’re gaining entry into these existing spaces and once they’re there, they’re shaping or they’re reshaping what those spaces are or what they can be,’ she says. ‘They’re also moving out of them completely and forming their own structures. I think both are equally important.’

That freedom also applies to the stories Black designers choose to tell about themselves.

‘Black designers now, I hope and feel, can decide when they want to tell stories about their Blackness and they can decide what part of their Blackness they want to talk about and when. And that’s the kind of freedom I think not just Black designers, but all designers deserve.’

She also questions why the responsibility for understanding those practices should continually fall on the designers themselves. When I ask what happens when Black designers no longer have to make themselves legible to predominantly white institutions, Prempeh turns the question around. ‘I think very much the onus is on the institutions to meet Black designers where they are and to make an effort to research and understand the integrity and intention of the Black designers. Because the only people missing out when that doesn’t happen are the institutions and their audiences.

‘Black design and the Black designers, not just in the show but globally, deserve to be seen and presented and understood fully.’

The exhibition closes with a new site-specific commission by Nigerian American designer and Wallpaper* US400 honoree Ini Archibong. ‘Mfon’, meaning ‘grace’ in Nigeria’s Ibibio language, is a vast chandelier made from hand-blown Murano glass and experienced alongside an ambient soundtrack. Its scale gives the different experiences, identities and localities carried through the exhibition room to coexist.

‘I think in terms of my own writing and curatorial practice, it’s always been about a series of questions being proposed as opposed to resolved,’ Prempeh says. ‘I think I want this moment at the end of the exhibition to do that for the visitors, for them to stop and start thinking about what the questions are.

‘I want the visitors to leave with curiosity,’ she says. ‘If they leave with a curiosity about Black design then I’ve more than achieved my goal and I’d be very happy.’

‘The Nue Black Aesthetic’ is at the Design Museum, London, from 6 November 2026 to 8 August 2027

There are few weeks in London’s calendar when the city feels quite as alive as it does during London Design Festival. Every September, museums, galleries and streets become the centre of conversation, where architects, designers and makers invite us to look differently at the spaces we move through every day.

The first programme announced for London Design Festival 2026, which returns from 12 to 20 September, looks at both the origins of design and its future direction. This year, both craft and artificial intelligence sit alongside one another as historic techniques are revisited through contemporary collaborations, exploring themes of migration, ecology, and cultural exchange across many confirmed projects.

London Design Festival 2026: programme announced

A bamboo pavilion with a bigger story to tell

Among the first commissions announced is The Pangolin Shield, the festival’s inaugural Landmark Project by the Anglo-Indian studio Studio Saar and structural engineers Atelier One. Installed on the Strand, the pavilion takes its cue from the pangolin, the shy, armour-plated mammal whose overlapping scales serve as the starting point for a structure made of bamboo and woven shields traditionally used by farming communities in north-eastern India.

While the pavilion could easily be appreciated for its impressive engineering, the aim is to encourage visitors to engage with it on a deeper level. It invites reflection on colonial histories, the movement of people and ideas, and the stories that materials carry as they journey across the Indian Ocean. Traditionally, the bamboo canopy serves both as shelter and as a space for contemplation, urging those on London’s busiest streets to slow down and be viewed.

On view all day, 12-20 September, Strand, Aldwych, London, WC2R 1ES

Made looks back to the Barbican

Renowned for its iconic brutalist architecture, the Barbican has profoundly influenced London’s design imagination. Its impact is evident in contemporary interiors, furniture design, and even the conversations surrounding urban living.

This autumn, Made revisits that legacy with a new Made x Barbican collection developed by designer Miriam Howitt, drawing on archival research into the estate and its original interiors. Furniture, lighting and textiles draw on the Barbican’s distinctive interiors. To accompany this, an installation at the Barbican during the festival explores how one of Britain’s most recognisable architectural landmarks continues to shape ideas of home decades after it first opened.

Installation on view 8am-11pm, 12-20 September, Barbican, Level G Hub Space, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS

The V&A begins with an awakening

The V&A has become the spiritual home of the London Design Festival, and its annual commission often captures the mood of each edition. This year, ‘Awakenings’, curated by Carrie Chan and Kristian Volsing, looks at how design can reshape our relationship with the world around us.

Spread throughout the museum, the programme brings together designers including Aziza Kadyri, Eunjo Lee and Henry Svendsen, alongside new commissions exploring sound, identity, artificial intelligence and the natural world. There is a sense of curiosity running through the exhibition, as well as a sense that technology is no longer treated as something separate from craft. Instead, both are becoming part of the same conversation.

From 12 September, V&A South Kensington, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 2RL

The Design Museum turns its attention to people behind the practice

The Design Museum’s programme during LDF, as ever, spans fashion, furniture and contemporary design culture. A major ongoing retrospective celebrates Nigo (until 4 October), charting the Japanese designer’s influence across streetwear and luxury fashion. London-based designer, educator and cultural change-maker Simone Brewster’s Platform installation (until January 2027) continues her exploration of sculptural furniture and material histories, layered with references from 'palaeolithic fertility deities to African diasporic traditions'.

Away from the galleries, conversations take centre stage too. Brewster joins Jasmi Hussein, Emefa Cole and Hettie Judah for a discussion exploring design and motherhood, shifting the focus away from finished work towards the lives and experiences that shape creative work.

224-238 Kensington High St, London W8 6AG; visit designmuseum.org for the full programme

Japanese craft meets contemporary design

This year, Craft x Tech Tokai Project continues its tradition of collaboration between Japanese artisans and international designers. The exhibition highlights the fusion of traditional craftsmanship and contemporary design, featuring media such as ceramics, washi paper, lacquer, textiles, and woodworking.

It spotlights designers such as Bethan Laura Wood, David Caon, and Philippe Malouin, who engage with artisans whose techniques have been refined and passed down through generations, showcasing the exciting possibilities born from this rich exchange of ideas.

12-30 September, Victoria & Albert Museum, Medieval & Renaissance, Room 64b, The Simon Sainsbury Gallery, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 2RL

New conversations between Asia and London

Elsewhere, cultural platform MixZ continues its exploration of exchange between Asia and the UK through a pair of exhibitions taking place at the V&A and the Old Selfridges Hotel, an event space within the London department store.

At the V&A, ‘MixZ: China White Reimagined’ highlights the ancient beauty of Dehua porcelain. At the Old Selfridges Hotel, ‘Future Living with Shenzhen Style’ explores future living through future with immersive technologies and artificial intelligence. Throughout both presentations, the focus is on collaboration as community, underscoring the idea that true innovation seldom occurs in a vacuum. Instead, it flourishes through the shared knowledge, materials, and ideas that flow between different cultures.

V&A, Cromwell Road London, SW7 2RL
Selfridges, 1 Orchard St, London W1H 6HJ

St Paul’s Cathedral becomes a space of light

Ukrainian artist and lighting designer Mykola Kabluka will install two works inside St Paul’s Cathedral. Created with his Kyiv studio, Expolight, Soul and The Point of Unity examines the moment when a thought or feeling remains private.

Soul draws on research into the brain during daydreaming and inward thought. Its audiovisual imagery has no set sequence. Light travels through glass and responds to people moving around the cathedral, changing the work as they pass. The Point of Unity debuted at Burning Man in 2025 and will make its UK debut at the LDF. Some 3,500 fibre optic points illuminate the sculpture after dark; during the day, its mirrored surfaces reflect the cathedral around it. Kabluka explores how an individual presence becomes part of a larger whole.

Created during the ongoing war against Ukraine, Kabluka highlights his thoughts and personal experience of uncertainty and hope.

St. Paul's Churchyard, London EC4M 8AD

The Speaking Oasis gives palm weaving a 'new language'

Saudi architect Shahad Alazzaz turns to the date palm for The Speaking Oasis, presented at The Lavery in Cromwell Place during the London Design Festival. Her project explores how a material deeply woven into Saudi cultural life can be used in contemporary design.

The largest self-contained palm oasis, Al Hasa Oasis in eastern Saudi Arabia, acts as a reference point. Its extensive date palm groves have long made it a place of movement and exchange, while generations of craftspeople have worked with the palm through weaving. Supported by the Ithra Palm Initiative, launched by the King Abdulaziz Centre for World Culture in Dhahran, Alazzaz, founder of Azaz Architects, brings this skill and knowledge into architecture and design, exploring how the material and its techniques can develop.

On view all day, 12-20 September,The Lavery, (3 Cromwell Place), London SW7 2JE

Mali Mowcka creates a special sanctuary in Shoreditch

At the Hart, Shoreditch has invited contemporary urban artist Mali Mowcka to create Sanctum of Renewal inside its pan-Asian restaurant 'UBA', turning it into a contemporary sacred space for the London Design Festival, filling the upper part of the room with wooden pieces that descend from the ceiling.

Making between 160 and 200 forms by hand, each with an organic shape. Translucent resin petals will be suspended among them, drawing on Yūgen, the Japanese idea that 'beauty can be found in what remains partly unseen.' UBA will continue operating as a restaurant throughout the installation, with guests eating beneath the sculpture as staff move through the room.
On view all day, 12-20 September, 61 - 67 Great Eastern St, London EC2A 3HU

Brompton Design District puts craft in focus

Brompton Design District returns for London Design Festival under the direction of British and Italian curator and gallerist Alex Tieghi-Walker. The Wallpaper* USA 400 honouree has invited designers and curators to occupy spaces across the district, bringing together more than 150 participants. Isamaya Ffrench and former guest editor Laila Gohar are among them, along with a group of New York designers making their festival debut alongside launches from designers and brands including Molteni&C, Cassina and Tai Ping, presenting new collections from their Brompton showrooms.

Following his 2025 programme, Tieghi-Walker returns with a closer look at craft and contemporary design, introducing work by new voices London audiences may not yet know. Taking place from 12 to 20 September, this year's programme considers the personal attachments we form with the objects and design around us. Titled Perfectly Imperfect, the programme opens up studios and workshops, bringing unfinished experiments into public view.

On view all day, 12-20 September, The Lavery, (3 Cromwell Place), London SW7 2JE

Byron Pritchard lets the material decide

Also at Brompton Design District, British designer Byron Pritchard presents a new body of work featuring a slab of sycamore at the London Design Festival. Building on traditional woodworking techniques and with a deep appreciation for the craft, he and his team will, in work yet to be completed, work entirely by hand in a garage in Cromwell Mews, following the grain and responding to the timber as they go.

Finding Form brings this part of the design process into public view with no drawing setting out the final object; visitors will see each decision take shape as the work develops. To do this, Pritchard will research historic woodworking at the nearby V&A, then return to the garage and keep making.

On view all day, 12-20 September, Cromwell Mews Garage, London SW7 2JS

Past Made Present takes over Ham House

At Ham House, students from Kingston University’s MA Product & Furniture Design programme have responded to a place with more than 400 years of history. Developed with The Storybox Collective and the National Trust, Past Made Present brings the work of a new generation of designers into the house and gardens that inspired it.

Projects and prototypes will be installed throughout the property, drawing on archival research and stories connected to the house. Accessibility is central to the exhibition, with the students considering how design can give visitors another way to experience a historic place. Their material experiments enter into the existing rooms quietly, responding to Ham House as it is.

From 10 September to 11 October, Ham St, Ham, Richmond TW10 7RS

The south of France’s annual design competition and festival, Design Parade, celebrates a milestone anniversary in 2026, marking 20 years of its ‘Objet’ (Product design) competition, and 10 years of its ‘Architecture d’intérieur’ (Interior design) competition. The occasion was customarily revelrous with passionate speeches, a pétanque tournament, a retrospective exhibition curated by David Giroire, and a talks programme featuring India Mahdavi hosted by Matter + Shape beneath umbrella pines to a soundtrack of cicadas.

Design Parade 2026 at Villa Noailles

At the 1920s Villa Noailles in Hyeres, the ten ‘Product design’ finalists included ‘imprecise candle clocks’ that challenge our relationship to time by Matisse Vrignaud and Lundja Medjoub (winners of a residency at the Sèvres National Manufacture). Yohan Thomas’ efficient lamp that hacked its own design system bringing autonomy back to small-scale manufacturing. And Mexican designer Eduardo Altamirano’s hypnotic, minimalist open speaker won the public prize.

Tin Ayala (Ecuador), who remixed precolonial Andean ceramic huacos with characters from video games and comics suggesting pre-to-post-colonial continuities, won the jury’s ‘Product design’ grand prize. Meanwhile conceptual designer Shahar Livne (Netherlands), a former student of Formafantasma, examined colonialism through the lens of rubber, examining its human and animal cost.

Stanislas Colodiet, director of CIRVA (France’s International centre of Glass and Plastic Arts) and member of the ‘Product design’ jury this year, remarked that post-colonialism has gained more interest from designers in recent years, as well as how objects can shape new rituals. 'An object should have agency,' he says.

Colodiet will work closely with winner Ayala during an upcoming residency at CIRVA in Marseille, which is part of the prize; and was proud to reflect on the collaboration with last year’s winner Simon Dupety, whose installation of organic glass vessels and lamps formed a dystopian garden inside the Villa Noailles.

Transforming Villa Noailles through contemporary interior design

The ten ‘Interior design’ competition finalists each transformed a room in the villa. Winner of the jury’s grand prize, Valentin Bayoud’s hearth-inspired cocoon replaced fire with water, inviting shared contemplation. Water was central to Elen Rio’s Mediterranean garden with a dynamic basin and playful hosepipes; as well as Yohann Hubert and Carlotta Lagazzi’s (winners of the Nationale manufactures Mobilier national Prize) reimagining of a wrecked boat.

Julie Liger, Artistic Director of Design Parade, noticed an increase in ‘spaces that isolate you from the intensity of life, yet not to be alone – to be with friends and discuss, and to see and observe nature.’ Reflecting on her own pioneering participation in 10 years of the ‘Interior design’ competition, she’s seen the rise of environmentalism. Today it’s integral to how all finalists think, yet this year explored it with the most freedom and sophistication in the use of circular and natural materials.

As well as noting an almost ‘Baroque’ approach to craft and decoration, with designers showing intensive interest in materiality and taking craft back into their own hands. See Boris Cojean’s silky beeswax surfaces; Simon Searle and Victoire Lesthevenon’s local timber tinted with plant-based dyes (Public prize winner); Marion Moustey and Ewerton Alves’ aubergine curtains; and Clément Pasquier’s magical cork oak skin.

Liger sees the competition as an extension of the rich French heritage of interior design, and importantly one that, rather than in Paris, is rooted in the Mediterranean context of the south. Taking place during intense heat-waves across Europe, Design Parade’s question of how to live in the Mediterranean felt very relevant, as Northern Europe looks south for wisdom and innovation from shading, to water management.

An eco-system of design

Each year of the festival, the regional eco-system of design further strengthens. This year, visitors can discover new collectible design gallery Pour Vous and return to the Banane d’Or concept space in Hyères; be inspired by graduate presentations at the Camondo Méditerranée school and an exhibition on design and textiles at the Hôtel des Art featuring Sheila Hicks, Hella Jongerius and Muller Van Severen in Toulon.

They can also experience the work of Design Parade veterans of all levels in various places. During opening week, Edgar Jayet (5th Interior design winner, 2021) opened a recently designed home to curious visitors; pétanque played out at the sea-front Hotel Le Provencal designed by Rodolphe Parente (6th Interior design jury president, 2022, and 10th Interior design jury member); and lunch was hosted at Hotel Lilou designed by Kim Haddou and Florent Dufourcq (3rd Interior design finalist, 2018).

One day, dreams Liger, Design Parade will take to the streets with regional public commissions from designers, such as a fountain or landscaping. Perhaps more critically and environmentally engaged than ever before, this year’s Design Parade shows that it’s set on further expanding its impact through its community, as well as continuing to inspire surrealist imaginations through its enduringly playful spirit.

Design Parade is on view until 4 September 2026
villanoailles.com

Since the 2026 FIFA World Cup kicked off, it is only to be expected that the world has gone a little football crazy. New York has become a new stomping ground for soccer fans, and to accommodate them, Crosby Studios has designed ‘Home of Football: Home & Away’ (tickets here), a pop-up exhibition created in collaboration with cultural platform Home of Football and arts collective Air Afrique. The exhibition is designed to serve as an interactive space that offers a new perspective on the sport’s enduring legacy.

Football memorabilia is reimagined in New York exhibition

Founded by Harry Nuriev, Crosby Studios is best known for championing a transformative spirit within spaces – from Clive Christian’s London flagship to a reimagined Parisian espresso bar. Located at High Line Nine in New York’s Chelsea Gallery District, the new exhibition is no different. Divided into six chapters, the showcase looks at the codes of sport, art, design, and fashion and how they intersect.

What marks out this exhibition from others is the new viewpoint provided. Designed through Nuriev’s architectural lens, the space is graphical, with acoustic elements to enhance the impact of the presentation. The colour palette alludes to a football field, with hues of mint green, while circles and curvatures integrated within the space nod to the shape of a football and the markings on the pitch.

Memorabilia was selected and curated by Air Afrique, with highlights such as Pelé's 1958 Brazil World Cup jersey and Ronaldo artifacts from Brazil's 2002 World Cup triumph. The presentation also includes more than 60 other match-worn jerseys, as well as trophies, and photographs of defining footballing moments.

Coupled with the display of archival pieces is a new retail concept, The Crosby Shop, a platform to present some of Nuriev’s favourite brands – among them Baccarat, Nothing, publisher Rizzoli, men’s grooming brand Obayaty, and olive estate La Terra Di Neena – including some that will be available in the US for the first time. The shop is also home to Balira Coffee, a café pop-up from former Real Madrid star Sami Khedira, a World Cup-winning player for Germany in 2014, who will make select appearances.

Says Nuriev, ‘This concept is about the clash between football, fashion, and art culture. It is a form of cultural transformism, translating the energy and visual codes of football into a new media format that feels open and accessible, not only to football fans, but also to people discovering this world for the first time. The green is a digital version of the football field colour, and the circles reference both the ball and the centre point of the field, becoming symbols of movement, gathering, and play.’

'Home of Football: Home & Away' is located at High Line Nine, Hudson Yards, 507 W 27th Street, New York, NY 10001 ,until 19 July 2026. Tickets are available here

Robert Wilson was the ultimate nomad. The Texas-born, Pratt-educated artist and theatre-maker moved easily and always: between cities and continents, cultures and disciplines, the expressive and the elusive, defying boundaries through the force of his vision and a compelling charisma. And so it’s fitting that The Watermill Center, the laboratory for creative thinking that Wilson founded in 1992 in an abandoned Western Union building on New York’s Long Island and described as his 'greatest artistic achievement', was the setting for the first American edition of Nomad, the globe-trotting showcase for art and collectible design.

Nomad makes USA debut

Powered by extraordinary destinations, ranging from the Monaco villa once occupied by Karl Lagerfeld (another nomad par excellence) to the decommissioned modernist terminal at Abu Dhabi International Airport, nine-year-old design fair Nomad has emerged as the anti-fair. It doesn’t layer atop a site so much as nestle and immerse itself within it, soaking up the power of a place to illuminating effects.

The prospect of a stateside debut at Watermill, home to a year-round artist residency programme and funded in part by one of the most highly anticipated bacchanals of any summer in the Hamptons, was suggested to Nomad co-founder and director Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte by a trustee of the centre some years ago and ultimately blessed by Wilson in spring last year, before his death on 31 July 2025 at the age of 83. (An age at which, he’d told Wallpaper* in an interview at Watermill earlier that year, he had ‘more work than ever’, including an installation destined for Salone del Mobile.)

'I think Robert Wilson liked the concept of Nomad very much, because it aligns with his way of being interdisciplinary and combining different cultures. We have a lot of common ground,' said Bellavance-Lecompte, an architect and curator. 'It was a whole process to consider how we could come here without invading, to do it in a respectful way that could also support and promote his work, and now to expand his legacy.'

Art, design and architecture at The Watermill Center

An architect of time and space across hundreds of performances around the world, Wilson viewed The Watermill Center as 'my most concrete and accessible legacy'. He boiled down the institution’s mission to four foundational principles: honour the present, look to the past, support the local community, and support the global community.

Wilson first came upon the ten-acre property in the mid-1980s, drawn to Long Island’s East End by the beautiful light and a desire to trade Manhattan loft living for natural surroundings. In the crumbling, U-shaped industrial building – once a research hub that from 1925 until its closure in 1965 developed innovations including the high-speed fax machine – he discerned an appealing architectural simplicity and a beguiling surplus of windows.

Retaining the original footprint, he embarked on a 15-year project to rebuild it, inspired in part by the work of Philip Johnson, in whose New York architecture office Wilson worked as an assistant in the early 1960s. A barn-like artists’ residence, designed by Wilson in collaboration with the architect Roger Ferris, was completed in 2021.

Visitors to the inaugural Nomad Hamptons arrived at the centre as Wilson intended: by walking along a lush woodland path studded with monumental sculptures from his collection of more than 6,000 art and design objects, before ascending the stairs to reach what he dubbed the 'Knee building'; a zinc-sided structure that acts as a joint between the north and south wings.

With a floor lined in river stones, it is punctured by perpetually open doorways that afford a clear east-west view through the building. A veil of cherry red heralded Nomad’s four-day residency (25-28 June 2026), and in the trees fluttered American artist Rachel Hayes’ vibrant and dreamy textile collages, a special commission that also made for picnic blankets with a Rauschenbergian flair.

'The concept is always to dialogue with the architecture where we go to create an experience,' said Bellavance-Lecompte. In the Hamptons, that experience was shaped by a thoughtfully curated group of 32 exhibitions, each one unfolding in its own nook of the Watermill campus, including the third-floor eyrie that served as Wilson’s summer home. Opened for private tours guided by Noah Khoshbin, the light-filled space is a mesmerising mélange in which a petite René Magritte cloudscape can join a Bruce Nauman screenprint to float above a Navajo blanket, smoke-fired ceramic vessels by Bonnie Lynch, and a stainless-steel mesh chaise longue designed by Wilson in 1987 for his production of Parzival in Hamburg. And that’s just the first room. (Wilson furniture fans can find more in his self-explanatory 2025 book, Chairs.)

'Bob started collecting when he was 12 years old. The collection is a bit like Andy Warhol’s or André Breton’s in that all periods, mediums, and cultures are represented,' said Khoshbin, the centre’s curator, who also organised a presentation of works from Wilson’s vast archive in a lower-level space. 'His mission and his legacy for the artists who are in residence is that they have this collection as a resource – you can touch the works, move the works, have it in your studio or your bedroom.'

A visual tribute to Robert Wilson

The photography of Dominique Nabokov offered additional vantage points on Wilson’s singular approach to living and working (spoiler alert: the two were inextricable). Curated by Paris-based architect Sophie Dries, who instantly ingratiated herself to seasoned Wilson followers on the fair’s VIP day by toting a fluorescent Louis Vuitton handbag from the edition he designed in 2002 at the invitation of Marc Jacobs, the images were accompanied by Wilson-designed objects ranging from iconic chairs ('as important as a character' in most of his productions, he bristled when they were referred to as 'props') to striking glass works made in Marseille during his artist residency at CIRVA (Centre International de Recherche sur le Verre et les Arts Plastiques) that spanned 1994 to 2005.

Nomad in the Hamptons

For most exhibiting galleries, 'site specific' was the prevailing ethos. Cairo's Le Lab was given a room anchored by a massive wooden table that Wilson designed for, and built within, the space. 'This table will never leave this room. It’s here for good,' said Russell Piccione, who curated the presentation, titled 'Through a Collector’s Eye', with gallery founder Rasheed Kamel. 'Knowing that it was going to be in our room influenced a lot of decisions: materiality, surface, and depth, a certain soulfulness.'

Among the works orbiting the table were Ibriham El-Salahi’s Pain Relief Drawings, etched on scrap paper during the African artist’s 2016-18 incarceration in Khartoum, and a steel-framed louvered wall work by Betil Dagdelen, described by Piccione as 'a contemporary Turkish painter who happens to work in fibre'.

The centre’s serene sunken art library hosted Abby Bangser’s Object & Thing, which celebrated material experimentation and the collecting impulse with works that included a special Watermill edition of 'Disco Vision' upcycled-LaserDisc lamps by Christian Wassmann, who designed the library’s original shelves.

On the other side of the space, amid volumes dedicated to matters anthropological, theatrical, and sartorial, was the unmistakable work of Gaetano Pesce. Presented by Kalei NYC in collaboration with the designer’s estate, the forms of the colourful resin chair and jumbo throne were inspired by the frankincense trees native to Oman. More Pesce was on view in the centre’s kitchen, reimagined as a joyful haven for Italian Radical Design and spritzed regularly with a fragrance from Amouage – a precursor to the scent-embedded Pesce pieces slated to launch soon.

Other highlights included Tabayer jewellery, with finessed gold forms inspired by modernist sculpture and inlaid with otherworldly morsels of chrysoprase, blue chalcedony, and red jasper. At the Maison Gerard nook, Ayala Serfaty’s patinated bronze console, part of her new ‘Janus’ series, had the lightness of a lily pad and the organic intricacy of multiplying cells.

Aurèce Vettier (an art project founded in 2019 by Paul Mouginot and presented at Nomad by the Spaceless Gallery of New York and Paris) deploys algorithms to inform the creation of forms ranging from an Aubusson tapestry to a tree-like outdoor sculpture that evoked a glitchy mash-up of Claude Lalanne and Ingo Maurer. New York-based jewellery designer Ippolita Rostagno joined forces with Piotrek Panszczyk Burke on an installation of wearable nuggets of eroded gold, harvested from the Yukon using placer mining. 'Please touch them!' they encouraged.

Corporate partners were intelligently integrated. Sisley Paris tapped French-born artist Sydney Albertini, based in nearby Amagansett, for an installation of lively and large-scale botanical compositions that lined the walls of the centre’s dining room, while Giorgio Armani, a longtime Wilson collaborator, explored the connections between art, design, and craftsmanship with the help of commissioned works by New York-based artists Ariel Dearie and Jonathan Kline. Curated by Abby Bangser and inspired by the natural setting of The Watermill Center, the Armani presentation placed the new works in conversation with Armani/Casa pieces in Murano glass and Limoges porcelain.

Kline, a basket maker whose chosen medium is black ash, created a suite of wall-mounted open-weave grids using the inner layers of the tree, which are distinguished by their intriguing grain and irregular contour. His process shares elements prized by Wilson: slowness, contemplation, and the endless possibilities unlocked by the meeting of vertical and horizontal. 'With basket weaving, there’s a lot of time between concept and realisation. You often don’t really know where it’s going,' said Kline. 'Baskets kind of grow more than you create them. They give you time to ponder.'

A place to ponder when entering, exiting, or traversing the Knee building was created by 'Rooted Movements'. Developed with Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism, the presentation brought together the work of Emirati artists Afra Al Dhaheri, Zuhoor Al Sayegh, and Azza Al Qubaisi. 'Our objective is always to link the destinations where we go around the world, and it was important for us to bring a presence from the Middle East,' said Bellavance-Lecompte, who in 2011 founded Carwan in Beirut as the first contemporary design gallery in the Middle East.

Al Dhaheri, a native of Abu Dhabi and a 2023 participant in The Watermill Center’s flagship International Summer Program, created cotton rope installations that cascaded in banded, hair-like bundles from the industrial catwalk, their deliberately untwisted ends frizzled and pooled on the cool stone floor. The suspensions created arches to walk under, directing movement through a space infused with fragrant incense. Recalled Al Dhaheri, 'It’s like Bob used to say, “Interesting things happen when people cross paths”.’

Light filters softly into the stone entrance of an old Kyoto townhouse where Michael Anastassiades stands in front of his new creation: five thin glass tubes rise from a narrow wood base, their illuminated filaments forming a circle – just like the sun above the horizon.

'Light is the base of everything,' says Anastassiades, the Cypriot-born, London-based designer. 'Everything starts from a glow. It’s the first thing I think about before I make or design. It's always the starting point.'

This philosophy shapes 'From Warm Yellow to Saturated Red', Anastassiades’ exhibition at Taka Ishii Gallery Kyoto, where his new works – lighting, sculptural objects, seating – are harmonised with the stillness of a 150-year-old machiya, or townhouse.

Sunset – the fleeting intensity of its scattered light, the precision of its deepening shades – is the creative inspiration behind his first solo exhibition in Kyoto. Anastassiades’ objects glow quietly in a play of light and shadows inside the traditional interior – among tatami-lined spaces, paper screens, textured soil walls, high timber rafters, an old storehouse and courtyard gardens framing patches of sky.

Elemental, light and pared-back in form, his works balance precision with poetry, through a mix of cultural influences – Japanese bamboo, Greek island stones, Icelandic fishing knots, Egyptian stools, Cypriot textiles.

A key protagonist in the exhibition is his series of ‘Sunset’ lamps. The first, with a fully lit ‘sun’, is positioned in the stone entrance – and as the exhibition deepens inside the machiya, the 'sun' in each work is positioned a little lower, mirroring its descent into the horizon.

Dynamic vertical lights are also crafted from Japanese bamboo, knotted with linen thread used by Icelandic fishermen; alongside two triangular wood stools with clean curves and pointed edges; and hand-patinated bronze objects, from thorns to stones, laid on handwoven textiles by Cypriot artist Joanna Louca.

The exhibition marks something of a new creative chapter for Anastassiades, opening shortly after he announced plans to close his eponymous lighting brand after nearly 20 years, to focus more deeply on creative projects.

Here, Anastassiades shares his thoughts on sunsets and stones, fishermen’s knots and filters, while taking Wallpaper* on a private tour of his new exhibition.

Michael Anastassiades in Kyoto: interview

W*: Tell me about the sun.

MA: This exhibition is about a very specific time of day, when the sun is setting. Interesting, intense moments. I’ve made a series of sunset light pieces. This one at the entrance is a whole circle of lights – and as you progress through the gallery spaces, the light goes down to the middle of the horizon, like the sun setting. The lights are super-thin – maybe 4mm with a very, very fine LED. These are one-off pieces. To me, these objects are sketches. Drawings. Improvisations.

W*: Standing inside the machiya entrance, I can see a row of stones in a tatami space. Tell me about these.

MA: I’ve always been fascinated with natural stones. These are 25 bronze casts from my collection of stones, which I’ve collected since I was a teenager. I have a huge collection of stones. These are from the Greek island of Kefalonia. I collected them when I was 20 or 21, from a cove in a special bay. I revisited that bay 30 years later – I asked a fisherman to take me to this cove. There were probably 30 different coves, but we got there – and found more stones.

W*: Why stones – and why casts?

MA: These are not the found objects: it’s the whole idea of creating something. I’m fascinated with the role of nature as a designer. They look almost perfectly spherical, like eggs. They were found that way. It’s the idea that nature is able to create this perfect shape.

W*: What about this ‘Bamboo’ light upstairs?

MA: I used Japanese bamboo and black linen thread with a knotting technique used by Icelandic fishermen, holding the metal brackets. The bulbs are the only technological bit. For my brand, I have a lamp called ‘Take’, made of bamboo. It’s interesting to see the evolution here: the other one is very much an industrial product – but this has a handmade feel. The cables on the floor are part of the piece.

W*: What inspires the verticality in your work?

MA: It is part of the language that I’ve used for a very long time. I have been completely fascinated with linear sources of light, ever since the first pieces I made commercially – the ‘Tube’ chandelier. That was very much based on the incandescent bulb. Of course, many people used this in the past, especially the famous Eileen Gray [for her] floor lamp – I was fascinated with these bulbs for a long time. And then, as soon as I started using them, they stopped making them. About 15 years down the line, I decided to make my own bulbs – so I had these made specifically.

W*: There’s such a softness in the light.

MA: The temperature, the colour – everything about it is so carefully chosen. It is not a random piece. It is very much a warm light. The glow is so fundamental, as part of the design of the fixture. It can completely transform how something is perceived.

W*: Why lights – what’s the seed of your desire to express light?

MA: I think we’re all drawn to light in some way or another. I’ve been attracted to light for a very long time. It’s part of the human instinct. From very early civilisations, people worshipped glowing things – the sun, the moon, meteorites, fire. Why did I decide to focus on light? Because I decided I needed to focus on something when I started my brand. I found myself making more and more lights and then eventually working with companies, especially Flos.

W*: In this space, the lights feel almost sacred.

MA: They are meditative objects for sure. If you put things in a certain brightness, you have to be really sensitive with how you want things to be seen. In this context, the house, it had to be this way, it could not be different. Even the choice of materials and selections – it’s all designed around these intimate spaces.

W*: Tell me about the stools.

MA: They’re made from Oregon pine – it’s the first time I’ve used this material. I made three stools before with the same scale, using basalt, so they had a very different energy. I thought wood would be more suitable for this house.

W*: Such clean curves and points. Why this shape?

MA: I’m very much inspired by Egyptian stools, where the corners are elevated, although they’re normally square. This is triangular because I wanted to make a dialogue with the two bronze ‘Thorn’ pieces, on the walls. The stools are quite welcoming, even though they have a presence that says don’t sit.

W*: And another ‘Sunset’ lamp in an alcove?

MA: Here, the sun is almost disappearing – the time between the bottom of the sun touching the horizon and the sun disappearing. All these sunsets are familiar in a sense. We have all watched so many sunsets. Somehow, you can relate to them.

W*: Tell me about the bamboo light screen in the kura storehouse.

MA: To me, it is about filter. The sensation of when something catches your eye without necessarily looking at it directly – from the tip of your eye, you catch a movement. This is what these screens are for me. They are filtering this idea, this play of light, this linear thing that we pass through. This light is part of a series of two screens, designed for this space. It just fitted.

W*: Do you see the sun as a metaphor?

MA: To me, it’s not really a metaphor: it is something that no matter how many times you see it or experience it, every time is unique. Plus it is responsible for how we experience life, the way we experience light.

W*: Was the exhibition inspired by a particular sunset moment?

MA: Not one particular sunset. You know, when you work so much, it is so rare when you can catch the light, catch the sunset. In recent years, I’ve been going to a small Greek island between Rhodes and Cyprus. Now I’m building a house to spend more time there. It’s a place where I can pause. Every evening, we go on hikes up on the rocks on the mountain, not very high – there is one spot which is an incredible place to watch the sunset.

W*: And how about your relationship with Japan?

MA: The first time I came here was 1991. I was a student at the Royal College [of Art]. I didn’t want to come as a tourist so I applied for an internship and came here in the summer, to Tokyo, to work for Toshiba. I spent three months here – it was fascinating, a very different Japan. I next came back 25 years later, with Flos.

W*: Has Japan left an imprint in you creatively?

MA: As a creative, as an artist, when you commit to something, it completely changes the result in your approach to your creative process. That level of commitment – I don’t think you can experience it in any other country.

W*: How do you feel about the light in Japan? Particularly Kyoto, where light is often filtered by paper and nature.

MA: I’m shocked at how soft the light is here at the moment. The humidity makes the light softer at this time of year. The light in the summer in Cyprus flattens everything out. In the Greek islands, it’s the same. In London too, the sun is very different. Coming here suddenly – the way you experience the sun, the light, is different.

W*: And how do you feel about your show opening now in Kyoto?

MA: This is the longest time I’ve spent in Japan. This is an important time for me. I wouldn’t have chosen a different moment. In this context especially, this is perfect.

'From Warm Yellow to Saturated Red' by Michael Anastassiades, at Taka Ishii Gallery Kyoto, until 4 July 2026

For those who believe that truly appreciating great design requires more than a glance on a screen – that it must be held and experienced – an unmissable event is arriving in London this weekend.

Basic.Space is an online marketplace spanning luxury fashion, design, art, furniture, collectibles and lifestyle objects, also known for hosting immersive retail experiences. Central to its appeal is a distinctive model of creator-led curation, where designers, artists and tastemakers build and oversee their own 'storefronts'.

Now, the platform has unveiled the first wave of participants for its London debut: a two-day event taking over The Old Selfridges Hotel from 13-14 June 2026, bringing together a mix of creative voices, brands and collectible pieces under one roof.

This marks Basic.Space's first venture outside the US, following successful editions in Los Angeles and New York. Produced in collaboration with creative director Juliana Salazar, the London edition is organised around four pillars: design, art, fashion and sound.

'Discovery has always been at the heart of what we do at Basic.Space, and London embodies that spirit like few other cities,' said Jesse Lee, the platform's founder and chairman of Design Miami.

What kinds of makers and objects can visitors expect? There is a strong emphasis on UK-based talent. Samuel Ross – the artist and designer known for his work across fashion and sculpture – will take part alongside gallerist Max Radford, production designer Jabez Bartlett and Loewe Craft Prize finalist Jobe Burns. Designer Lewis Kemmenoe and London-based jewellery, homeware and accessories brand Completedworks round out the local contingent. Platform:, the art e-commerce destination acquired by Basic.Space in 2025, will also present a dedicated exhibition featuring London galleries Nicoletti and Albion Jeune.

The international roster is equally eclectic. Berlin-based designer Illya Goldman Gubin joins multidisciplinary artist Marcin Rusak, whose practice spans furniture, objects and botanical materials. Paris- and Seoul-based artist and designer Nara Lee will also exhibit, alongside UAE-based creative Roham Shamekh and Melbourne- and Los Angeles-based artist Nick Thomm.

Among the more unexpected additions is Telepathic Instruments, an Australian music technology company founded by collaborators including Tame Impala's Kevin Parker, which will use the event to unveil a limited-edition transparent version of its chord-based synthesiser. Carpenters Workshop Gallery, meanwhile, will bring a collection featuring works by Rick Owens, Karl Lagerfeld, Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé.

To purchase tickets to the event, visit Basic.Space's website

During 3 Days of Design 2026, Georg Jensen took over a space in the city's Højbro Plads (opposite its showroom) and transformed it into a ‘Secret Garden’ to debut its new ‘Georg Jensen at Play’ collection. Featuring silver and stone dice, a woodland-inspired Mikado set, a spinning top, a snail whistle, a yo-yo and a new take on the traditional Scandinavian 'Kubb' Game (here renamed 'Toad'), the series taps into a playful side of the Danish design house and silversmithy, and offers an insight into creative director's Paula Gerbase's approach to the illustrious heritage of the brand.

Since her appointment in 2024, Gerbase has been studying Georg Jensen's history and the opportunities to quietly shake up its heritage in a way that is both exciting and respectful. Recent launches include a home fragrance debut, and a collection of archival jewellery expressing modernist Danish design principles. With ‘Georg Jensen at Play’, Gerbase uncovers another chapter of the company's legacy, inspired by its founder's own life and the approach to silver that has defined its history.

We met Gerbase at Georg Jensen's ‘Secret Garden’ to find out more about how play fits into the company's history, and how it's helping shape her future vision.

Georg Jensen at 3 Days of Design: interview with Paula Gerbase

Wallpaper*: Why did you choose games?

Paula Gerbase: My perception of Georg Jensen before I started was quite different to what I found when I joined. [I saw the company as] something that was quite rigorous; it was about quality and silversmithing, but in my view it had a seriousness to it, and an overarching diligence. But actually, as I started to uncover the history of the man himself, the way that he set up his original atelier, where his roots were from, my perception changed.

W*: Can you tell me more about Georg Jensen’s life before he founded his workshop?

PG: [He came] from this woodland area outside of Copenhagen, quite humble beginnings. As a child, he was a wanderer, and this curiosity was really integral to how he lived and worked. I was told stories of him as young boy, being sent out to fetch milk, and then being surprised at finding a little field mouse, forgetting about the task, and scooping up the field mouse and taking it home.

Then it was fast-forward to his sculpture education at the Royal Academy here in Copenhagen, and then his being awarded a travel studies scholarship, whereby he went to France and Italy, and really absorbed a lot of [local] nature. He then came back home, and when he started working as a goldsmith, most of his pieces were belt buckles, brooches, pendants, all very animalistic: insects, critters, fireflies. So all of those elements led me to realise that what I was actually undertaking was something so much more playful, it had so much more freedom, and was also more fluid in nature.

And I also saw an openness to chance: when [Georg] started setting up his own atelier, collaboration was there from the very beginning, with other artists, sculptors, silversmiths invited come in and reinterpret his own work. This became integral to how he founded the company, but also how he continued his legacy.

W*: How has this shaped your approach to silver?

PG: That openness is something that I would love to recreate here: an opportunity for chance encounters, a space which has some generosity, a playfulness, and curiosity for allowing people to interact with silver in a way that isn't so rarefied. [It’s a chance for] speaking of material, a material that is living and breathing, has patina, and dents, and evolves with time; and of course, it’s absolute quality, but we're showing the material for what it is, which is a very beautiful material that can weather and absorb these simple moments. Because if you inherit something, you're inheriting it with the traces of those moments well lived.

W*: How did that lead to ‘Georg Jensen at Play’?

PG: It felt completely natural to create a space to allow for those dialogues, and for people to be able to touch and feel the material, and maybe also [to give them] permission to look at design as imperfection.

Design should be reflective of the way that we live and [our work] should support and honour that. I think silver as a material can really do that because it does absorb [lived] moments, and it has markings of those moments.

W*: This is an interesting approach for Georg Jensen: we are very used to experiencing the company's objects behind glass. Here in the garden, though, a child was just playing with a silver object and throwing it around. That wasn't on my bingo card for today. I imagine it is important for you to open up the house in this way.

PG: There's, I hope, a humility [that reflects] the spirit of our founder as someone who invited so many different kinds of people into the atelier. And this is also my experience of working in this house, alongside artisans; this is a community, and these relationships, these conversations are actually imperfect, just like a family is. There are moments when you love each other. There are moments when you're arguing about something. But ultimately, it's a space for dialogue.

That is also something that is important for me, to be a catalyst for dialogue; I think that is very much in the spirit of Georg Jensen and maybe it starts to tell different stories about what the house is.

W*: Can you tell me more about the games you are launching? Did they exist in the archive?

PG: They are all new. We've conceived several woodland creatures that are very much inspired by Georg Jensen's own childhood in the woods. And so, for example, in the King's game and the Ring Toss, the King is an arrogant toad, proudly cross-armed.

But we have a history of many playful, small objects in the archive. There are lipstick cases, there's a flashlight, a silver wheelbarrow. There's lots of humour and unexpected moments in silver that you can find in the archive, [and that] inspired these objects.

W*: What are the key themes that you're looking to explore through your role as creative director?

PG: Movement, lightness of spirit, curiosity. I also think about eccentricity a lot, which is perhaps not something that one might currently relate to Georg Jensen, but when I look at the history, there's a huge amount of eccentricity. Of course, this house is also proudly Danish, and so, for me, it's been an education in heritage and folklore.

And actually, we are here [in our ‘Secret Garden’], near the statue of Absalon, the founder of Copenhagen: I saw something interesting and light about putting something so silly in a space that is so filled with history.

W*: How do you think the panorama of Danish design is changing, and how might the future look like?

PG: Each house is quite unique, so I think it's important for the authenticity to start to come through quite strongly. That's a focus for a lot of us – what our own values are. Danishness is, of course, a common factor. But it is not (for us, at least) the only one. So finding those pillars that make each house unique, and leaning into those will allow for a future that is interesting and modern, while also challenging the perception of what design can be – it doesn't always have to be midcentury.