Brooklyn-based Virginia Sin started her eponymous home goods brand with one premise: ‘to spread warmth and happiness to every home by infusing delight and function into every creation.’

From that manifesto, a series of essential home objects grew into a collection defined by the tactile materiality of ceramic, transformed into essential shapes that just about suggest a function. Looped organic forms become a bookend of a toothbrush holder, and extruded profiles are curved into a lamp shade or a wall hook.

Given the distinctive use of material that has defined the studio until now, it is perhaps surprising that Sin’s latest launch features a very different language: titled Ritual, the new series of objects features some of the objects from the brand’s portfolio as well as new typologies, all made of stainless steel and aluminium.

A butter dish, tray, lidded box, waste bin, tissue cover, and toothbrush holder: those objects, the designer notes, that ‘we reach for without thinking.’

While some of the objects’ silhouettes nod to the brand’s existing collections, others feature a starker composition, led by the new materiality. ‘Clay taught us our language,’ she says. ‘It taught us softness, restraint, utility, and the importance of the hand. With Ritual, I wanted to see if that same language could move into metal. The material is harder and more exacting, but the intention is the same: to make everyday life feel more artful without making it feel overly precious.’

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As many contemporary designers increasingly identify as artists, making one-off furniture pieces that turn into collectible artworks, so the two creative disciplines mix and traditional boundaries dissolve. Design galleries show paintings; art fairs exhibit chairs.

The concept of ‘art furniture’ is not new, having emerged in the 19th century with the Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts movements and seen successive waves of exploration since then. Seating, in particular, has long been a vehicle for artistic expression that moves beyond function; alluring for its deep engagement with the human body, artists turn to the format as sculptural medium. Today, it feels like furniture has become a connective thread between the design and art worlds.

So as the behemoth Frieze contemporary art fair comes to London (on until 18 October), we scoured the booths of international galleries – squeezed into tents in Regent’s Park – to find the furniture bringing design to the party. Here are our seven top picks.

‘Bosa Bosa Chair 11’ (2026) by Rio Kobayashi

London-based Rio Kobayashi has garnered a following for his playful furniture pieces that often transform vintage finds with experimental carpentry and decoration. ‘Bosa Bosa Chair 11’, shown with Kate MacGarry, saw Kobayashi repair an antique oak swivel chair and decorate it with mini black and white brushes tied together with blue and red thread. The effect is part mohawk, part crazed broom.

‘Bosa Bosa’ means ‘messy hair’ in Japanese. ‘I liked the idea of repairing and transforming an old chair while adding something like hair to it,’ Kobayashi tells Wallpaper*. ‘Messy hair creates a particular sense of attachment – it can make you want to take care of someone or something.’ Kobayashi has also carved away parts of the chair, removing the dark varnish finish to reveal the raw wood beneath, and punching two holes in the backrest.

‘afterimage of beginning 026-642’ (2026) by Choi Byung Hoon

This ash wood and natural stone cabinet by Korean artist Choi Byung Hoon is presented by Busan-based Johyun Gallery. It appears as a stack of carefully balanced, sleek black boxes set in contrast with blocks of rough, organic stone; a dialogue between natural beauty and human intervention. Seoul-based Choi has carved out an important place in Korea’s art furniture market, and the gallery describes his work as merging the ‘practical object-ness of furniture’ with the ‘sophisticated aesthetics of art and a craftsman’s dexterity’.

‘Bent Around With Love Handles’ (2009) by Martino Gamper and Francis Upritchard

Turin-based Galleria Franco Noero presents an array of chairs by Italian designer Martino Gamper, including ‘Bent Around With Love Handles’, which Gamper designed with his wife, the sculptor Francis Upritchard, for an exhibition in 2009. A four-legged metal base is combined with a curved, plywood patchwork seat and bright green modelling clay sculpted to become bulbous handles.

‘Survival: Protect me…’ (2018) by Jenny Holzer

American artist Jenny Holzer makes literal statements with her work, wielding text through installation and sculpture to offer political and social commentary. In ‘Survival: Protect me…’, presented by Kukje Gallery, the words ‘protect me from what I want’ are engraved onto a bench made from dark labradorite stone. But what if what I want is to sit on her bench?

Bench by Giuseppe Ducrot

Italian sculptor Giuseppe Ducrot makes work that draws on classical and Baroque styles, interpreting these through a loose and expressive contemporary approach. 'Panca verde' (2026), his glazed ceramic bench on show with Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, possesses a decorative grandeur, and wouldn’t look out of place at a palace or cathedral – which is apt, because Ducrot regularly makes pieces for churches and cultural institutions across Europe, including Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

‘Carbonated Express’ (2026) by Steph Huang

Steph Huang’s bar cart is not conceived as a design object, but the London-based Taiwanese artist did turn to the medium of catering furniture to explore systems of mass production and commerce in the food industry. The steel and aluminium ‘Carbonated Express’ cart – on wheels and with a wooden handle carved to look like a baguette – is part of a special presentation from London’s Public Gallery dedicated to Huang’s work, which also features a playful wall light made using a Perelló olive can.

‘Day Tracker’ (2025) by Anna Gonzalez Noguchi

A series of golden, powder-coated steel stools by Anna Gonzalez Noguchi is presented by Shanghai-based Gallery Vacancy. Each stool has a Japanese kanji character cut into its seat, which correspond to the days of the week – while also referencing elements or phenomena in nature. The work, which was showcased outdoors at the Liverpool Biennial last year, is dedicated to the Japanese-Spanish artist’s grandmother, who lives with dementia and regularly records the date and weather. The stools, presented at Frieze in a circle, can be connected or dispersed in different arrangements, reflecting the potential for confusion in those affected by dementia.

In the moment when late summer slips into autumn, attention naturally shifts from beach villas and pool cabanas to cosy woodland retreats, where the chill in the air is welcomed. In New Hampshire, one such property provides a family getaway to suit both seasons, thanks to a colourful-yet-grounded and nature-driven renovation courtesy of Minneapolis- and New York-based Yond Interiors.

This old horse barn had been moved onto the clients’ property many years previously. Painted an auspicious shade of electric green across the exterior, the inside is surprisingly raw and natural, with so much exposed wood that it actually needed toning down a touch. 'It’s harder when you have to build character into the project,' says Yond Interiors founder Julia Miller. 'But this was the opposite. There's so much here that our job was to soften some of it, to make it really cozy and comfortable.'

The three-bed, three-bath residence includes a lofty double-height living space with columns, beams, joists and boarding all left bare. By the time Miller and her team were brought on, the layout, the staircase to the upper level and some of the finishes had already been completed. Their job was to help the interiors feel more stylish and intimate, without compromising the building’s character. 'It’s old and rugged, so we had to be kind of careful when adding a ton of new stuff,' Miller says. 'You can't just have drywall.'

One approach to complementing the expanses of rough timber was to wallpaper generously. Originally from Mexico and having lived internationally, the client had gained an appreciation for colour, pattern and texture, so expressive wall coverings were welcome. From a 'classic cabin' design featuring ducks in the powder room that 'looks like it could’ve been there for 50 years', according to Miller, to a Japanese-influenced print in the primary bedroom, these treatments helped to steer the nature-leaning colour direction for other surfaces, furniture and decor pieces.

In the kitchen, the green tiles across the backsplash were created by New Zealand-based ceramicist Lucy McMillan, who presses different clays to produce a marbled effect across each unique tile. '[The client] wanted these crazier little moments, and this was one of them,' says Miller. 'It’s the perfect place to do something completely unexpected.' Stone countertops with similar patterning also offset the millwork, and a pair of Allied Maker’s Arc Dome pendant lamps over the island visually bring down the ceiling height.

Rugs were another tool for subtly softening the architecture. 'They're not as punchy as they might be if you were interacting with them on a vertical surface,' says Miller. For instance, a yellow carpet based on an Art Deco pattern anchors another unexpected moment in the dining room, where an ash dining table coated with Farrow & Ball’s Bancha green and chairs with two-tone dark leather seats and peacock-blue mohair backs create a layered assemblage. 'By diversifying the materials on these chairs alone, we were able to give something quite special to this room,' Miller adds.

A mid-century-style pendant lamp overhead is one of several winks to the era, with others including the yellow colour of the large, ruched-fabric primary bed and the shapes of the vintage-inspired living room sofas. Yond’s sister brand, Brunel, custom-designed the majority of the furniture and lighting pieces for the residence. A coffee table with fabric-wrapped legs and a flat walnut top was born from the need for something lightweight and durable that wasn’t entirely wood or stone, but that you could still rest a coffee cup on. 'It was a genuine exercise in how to add softness to this room and build a workable surface,' Miller says.

Other items sourced to complement the bespoke pieces include the ceramic-front Riva Sideboard by Patricia Urquiola for Cimento, a Souvenir Table Lamp resembling a conch shell from Kawabi, plus lounge chairs and several decor objets that are all vintage. Textile art again helped to cover large expanses of the wood, including a square tapestry in the living room and a large, brightly coloured and highly textured work hung above the staircase—a family heirloom of the client. 'It's super meaningful to her, and it really helped to soften this space and give this wall a lot of interest,' Miller says. 'I think otherwise it would have been really difficult to hang art here.'

Filled with unusual colour combinations, plenty of pattern and texture, and touches of whimsy, the home invites a sense of discovery as more and more time is spent enjoying its spaces. Spaces in which it only feels appropriate to wrap up in a blanket, sink into the furniture and experience the New England foliage beginning to change outside the window.

Iittala and Byredo launch Ljus, a collaborative collection first announced earlier this year that explores light through glassmaking and scent. The collection includes a candle stand, a candle ornament, a light refractor, an incense holder and a diffuser, merging Byredo fragrances and Iittala’s heritage in glassmaking.

'We wanted to create a small collection that explores the material expertise of both brands and enters the world of the home with this more ritual approach,' says Janni Vepsäläinen, Iittala creative director. 'Lighting a candle is a beautiful, meditative moment. The scent enters your nose and fills the room, and glass works as a beautiful companion for that living light. They sort of complement each other. This conversation between glass and light really was the beginning.'

Light in particular is a concern of Vepsäläinen and an element that becomes integral to the everyday rituals both Iittala and Byredo represent. 'Being from Northern Europe, we also share an understanding of the northern light, which shifts from complete darkness in the winter to eternal sunshine in the summer,' she explains. 'This is a theme I often approach in my projects at Iittala, because it’s such a unique quality for a brand that lives and breathes in this Nordic environment.'

Glass and flames come together in the objects, which carry a timeless quality and whose forma reflect the warmth of their craft. Each object is handcrafted in Iittala's glass workshop, resulting in subtle variations that enhance the personality behind their design and manufacturing.

The pieces of the ‘Ljus’ collection combine classic home fragrance designs with new ways to approach such objects. The ornate forms of the pieces are declined in a series that includes a thick candle stand, an ornament designed to sit on top of a candle to refract and enhance its flame, and a 'refractor', imagined to encase the candle to create a mesmerising interplay of light and glass.

The last is the piece that, for Vepsäläinen, most reflects the collection's spirit, and the starting point of the series. 'It’s a piece that really beautifully demonstrates the conversation between crafted glass and living light,' she notes. 'There’s something about the integrity and the intricate details of crafted glass in this object. You can almost feel the process of glassblowing, how the molten glass has been formed.'

The series also includes an incense holder, and the same silhouette found in the Refractor is translated to a fragrance diffuser vessel.

'The strongest shared value [between Iittala and Byredo] is a belief that objects can carry emotion and meaning, as well as function,' concludes Vepsäläinen. 'There’s this Nordic understanding of design: that it should always serve a purpose and be part of people’s everyday lives.'

Pioneering Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos has a propensity to reimagine the everyday with bold, larger-than-life expressions, famously once turning tampons into a chandelier, and metal pots into a pair of monumental high-heeled shoes. ‘You can only do a great project when you find the right place: a museum, a location or a client,' Vasconcelos once told us. For her latest commission, she found the latter two of those: the New York apartment of Randi Charno Levine, the former US ambassador to Portugal, in a BIG-designed tower in West Chelsea.

The apartment was designed by Kelly Behun, whom Levine chose for her thoughtful approach to a curated home. ‘I had seen a number of projects by Kelly and her team and was struck by how they balanced restraint with real warmth; nothing felt forced, and nothing felt like it was there simply to impress,' says Levine. ‘That sensibility, of letting objects and art complement each other within a space rather than compete, was exactly what I was looking for. Kelly and I worked closely to ensure that each space was beautiful, but also functional and comfortable for both entertaining and living.'

The space also had to accommodate an important art collection, gathered over decades and featuring significant pieces by the likes of Tschabalala Self, Jenny Holzer, Cecily Brown and Hank Willis Thomas. ‘Much of my collection reflects my life in cultural diplomacy: pieces that came out of friendships with artists, or moments when a work resonated strongly and I knew that I wanted to live with it,' says Levine.

The apartment opens into a loggia with far-reaching views across Manhattan to the Empire State Building, Hudson Yards and the Hudson River, and Levine saw it as an opportunity to commission one of her favourite artists to intervene in the space. In 2023, Vasconcelos had taken part in an exhibition that Levine had curated during her time in Portugal, which brought together American and Portuguese artists. For the occasion, Vasconcelos lent one of her wrought-iron teapots, a monumental 4m-tall structure.

The artist then invited Levine to attend the A/W 2023 Dior show in Paris, for which Vasconcelos had created an immersive environment, featuring amorphous, tentacular shapes, clad in her signature mix of textiles, crochet and knitted surfaces, embellished with elements from the collection itself. ‘As guests, we sat among the various installations, becoming part of the artwork itself,' says Levine. ‘How often do we, as art lovers, get to live, play and rest within an incredible art installation?'

She knew Vasconcelos had to be the one commissioned for the apartment's loggia, and she worked closely with the artist to develop the piece, which is based on a theme of ‘garden of delights'. The elements defining the space include columns and abstracted sculptures shaped like bold, exaggerated palm trees, which metamorphose into seating elements. The colour and material palettes are quintessentially Vasconcelos, with layered textiles embellished by fringes, feathers, beads and ruffles, and some of the upholstery from Behun's interiors have been used to connect the loggia with the rest of the apartment. New York is in the background, and it's hard to say if the city complements the installation or the other way around.

‘There's an exuberance to Joana's piece that creates a strong focus within the space: it's quite literally the first thing you see when you enter the home,' says Behun. ‘It has such a beautiful and radiant spirit, one that really reflects Randi's personality – it's richly textured and layered, and I love how its character shifts as the light changes throughout the day. When it lights up at night, it's as though a small part of the city's storied skyline has been transported inside, albeit more colourfully. It so perfectly represents Randi, her passion for art and her unwavering support of artists.'

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Take a tour of Ambassador Randi Charno Levine’s Manhattan apartment by Kelly Behun

A version of this article appears in Wallpaper’s November 2026 Art Issue, available from 8 October, in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

For Kasseem Dean, the Grammy Award-winning rapper and producer best known as Swizz Beatz, furniture and family go hand in hand. He remembers, as a kid growing up in the Bronx, the squeak of the plastic that covered his grandmother’s couch and the ritual that accompanied her record cabinet, which also conveniently concealed adults-only barware.

‘Furniture’s always been a language of family,’ Dean tells Wallpaper* from his home in Harlem, one of several the mogul owns alongside his wife, fellow Grammy-winner Alicia Keys. ‘For me growing up, it was like, “Come sit down, come have a talk.” But furniture was always to be respected as well.’

All of those memories, not to mention decades spent amassing one of the world’s most significant collections of Black art, have informed Dean’s latest venture, a furniture collection in partnership with the contemporary home decor brand CB2. The collection, which comprises furniture, lighting and decorative accessories, is appropriately named for the producer’s family: Casa Dean. ‘I didn't want to just do something just to do it,’ Dean says. ‘My thing was more like, if we're gonna do it, what's the concept? What hole are we filling? And how can this inspire people?’

Dean’s fascination with design grew as he found success as a teenager, first as a DJ and later, at the ripe age of 18, the producer of DMX’s hit ‘Ruff Ryders' Anthem’. Dean jokingly recalls decorating his first home: ‘At that time there was no taste involved. It was just like, is it expensive? OK, I need that couch. What's the name brand of it? Gucci? OK, let's get it.’

But as his renown grew, Dean began to develop his own taste. ‘My style has grown tremendously throughout the years from travelling and seeing different walks of life,’ he says. ‘I'm just a creature of culture.’

In the Casa Dean collection, those sensibilities manifest in the line’s variety of colours, textures and silhouettes. There’s a curvaceous chair in a woolly taupe shearling; a linear console table topped with red enamel; a green velvet modular sofa with a gently swooping silhouette; artwork created in collaboration with artist ​​Megan Gabrielle Harris; and bubbly barware in smoked crystal.

‘I love where I landed with the diversity of the collection and the colours and the palettes,’ Dean says. ‘That took guidance. That took being open-minded and not just coming in with the fake celebrity energy. I was more of a student.’

That’s because designing furniture didn’t come into the picture until recently. Keys’ nail tech, the celebrity manicurist Dawn Sterling, introduced Dean to a mutual connection at CB2. ‘Next thing you know, I was in Chicago looking at fabrics,’ the rapper jokes.

Working alongside designer Evan Jerry of Studio Anansi, the collection began to evolve. ‘Swizz was especially thoughtful about the experience of each piece. How does a sofa sit? How does a material feel? How does the furniture encourage people to gather and connect?’ says Andrea Erman, CB2’s senior director of design and development for housewares. ‘He was equally interested in the emotional experience of a space as he was in the visual impact.’

‘People take furniture so [lightly], but just with this hands-on process with CB2 and their amazing team that they surrounded me with, I really got a front-row seat to the movie called “furniture”,’ Dean adds. The Dean family even got a front-row seat: he and Keys would review drawings and photos at the family dinner table.

Each piece in the Casa Dean collection is meant to foster what Dean calls ‘the creative home’. There are items that especially resonate with him, like the ‘Lam-Louie’ credenza, named for his father, who also worked as a DJ alongside hip-hop pioneer Cool Herc, that doubles as a DJ set-up. And a chair that’s designed exclusively for solo daydreaming. His favourite colour, British racing green, pops up throughout.

‘I just want people to just tune into themselves with this collaboration,’ Dean reflects. ‘The world is moving so fast and there's so much uncertainty that when you sit on this couch, or when you plug your set-up into this DJ set, or put some ice in this amazing bucket, you're doing it to reflect yourself.’

In a world increasingly dominated by social media, artificial intelligence and digital screens, it might do us some good to touch grass. That’s precisely what American paint company Benjamin Moore is proposing with its 2027 colour of the year – a verdant hue called Webster Green HC-130.

The annual reveal – also known as ‘COTY’ in the industry – marks one of the important colour-trend forecasts in the world. Webster Green, according to Benjamin Moore’s colour specialists, will be the ascendant shade in the months ahead, a prediction based on intensive market research.

‘When we looked across the past, present and future of colour trends, variations on green consistently demonstrated remarkable staying power,’ said Andrea Magno, Benjamin Moore’s vice president of brand, colour and integrated marketing, in the announcement. ‘Webster Green HC-130 reflects this timeless appeal by pairing reassuring stability with optimistic energy.’

Webster Green lies somewhere between a vibrant emerald and a rich evergreen and, according to the paint company, ‘supports the current desire for trusted, grounded hues that create distinctive and noteworthy spaces’. Indeed, designers have been relying on green for years to bring both sophistication and Mother Nature into space, whether coating a sitting room or kitchen cabinets or a doorframe. In fact, the shade is so versatile it’s often referred to as ‘nature’s neutral’.

Benjamin Moore’s 2027 choice builds on a years-long trend cycle of nature-inspired colours in the home. Its 2026 COTY, Silhouette AF-655, was a warm blend of espresso and charcoal grey, a hue that was indicative of a wider brown trend across interiors and fashion.

But Webster Green indicates something else, according to Benjamin Moore’s colour experts – a desire to reconnect with the past. In a marketing video, illustrator Tanu Vasu sits at an antique desk and proceeds to paint a whimsical interior that could be plucked straight from Bridgerton. The company also revealed seven other complementary paints that comprise its 2027 colour trends palette, including a warm neutral called Shakespeare Tan; a berry-tinged mocha called Townsend Harbor Brown; and a milk chocolate hue, Antique Copper.

It all augments Webster Green’s essence, one that Magno, the Benjamin Moore VP, describes as ‘rooted and forward-looking’. By painting a space in the company’s 2027 hue or any of its sister colours, you’ll be able to create rooms that feel ‘distinctive, collected and continually new’ – a perfect analogue foil to this ever-changing world.

Now in its 18th edition, PAD London has got us accustomed to its distinctive blend of collectible design, fine art, objects and jewellery. Uniting works by contemporary makers and creatives with historical pieces that represent some of the most celebrated design movements of the past, its eclectic curation attracts international collectors and those curious to see where collectible design is heading.

This year, we wanted to cast our lens on the new names to know in collectible design, creatives working in a variety of materials and techniques, that are merging personal cultural histories with ancestral craft, material research with formal experimentation. Here are five talents from across the globe that are setting new directions in collectible design. Discover their profiles below, and find their work at PAD London, 13 to 18 October 2026 at Berkeley Square

PAD 2026: five new names to know in collectible design

Noe Kuremoto

London-based Japanese ceramicist Noe Kuremoto creates clay objects that speak of Japan’s ancestral traditions, her experience as a mother, and the role of the artist in today’s world. At PAD London 2026, she is bringing significant new bodies of work that reflect how the complexity of her heritage and her life merge in an inquisitive, personal way. They include ‘Project Crane Wife’, a series of black stoneware sculptures shaped like vessels with tall necks and elongated handles, referencing one of Japan’s oldest folk tales. ‘Project Shodō’, meanwhile, is a series of black, unglazed sculptural objects that nod to the traditional art of Japanese calligraphy, while ‘Jōmon’ is inspired by the intricate fertility vessels of the eponymous Japanese era (between 14,000 and 300 BCE).

'When I started to face the complexity of life, I looked for ancestral wisdom; that mythology felt dusty when I was in Japan, it felt like shackles to my teenage self when I was trying to figure out who I want to be,’ she explains. ‘Now, that same mysticism gives me a map to figure out life’s most complex moments.’

Read: Noe Kuremoto reconciles contemporary craft with Japan’s ancestral mythology

Noe Kuremoto is at Pik'd, Booth B7, and Galerie Boketto, Booth A20

Manuel Bano

Mexico-based designer Manuel Bano's love of making deepened during the pandemic, when the ‘OBJ’ collection began; an evolving body of work. Bano found himself drawing and exploring new ideas, even as workshops remained closed. 'I had a friend who had a laser-cutting machine. It was essentially the only workshop where I could produce something,' he says. He made that constraint his starting point, creating the ‘OBJ-01’ table lamp – the first piece he produced independently. The series has since grown to include a floor lamp, chair, bench and stool, while his fascination with metal – stainless steel, brass and oxidised steel – has remained constant.

'What I value about working with metal is the directness of the process. In many of my pieces, I can work with a single material, and I like knowing from the beginning how the finished piece will look. There is an honesty to metal. That doesn’t always happen with stone, glass or other materials, where surprises can occur along the way,' says Bano.

Read: Manuel Bano shows metal’s softer side at PAD London this year

Manuel Bano is at Objects with Narrative, Booth A8

Adriana Meunié

Born and raised in the small coastal resort of Cala Llombards, Mallorca, for Adriana Meunié, exploring different woven textures and volumes offered a return to something fundamental. 'It was like going back to the essential and primordial textile form,' she tells Wallpaper*. Her large-scale weavings and tapestries, appearing like hairy mythical creatures, are made using traditional weaving techniques and local materials sourced from her native Mallorca. Although calm and mesmerising, her works can also be slightly unsettling – possessing a tension that she describes as a kind of 'monstrous elegance'.

Read: Mallorcan artist Adriana Meunié tells us why she doesn't believe in easy beauty

Adriana Meunié is at Sarah Myerscough Gallery, Booth B27

Seungjin Yang

A sense of childhood wonder lies at the heart of Korean artist Seungjin Yang’s ‘Blowing Series’. Soon after graduating from Hongik University in Seoul, he began experimenting with epoxy resin, which allowed him to give lasting form to a balloon’s fleeting shape.

'The first balloon was an inexpensive one from an office-supply shop in Korea,' he shares. 'I was experimenting with ways to coat balloons in epoxy resin and initially used the balloons to make lights. As I made them stronger, I began to wonder whether people could sit on them. I liked the contrast between the balloon’s apparent fragility and the solidity of the resin.'

Read: Korean designer Seungjin Yang’s whimsical balloon furniture offers more than just nostalgia

Seungjin Yang is at Gallery LVS & Craft, Booth B22

Lukas Wegwerth and Corinna Dehn

This October, Gallery Fumi presents 'Companions’, an exhibition of friendly-looking wooden furniture designed by Lukas Wegwerth and Corinna Dehn. The pair have conceived a family of furniture clad in shingles inspired both by animal scales, wings and feathers, and by the vernacular architecture of Wegwerth’s home region in central Germany.

Part of their ongoing ‘Armadillo’ series, the six new works include two cabinets, a sideboard, a birdhouse, a dining table and a stand-alone screen. All feature the collection’s signature shingles, but with new experimentations in tone, density, and pattern. The wooden elements are sourced locally, often recycled, and processed in the designers’ own sawmill, while the colours come from natural pigments and ebonisation as well as traditional oil paints.

Read: Meet Lukas Wegwerth and Corinna Dehn’s shingle-clad menagerie

Lukas Wegwerth and Corinna Dehn are at Gallery Fumi, Booth A24. A solo exhibition of the duo's collaboration is on view at Gallery Fumi, 2–3 Hay Hill, until 28 November 2026

When John H Johnson opened the South Loop, Chicago, headquarters of his publishing company in 1972, he called the new home of magazines like Ebony and Jet, among his other ventures, 'the miracle on Michigan Avenue.'

The 11-story building clad in bands of walnut travertine alternating with ribbons of tinted glass was the first downtown tower commissioned by a Black-owned company and became a universe unto itself. Its interiors – furnished wall-to-wall and floor to ceiling in explosive patterns, rich textures and modernist furniture – symbolised the dynamic expressions of Black life Johnson depicted across his media empire.

For nearly four decades, that architectural vision at 820 S Michigan Avenue remained virtually unchanged. Then, in 2010, the Johnson Publishing Company (JPC) had to sell its headquarters in order to cut costs and help stay afloat during a collapsing ad market. What was once the epicenter of Black media would soon become vacant, which sparked last-ditch actions from preservationists, artists, historians and more to document and save what they could from the building.

820 Ebony/Jet: Visions of the Johnson Publishing Company, an American Icon, a new book by the photographer Barbara Karant, is one such endeavor. It features new and archival photos of the building along with a foreword by Deborah Willis and essays by Cheryl Finley, E James West and Carla Williams, among others.

As soon as JPC left the building, Karant (who was teaching at Columbia College Chicago, which purchased the building) toured it. 'I was completely blown away,' she recalls. 'The interiors were so dynamic and lively and graphic and colourful.'

From 2013 until the building’s conversion to luxury residential units in 2017, Karant periodically documented every floor inside of the vacant building, photographing for six to eight hours straight when she came.

'I felt like it needed to be retained for posterity's sake, for historical purposes and cultural purposes,' Karant says. 'The vibrancy that still remained in this space was very compelling and intriguing to me. So I felt like I needed to set up some kind of project to document this interior before it disappeared.'

Karant's images aren’t time capsules. Rather, her frames of empty rooms picked clean serve as a post post-occupancy report, one final look at the center of gravity that was. The sun-bleached wallcoverings, delaminated veneers and scuffed furniture across the photographs depict decades of use. There is, of course, solemnity in seeing what is essentially the corpse of a culturally significant institution. But the fact that the headquarters’ interiors still looked so distinctive in the twilight of their life is still remarkable. Aging is its own kind of honour.

'I never really felt like it was abandoned because there was so much of the spirit of the company in the building,' Karant says. 'From the beginning, it was such a statement for JPC. It was deliberate and it empowered the company and everybody loved it. People were so committed to it that I think that's why everything may have stayed the same for the duration that it did.'

In 1969, Johnson hired John Warren Moutoussamy – a pupil of Mies van der Rohe at IIT and the first Black architect to become a partner in a major Chicago firm – to design its new headquarters. While glistening curtain-wall high rises defined the new downtown skyline, Johnson sought something different. As E James West writes in an essay in the book, 'it had to be Black. Black architect. Black enterprise. Black aesthetic.' Moutoussamy delivered a sophisticated tower whose mass imparted presence and staying power.

Eunice Johnson, the fashion director of Ebony and Johnson’s wife, oversaw the interiors and worked closely with Arthur Elrod and William Raiser on them. The Palm Springs – based designers gave each floor its own maximalist identity. To wit: The lobby was clad in panels of bronze and Mozambique wood and featured a monumental bronze sculpture by Richard Hunt along with red leather banquettes. The reception area of the ninth floor, which housed executive offices, featured a sculptural bronze-toned resin screen, a coffee table made of Mexican onyx, and an earth-toned checkerboard carpet. Some wallcoverings were stylized like peacock feathers and the famous Ebony test kitchen was enveloped in psychedelic, marbled laminate. Eunice’s own office, on the seventh floor, was adorned monochromatically in cream tones, with Space Age executive chairs, Italian lamps and African antiques.

JPC stuck to its aesthetic for the entirety of its tenure in the building. 'The idea that a corporation was so committed to a brand that was presented in their environment that they never renovated,' Karant says. 'They might have retrofitted or fixed things, but they didn't change it. I mean, it's pretty astonishing.'

One of her favorite design moments is a room with leopard-print carpeting that extends up the walls. 'It covers a fire extinguisher and the fire closet,' she says.

After JPC moved out, the building’s future became uncertain. It eventually received designation as a national landmark in 2017, sparing it from demolition; however its interiors were not protected, as is often the case with historic buildings. Rescue missions ensued. Its photo archives went to the Getty Research Center and the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Landmarks Illinois  managed to excise the Ebony test kitchen, which the NMAAHC acquired in 2023 for its permanent collection. With the blessing of Linda Johnson Rice, John Johnson’s daughter, the artist Theaster Gates retrieved over 15,000 objects from the space – 'anything movable,' he said. This included artwork, furniture, books, ephemera and fragments of its interior finishes, like wallpaper and carpet. 'So much was built into the architecture that you had to take large pieces of wall with you just to remove some things,' Gates recalled. 'You had to choose the cut to save the body.'

Evidence of this shows up in Karant’s photos, too. The building was not quite a shell, but it had been picked over. 'What's left behind is kind of always a bit of interest because it tells a story about what came before and it tells a story maybe about what's going to come afterwards,' she says.

And what comes afterward is, in some ways, still unfolding. In 2017, Columbia College College Chicago sold the building to developers who converted it into luxury condos. None of the JPC interiors remain, but the way they shaped the thousands of people who came through them and what their memory might yield remains to be seen. The daringness of JPC to create a corporate headquarters that was fully in its style remains peerless.

Karant hopes the ambition still serves as an inspiration. 'There was a residual message left in their departure,' she says, noting that she hopes the book offers a way to remember and appreciate everything the Johnson Publishing Company achieved.

Growing up in Japan as the daughter of two artists, Noe Kuremoto was raised around her father’s painting practice and his job at the local university, where she would join him on campus to hang out with artists, musicians and poets. ‘I thought it was very normal to see adults who are so enthusiastic about life, so I was very surprised to find when I went to school that not all parents were so passionate about their jobs,’ she recalls, hinting at the smell of oil painting from her father’s work, or her mum always playing the piano in the background.

Despite this natural connection to the artistic practice, she was fascinated by the freedom of the London art community and moved to the city to study at Central Saint Martins. ‘I wanted to leave the Japanese-ness behind,’ she explains. ‘The Japanese art community is much more academic, technically driven, led by more traditional aesthetics.’ Through the magazines that her parents had at home, she had discovered a different kind of vibrancy: Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen, Sara Lucas, Damien Hirst, Gilbert and George were all working in London at the time, and it felt exciting. ‘I was born in this little island: now I wanted to look for something more.’

Her chosen medium, ceramics, was also one that she was able to explore freely in London. If you want to be a ceramicist in Japan, she explains, you have to shadow a master and learn the skill as an apprentice, without much freedom to develop your own practice. But in London, Kuremoto started working freely on her own pieces – clay objects that feel totemic and ancestral, based on abstract compositions featuring bulbous forms, anthropomorphic elements and often a sense of symmetry.

Her studio set-up, she insists, is ‘very humble. My most important tools are hands, water, fire and clay. A ceramic studio can be fancy, but mine isn’t.’ Currently based in east London, she is in the process of building a studio in a forest in Lithuania, where her husband’s family is from. But, she admits, the simple set-up of her practice also means she can work almost anywhere.

Despite establishing her work in a context so geographically and culturally far from Japan, she wound up establishing a connection with her native country that transcends her craft. Mysticism is at the heart of Kuremoto’s practice, and the connection with such an integral part of Japanese life and culture doesn’t feel casual. ‘Perhaps when I started to face the complexity of life, I looked for ancestral wisdom; that mythology felt dusty when I was in Japan, it felt like shackles to my teenage self when I was trying to figure out who I want to be,’ she explains. ‘Now, that same mysticism gives me a map to figure out life’s most complex moments.’

Discover Noe Kuremoto's work at PAD 2026

At PAD London 2026, she is bringing significant new bodies of work that reflect how the complexity of her heritage and her life merge in an inquisitive, personal way. ‘Project Crane Wife’, a series of black stoneware sculptures shaped like vessels with tall necks and elongated handles, refers to one of Japan’s oldest folk tales. ‘Like all great folk tales, The Crane Wife carries many layers of meaning,’ she says. ‘But the lesson that remains closest to my heart is this: the tragedy is not losing what we love. The tragedy is that humans only understand the true value of a gift once it is gone.’ For Kuremoto, the allegory brings to mind her elderly mother, back in Japan, and the collection serves as a ‘meditation on the impermanence of true gifts’; the three pieces in the collection all feature a tear, added by the artisan during the process, to make them veritable in-between objects.

‘Project Shodō’, meanwhile, is a series of black, unglazed sculptural objects through which Kuremoto explores the dichotomy of her roles as a mother and an artist, and how these can (or cannot) coexist. The series is named after the traditional art of Japanese calligraphy: ‘I vividly remember the smell of deep black sumi ink while a brush swept gracefully across white paper. As youngsters, we had to write kanji characters every morning that anticipated our day ahead. We were told the process would engrave an ideal into our minds, and help us to make it real,’ she explains. That practice and habit became useful to her as the mother of young children: ‘I get just three sacred hours in my studio per day,’ she says. ‘To make the most of precious time, and distance myself from the failure to attain my ideals, I decided to treat my clay like shodō – to do everything in one go. I committed to make one “drawing in the air” with clay, each and every single day. Good or bad, it didn’t matter. In fact, allowing myself to produce bad, ugly work was a game changer.’

Ancestral Japan also recurs in her final project shown at PAD this year. ‘Jōmon’ nods to the intricate fertility vessels of the eponymous Japanese era (between 14,000 and 300 BCE). ‘It remains astonishing that such complex, expressive forms were created using nothing more than wild clay and pit fire,’ she says. ‘In a time defined by hunting and gathering, when survival was the primary, daily concern, the Jōmon people invested energy in something far greater than individual biological need.’ Kuremoto explores the concept of the Jōmon vessel in a contemporary guise, drawing from her personal experience of and approach to motherhood. ‘Motherhood cracks you open. It gives urgency, depth, a new way of seeing. But society rarely sees this labour as real,’ she says. ‘If your work isn’t paid, it barely exists. We measure output, not care. Invoices, not endurance. I make fertility vessels for women walking this impossible line.’

Guiding her practice is something that Kuremoto's father told her as she was about to leave Japan for London, age 17. 'He said: "If you really want to be an artist, you have to bring light to the world." I didn't understand it at the time, but today I firmly believe that is my mission, and every artist and designer's mission is to bring light to the world.'

Noe Kuremoto is at Pik'd, Booth B7, and Galerie Boketto, Booth A20, PAD London, 13 to 18 October 2026 at Berkeley Square

'What I was trying to understand was, what does it actually mean to make light,' says Gabriel Hendifar, artistic director of Apparatus. The question led him to Act V: Afsaneh, the New York design studio’s first new collection in five years, and a meditation on creativity, knowledge and the cycles of life.

'I really needed a moment to understand what I was saying and why,' he says of the time between collections. Hendifar had created an impressive body of work over the past 14 years, and wanted to consider 'the kinds of things and the ways of making that feel relevant now.'

In previous Acts, he channeled the glamour of late-1970s New York, the 'sparkly creative expression' of the Wiener Werkstätte, a reimagining of his family’s Iranian history and a playful vision of the future. With Act V, 'I am trying to make sense of where we are collectively by looking back at the cycle of the seed and the flower, and what it can mean for us to hold ideas dear and to amplify them.'

Afsaneh, which is both his mother’s name and the Persian word for fable, unfolds in four series: Esfand, the seed, symbolizing the mother; Gol, the flower, the amplification of the seed; Rahvi, the serpent and collector of knowledge; and Jahaan, the cosmos, where the seed, flower and knowledge are shared. As for materials, Hendifar explains, 'We’re working with materials that say something about the future, and something about the past, and place the work in an atemporal place.'

The seed becomes the collection’s building block, appearing in sconces, vessels and an incense burner. 'They feel like their own little universe, like they hold the entirety of the cosmos,' Hendifar says. In Gol, cast-glass seeds are enveloped by large fiberglass shades that suggest (depending on one’s point of view) flower petals, jellyfish or octopuses. 'This is the seed wrapped in beauty as a way to both protect it and attract the people who are meant to seek it,' he adds.

The amulets in Rahvi are crafted from seven semi-precious stones, including tiger’s eye, lapis lazuli and red jasper. Like the flower, they embody both amplification and protection. 'This is almost like a spiritual starter kit for leaning into the light,' he jokes. The final series, Jahaan, centers on the table. 'It’s where we gather to share knowledge. It’s where we gather to share food. The table is the idea of community.'

As with previous Acts, Afsaneh incorporates scent and performance. The fragrance, with notes of damask rose and oud, evokes what Hendifar calls 'moonlight in a desert rose garden.' This year he debuted five short films, made in collaboration with the Martha Graham Dance Company. Hendifar, who grew up as a musician and self-described theatre kid, sees film as another block in building each Act. 'It allows me to say a lot of things in a way that isn’t always so direct…it can feel like a collage.'

When scheming a new collection, he asks, 'What are we telling people in movement, sound and music? And what is the moment when we are gathering in a room together? What does it feel like to be at the party?'

For Hendifar, it’s about creating a world people want to enter, and leaving them with something that lingers long after they leave.

In 1928, when Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks conceived a mischievous mouse with two oversized circular ears, a corporate icon was born. ‘There are very few characters that people recognise in a second, wherever they are in the world,’ says Swedish designer Gustaf Westman, who today reveals the first three pieces from a new homeware collection with Disney. ‘For me, that is the highest level of design.’

What's in Gustaf Westman's Disney collection?

Westman’s 35-piece collection is based on Disney’s Mickey & Friends and spans gifts, apparel and home décor, as well as collectible, made-to-order furniture. The full collection will be unveiled at a free-to-attend pop-up in Paris, followed by events in Tokyo and New York, before launching globally online on 15 November. Further pieces will be revealed on Westman’s Instagram account throughout October.

Today's reveal includes a Mickey tumbler with mouse ears (€110), a Mickey-shaped black ceramic cup and saucer (€68) and a bulbous black leather sofa that evokes Mickey's silhouette (€9,250). ‘Mickey & Friends are built from very simple shapes and colours, yet everyone understands them. That fascinates me as a designer,' Westman tells Wallpaper*.

The Mickey Mouse tumbler, based on Westman’s own Chunky Tumbler – a ceramic cup and straw set in a doughnut-shaped coaster – translates Mickey into an abstract arrangement of ears, red shorts with white buttons and a yellow coaster that evokes his trademark shoes.

'It's probably my favourite piece,' says Westman. 'It’s very simple and almost obvious in the best possible way.’

Meanwhile, the sofa gave Westman more freedom to play with proportion and form, drawing on his trademark postmodern aesthetic and Memphis influences.

There is an obvious synergy between the legendary American brand’s cartoon characters and Westman’s work. Since establishing his Stockholm studio in 2020, the architect-turned-designer has won a following for his unashamedly playful and highly marketable style – full of glossy colour and volume – and collaborated with brands including Ikea, Nike and beauty brand Ilia.

A lifelong Disney fan himself, Westman describes the collaboration – which included a research trip to Disneyland Paris to immerse himself in Mickey's world – as 'a dream'. 'There is also so much emotion attached to these characters,' he reflects. 'People have known them since childhood, so you are designing with something that already carries all of these memories, feelings and associations.'

The Paris pop-up runs from 30 October to 1 November 2026, followed by Tokyo from 6 to 8 November and New York from 13 to 15 November. Visitors will be able to explore the collection and shop selected pieces ahead of the global online launch. Some items will also be available to purchase at Disneyland Paris.

The campaign was photographed at Disneyland Paris with Westman styled by Harry Lambert, whose clients include Harry Styles and Emma Corrin.

The Disney x Gustaf Westman collection launches online on 15 November at gustafwestman.com and through Beams in Japan

Design marketplace Basic.Space is an online platform where browsing feels like walking through a curated gallery. This week, it launches a $1 draw where the winner will take home a selection of objects and furniture inspired by the concept of the ‘lounge’. All proceeds will benefit the Virgil Abloh Foundation.

The draw, run in collaboration with Apple Pay, includes a series of design objects and never-before-seen pieces, such as a one-of-a-kind seat designed by Crosby Studios. The seat is heavily inspired by a business-class airplane seat, with an industrial, sculptural element. It is fully upholstered in a metallic silver fabric, and even though it looks like an installation, it is entirely functional, with a reclining chair, footrest and TV screen.

‘I travel so much that the airplane seat has become a kind of one-square-meter studio for me,’ says Harry Nuriev, designer and founder of Crosby Studios. ‘It’s where many of my ideas were born, a small, isolated capsule where I can focus, work, think, and disconnect from everything around me. With this object, I wanted to recreate that feeling.’

There will also be a rare Virgil Abloh Vitra collection up for grabs: the complete 2019 three-piece Virgil Abloh c/o Vitra collection, comprising a Ceramic Block, redesigned Jean Prouvé’s Antony chair (1950s) and Petite Potence lamp (1942), all in a baby blue colourway devised by Abloh.

Further design icons included in the draw are Gatto Lamps by Achille and Pier Castiglioni for Flos, the 'Bambole' Sofa by Mario Bellini for B&B Italia, a ‘Diamond Dusty White Rug’ by Nordic Knots, and an LC10-P Coffee Table by Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, and Pierre Jeanneret, for Cassina.

The ‘lounge’ collection will be presented as a physical installation at Basic.Space New York (13-19 November 2026). The winner to be randomly selected on 8 December 2026.

Entries now open, closing 19 November 2026 at 11:59pm ET, exclusively via Apple Pay at basic.space/luxurydraw

This week in London's Mayfair, Vikram Goyal is transporting weary Frieze and PAD visitors to a land of myth and legend. Within the walls of a Georgian Townhouse, a troupe of animals plucked from the Indian epic poem the Ramayana have taken up residence: a vulture unfurls its wings across a textile screen, an embroidered monkey swings across the shimmering seat of an upholstered stool while a set of gold claws peep from below an ottoman. Flora and fauna, feasts and festivities are played out across hand embroidered silk, velvet and brocade, repoussé brass, silver and mother-of-pearl. The scent of spices, fruits and rose hips fills the air.

Wings and Tales by Vikram Goyal is on view in London

This immersive showcase of Goyal’s latest work, titled 'Wings and Tales', is a celebration of spirituality and storytelling through craft – and an argument for the value of ancient narratives in an increasingly homogenous and ephemeral culture. 'There’s stability in the past,' says Goyal. 'In this world of fleeting social media reels…where everything is gone in a nanosecond, you have something where there’s more permanence.'

Building on his previous Soul Garden exhibition presented at Design Miami Paris in 2025, which drew on the Panchatantra fables and their animal characters and moral lessons, 'Wings and Tales' explores the Ramayana – the 3000-year-old Indian epic that tells the story of heroic Prince Rama rescuing his consort Sita from the demon king Ravana. In one part of the poem, a battle brings together monkeys, crocodiles and vultures across land, sea and air, ending, happily, with the triumph of good over evil. The festival of Diwali celebrates the victorious homecoming of Prince Rama, Sita and his brother Lakshmana to the ancient city of Ayodhya.

The story shares lessons of friendship, empathy and compassion with each animal playing its own symbolic part. The forest-dwelling monkeys, known as Vanaras, represent collective labour and bridge-building; the crocodiles signal hidden obstacles and tests of strength, while the winged vultures embody loyalty and resistance. Goyal sees this narrative richness as increasingly unusual in contemporary collectible design, which he feels often concentrates instead on pushing material and form

Staged across two of the townhouse's rooms, the showcase is arranged like a baithak - a formal Indian drawing room. In the first room, a richly patterned Samarkand-style rug and a repoussé brass folding screen are joined by hand-embroidered silk brocade and velvet seating with mischievous clawed feet. Gathered around a fireplace, the assembly includes brass tables, vessels and mirrors. Here, surrounded by claws, fangs and many eyes, Goyal invites guests to pause and take in the mythical creatures, allowing their imagination to wander.

In the next room, the Madhuvana ('honey forest') from the Ramayana is depicted across brass screens decorated with vine-like forms. A series of velvet and brocade seats are arranged across a trio of rugs that reflect the realms of land, sea and air. Brass and silver-plated platters, bowls and champagne buckets adorned with repoussé details of delicate jasmine suggest the imagined occupants of this place are accustomed to lavish feasts, while a mother-of-pearl chess board decorated with monkeys adds to the feeling of a scene interrupted.

The furniture and textiles on show draw from a deep well of references. There are nods to Silk Road textiles, 18th-century European furniture, Indian miniature painting and French art deco. For Goyal, the eclecticism comes naturally from his own 'image bank of references globally' – and even from his New Delhi home, where velvet, brocade and metal sit alongside old Persian carpets populated by animals.'My work has always been along this entire spectrum,' says Goyal. 'I think one complements the other because one shows you where it’s all come from, and you can see where it’s gone to.'

Goyal's New Dehli atelier is widely known for its signature repoussé work – an ancient technique where sheet metal is hammered from the reverse to create intricate reliefs. Wings and Tales sees the studio venture into new mediums, including hand-knotted rugs, inlaid mother-of-pearl decorative arts and handmade brocade upholstery, working with one of India’s finest brocade ateliers.

The immersive format, Goyal believes, allows visitors to connect with the studio's work in a more intimate way than they could within a white exhibition booth. This, he says, is a space for 'engagement, introspection, reflection'. Conveniently located around there corner from PAD London in Berkeley Square, the Georgian townhouse at 7 Grafton Street is also home to the Sprüth Magers contemporary art gallery and next door to members’ club Maison Estelle. Throughout the week, the space will play host to a series of 'salon' events and conversations on Indian literature, history, cuisine and design, accompanied by food and drink from Gymkhana and floral arrangements from Blooming Haus.

'I wanted to create an experience which would allow the viewer to come in and take it all in, and think about the larger issues at play, not just the objects,' he explains. 'To give it meaning and relevance – resonance.'

Wings and Tales is on view until 16 October 2026
7 Grafton street, W1S 4EJ

vikramgoyal.com

Nanna Ditzel didn’t just design furniture, she imagined new ways of living. Where others saw a chair, she saw an opportunity to rethink how people sat, moved and occupied a room. Seating could hang from the ceiling or become a landscape of upholstered steps; colour and curves could invite a less prescribed way of inhabiting a space.

Ambitious and experimental, Ditzel (1923–2005) deserves a place alongside Danish contemporaries such as Hans J. Wegner, Arne Jacobsen and Verner Panton but – like so many female designers from the 20th century – remains less widely known. Across furniture, textiles and jewellery, she combined technical curiosity with a determination to question established forms.

Her work could be radical, but its starting point was everyday life: how design might make it more comfortable, flexible and interesting. She approached practical obstacles with the same persistence, summed up in her maxim: 'Three steps forward and two steps back still means I've taken a step in the right direction.'

Here's everything you need to know about the designer's life and career, from her early collaboration with Jørgen Ditzel to the work that helped renew appreciation for Danish furniture design in the 1990s.

Early life

Born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1923, Nanna Ditzel trained as a cabinetmaker before studying at the School of Arts and Crafts and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. As a 20-year-old student, she exhibited her first furniture at the annual exhibition of the Carpenters' Guild, graduating as a furniture designer in 1946. The same year, she married her colleague Jørgen Ditzel and together they started a design studio.

'The Padded Cell', 1952

'The Padded Cell' was the couple’s first ever ‘stairscape’ – a series of cushioned seating landscapes based on the idea that people think and converse better when they can lie down rather than just sitting. Created for an avant-garde exhibition at Winkel og Magnussen, the ‘Padded Cell’ took the form of a multi-level upholstered terrace, with movable foam-rubber elements and small cushions that allowed people to arrange their own support. Fellow Danish designer and sculptor Aagaard Andersen devised its bold blue, yellow and red colour scheme.

Jewellery for Georg Jensen, from 1954 - 2003

Ditzel brought her interest in organic forms to jewellery, becoming the first woman to design for Georg Jensen in 1954. Her bold silver pieces included a bracelet composed of crescent-shaped discs and a ring designed to elongate the finger. Designs created with Jørgen won gold medals at the Milan Triennale in 1957 and 1960; the couple also received the Lunning Prize for their jewellery designs in 1956.

'Hanging Egg' chair, 1959

One of the Ditzel’s most recognisable designs, this suspended wicker chair embodied their ambition to use every dimension of a room. Freed from the conventional four-legged base, the seat could move with its occupant.

Two years after launching this piece, Jørgen died, leaving Nanna to raise their three daughters and continue the studio alone.

'Chill' lounge chair, 1961

Designed in late summer 1961, the lounge chair and footstool were the first furniture Ditzel created after Jørgen’s death. Originally called the Fireplace Chair, the design was developed with Danish rattan maker Robert Wengler and remained in her summer house for more than 40 years. Its low, rounded form offered another way to sit close to the floor.

'Trisse' stool, 1962

Originally known as Trissen in Danish, meaning ‘spool’, and Toad Stool in English, this playful design responded to children’s tendency to climb over furniture and knock it over. It could be turned, rolled and stacked, encouraging uses beyond conventional sitting. Conceived for children, it found an audience among adults too.

This year it was reintroduced by Danish brand Fredericia. Maria Bruun, Head of Design at Fredericia, believes Trisse possesses a rare balance. 'It is intuitive and playful, yet highly resolved,' she says. 'You understand it immediately, but it continues to reveal new ways of being used. That sense of openness is very much at the core of Ditzel’s work.'

'Hallingdal' upholstery fabric, 1965

Hallingdal brought Ditzel’s love of colour to an everyday material. Developed with Norway’s Gudbrandsdalens Uldvarefabrik as part of a collection for the Halling-Koch Design Centre, the upholstery fabric appeared in Ditzel's choice of vivid pink, blue, turquoise, red and orange. Its bright palette offered an alternative to the subdued shades prevalent at the time.

Distributed internationally by Kvadrat, Hallingdal has remained in production for decades, its colours revised over time. Gudbrandsdalens Uldvarefabrik, which still distributes the design in Norway, reports that over 10 million metres of the fabric have been sold since its launch in 1965

'Villette' furniture landscape, 1966

Concieved as 'body-freindly' upholstered building blocks, 'Villette' extended Ditzel’s stairscape experiments into soft, upholstered seats. Designed to be lightweight and affordable, the 'Villette' elements were upholstered in brightly-coloured knitted fabric.

The introduction of the design coincided with Ditzel's move to London (where she remained until 1986). 'Villette' was installed at Interspace, the furniture showroom and meeting place she established with her second husband, furniture dealer Kurt Heide, in London’s Hampstead. Housed in a former chocolate factory, Interspace hosted exhibitions and parties attended by figures including Terence Conran and Verner Panton. Ditzel’s seating landscape provided a setting for the informal encounters her work encouraged.

Fairy Tale Room, 1968

Developed for the children’s library in Lyngby, near Copenhagen, the Fairy Tale Room brought the stairscape concept into a public setting. Its multi-level arrangement gave children a space to explore, play and listen to stories, treating furniture as an invitation to use their imaginations.

Ditzel's work was full of colour and curved lines. Her daughter Dennie Ditzel recalled when she would ask her mother why she didn't use straight lines: 'Look outside, there are no angles in nature,' she replied.

Ceramic and wooden tableware, 1970s

Many of Ditzel’s designs slipped into everyday life, from ceramic salad bowls and serving dishes for Søholm and tea and coffee services for Nordlys to wooden bowls and cheeseboards for Brdr. Krüger – familiar objects that people may have lived with without ever knowing who designed them. These smaller domestic pieces reveal the breadth of a practice often remembered chiefly for its furniture.

'Bench for Two', 1989

After the death of her second husband, Kurt Heide, in 1985, Ditzel returned to Copenhagen and established a studio in her home in Klareboderne. In 1989, she began working with Fredericia on 'Bench for Two', a conjoined pair of seats that positioned two people at a right angle to one another.

Thin plywood surfaces carried a screen-printed striped pattern, creating a sense of movement. A quarter-circle table fitted between the seats like a slice of cake – a solution suggested by her daughter Dennie, replacing Ditzel’s original square design.

Dennie recalls asking her mother how she knew when a design was complete: 'It's finished when it looks like something that's always been here,' she told her.

The bench won a gold medal at the international furniture design competition in Asahikawa, Japan, in 1990. Its unconventional form reflected Ditzel’s continuing willingness to experiment, well into her sixties.

'Trinidad' chair, 1993

Inspired by the carved fretwork Ditzel saw on Caribbean balconies and doorways, the 'Trinidad' chair translated an architectural detail into a finely patterned seat and back. Its cut-outs allowed light to pass through, casting shifting shadows.

The chair’s instant success (the company has sold over 1 million to date) strengthened her partnership with Fredericia and helped establish her as a leading figure in the renewal of Danish design in the 1990s. It also marked a turning point in Fredericia’s history, establishing Nanna Ditzel as Fredericia’s second house designer after Børge Mogensen.

Recognition continued through the decade. Ditzel received Denmark’s ID Prize in 1995, was elected an Honorary Royal Designer for Industry by London’s Royal Society of Arts in 1996, and received a lifelong artists’ grant from the Danish Ministry of Culture in 1998.

Legacy

Ditzel died in 2005, leaving a body of work that ranged from everyday household objects to radical proposals for how a room might be inhabited. Reissues continue to introduce her designs to new audiences: Mater reimagined the outdoor furniture she designed with Jørgen in 1955 using ocean-waste plastic in 2019; Kvadrat revisited her 1960s Sisu textile with artist Danh Vo in 2021; and Fredericia continues to reissue pieces from her archive, including the 'Bench for Two,' which was reintroduced in 2025.

Behind this prolific output lay a patient process of observation and experimentation. ‘Inspiration is the result of many thoughts and many experiences in the company of other people or alone in nature,’ she said. ‘I look at life, people, shapes, colours, the weather and everything around me. Ideas don’t come out of thin air. You can’t ask for them. They are hard work. Out of one’s exertions, analyses and thoughts something surprising often comes. Something one hadn’t expected.’

We are often drawn to the simplest things, especially when they bring back childhood memories. Few objects do that quite like a balloon, and that sense of childhood wonder lies at the heart of Korean artist Seungjin Yang’s ‘Blowing Series’. Early in his design journey, he found himself drawn to this object, one that's made to be held for a moment, then let go.

While studying BA in metal art and design at Hongik University in Seoul, Yang decided to also take a furniture class. He continued working with metal until he graduated, but soon began experimenting with epoxy resin, which allowed him to give lasting form to a balloon’s fleeting shape.

'The first balloon was an inexpensive one from an office-supply shop in Korea,' he shares. 'I was experimenting with ways to coat balloons in epoxy resin and initially used the balloons to make lights. As I made them stronger, I began to wonder whether people could sit on them. I liked the contrast between the balloon’s apparent fragility and the solidity of the resin.'

From those first experiments grew an ongoing series of stools, chairs, armchairs, benches and children’s furniture in vivid colours and playful forms. 'The balloons have a very special meaning for me,' adds Yang. 'As a child, I loved making things with Lego, paper and other materials. My work follows a similar process of bringing many small parts together. Making these pieces brings back the excitement I felt when creating things as a child.'

Yang has built upon that initial experiment: he begins by inflating the balloons and coats them in successive layers of resin. Each layer strengthens the shell and more coats build colour and sheen as he joins the forms into a stable whole. It is painstaking work. 'It usually takes me around two weeks to make one piece,' Yang adds. 'When developing a new design, though, I don’t set a deadline. I let the ideas take shape naturally.'

When observed together, his collection has all the exuberance of a party shop. Look closer, though, and the care behind each seemingly spontaneous shape comes into focus and reveals how meticulous and well-thought each piece is.

A sense of joy and surprise has followed Yang’s work from exhibitions at Seoul’s Kumho Museum, Dongdaemun Design Plaza and Seoul Museum of Art, to international projects including the XXI Triennale di Milano and Design Days Dubai. The first time he presented his work was at the Seoul Design Festival in 2013, 'where many people were initially afraid to sit on the pieces,' he confesses. 'Some wondered if it was glass. But once they sat down, they felt safe. Some even said the chairs were much more comfortable than they had expected!'

Returning to PAD London is particularly exciting for Yang, who will present a sofa, two armchairs and two stools this year. The forms will be familiar to those who know his work, but he hopes their new colour combinations will delight visitors. As for his upcoming projects, 'I’d like to explore other materials and types of work, but the balloon series will always hold a special place in my heart,' he shares, 'I’ll keep developing it alongside my other work for as long as I enjoy the process. I still feel there’s more to discover, and I want to see where it takes me.'

Seungjin Yang is at Gallery LVS & Craft, Booth B22, PAD London, 13 to 18 October 2026 at Berkeley Square

Victoria Beckham has added another string to her bow. The fashion designer, founder of the eponymous fashion label and beauty brand, has now ventured into the world of homeware, unveiling her debut collection with Westwing (which will be available to purchase from 12 October).

Discover Victoria Beckham's debut homeware collection

Like her runway designs, the collection is minimal and chic, featuring tableware, textiles, and decorative objects. Beckham was inspired by the idea of designing ‘fashion for the table ’ and creating a striking tablescape that balances elegance with informal dining.

The collection aims to elevate everyday gatherings. ‘Home is where some of life's most meaningful moments happen, and this collaboration felt like a natural way to explore that world through the same lens of design, craftsmanship, and attention to detail that defines everything we do as a brand,’ says Beckham.

The Arts and Crafts movement in 19th century Britain inspired the designs. Silver, deep green and whites define the palette, while hammered finishes and simple silhouettes bring the collection together. Beckham also wanted to include elements of her ready-to-wear and accessories collections; eagle-eyed users may spot chain motifs and shell detailing on the pieces that channel the runway.

For German homeware brand Westwing, the collaboration continues to expand its presence in the UK after the launch of its business in the country earlier this year.

‘Partnering with Victoria Beckham is a defining moment for Westwing,' says CEO Andreas Hoerning. 'Her unmistakable aesthetic has shaped contemporary fashion for years, and we are proud to bring that same vision into the world of Beautiful Living. This Collection creates a natural dialogue between fashion and interiors, offering design lovers a new way to express their personal style at home’

The Westwing | Victoria Beckham Collection will be available exclusively at Westwing from 12 October 2026 online and in all Westwing stores westwing.co.uk

A glass artist and material researcher, Lulu Harrison works at the cusp of historical and contemporary glassmaking. A self-taught glass artist ’specialising in glass alchemy’, she is inspired by primitive forms and techniques, which she develops through a practice aimed at working with local and waste materials.

The designer has now been announced as the recipient of the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust and Sanderson's Rising Star Craft Award, for which she will receive a £25,000 bursary in support of her practice's future development. The award is part of the British company's commitment to supporting a new generation of creative craftspeople, and a speculative look at how innovative artisanal approaches can help move the industry forward.

'What distinguished Lulu Harrison was not only the quality of her craftsmanship, but the strength of her vision for the future of glassmaking and her commitment to ensuring this remarkable artistry continues to evolve and thrive,' says Sanderson Design Group CEO and QUEST chair Lisa Montague, who led a jury including journalist Debika Ray and Wallpaper* design critic Hugo Macdonald.

Now based in Oxfordshire, Harrison first approached glass while studying for an MA in Materials Futures at Central Saint Martins, from which she graduated in 2022. 'Having previously lived in Cornwall, I already had links with local fishermen and was particularly interested in working with waste from the fishing industry,' she says. That kickstarted a process of discovery that led her to learning about traditional practices that employ limestone from local shells as the main ingredient for her exploration of glassmaking.

'Her work demonstrates a compelling harmony between traditional making techniques and emerging technologies, creating new ways for craft to be communicated, understood, and embraced by future generations,' continues Montague. 'Through her innovative approach, alongside her commitment to research, sustainability, and the preservation of specialist skills, she embodies the spirit of innovation that has always driven great craft forward. This builds a bridge between heritage and progress that will inspire the next generation of makers.'

Swiss recycling specialists Freitag is ushering in a new direction with a revitalised ‘Reference’ collection. Founded in 1993, the Zurich-based company established itself as a pioneer of the circular economy, transforming heavy duty truck tarpaulins into a wide range of hard-wearing bags and accessories, emphasising the unique, one-off nature of every product and earning itself a cult reputation in the process.

The first batch of ‘Reference’ bags was launched in 2009, but the new collection takes upcycling to new levels. Four new bags feature a more refined cut, as well as careful and more delicate detailing.

Overseen by product design Anne Bachmann, the four bags still use truck tarps, but with a much keener eye for uniformity of colour and texture. Still unique, yet more minimal than before, the aim was to elevate the humble raw material through design and craft.

Bachmann has worked for Freitag for 16 years. ‘Used tarpaulins have no reason to hide their stories,’ she says. ‘Each one of them has a raw elegance of its own. And ‘Reference’ puts that firmly at the centre.’ Launching the new collection in a refined palette of whites, silvers, reds and blues (‘in the most beautiful nuances the transit routes have to offer’), other colours will arrive in due course.

The four initial ‘Reference’ bags comprise the compact crossbody R201 ELLY, the classically styled R202 BATES purse, the R203 MAZIE giant tote and the R204 NAN shoulder bag. All are made by hand, with prominent edge seams and interior linings made from recycled polyester. The bags also include their own repair kit featuring the essential components – a tarp pouch, lining and thread – to repair any damage in keeping with the unique colour and patina of the original.

‘Every time I walk through our factory, I realise that beauty happens where it isn't trying to,’ Bachman says, explaining one of the key sources of inspiration behind the collection. The original model for the heavy-duty branded magnetic clasp was an adjustment hook for industrial shelving, found on one of her reference expeditions.

Of the new collection, R201 ELLY has a capacity of 1.5 litres and has an adjustable shoulder strap and a zippered inner compartment. R202 BATES has a volume of 8-12l, with inner pockets designed for an A6 notebook as well as a zippered section and enough space for a 13-inch laptop. The larger R203 MAZIE will take 26-40 litres of stuff, with an additional detachable 0.4 litre mini pouch, while the R204 NAN is a baguette bag with 4 litres of carrying capacity.

‘“Reference” is attitude in the shape of a bag,’ says Freitag’s CEO Janine Bühler. ‘The act of choosing one of these unique pieces is a statement in itself: it stands for resource-conscious material choices, for timeless elegance, and for rejecting the throwaway culture… [“Reference” features] forward-thinking design, meticulous finishing, and repairability, enabling a long, intensive bag life – fully in line with the circular economy.’

Freitage ‘Reference’ collection
R201 ELLY, EUR 360 / GBP 325 / USD 460 plus local taxes
R202 BATES, EUR 520 / GBP 470 / USD 660 plus local taxes
R203 MAZIE, EUR 490 / GBP 440 / USD 620 plus local taxes
R204 NAN, EUR 420 / GBP 380 / USD 530 plus local taxes
All available from Freitag.ch, @Freitaglab

Located in Henley-on-Thames, Friar Park has a mysterious energy. Fans of The Beatles may know it as the home of the late George Harrison, where he and his family resided. Harrison purchased the Victorian neo-Gothic estate in 1970, when it was overgrown and needed some serious care. It is now managed by his family, who helped to maintain the private land. His son, Dhani Harrison – also a musician and co-head of Dark Horse Records– worked with Niwaki on the collaboration.

Perfectly pruned, yet outrageously wild, the gardens are managed to the highest order, not for anyone to see, but for the joy of gardening. It is no surprise that premium gardening tool and accessories brand Niwaki decided to partner with Dhani, who helps to maintain its legacy.

Discover the Niwaki x Friar Park collaboration

‘It's a very well-known, but completely unseen garden,’ explains Jake Hobson, founder of Niwaki. ‘Everyone's heard about it: it's got this incredible topiary garden, which is very English, with a baroque intensity. But then it's got this very beautiful Japanese garden a few minutes away from it. It's that contrast between the two that makes the place so special.’

Hobson became close with Dhani after the latter consistently frequented the brand’s London, Chiltern Street store. ‘We had a shared – passion isn't the right word – I think obsession with Japan, with gardens, and with the pleasure of being involved in gardens, working in gardens, living with gardens, and seeing gardens. The collaboration is kind of a fusion of Japan and England, which made perfect sense,’ Hobson tells Wallpaper* over a call on a hazy autumnal morning.

Dhani agrees. ‘I am extremely addicted to the Niwaki brand,’ he shares. ‘I use it because I’m a maker and I like to build – I don’t just use the topiary tools, but the chisels, the wood planes, the whittling knives, the axes, ladders, gaiters, tabi boots: you name it, I use it. Because I spent so much time in the store, I eventually became friends with the team there, and Jake and I started talking, and it turns out we got on very well, and that’s how the whole thing came about, from a friendship.’

The collection includes a Meditation Jacket, inspired by Niwaki’s Kojima Work Jacket. It features long tails and a hood, and has a cloak-like quality, and was inspired by Dhani’s love of meditating in the estate’s Japanese garden. Hoods are often used in meditation to increase inward focus and block out distractions.

Meditation is as much a part of Dhani’s life as is music, as he tells Wallpaper*: ‘I listen to the same thing over and over throughout the seasons – the same piece of flute music or the same piece of choral music. I’ll use the music as a meditation through the garden every day, whether it’s rain or shine. I think it’s important to listen to the same thing if it’s something that moves you, so you can experience the consistency of the spirit through the passing of time – it’s quite an interesting experiment. I’ve been listening a lot to Canyon Trilogy by Carlos R Nakai, which is a record we put out on vinyl for the first time this year on Dark Horse Records.’

The collaboration’s colour palette is inspired by the maroon of the Acer Palmatum tree when it turns in autumn. ‘This is such a prominent colour in Friar Park,’ says Dhani. ‘There is a week every year where it just becomes fire – you have that whole spectrum of maroon, through to fire red and yellow.’

The collection also includes a Kojima Jacket and Rucksack. There are also essential pruning tools, including Garden Shears and a Karikomi Holster, the Hori Hori Pro, Higurashi Secateurs and Moku Pruning Saw, in Japanese carbon steel. Keen gardeners wishing to purchase the full collection can also opt for the Friar Park x Niwaki Collector's Edition, a gift set that brings all these tools together, plus a Cap, Lunch Bag and an exclusive George Harrison vinyl.

‘Japanese design is, for want of a better word, perfect’, says Dhani. ‘Jake said to me that all of these products come from individual Japanese artisans, and chances are there are only two people working at these companies, like a father and son, who have been doing it for generations, and that’s the one thing they focus on, so the skill level is very high. It’s almost too hard to explain, but Japan, as a concept, is probably the most inspirational thing in my life. If I had to [put it in] one word, it’s the mindfulness.’

While Dhani may describe Japanese design as ‘perfect’, can a garden ever be? Hobson notes, ‘There was a joke in English society gardening, that the three things you need are the three M's (money, muck, and muscle), to make a perfect garden. I don't think any of that counts. It's the passion and the personality of the person involved with the garden. A garden is never finished, and that's how a garden can live through generations.’

The Friar Park x Niwaki collection is available in limited quantities from Niwaki Chiltern Street, London; Niwaki HQ in Semley, Dorset; and niwaki.com from 12 October 2026

Creativity may be instinctive, but it can also be passed down through the way parents think, create and teach. This is the story of Manuel Bano, the Mexico-based designer who runs his own practice and is also part of the collectible design studio EWE Studio. 'My love for design comes from my parents,' shares Bano. 'My father, a designer, and my mother, an artist, shared a studio in our home in Valencia, Spain. Later, they both taught at the university where I studied: my mother taught art and my father product design.'

Early in his career, Bano interned with London-based designer Magnus Long learning the workings of industrial design and the nuances of producing commercial furniture for brands. But a year later, he was ready for an adventure of his own and set his sights on Mexico. He began speaking with Héctor Esrawe, a designer and architect who invited him to join his studio in Mexico City in 2013. Bano spent several years there in various roles, and their collaboration eventually grew into a partnership, and in 2017 they, along with Age Salajõe, founded EWE Studio, a collective dedicated to exploring Mexico’s rich natural materials, techniques and craftsmanship (previously spotlighted by Wallpaper* when they showed at Dubai’s Gallery Collectional in 2024).

So, what is it about the country that kept Bano hooked? 'Mexico inspires me in every field, from architecture and cinema to music and, of course, food. Craftsmanship is alive everywhere, from small carpentry shops to stone workshops, and people continue to make things using techniques passed down through generations.'

His love of making deepened during the pandemic, when the ‘OBJ’ collection began; an evolving body of work. Bano found himself drawing and exploring new ideas, even as workshops remained closed. 'I had a friend who had a laser-cutting machine. It was essentially the only workshop where I could produce something,' he says. He made that constraint his starting point, creating the ‘OBJ-01’ table lamp – the first piece he produced independently. The series has since grown to include a floor lamp, chair, bench and stool, while his fascination with metal – stainless steel, brass and oxidised steel – has remained constant.

'What I value about working with metal is the directness of the process. In many of my pieces, I can work with a single material, and I like knowing from the beginning how the finished piece will look. There is an honesty to metal. That doesn’t always happen with stone, glass or other materials, where surprises can occur along the way,' says Bano.

Then came copper. 'As I worked more with steel and brass, I began to encounter certain limitations in achieving the forms and textures I was looking for,' shares Bano. 'My friend, artist and designer Brian Thoreen, introduced me to a workshop where he was producing his pieces in copper, a material I was already curious about. I fell in love with it immediately. The possibilities of copper felt endless.'

Thoreen introduced Bano to Raúl Rauda, an artisan in Santa Clara del Cobre, a town whose copperworking tradition dates back to the pre-Hispanic era and is rooted in Purépecha craftsmanship. In fact hand-hammered copper shapes around 250 local workshops, filling the town with the constant, rhythmic sound of metalworking. There, Bano realised how this recycled copper could be cut, bent, stretched and hammered, opening up possibilities that led to pieces including the ‘OBJ-12’ dining table, ‘OBJ-10’ cabinet and more.

Today, Bano divides his time equally between his own practice and EWE Studio. 'Some designers love to discover a piece through experimentation,' avers Bano. 'My process is almost the opposite: I tend to know what I’m looking for from the beginning, and from there the work is about refining and resolving the piece.'

At PAD London 2026, he is eager to hear how people respond to his work, particularly as he is based on the other side of the world. He is pleased to have found an exhibition partner in Objects with Narratives. As people will notice in his work, there is something very romantic about materials ageing and changing over time. 'I think many designers can relate to that, regardless of the materials they work with.'

Manuel Bano is at Objects with Narrative, Booth A8, PAD London, 13 to 18 October 2026 at Berkeley Square.

Earlier in 2026 London-based designer Michael Anastassiades announced he was going to close his eponymous lighting brand. 'What comes next for me as a designer is a deeper focus on the creative process, and the freedom to explore new directions in design, in all its forms,' he said at the time.

The next chapter in the designer's practice has just been revealed, and it involves a partnership with long-term collaborator, Italian lighting company Flos. Several of the designer's most celebrated lighting pieces from his eponymous collection will now enter the Flos portfolio, and the company will integrate the designs into its catalogue, which will involve manufacturing and distribution.

'The inclusion of Michael Anastassiades’ heritage collection in the Flos catalogue is the natural consequence of a collaboration that began more than ten years ago and has produced beautiful projects and great successes,' said Piero Gandini, the executive chairman and artistic supervisor of the Flos B&B Italia Group. '[It’s] Michael’s completion of a collaboration aimed at future milestones.'

Over the past 15 years, the creative partnership between Anastassiades and Flos has been running in parallel with the designer's own production. His lighting work, the designer observed, started as 'an open-ended experiment [and] grew organically into a body of work that reflects a deeply personal journey'.

Meanwhile, the work he created with Flos offered a more nuanced, industrial and commercial direction to the poetry that defines his approach. Anastassiades' brilliance at illuminating a space has been reflected in his ability to transform a lighting object into a delicate gesture, made possible by a rigorous design process, and aided by sublime materiality and technology (see our video series, The Stuff That Surrounds You, for more on his experimentation and a look at the objects he most treasures).

With Flos, Anastassiades has created classic objects such as the ‘IC’ series, where an illuminated sphere balances on a brass rod, or the ‘Coordinates’ chandelier, featuring geometric compositions of lighting objects that become micro-architectures to light up a space.

'Since its start in 2011, my collaboration with Flos has become an important part of my practice as a lighting designer,' comments Anastassiades. 'Now it feels like a natural progression that the pieces I have developed under my own name over the past 20 years will continue with Flos.'

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

Adriana Meunié fell in love with textiles while studying fashion design at BAU Centro Universitario de Diseño in Barcelona, Spain. 'I feel like textiles have become the language with which I can express myself better,' she says, reflecting on her ever-growing body of woven work. Her large-scale weavings and tapestries, appearing like hairy mythical creatures, are made using traditional weaving techniques and local materials sourced from her native Mallorca. Although calm and mesmerising, her works can also be slightly unsettling – possessing a tension that she describes as a kind of 'monstrous elegance'.

Born and raised in the small coastal resort of Cala Llombards, for Meunié, exploring different woven textures and volumes offered a return to something fundamental. 'It was like going back to the essential and primordial textile form,' she tells Wallpaper*.

In 2014, after years of experimentation, she came across a raw piece of wool in an old barn and was captivated by its beauty and textures. In this moment, she says, she realised the importance of provenance – understanding where materials come from, who works with them and how.

Over time, she learned how to turn this raw material into something clean yet expressive, initially creating woven pieces before she started attaching the wool – along with rope, grass and leaves – to canvases, creating tapestries that she likens to woven paintings. 'This opened a whole new portal and it allowed me to create more defined lines and shapes,' she says. 'I always say that I’m a studio person – it’s by doing that I learn and new things come out. One piece evolves from the other through a mistake... an idea while working.'

As an island, Mallorca has a proud history of craft and making that was developed out of necessity to be self-sufficient. Traditional fabrics called Teixit de Llengües are still made on looms, but the number of people with the requisite knowledge and skill is vastly reduced – Meunié says only three companies using the technique remain on the island. While there are still basketry artisans practising across Mallorca, Meunié believes the rapid growth of tourism has contributed to the loss of other techniques. 'Tourism is a very tricky business – it can erase cultural heritage if you don’t position and value it as a community,' she reflects. 'It was one of my motivations to start using the local materials of my surroundings. Twelve years ago, it wasn’t so popular here. I was so tired and sad with the image of sun and beach that Mallorca had, that I decided to concentrate my attention in the land part: sheep, vegetal materials, our fields, shepherds and farmers.'

Since she began her practice, Meunié has noticed a revival of local craft and its potential to be used to create contemporary art and design. 'Mallorca is so culturally rich: we have our language, a long tradition in craft, a way of living simply (the true Mediterranean), a millenary history. I think that globally, people are increasingly appreciating craft because it connects you better to the place where you find yourself, and in this tech era we are stepping into so quickly, I think it’s crucial for everyone to keep a connection with reality.'

Today Meunié lives and works from a renovated Mallorcan farmhouse in the south of the island surrounded by fields. Her working day is punctuated by taking care of her many animals – a coop of chickens, a donkey named Cato, Petit the goat and her dog, Tota. 'I fight for having time,' she laments. 'It’s incredible because the world is so crazy that even living in the countryside doesn’t exempt me from feeling a kind of constant stress, like if the days were too short. I really don’t like this sensation – it’s my life goal to get rid of it somehow.'

Since 2024, Meunié has been working with Sarah Myerscough Gallery, participating in the group show 'Thread' - an international survey on contemporary woven work – earlier in 2026. At PAD London 2026 (13-18 October) she will present two tapestries named 'A Wall of Wilderness', made using a combination of plant fibres from her native Mallorca, including carritx, esparto, sisal, linen, estopa and antique esparto rope. These tapestries, she explains, create a sense of movement but also play with the idea of bringing the outside in – 'like having a bit of a field inside a space', she says.

'Nature isn’t only calming, it’s also wild, violent and dangerous,' she reflects. 'That tension is something I want to keep digging into, or let’s say, what gives me satisfaction, because I don’t believe in simple or easy beauty. I think that when something is unsettling, it’s because it’s moving things in you that maybe you weren’t aware of.'

Adriana Meunié is at Sarah Myerscough Gallery, Booth B27, PAD London, 13 to 18 October 2026 at Berkeley Square

To most, the pop artist Roy Lichtenstein will forever be associated with Ben-Day dot patterns, comic strip subjects, and whaams, blams, and pows. But Lichtenstein, who created more than 5,000 artworks in his lifetime, loved to experiment in other mediums, including printmaking, sculpture, film – and, as an auction at Sotheby’s proves, furniture.

Back in the late 1960s, Lichtenstein designed a brass and glass coffee table, one of which is part of an online sale happening now at the global auction house. The sale, which coincides with a blockbuster Lichtenstein retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art opening this week, sheds light on this rare part of the artist’s practice – and also offers collectors the opportunity to seriously level up their living room.

‘Roy really dabbled in everything, and so this auction as a whole really demonstrates his versatility as an artist, his boundary-breaking approach to art making,’ says Keith Lebel, an assistant vice president in Sotheby’s contemporary art department. ‘This table represents an unusual foray into furniture design for him.’

The table is an extension of the Lichtenstein’s ‘Modern’ series, a vibrant body of work created in the 1960s that moved away from comic strip subjects in favour of geometric Art Deco motifs. Like the Modern paintings, the table features energetic shapes, as with its rounded, D-shaped legs and horizontal bands.

While experts don’t know precisely why the artist designed the table, they do know that it was made in an edition of three. Lichtenstein kept it for himself and his wife Dorothy to furnish their home in Southampton, New York. ‘This is an object that they lived with,’ Lebel explains. ‘He thought of it as a sculpture, but it was not this precious item not to be touched. It was certainly used.’

The other tables have equally legendary provenance: one went to legendary gallerist Leo Castelli, who swapped a Dan Flavin artwork for it. Meanwhile, the third went to artist Donald Judd in exchange for a sculpture (it’s since wound up in a private collection). ‘The only people who have ever owned these are just remarkable figures,’ Lebel says.

The Modern table as it’s known is part of two sales drawn from Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein’s personal collection, one live in New York and one online-only. While the 21-lot live auction features works that will likely fetch in excess of $1 million, the online sale has markedly more accessible works, including the coffee table, which is estimated to fetch between $50,000 and $70,000.

‘I hope that collectors, both seasoned and new, will recognize this work as a really unique opportunity to acquire a work by Lichtenstein that is at once instantly recognizable and unusual,’ Lebel says. ‘It has that sort of old New York Art Deco glam that continues to be really appealing.’

Pow, even.

Selections from Reflections on Pop: Works from the Collection of Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein are now on view at Sotheby's Breuer headquarters. 945 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10021, USA

In October, London’s Gallery Fumi welcomes 'Companions’, an exhibition of friendly-looking wooden furniture designed by Lukas Wegwerth and Corinna Dehn. The pair, who first met while studying at the University of the Arts in Berlin, have conceived a family of furniture clad in shingles inspired both by animal scales, wings and feathers, and by the vernacular architecture of Wegwerth’s home region in central Germany.

Part of their ongoing ‘Armadillo’ series, the six new works include two cabinets, a sideboard, a birdhouse, a dining table and a stand-alone screen. All feature the collection’s signature shingles, but with new experimentations in tone, density, and pattern. The wooden elements are sourced locally, often recycled, and processed in the designers’ own sawmill, while the colours come from natural pigments and ebonisation as well as traditional oil paints.

Working together, Wegwerth and Dehn apply the shingles to wooden structures, pushing each other in directions neither would arrive at alone, to always surprising results. Here, they tell us more about ‘Armadillo’, their partnership and their collaboration with Gallery Fumi.

Wegwerth and Dehn on their creative practice

Wallpaper*: When did you start collaborating with Gallery Fumi?

Lukas Wegwerth, Corinna Dehn: About 13 years ago. It started with ‘Crystallizations’, a series of broken ceramics that are ‘repaired’ through growing crystals in the cracks of the broken vases. Working together with Fumi has given us the opportunity to explore this process further over many years.

W*: Gallery Fumi focuses on designers and artists who blend traditional craftsmanship and innovative technologies. Are there any other creatives in the Fumi family who you find particularly inspiring?

LW, CD: We are fans of the organic, playful and architectural works of [Athens-based design studio] Voukenas Petrides. We collaborated on the very first ‘Armadillo’ furniture with them. While they came up with a shape, we developed the material strategy for the piece: it was cladded with shingles that we repurposed from the façade of our barn that we were renovating at the time. And we’ve always been fascinated by [ceramicist] Johannes Nagel’s processes and artistic works; we also worked together on the ‘Crystallizations’ series with objects he made.

And of course, Max Lamb’s distinctive way of crafting and constructing across materials and techniques continues to inspire us. We love Jochen Holz’s playful and sophisticated glass works and Saelia Aparicio’s very free spirited furniture and objects, among others.

W*: How did you two start working together?

LW: I trained as a cabinet maker before studying design and started my studio organically while I was still studying. Wood as a material and the forests I grew up surrounded by always shaped my design works.

CD: I studied fashion design and worked in the fashion industry for many years. As senior designer for Y-3, I worked in close collaboration with Yohji Yamamoto’s design team, contributing to the menswear and accessories collections. Since then I have started exploring different ways of working in the design field, among other things facilitating design workshops in Berlin’s youth prisons.

After many years of helping each other out and collaborating on smaller and bigger scale projects, we started working together more closely.

W*: ‘Armadillo’ is based on the wooden shingle, and in particular, the rounded shingles are used in buildings in Germany’s Vogelsberg region, where you have a studio. Can you tell us more about these buildings, and what they are used for?

CD: The Vogelsberg region is a widely forested volcanic region in the midst of Germany. The abundance of beech and oak wood and the local stone shaped the rural architecture. Most houses are grounded on a volcanic rock foundation and constructed as timber frameworks. The wooden shingles act as a protective layer; they wear off over the course of many decades while the actual framework is protected from the weather. The exact application and shape of the shingles’ ‘nose’ differs almost from one village to the other and from craftsperson to craftsperson, but the basic principle is always the same. Shingles had been used in all types of buildings from barns to mansions, from raw to ornamented and painted.

We are mainly inspired by the most simple ones. Time and weather let these facades become silvery and vivid. The rain shadow of each shingle is also a potential home for a range of wild bees – so the entirety of the facades does not only look like an insect wing seen under a microscope, they actually become inhabited by wild bees.

LW: I grew up in the region, in a farmhouse clad in beech shingles. I did not pay much attention to it as shingles were so normal for me, but thinking back, I feel really related to this material culture and the natural, gentle and ever-changing appearance of those buildings.

The traditional shingles of vernacular architecture are very regular, while your designs come in all shapes and sizes – why is that?

CD: Shingles are an architectural feature – that application to furniture needed some interpretation to make things work and to recreate the emotion we are inspired by. It might be true that in buildings the application is more regular, but weather and time and the use of a non-standardised shingle also reduce the feel of order over time.

But if we look at the other inspiration of our project, the animal skins, we see much more variety in size and direction of organisation around the body. A complex shape asks for more complexity and diversity of the shapes and sizes of shingles.

We were interested in combining these two realms – the vernacular building culture and the universal principle of scales in animal skins. Straight surfaces can be covered with rather large shingles, while curves need to be covered with much slimmer shingles in a wide range of shapes.

W*: This organic look, similar to scales and feathers, is reflected in the collection’s – and the exhibition’s – name. Do you see the various pieces as little creatures?

LW, CD: Yes, there is definitely a lively quality to the pieces. There is a dialogue between elements and shapes. The appearance differs from one piece to the other, sometimes the architectural references become stronger, in others the animalistic perception is more obvious. We think that a part of the animated perception is inherent to the material. Even a straight but weathered facade feels more animated with wooden shingles applied to it – so it seems to be coming from the shingle itself and is not only a result of their individual forms.

Additionally, we search for shapes that shingles can cover – it is actually not a material without limits. Certain shapes just do not go well with shingles, so we also follow the material logic on our search for shapes.

W*: What type of wood do you use for this, and where do you source the wood from? I believe you have your own sawmill in the Vogelsberg?

LW, CD: Sourcing is varied: repurposed beech shingles from our renovation site, oak beams from the repair of the timber framework, old handmade shingles we found stocked on the attic of our barn, leftover larch shingles from an architectural project that we worked on for the Crespo Foundation, an art foundation based in Frankfurt.

Making use of the sawmill is a part of the sourcing strategy for this project. It allows us to work super locally and process local wood. Vogelsberg’s vernacular buildings are defined by the local, natural materials: oak, beech, basalt stone for example.

The basalt also plays a role in our project. As in the buildings it serves to build out strong and durable details such as table tops in our case. We for example source the basalt stone from collection points to which farmers bring them when they become obstacles in their acres. This material dialogue that is very specific to the region is reflected in many pieces of the ‘Armadillo’ series.

W*: How do you work together to create these pieces? Corinna, you first work on the shingles and you shape and colour them yourself?

CD: The shingles are cut, shaped and coloured individually by hand. For some of the pieces the shingles are stained – I apply the stain in a way that creates colour gradients where different colours will blend into each other. Some pieces of the series are painted with linseed oil colours. We used these sometimes in a more transparent, light way where they are a nuance or hue of colour. Other times they are used in a way that they really cover the wood completely and highlight the texture of the different shingles.

We also investigated coloration techniques like ebonizing. This is a process using natural ingredients such as tannin, rust and lime which results in dark shades ranging from blacks and dark greens to dark browns.

W*: Lukas, you are in charge of creating the structures that will then be clad in the shingles. Where do you find the inspiration for the shapes?

LW: We develop the shapes together. Parts of the shapes are pre-planned, while many details develop over time and through experimentation. Covering the pieces with shingles requires starting at the bottom and growing the layer of shingles slowly moving from the ground up.

During the process of renovating my grandmother’s farm house, we visited a lot of farm house museums and looked at books about agricultural and vernacular architecture, traditional beehives and wooden toys. These were really strong sources of inspiration for us. We were looking for shapes that reflect the friendly and gentle attitude that we felt the shingle facades had – also something that is animate just as the facade itself is vivid and lively, seemingly but also in actuality by serving as a home for wild bees.

W*: Where are the pieces actually built? And how long would you say it takes to create one from start to finish?

LW, CD: Some were built in the Berlin studio, some were built in Vogelsberg studio. We decided to split the work following the seasonal advantages of working in the countryside. Colouring the shingles with the tannin, rust and lime required quite some space: it was perfect to use the garden and work outside. Whereas other pieces and steps of the process require different tools and machines, so working in the Berlin studio is then perfect.

A big challenge while working on the ‘Armadillo’ pieces is the slowness of the process. While it is really enjoyable to see the pieces grow and experience them becoming more and more animated, it takes a lot of time. A large piece like a cabinet will take 10 to 12 weeks from start to finish including the woodwork, the preparation of the shingles, the application and finalisation of all the details.

W: Do you have a favourite piece in the latest series?

LW: My favourite is a three-legged side table with a basalt stone top. I really love the material dialogue between the wood and stone. The shape of the structure and the variety of the different colourations of the shingles – I just feel very drawn to it.

CD: I love the high cabinet. I like its colours and the variety of the shingles – some have very beautiful gradients and others have very nice textures, so it really looks a bit like fur or feathers. A very gentle, friendly monster.

‘Companions’ by Lukas Wegwerth & Corinna Dehn, from 3 October – 28 November 2026, at Gallery Fumi, 2–3 Hay Hill, London, galleryfumi.com

Some of the pieces will also be part of Gallery Fumi's PAD participation, 13 - 18 October, 2026, Berkeley Square, Mayfair

A traditional showroom, at its core, is ‘something void of personality to showcase product only,’ says Alexia Beghi, a design director at Gensler. So, when carpet brands Tai Ping and Edward Fields tapped the architecture and design firm to dream up a joint showroom in New York, the teams set out to create the antithesis to that stiff, uninspiring setting.

Housed in midtown Manhattan’s A&D Building, the new flagship harnesses the energies of a cosy hotel lobby, high-end bar and elegant design atelier. Warm yet restrained, the showroom blends Tai Ping’s East Asian influence and Edward Fields’ midcentury roots — resulting in a unified vision built for settling in and getting inspired.

‘We wanted it to feel incredibly welcoming. We deliberately created a calm, almost transportive environment that feels like a respite from the energy of New York,’ says Kate Judd, managing director of the Americas for Tai Ping and Edward Fields. ‘We wanted it to feel completely non-transactional.’

The entry ignites that mood shift. Marked by vintage carved midcentury doors, the vestibule is enveloped in deep mauve Venetian plaster, wood paneling and travertine mosaic flooring that kindle serenity.

Conversely, the foyer flows into a bright reception area. Intentionally open for moving large carpets, the airy space features a custom three-panel tapestry full of Easter eggs tied to Tai Ping’s 70th anniversary, such as its pavilion roof silhouette emblem, and the showroom’s opening during the Year of the Horse.

Across the way, an illuminated, curved wall made of rippled glass blocks shapes a conference area and draws guests into the main showroom. There, white oak flooring and matching millwork form a cohesive backdrop for rugs and samples, ‘giving clients a familiar visual anchor to imagine the carpets in their homes,’ says Beghi.

The pom bar — for viewing carpet tufts in a wide colour range — adds a bit of drama with a whirlpool-like rug in rich tones under a custom stainless steel disc sculpture by Studio S II.

Throughout, archival pieces accessorise walls and surfaces, including Edward Fields’ early order books, Tai Ping ads from the 1960s and an original tufting gun from Hong Kong. These heritage objects ‘invite discovery and provide inspiration for palettes and patterns,’ says Beghi.

At the heart of the showroom, the lounge promotes intimacy and conversation. Guests can grab a complimentary drink — including Chinese tea, American whiskey and cocktails inspired by each brand — at the bar. Then, they can ease into inward-curving, velvet banquette seating, which hugs plaster columns, under a lowered ceiling with a lattice-screen-like design.

Guests may wish to make the showroom their go-to for rendezvous, but they can, at the very least, stay for much longer than a New York minute. ‘We really want people to feel comfortable dropping in, exploring the collections and spending time in the space,’ says Judd.

The Tai Ping and Edward Fields showroom is located at 150 E 58th St, Floor 11, New York, NY 10155

In 1972, designer Peter Opsvik created the Tripp Trapp, a child’s chair designed to evolve and change over the years. The chair, with its signature angled profile, was simplicity itself, endlessly reconfigurable with slots to raise and lower the height of the seat and footrest, along with provision for a safety bar for smaller children.

The chair was manufactured by Stokke, founded in Ålesund, Norway, in 1932. Today the company makes all manner of child and baby accessories, from the timeless Tripp Trapp through to prams, foldable baths, baby bouncers and toys.

The MoMA collaboration taps into the museum’s close connection with contemporary design – and its all-important retail arm – by bolstering the Tripp Trapp story with a new version that adds colour, collectability and an element of abstract, artistic charm. Stokke and MoMA logos are included alongside Opsvik's signature, while the red, pink, orange and blue seating and footrest can be mixed and matched.

‘At MoMA Design Store, we believe in products that seamlessly unite exceptional design with everyday life. Inspired by MoMA's colour palette, this chair pays tribute to a landmark children's product in MoMA's collection, celebrating its enduring legacy while bringing a new expression of this beloved icon to families today,’ says MoMA’s Chief Retail Officer, Jesse Goldstine, ‘It's a collaboration that reflects our shared belief that good design is for everyday living.’

Wallpaper* spoke to Tor Opsvik, Managing Director of the design company Peter Opsvik AS, and son of Peter Opsvik, along with Stokke’s VP Innovation, Martha Jørgenvåg, about this enduring product and the new collaboration.

Wallpaper*: When did it first become apparent that the Tripp Trapp design was on its way to becoming an icon? Was it instantly acknowledged from the start, or did its reputation take time to grow?

Tor Opsvik: There was no single moment when it became apparent that Tripp Trapp was on its way to becoming an icon. However, in 1973, Peter demonstrated the chair on a television programme. Afterwards, the station's switchboard was flooded with calls from parents wanting to know where they could buy it.

From that moment, sales began to grow. Within ten years of its launch, more Tripp Trapp chairs were being sold annually than there were children being born in Norway and the chair was well on its way to becoming an international success.

Its distinctive silhouette and visual expression quickly attracted attention, and its place in everyday family life helped generation after generation develop a lasting connection to the chair. It was bringing children of all ages up to the family table.

Over time, it became clear that Tripp Trapp was more than a product. As the design gained recognition and its distinctive silhouette became embedded in generations of families, the chair earned recognition as a true design classic. Its ability to remain relevant decade after decade, without significant alteration, reflects the enduring strength and timeless character of its original design.

I truly believe timeless designs are often out of step with prevailing trends when they are introduced. They do not fit comfortably into what already exists. Instead, they present a new visual and creative perspective, gradually reshape their category and ultimately outlive the trends that once made them seem unusual.

Tripp Trapp is a good example of this: a highly original design whose distinctive visual identity has remained relevant for more than 50 years. Today, it is a widely recognised piece of applied art, with museum representation that serves as a reflection of such recognition.

W*: Have there been any major changes in the way the chair is manufactured or even designed over the years? Or has it remained very consistent?

Martha Jørgenvåg: Innovation is not always measured by how much a product changes. Sometimes it is measured by how little it needs to change. Tripp Trapp is a good example of this. The chair's iconic design has remained largely unchanged since its introduction in 1972, which speaks to the enduring strength of the original vision. Rather than constantly reinventing the product, the focus has been on preserving the qualities that have resonated with generations of families.

W*: Have there been other design and colour collaborations and experiments before?

TO: Not like this one. For us, it is important to preserve the integrity of an icon whose strength lies in the clarity of its design. This partnership feels both unique and exciting. The Tripp Trapp MoMA edition succeeds in celebrating and honouring the visual identity and enduring design significance, while adding a fresh perspective through reversible seat and footplates. Families can bring their own personality to this classic design and make it part of their home in their own way.

W*: How did the MoMA collaboration come about?

MJ: Tripp Trapp has earned recognition over more than five decades as an enduring design classic. Its inclusion in museum collections, including The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, reflects the iconic status the chair has achieved through generations of families and its lasting relevance in design.

In 2012, Tripp Trapp was featured in MoMA's exhibition Century of the Child: Growing by Design 1900-2000, which explored influential examples of design created for children throughout the twentieth century. Building on this shared appreciation for design, the MoMA team approached us last year with the idea of creating a limited-edition Tripp Trapp to celebrate this unique legacy.

Working closely together, MoMA and our own teams explored how MoMA's signature colour palette could be incorporated while preserving Peter Opsvik's original design. Inspired by the creativity and individuality associated with childhood, the resulting colour combinations bring distinct character and playful expression to the iconic chair, remaining true to the timeless design that families have recognized for generations.

Tripp Trapp Chair MoMA Edition by Stokke

Store.MoMA.org, @MoMAdesignstore, Stokke.com, @StokkeBaby

Spanish-Equatoguinean ceramicist Bisila Noha has been named the recipient of the Tacchini Prize, an award from the Italian furniture brand in partnership with Fondazione Officine Saffi, a non-profit dedicated to contemporary ceramics. The newly established prize celebrates the intersection of contemporary artistic research and design culture, focusing on materials as a field of research and expression.

With the prize comes an exhibition dedicated to Noha at Casa Tacchini, the brand’s apartment-turned-showroom in Milan. The show, ‘A Tactile Story’ (on until 13 November 2026), presents Noha’s sculptural, expressive ceramics among a selection of Tacchini furniture. Vessels that appear cracked and disintegrating hang from a rope attached to the ceiling; four-legged sculptures stand in an illuminated corner; a giant pot with gradated colours sits in the window.

Bisila Noha and the culture of ceramics

Born in Spain in 1988 and based in London, Noha’s star has been rising since she turned away from a career in advertising towards exploring pottery in 2016. ‘I just fell in love with it,’ she tells Wallpaper*. Since then, she has enjoyed multiple international residencies and solo exhibitions, and her work has been acquired by the V&A Museum, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and several other cultural institutions.

She is currently an artist-in-residence at the Sarabande Foundation in London, and has work on show at the Venice Biennale and Princeton University Art Museum. In March 2026, she staged a solo show with Thrown Contemporary at OmVed Gardens in London, ‘Ile Ọkàn (House of the Soul)’.

Noha’s approach to ceramics is underpinned by deep historical and cultural research, which she has pursued at residencies in Nigeria and Senegal, in particular. ‘I thought, if I want to be fluent in clay, I need to go to the places where people have been doing this for generation after generation,’ she says, adding that she is ‘really interested’ in the history of women’s labour in relation to pottery. For Noha, the craft of ceramics is about much more than simply making beautiful objects, and is deeply connected to notions of community and feminism.

Past projects include ‘Baney Clay’, in which Noha used clay sourced from her father’s village in Equatorial Guinea, mixing it with other ingredients such as porcelain to make vessels that explored her dual identity as Spanish and Equatoguinean. ‘I wanted to develop this body of work looking at my own heritage’, she explains. The pots take on different appearances, hues and textures depending on the clay mixes chosen for each work.

‘Searching for Kouame Kakahá’ involved tracking down a potter in Ivory Coast whose work from the 1960s had inspired Noha’s own practice, as a way to counter the traditional erasure and devaluing of female potters. The vessels and sculptures Noha made in the process feature gestural scratches, openings and holes; ‘It’s the idea of unearthing myself,’ says Noha.

The exhibition ‘Ile Ọkàn (House of the Soul)’ brought together four years of work, reflecting on West African culture, ritual practices and communal making. As well as clay vessels, some of which seemed to break open and unfurl, there were stools and bronze sculptures.

‘I’ve always loved stools,’ Noha says. Those she made are small and very low to the ground, reflective of the type Noha has seen used by many women in kitchens and pottery studios, to stay close to work on the floor. Making the stools combined throwing, sculpting, hand building, and joinery; while Noha approached it through a sculptural lens, she ensured the stools were also functional. Noha, who uses some of the stools she made in her own home, is considering the possibility of getting them manufactured one day.

Her exploration of bronze began in 2022, and was pursued at a residency in Benin City, where Noha discovered the importance of wax, and clay, in enabling bronze sculptures. The work she made there reflected on Benin’s rich history of lost-wax bronze casting, in which wax models encased in moulds melt away to be replaced by molten metal. Noha saw the method as a metaphor for the hidden labour of women, particularly women of colour, in society. Her new project, ‘The Lost Bronze’ – which is due to be exhibited at the 1-54 art fair in London this October – expands upon this work, exhibiting a series of vessels in unfired clay and wax.

Noha’s Sarabande residency will conclude in November, as will her Casa Tacchini show, prompting a new chapter. She plans to move to a new studio in Dalston, east London, and has an upcoming project with the Museum of Romanticism in Madrid. What drives her forward, she says, is the exploration of history, and place, through the act of making.

Casa Tacchini hosts 'A Tactile Story by Bisila Noha', on view until 13 November 2026

Casa Tacchini
Largo Treves 5,
20121 Milan

The warm glow of Louis Poulsen’s three-shade PH lamp system, first designed in 1925 by lifelong collaborator Poul Henningsen, has come to epitomise Danish design. So it’s no surprise that every year, the historic lighting brand celebrates this incredible legacy with a limited-edition reissue of one of its classic designs.

Launched in 2014 to mark the 120th anniversary of Henningsen’s birth, the highly collectable reissues have included untreated copper lamps and amber-coloured pendants. This year, it’s the turn of an unusual, music-inflected piece: the ‘PH 1/1 Piano’ table lamp. Its swirling stem, inspired by the flag of musical notes and the twirl of treble clefs, manages to steal the limelight from the famous tiered glass pendant.

‘The original 1931 design of the “PH Piano” lamp has been respectfully scaled down and refined to offer greater versatility for contemporary living, functioning not just as a piano lamp but as a table lamp as well,’ says Monique Faber, chief design officer at Louis Poulsen. The lamp, which has not been manufactured since the late 1930s, will be available to purchase only until December 2026.

An architect, designer, and critic who often signed his essays with his initials (the hallmark of the limited-edition pieces, these letters proudly appear in gold at the base of the lamp), Henningsen was also a talented composer, songwriter and jazz aficionado. In the early 1930s, he turned his attention to music, creating this distinctive lamp as well as the PH Grand Piano, whose transparent acrylic lid reveals the instrument’s strings.

Offering a precise adjustment of the lighting direction, the ‘PH Piano’ lamp’s flexible curved stem is punctuated by a round, notehead-shaped element that functions as a counterweight to ensure stability while the user is playing. The frame is crafted in aged brass with fine hairlines, carefully lacquered to preserve the patina, and is paired with a dark brown fabric cord.

As for the lamp’s three-shade set (the ‘PH 1/1’, the smallest set in the PH system), it is made from four-layered, mouth-blown opal glass in a distinctive dusty terracotta hue. ‘Each shade is finished with a glossy exterior, while the inner surface is sand-blasted to a matte white finish. This combination of layers and finishes produces a beautifully soft, diffused light, ensuring exceptional visual comfort in any setting,’ say the Louis Poulsen team.

The earthy-coloured glass adds to the organic expression of the heritage design. Like every piece in the PH collection, the ‘Piano’ lamp also offers a glare-free, soft light that feels as natural as daylight and as warm as candlelight.

This is due to the PH system’s way of distributing light in gentle layers, a method inspired by the logarithmic spiral, a natural curve also found in seashells and plants. The top shade takes care of the brightest light, the middle shade redirects and softens it, and the bottom shade shields the eyes from glare.

The ‘PH 1/1 Piano’ table lamp limited edition 2026 will be available exclusively at selected stores and at louispoulsen.com from 1 October to 31 December 2026.

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

British water filtration company Hello Klean has made it its mission to 'build beauty solutions for your water'. Founded in 2019 as a personal response to the changing experience of washing, its first product was a shower filtration device providing 'hair, body and scalp care designed to reduce the everyday impact of hard water and chlorine'.

'We tend to look for answers among the things we already know to question,' says Karlee Zhang, the brand's co-founder. 'When our hair or skin changes, we reconsider our products, our habits, ourselves. Hello Klean began by asking what we were overlooking in the conditions around us, including water.'

Hello Klean introduces the Skin Filter

'We think of a beauty routine as something personal, yet part of it is pre-determined by the building and the city we live in,' she adds. 'That connection drew me to water and led to a design question: what could we change at the point where that water meets the person using it?'

With this in mind, the brand now launches the Skin Filter, focusing this time on the bathroom sink to offer multi-stage filtration enhanced with microbubble cleansing technology as well as intelligent water tracking.

The company's most advanced water filtration system yet, the Skin Filter combines three different filtration substances that come from its ongoing research into skincare and water. The Hello Klean Skin Filter includes the company's KleanShield Filtration for scale and metals (respectively, a slow-releasing, calcium-based scale inhibitor and a crystalline titanium-based medium) and Activated Carbon Fibre (reducing free chlorine). Together, this recipe helps reduce irritating build-up and minimise inflammation, and combats post-cleanse dryness and tightness.

The device has the sleek appearance that defines much of contemporary tech, designed to attach seamlessly to a single-lever bathroom tap, and is available in Black and Chrome. It is also equipped with HydroTrack technology for realwater-flow measuring and includes an integrated SmartRefill light to signal when it is time to replace the filter.

'Directness shapes our design language, the experience of using our products and how we work as a team,' concludes Zhang. 'A product’s purpose should be clear. Internally, we should be able to speak plainly about a problem and be adaptive to change.'

The Hello Klean Skin Filter is available from 1 October 2026 in Black and Chrome, RRP £135 (launch offer £108) when bought with a subscription

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.

While Palm Springs, California has no shortage of marvellous midcentury architecture, not all of these historic homes were created equal.

The vast residence at 650 E Tachevah Drive – completed by architectural designer Howard Lapham in 1966 and spanning 9,445 sq ft – is one of the largest and most impressive properties from the era within the city limits. A real estate developer bought it and, along with his girlfriend, hired Los Angeles-based interior designer Jessica Ayromloo to reanimate its capacious entertaining spaces and no less than 12 bedrooms 'They were looking for somebody who could re-envision it, but still keep the original aesthetic and bones,' Ayromloo tells Wallpaper*.

The sheer scale of the interior spaces could have been daunting. 'They're enormous,' said Ayromloo, whose initial thought was: 'What am I going to do with this giant gallery-sized living room that’s 60 feet long?' But she approached the project like a small boutique hotel, treating the main social space as a lobby.

Here, Pierre Paulin chairs that the clients had already bought at auction and various configurations of B&B Italia’s Camaleonda modular sofa – a design the clients dreamed of owning – are arranged to invite more intimate moments. 'If you're hosting a party, you want it to be conversational,' Ayromloo says. 'You can either sit and face the pool, or the fireplace. And if you get bored of this layout, you could always change it up.'

While retaining the classic mid-century features, Ayromloo dialled up the drama a few notches to live up to the 'party house feel.' Located in Palm Springs’ Movie Colony neighbourhood, the home lent itself to her aptly cinematic references. These included the 1968 sci-fi film Barbarella, whose sets and costumes inspired the home's mirrored and metallic finishes, curvaceous forms and highly textured surfaces. In the living area, these manifest as a fireplace clad in metal panels set against a reflective wall, amorphous coffee tables with shiny surfaces and a custom rug that stretches the full length of the room. 'I sometimes think of myself as more of a set designer than an interior designer,' Ayromloo says.

On the back wall, a trio of disc-shaped sculptures by LA artist Nicholas Biddle – one of which the designer discovered at Rhett Baruch Gallery, with the others commissioned in slightly different warm colour gradients – offers another movie nod, according to Ayromloo. 'In the really kitschy sci-fi film Total Recall, with Arnold Schwarzenegger, there's a woman with three breasts, and it reminds me of that,' she says.

Continuing in the dining room, a glass-topped table with mirrored legs and matching chairs all reflect a patterned Kyle Bunting area rug to create 'trippy' illusions. A Slinky-esque pendant light helps to resolve the tall ceiling height, while a mirrored-mosaic Space Curtain from Paco Rabanne presents a disco motif that will reappear later.

In terms of spatial reconfiguration, the kitchen received the most attention. Appliances were shifted around to improve the flow, with the stove landing below a cut-glass, mosaic-tiled hood. A long central island is accompanied by 'ice cream parlour' bar stools that could’ve been lifted straight out of The Jetsons, while the distinctive cabinet colour required a compromise. '[The client] wanted a green kitchen but super faded, and I actually wanted a darker green,' Ayromloo shares. 'So we met in the middle, and eventually landed on this desaturated pistachio.'

The same pistachio shade appears in the numerous guest bedrooms across Flavor Paper wallpaper, paired in geometric patterns with silver to match the patent leather bed frames and metallic linens. Meanwhile, the family room at the end of the property received a punchier injection of colour thanks to a painting by Ozzie Juarez sourced from the Frieze art fair, which informed the furniture choices. 'Here, the desaturated colours get a little more saturated,' Ayromloo explains. 'You’re dabbled in colour through the other spaces, and then come to the end of the rainbow.'

For the primary bedroom, a custom white-lacquer and polished-steel bed, silvery carpet, chainmail curtains and more metallic accents reinforce the Barbarella theme. This is taken even further in a stand-out powder room, where original gold mosaic tiles were replaced with silver—evoking the inside of a disco ball. 'We wanted to pay homage, but do our own thing in a way that goes with the rest of the house,' says Ayromloo. 'It's a disco ball party!'

Meanwhile, the mosaic tiles that surround the outdoor bar and lounge are iridescent, creating a mother-of-pearl backdrop for glowing Artemide Alphabet of Light numbers that divulge the home’s address. 'Who doesn't want to be inside of a seashell? We just need a mermaid posted up in there,' Ayromloo says.

A separate pool house was treated similarly, with pink and aqua decor and transparent furniture reminiscent of a life-size Polly Pocket toy. 'It speaks more to the outdoor lounge, with the iridescent pink tile and the blue of the pool,' Ayromloo says. 'We really had fun with it.'

Finishing touches included repainting the huge front doors beyond a pair of koi ponds in a peach melba hue. 'We wanted to go with something not as expected for Palm Springs,' said Ayromloo. 'This colour echoes the koi fish without matching too perfectly.'

The sculptural door handles that resemble Georg Jensen vessels were thought to be original to the home, but when they were removed to be repolished, Ayromloo discovered that they were in fact from a 1990s Ikea designer collaboration. 'That was a really unexpected surprise that really threw us all,' she says.

Now glistening anew, these pulls and a pair of custom vertical lights on either side of the entrance subtly hint at the exuberant sci-fi fantasy that visitors can expect to encounter inside.

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.

With the arrival of autumn, our thoughts can finally turn to more agreeable prospects: ski season. A snowy Courchevel sounds particularly enticing to those who were never made for the heat. If you're anticipating the layers-worthy weather, here's a little escapism: a new luxury ski residence designed by London studio Spinocchia Freund, the Alpine Chalet in Courchevel.

Developed under the eye of founder and creative director Brigitta Spinocchia Freund, the private residence lies in Courchevel village, embodying the resort's alluring blend of convenience and exclusivity, with ski-in, ski-out access alongside proximity to designer boutiques and Michelin-starred restaurants.

Spanning a dizzying 30,000 sq ft, the chalet exists somewhere between a private home and a five-star hotel. Views are, of course, paramount: the residence occupies an impressive mountainside position looking out across snow-covered forests and surrounding alpine peaks.

Inside, the challenge was to balance scale with warmth, one that Spinocchia Freund strikes through the richness of timber, the earthiness of stone and an abundance of woven details. These are design languages frequently drawn upon in alpine interiors, with wood and stone echoing the mountains beyond. But here, refined detailing elevates proceedings from rustic to elegant.

The layout is zoned between communal areas and private retreats. Chief among the latter is the principal suite, conceived as a private apartment within the chalet, complete with bespoke joinery, handcrafted furnishings and generous dressing rooms. Ten further bedrooms each have their own identity, with bespoke linens and individual vignettes framing the surroundings. This thoughtful lack of uniformity reinforces the sense that this is a private home first and a ‘hotel’ second.

Entertainment and relaxation sit at the heart of the Alpine Chalet experience. A vast dining table anchors the home, a natural gathering point for hearty meals; the stylish bar is made for après-ski drinks; and fireplaces warm several lounges, perfect for unwinding after a day on the slopes. And that's only the beginning – the lower ground floor is devoted entirely to leisure, with a traditional bowling alley, a cinema and a games room complete with vintage arcade machines, alongside wellness facilities including a swimming pool, spa and treatment rooms.

For anyone dreaming of the mountains, it's hard to imagine a more persuasive vision of ski season.

When it comes to interiors, Westwing has plenty to offer. As the year draws to a close, the brand’s take on the advent calendar turns the countdown to Christmas into a celebration of design, with a curation of surprises combining pieces from its own collection with an edit of finds from premium partner brands.

It comes in an oversized red-and-white house-shaped box elegantly illustrated by Kera Till, a Munich-based artist whose whimsical motifs have featured on previous collaborations with Westwing. Behind each of the 24 doors is a design-worthy surprise, spanning home decor, tableware and self-care essentials, to be enjoyed during the festive season and beyond.

What's inside the Westwing advent calendar

The collection brings together some of Westwing’s most coveted brands, including Aesop, Audo Copenhagen, Ferm Living, Vinga, DBKD, Philippi, Vondels, WMF, Archivist and Broste. Several pieces have been specially customised for the calendar and aren’t available for individual purchase, adding an exclusive touch to the experience.

Beautiful yet functional, objects have been chosen to inspire elegant spaces and elevate the everyday, reflecting Westwing’s focus on craftsmanship, considered design and timeless appeal. Without giving too much away, last year’s sold-out edition featured a scented candle by Meraki, place card holders by Georg Jensen, and a wood plaid from Westwing's Collection – alongside linen napkins, champagne coupes, Christmas stockings and other festive accessories.

This launch comes at an exciting moment for the company: following its online UK debut earlier this year, Westwing opened its first flagship store in Germany in September, marking another step in its growing presence in the world of home and lifestyle.

As the brand continues to expand its offering for design-conscious consumers across Europe, the calendar captures its vision for shaping trends and taste. Conceived to be gifted or enjoyed as a daily discovery, it is a considered way to round off the year in style.

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

Welcome to Wallpaper’s video series, ‘Work in Process’, where we delve into the creative methodology of today’s most inspiring artists and creators. For this episode, we head to Object of Common Interest's workshop to discover what a day in the life looks like at an award-winning studio's space for experimentation.

The founders at Objects of Common Interest, Eleni Petaloti and Leonidas Trampoukis, never stand still. Sharing an architecture background, they decided early on not to confine themselves to building design, the speciality of their first joint practice, LOT (featured in the Wallpaper* Architects Directory in 2014). Instead, they set up LOT's younger sibling – their now-renowned design outlet Objects of Common Interest, in New York in 2016. Splitting their time between their native Greece and their current base in New York, they swiftly and boldly expanded into the world of product and installation.

International recognition soon followed (including being named Wallpaper* Design Awards Designers of the Year 2022), and the pair now find themselves at the forefront of the design world, a position that developed organically and that they don't take for granted. Did they rest on their laurels? They did not. Their resin workshop in Greece, which opened its doors in 2022, is proof of that.

Step inside Objects of Common Interest's Piraeus workshop

Petaloti and Trampoukis launched their resin fabrication workshop in the Athenean port of Piraeus as a physical extension of their commitment to 'artisanal craftsmanship and human-centred design’. Its manifestation in the two-storey, 800 sq m industrial building it currently occupies behind an unassuming – if not slightly mysterious – blank wall came to be thanks to a series of unplanned, and possibly unexpected, events.

Master craftsman and artisan Ovidiu Colea maintained his own resin workshop in Long Island City, New York, for years, and a chance meeting with Petaloti inspired an interesting possibility. Looking to retire, Colea offered to pass on all his machinery to Objects of Common Interest and relocate it to Piraeus, to be managed by the two designers and their team. It was not something the pair necessarily had on their to-do list but, intrigued – and fuelled by their desire to keep experimenting, making and pushing the boundaries of materials and objects – they jumped at the opportunity.

Taking Colea's knowledge, legacy and techniques and pushing them even further became a fascinating challenge for the duo, who share a deep appreciation for craft and artisanal skills that deserve to be preserved – such as resin craft. One of their goals? To make resin fabrication a circular process, as they test saving and reusing the same material in new moulds. Meanwhile, their manufacturing offering also includes resin types from cast to lucite and mineral powder.

'The method of resin making is simple, but at the same time has a certain complexity,' says Trampoukis. 'During every process, there is an amount of uncertainty. We can be surprised ourselves that something started as [one thing], but that it evolved into something new.'

Objects of Common Interest embraces this unexpectedness, which sits at the core of its approach, and is even enshrined in its name. 'Our name has a certain amount of ambiguity that leads to curiosity,' says Trampoukis.

In a similar way, resin's qualities, such as its fluid nature and malleability, continue to attract the designers – precisely because it's a material not without challenges. Trampoukis explains: 'Resin is a very demanding material because it needs precision and needs the context to be able to be cured properly. Temperature, heat, dust all affect its quality. So there is a certain type of predictability in how you can achieve a perfect result, controlling the environment and controlling the circumstances. But then there is this magic of randomness and the magic of surprise that comes when you open the mould.'

This workshop offers the perfect space for experimentation. '[In] our fabrication studio in Piraeus, it's where we develop our ideas. And it's a place that we can test any crazy idea, fail, and start a new one,' Petaloti says. 'For us, the most exciting moment is the process: starting an idea and seeing it being developed.'

Video credits
Directed by Sebastian Jordahn. Director of photography: Evan Maragkoudakis. Focus puller: Nick Sempos. 2nd AC and data wrangler: Argiris Papatheodorou. Sound recordist: Yiannis Zervakos. Editor: Mikołaj Denysiuk. Colourist: Nielsan Bohl at Selected Works. Sound design: Indústries Sòniques. Production : 10 AM. Prodution manager: Yiannis Anagnostou. Title animation: Berke Yazicioglu. Opening track: Extempore by Musical Meandering

With thanks to Objects of Common Interest

Like the familiarity of your morning jogging route, running-store design sticks to a well-trodden path: a wall of shoes, a jumble of fuel belts and caffeinated goops, and that distinct, fresh-out-of-the-box aroma of synthetic fabrics.

As running has experienced a post-pandemic explosion, though, the culture – and the style– has swiftly evolved. Leading the pack is Paris-based label Satisfy, a running brand known for its routinely sold-out technical apparel as much as its viral marketing activations (say, a mosh pit in the Arizona desert).

This month, Satisfy opened the doors to its first-ever brick-and-mortar storefront in Paris’ historic Marais district. Rather than cashing in on thousands of $140 moth-eaten T-shirts, however, this boutique is selling something else: ‘It’s not really a Satisfy store. It’s Satisfy as a store,’ founder Brice Partouche wrote on Instagram.

To distill Satisfy’s ethos – one driven by performance, design innovation and a winking sense of humour – into an IRL location, Partouche hired Ciguë, a multidisciplinary architecture and design office located just outside of Paris. The firm, founded by three friends in 2003, is known for its innovative takes on tried-and-true typologies, ranging from hotels (see: Ace’s new Athens location) to factories.

‘Satisfy is one of the few brands where we were like, “We should call them,’” Ciguë co-founder Alphonse Sarthout recalls. ‘But Brice called us first.’

Satisfy’s Paris footprint occupies two storefronts on opposite sides of Rue de Saintonge – Supply, which hosts the boutique, and Fuel Station, a pint-sized coffee shop that concocts caffeinated pre- and post-run beverages. ‘The brand has been online for 11 years, and it sells super well, so the main target of the store was not to sell more – it was to sell differently and finally meet the people,’ Sarthout says.

The main store, Satisfy Supply, feels more like an art gallery than a running store. That’s because it’s mostly bare, save for a wall-spanning triptych of the American West by painter Othelo Gervacio. The mural – which depicts rugged buttes and a mustang horse – comes directly from Satisfy’s brand lore, which draws heavily from desert terrain and the kitsch that can accompany it (fringe is a common feature on Satisfy apparel, as are bald eagles). It also serves as Ciguë’s boldest design move: ‘We had the idea of a diorama, like in a museum,’ Sarthout explains.

Against this western backdrop, the designers kept displays to a minimum. Clothing hangs off of suspended stainless steel rods or gridded display racks; shoes are displayed on sculptural wood plinths; and T-shirts are splayed out on custom cast-Zamak alloy slabs, hovering just inches off the ground. ‘So many brands would be like, oh, you kill the strength of the product. How can I buy a $200 T-shirt when it's lying on the floor?’ Sarthout says. ‘But [for us] it's very interesting because it slows down the rhythm of the space – you almost feel like sitting, and bending down to touch the products.’

There are other retail unorthodoxies. For instance, there is a conspicuous absence of explanatory text touting the technical qualities of shoes and clothing; the choice encourages customers to ask questions of sales associates, who underwent months of product knowledge training. ‘It brings back the importance of hosting and the team working there,’ Sarthout says. The same thought went into the changing rooms, which are clad in knotty timber (not unlike an old school diner you might stumble into on Route 66) and feature linen curtains. The store even features a custom scent. ‘It makes you feel like you’re in a luxury fashion store and not in a running store,’ the designer adds.

Satisfy Fuel Station, the coffee bar, has a similarly minimal feel, akin to American gas stations and hardware stores. The idea is for runners and shoppers alike to achieve the coveted endorphin-driven ‘runner’s high’ with hydrating, energising or carb-rich concoctions (the menu is helpfully organised into ‘pre-high’ and ‘post-high’ categories). The western imagery continues on the shiny espresso machine. ‘Here you can just come in, get a drink, and not necessarily buy something [at the store], so it becomes a gathering space,’ Sarthout says. Already, the Fuel Station has become the de facto meeting point for Satisfy’s regular ‘LSD’ club runs – runners'-speak for ‘Long Slow Distances.’

Judging by the queues that regularly form outside the shop, it’s likely that there are more Satisfy locations in store (a spokesperson said the brand is currently exploring opportunities for expansion). And even if Satisfy’s vibe (or price tag) isn’t aligned with your personal running aesthetic, the label is demonstrating a principle that other athletic brands would be wise to note: create community or eat dust.

Known as the ‘king of chairs’, Hans J Wegner (1914–2007) created more than 500 chairs over the course of his six-decade career, including some of the most recognisable designs of the 20th century. More than a century after his birth, many remain in production and his influence is almost omnipresent in the world of design.

A trained cabinetmaker with an exceptional understanding of wood, construction and the human body, Wegner approached the chair as a problem that could be endlessly reconsidered and refined. ‘If only you could design just one good chair in your life,’ he once said. ‘But you simply cannot.’

Who was Hans J Wegner?

Born 2nd April 1914, Hans Wegner came from humble beginnings. The the son of a cobbler, he grew up in Tønder, southern Denmark, where a career as a furniture designer seemed unlikely. However, he showed early artistic promise as a child, reportedly drawing and creating paper cuttings before he could even walk.

At 14, he began an apprenticeship with master cabinetmaker HF Stahlberg, where he learnt traditional joinery, developed what he called ‘a feeling for wood’, and made his first chair aged 15.

A visit to the Copenhagen Cabinetmakers’ Guild Exhibition in 1935 proved pivotal. Seeing master cabinetmakers collaborate with architects and designers including Kaare Klint convinced Wegner to pursue furniture design.

He went on to study at the School of Arts and Crafts in Copenhagen under Orla Mølgaard-Nielsen, where his remarkable drawing ability reportedly led teachers to suggest he become a portrait painter.

In 1938, Wegner exhibited his first design at the Cabinetmakers’ Guild Exhibition and was recruited by Arne Jacobsen and Erik Møller to design furniture for Aarhus City Hall. He also began an important collaboration with master cabinetmaker Johannes Hansen and worked briefly with his former classmate Børge Mogensen at FDB Møbler, producing affordable, functional furniture for the Danish cooperative.

Wegner opened his own studio in Aarhus in 1943, spending much of his time at the local library studying furniture from different cultures and periods.

Hans J Wegner and the rise of Danish modern

In a book by Danish furniture designer Ole Wanscher, Wegner encountered images of Danish merchants seated in Chinese Ming dynasty horseshoe-back chairs, distinguished by a continuous curved rail forming the backrest and arms. Rather than simply imitating them, he distilled their construction and reinterpreted the historic archetype through the lens of Danish craftsmanship. The result was the China Chair, produced by Fritz Hansen in 1944, which established an approach he would refine throughout his career: studying earlier furniture traditions, identifying their structural logic and reducing them to their essential elements.

That same year, he designed Peter’s Chair as a christening gift for Børge Mogensen’s son, using four pieces of wood that fitted together without adhesive or fasteners. In 1947 came the Peacock Chair, created with Johannes Hansen and inspired by the British Windsor chair. Its fan of ash spindles was flattened where the sitter’s shoulder blades met the back – an ergonomic refinement that appeared decorative. Finn Juhl likened the effect to a peacock’s plumage, giving the chair its name.

It was a more restrained design, created for the 1949 Cabinetmakers’ Guild Exhibition, that transformed Wegner’s international reputation. Reportedly conceived in 48 hours, the Round Chair featured four legs, a seat and a continuous backrest and arm rail. Initially overshadowed by Wegner’s other more experimental plywood design, it caught the attention of visiting American journalists. Interiors magazine described it as ‘the most beautiful chair in the world’, prompting orders beyond the capacity of Johannes Hansen’s small workshop. Wegner nevertheless resisted moving production to the United States, maintaining that the chair had been designed for Danish craftsmen.

The same year brought the Wishbone Chair, the final and most commercially successful design in Wegner’s China Chair series. Carl Hansen & Søn began production in 1950 and continues to make it today. In 1951, Ivan Olesen established Salesco, bringing five of Wegner’s preferred manufacturers together under one sales and marketing organisation and helping his furniture reach an international audience. Recognition followed, including the Grand Prix at the 1951 Milan Triennale and the inaugural Lunning Prize that same year.

That audience expanded dramatically in 1960, when John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon sat in Round Chairs during the first televised US presidential debate. Seen by some 70 million viewers, the broadcast introduced Wegner’s work to millions of Americans and earned the design its enduring nickname, ‘The Chair’.

Craft, comfort and experimentation

In 1950, while at the beach with his children, Wegner reportedly made a chair out of sand to explore the ideal reclining angle. The resulting Flag Halyard Chair was unlike anything he had previously made: a stainless-steel frame wrapped in 240 metres of flag rope, topped with an Icelandic sheepskin and leather neck cushion.

Conceived as an homage to modernists including Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer, it also proved that his finesse extended beyond wood.

Continuing this experimentative and playful streak, the enveloping Papa Bear Chair followed in 1951, while the Valet Chair (1953) brought ingenuity to the everyday problem of storing clothes at bedtime. Its back rail doubled as a coat hanger; the hinged seat flipped upwards to hold trousers and concealed a compartment for small possessions. King Frederik IX of Denmark ordered ten.

The 1950s were Wegner’s most productive decade. Alongside chairs, he designed tables, desks, sideboards and sofas in a wide range of materials and styles. He made almost all his prototypes in his studio and tested them at home, looking for weaknesses and opportunities for improvement before they entered production. Although he experimented freely, he remained devoted to natural materials, selecting timber so that its grain contributed to the design.

In 1960, he debuted the Ox Chair, a humorous leather-and-chrome design reportedly inspired by Picasso’s paintings of bulls. Available with or without horns, it was said to be Wegner’s personal favourite. ‘We must take care that everything doesn’t get so dreadfully serious,’ he said. ‘We must play, but play seriously.’

Later work and enduring legacy

By the 1960s and 1970s, new plastics, Pop and postmodernism had pushed Danish modern out of fashion. Wegner continued designing, however, and his relationship with the family-run workshop PP Møbler became increasingly important. When Johannes Hansen’s workshop closed, PP Møbler assumed production of many of his most significant designs.

The changing reception of the Shell Chair encapsulates Wegner’s later career. Introduced in 1963, the three-legged plywood chair grew out of experiments begun 15 years earlier, but its wing-like seat and curved backrest proved too radical for the contemporary market. When Carl Hansen & Søn reintroduced it in 1998, a new generation embraced its sculptural form, transforming a commercial failure into one of Wegner’s most celebrated designs.

Wegner lived to see the revival of Danish modern and received honours including the Danish Furniture Prize, the CF Hansen Medal and an honorary doctorate from London’s Royal College of Art.

For Wegner, furniture was never complete until there was human interaction: ‘A chair is only finished when someone sits in it.’ His constant process of testing and refinement continued throughout his career. As he put it, ‘The good chair is a task one is never completely done with.’

He died in Copenhagen in 2007, aged 92, leaving an influence that lives on as much in his methods as in the objects themselves. Of the 500 different chairs he designed during the course of his lifetime, a over 100 designs reached mass production. In April of this year, Museum Wegner opened to the public in his birthplace of Tønder, Denmark .The opening marks the first phase of a larger museum project dedicated to his life's work.

In the multifaceted world of Faye Toogood, clay is a material that is both recurring and beautifully shaped by the designer's hands. Her propensity for hand-prototyping is well-documented throughout her practice, and every project begins with an intimate act of creation before developing into fully fledged products. It is surprising, then, that throughout her career, the British designer had not yet tried her hand (literally and figuratively) at making tiles. 'As a studio, we have been asked by a few tile companies to collaborate,' the designer admitted earlier this week. 'But I turned them down in the hope that maybe one day I would get a call from Mutina.'

That call eventually arrived, and the pair just unveiled their first collaboration at the company's HQ in Fiorano Modenese, Italy. Titled 'Faces & Figures', the collection speaks the visual language of clay through a dual approach that is both discreet and boldly figurative, a testament to the designer's ability to shape her thinking into three-dimensional expressions.

‘Faces & Figures’ tiles by Faye Toogood for Mutina

The starting point for Toogood was a question: 'How can I challenge the industrial nature of Mutina to create something that felt like it had been touched by the hand?'

Hailing from Italy's centre for ceramic tile production, Mutina has perhaps been the company that most successfully continued the industrial tradition of its manufacturing district while opening up its portfolio to some of the most celebrated creative voices of today. From Patricia Urquiola to Barber Osgerby and Nathalie Du Pasquier, Mutina's collaborators have had a go at reinventing the tile both functionally and creatively.

The project started in Toogood's London studio, as the designer began modelling with clay, cardboard, paper and canvas – her usual palette of materials that helped visualise the collection's direction. The result is a full toolkit for creating a space: three sizes of plain geometric tiles in four colours (chalk, sand, clay and mud), each available in glossy and matt finishes, and two matching organic forms in a brushed matte clay effect, as well as a series of extruded bricks (bricks being a staple of Mutina, which has reinvented the genre creatively).

The human body was at the heart of Toogood's exploration, and the resulting collection features the subtle warmth of clay and the bolder expression of anthropomorphous forms. Sculptural eyes, ears, mouths, noses and nipples peek out from tiles, animating their surfaces, and serve as a complement to the more neutral pieces.

Although every tile in the collection is the result of Mutina's industrial process, they appear handmade, as if they just came out of the designer's studio. The idea is for every element to be able to be mixed and matched in both traditional and unexpected patterns, the more human elements able to insert themselves into the visual conversation quite seamlessly. 'Maybe the fact that I didn't study design means that I'm able to open a door without even realising I'm breaking a boundary, because I haven't had those boundaries and lines created for me,' notes Toogood, who started her career as a magazine editor before pivoting towards design.

It is an admirable feat, to be able to create something that is so warm and personal ('There couldn't more of me in this collection,' Toogood admits) and yet replicable on an industrial scale to be used effectively and efficiently to design a space. 'Could we create, on an industrial scale, something that generally felt like it just came out of my studio?' she asked earlier on in the process, and the answer is an astounding yes.

'When I think about a chair, I think about how the body connects to the chair, when I make a table, I think of how the legs sit underneath the table. It's all about how the body connects to furniture and objects,' Toogood shares of her process. 'And I wanted to do very much the same with a surface, so it couldn't be only geometric. I wanted it to feel like it had actually had a human touch.'

In west London, housed in a historic 1910 building, designer Rose Uniacke’s latest project unfolds. She worked closely with her client, a collector with an eye for art, who wanted to improve the apartment conversion and create a comfortable London base for him and his family.

The 3,111 sq ft space offered more than a design project, as Uniacke – who has previously shown Wallpaper* around her own London home – leaned into the building’s architectural context, encompassing bespoke joinery and lighting design. ‘While the interior is now fairly contemporary, with minimal detailing, the original architecture retains a strong presence, particularly through the bold arched windows that frame beautiful, expansive views,' Uniacke tells Wallpaper*. She sourced rare midcentury works by Jean Prouvé, Charlotte Perriand and Jean Dunand, and paired these with contemporary elements.

Uniacke stresses that it was important for the home not to feel like a gallery. ‘I wanted the spaces to feel considered and layered. The room should always come first, with the beautiful things within it coming second. The overall feeling needed to be comfortable, welcoming and light, with a sense of ease.’

Artworks from the client's collection were chosen to anchor colour and mood, and Uniacke added furniture and objects of equal standing, inspired by the initial conversations she had with her client. ‘It led me towards collectible French furniture of the 20th century and pieces from contemporary Japan, alongside my own designs from the Rose Uniacke Editions range, and I wanted to include some pieces from antiquity. As always, the pieces led the design.’

Uniacke explains that fabrics and paints are always in response to light, objects and furniture. For this project, the palette shifts from white and pale blue-green through to soft pink and dark red. Fabrics are used on the bedroom walls, adding a sense of softness.

‘I like the way there is often a lightness to 20th-century design that worked particularly well in this apartment, alongside the large windows and open views. The Jean Prouvé bookcase in the main sitting room was an important starting point,' she notes. 'It was made in 1930 as a special commission and is an important and unique piece, complete with its original paint. It was the right scale, the perfect colour, and had an interesting feeling of airiness that felt completely at home next to the windows. It became an anchor for the room and, in many ways, the driver for everything around it.'

The rest of the room features treasures such as an Egyptian carved tablet from 332–30 BC, depicting Ptolemy III and retaining traces of its striking original paint, a ceramic Pyramide by Jacques and Dani Ruelland from 1980, and a Jean Prouvé wall light from 1950. ‘I like these kinds of echoes and conversations between pieces, particularly when they cross periods and cultures. The overall feeling is one of elegant informality and ease.’

Although the home is full of collectible pieces, it is important for the space to feel comfortable and welcoming – even if there are significant art pieces, the atmosphere doesn't feel too precious. However, in a world full of visual noise, how does one know when a room is done? For Uniacke, the answer is simple: ‘I don’t think a room is ever done, is it? It might achieve a certain balance that makes it ready to be lived in, but rooms are always going to evolve. In this case, being the home of a collector, things come into the collection and move around. Rooms change over time with the people who live in them. I’m excited by rooms that continue to evolve; it’s part of the fun.’

roseuniacke.com

Midcentury Italian lighting design spans as many genres as one can imagine, with a range of creative expressions that expand on the functional mission of lighting design. From the overly decorative to the sci-fi inspired, from the sculptural to the purely industrial, Italian lighting design has shaped the history of domestic objects in an impactful, long-lasting way.

The work of Venetian lighting designer Carlo Nason sits at the more abstract, experimental end of this spectrum. A Murano glass expert that operated at the cusp of art and design, his work explored the sculptural creative possibilities of glass.

'Carlo Nason grew up with an extraordinary knowledge of Murano glassmaking, but he was not defined by its traditions,' says Marie Kristine Schmidt, CEO of Danish design company Gubi. This month, the Scandinavian company adds Nason to their ever-growing portfolio of design reissues, with a collaboration that brings back the designer's ‘LT305’ lamp, now re-named the ‘Lotus’ lamp after the evocative nickname used by collectors.

One thing Schmidt admired in Nason's work was his independence. 'He looked beyond Murano to industrial design in Milan, Northern European modernism, photography, and the world around him, and brought those influences into his work,' she told Wallpaper*. 'There is an intelligence and practicality to his designs that I find very compelling. He thought about how a lamp was made, assembled, cleaned, and used, without compromising the beauty of the object. Nothing feels unnecessary.'

Nason died in May 2026, so the timing of the launch, which was developed in close collaboration with the designer and his son Alberto Nason, feels momentous. 'It gives us the opportunity to celebrate his work and bring renewed attention to a designer with a very independent and original point of view,' adds Schmidt.

Carlo Nason's ‘Lotus’ lamp reissued by Gubi

The ‘Lotus’ lamp was originally created in 1969, and embodies Nason's curiosity and prowess with glass. Through his work, he was instrumental in putting Murano on the global design map and among his most creative glass experiments are lighting objects that push the boundaries of the material with explosive forms that appear futuristic and are technically challenging.

The ‘Lotus’ lamp is a fitting example: only produced for a few years after its creation, it was originally part of Nason's exploration of multi-layered glass compositions within an object (a recurring theme of his vast oeuvre).

'The “Lotus” looks simple, but making it is incredibly demanding,' notes Schmidt, describing the intricate manufacturing process behind the piece. 'Each of the four glass shades is mouth-blown individually, and they have to fit together with great precision. Inside, a compact steel structure carries the weight of the glass, keeps exactly the right distance between each layer, and hides the light source.

Then you have the pulegoso glass, with thousands of tiny bubbles and natural variations created during the making. So there is a very precise construction, but you can still see the hand of the maker. No two lamps are completely identical. That balance between precision, craftsmanship, and individuality is what makes the “Lotus” so special.'

The lamp joins a collection that includes archival designs from some of modern history's most celebrated voices, from Gabriella Crespi to Pierre Paulin, as well as regular contemporary commissions to the likes of Gam Fratesi and Space Copenhagen. It is an interesting approach for a Scandinavian design brand, to expand its portfolio beyond its geographical confines and playing an integral part in the preservation of some of the past century's most important creative moments.

'For Gubi, being historically important is not enough reason to bring a design back. It has to be relevant today,' explains Schmidt. 'We have to believe that people will want to live with it now, not simply admire it because of its history. The “Lotus” is a good example. Carlo Nason designed it more than 50 years ago, but the way he thought about lighting feels very relevant today. Bringing back the Lotus is also about telling Nason's story and introducing his work to a new audience. That is an important part of Gubi's role when we reintroduce historical design.'

gubi.com

With their steel profiles, flush cabinetry and marble tops, the low-profile credenzas and elegant desks designed by Florence Knoll in 1961 revolutionised office design, consigning traditional clunky filing cabinets and heavy bureaux to the past. Sixty-five years later, a new collection by Sam Chermayeff for Knoll allows these classics out of the executive suite and into the home, where they have increasingly been put to use over the last decades.

‘If Florence Knoll was still around, she would’ve responded to the current climate by reshaping her own system to fit domestic needs. Back then, people didn’t put their socks in a Florence Knoll credenza, but she would’ve been like, “of course people do that now”,’ says Chermayeff, whose new ‘Knoll Chermayeff Storage’ collection includes a bookcase, bar cabinet, console, side table and coffee table.

Florence Knoll’s ‘2544’ credenza was inspired by her former mentor Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s minimalist principles, and Chermayeff has taken a similarly architectural approach to his debut collection for Knoll, pairing bold precision with various finishes that allow for personalisation.

The American-born, Berlin-based architect has a strong personal connection to Knoll: his father, Ivan Chermayeff, led Knoll’s rebranding and graphic standards in the early 1990s with Tom Geismar (and also designed the MoMA logo). ‘In my memory, there was a Florence Knoll credenza in my father’s office,’ he says. ‘I remember Massimo and Lella Vignelli also had one in their office/house. In both cases, I remember red things on top of them and flowers. My son will probably remember the toys in the new ones that we have.’

Chermayeff knew that a light touch was all that was needed to adapt Florence Knoll’s original modernist designs to our more flexible contemporary world. From the tall open shelving to the console tables with push-to-open drawers, each piece clearly belongs to the Florence Knoll lineage – an evolution, not a revolution. All are fully finished on all sides, with particular attention spent on their silhouettes, so the pieces are free to float and take centre stage in the room.

There are plenty of colours and finishes to choose from: the side table, for example, is available in five types of veneers, ranging from Ebonized ash to Oxford walnut, as well as deep red, green, and blue lacquers – plus seven different types of marble (either gloss- or satin-coated) for the tabletop. The bookcase is also available with clear class shelves, while the bar, which features a mirrored top half with glass rack, is particularly striking in Dark Red Ultra.

‘‎Florence Knoll was a genius in how she used materials,’ says Chermayeff. ‘I like to follow her way, and I think it's best when the top is lighter and the body is darker – but not too dark. In my mind, the most classic combination is chrome, maple veneer, and white marble. You get that feeling with many of the colours and light tops. But then there’s black stone, which really has something and is lovely to live with.

‘I love this system for being able to withstand a lot of different expressions,’ he continues. ‘It’s generous in that way, and even though I took it on a little walk, it’s still Florence’s thing.’

The ‘Knoll Chermayeff Storage’ collection will be available in the UK and EU in November 2026.

New York has no shortage of venues to view great 20th- and 21st-century design – the Cooper Hewitt, the Brooklyn Museum, the Met and the Museum of Arts and Design, to name just a few.

Less common, though, are places to view rarities, prototypes and other design B-sides in an archive-like atmosphere, outside the constraints of an exhibition thesis or a permanent collection. The co-founders of R & Company – one of America’s most esteemed collectible design galleries – are looking to change that by opening their long-time storage facility Building 86 to the public for the first time.

The 16,000 sq ft warehouse, located in a former machine shop in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, housed the gallery’s permanent collection, designer archives, photo studio and administrative spaces for the better part of a decade. But co-founders Zesty Meyers and Evan Snyderman recognised an opportunity: ‘The idea of being able to share 30 years of collecting with our clientele seemed like a really great idea,’ says Snyderman. ‘Everything in this building has a story.’

Building 86 will be open, by appointment, to collectors, designers and the public alike. Items are displayed on towering shelves, in no particular order, allowing visitors to wander and discover. Here, you may bump into a work by a modernist titan. There, you may encounter a contemporary designer you’ve never heard of. It’s all meant to foster a sense of serendipity and discovery. ‘We have things from France, we have things from Denmark. We have things we’ve owned, collected, wanted, lived with, cherished, loved, found – you name it,’ says Meyers.

‘A bigger thing,’ he adds, ‘is we just get to have fun.’

Below, Snyderman and Meyers share their 10 favourite finds.

1. 'Sluggo' lamp by Wendell Castle

This is one of my favourite things of all time. Most people know Wendell for his work in wood. I sort of brought him out of retirement in a way about 25 years ago when he didn't have a gallery representing him. One of the things I found most interesting was this series of work that he created in the late ‘60s to early ‘70s. It was a very short period of time, about four years, that he took a break from working in wood and switched to working in fibreglass because he was inspired by what was happening with the Italian Radical Design movement through a show at MoMA called The New Domestic Landscape. He got tired, from what he told me, of ‘everything being brown.’ He wanted colour. Wendell also comes out of hot rod culture – he built racing muscle cars and things like that. He was always a car fanatic. This lamp is sparkly blue – It's like that hot rod color. He was also looking a the cartoons of the 1940s, like Sluggo from the Nancy comic strip. That has nothing to do with the shape of this. It's just like this odd, surrealist object, and it looks like a slug. It sits on the floor. It's a lamp, which only illuminates this little strip of clear plexiglass at the bottom, so it really doesn't function as a lamp – it just glows. The whole thing is absurd, and that's what I love about it. – Evan Snyderman

2. Modular cat toy by Verner Panton for Naef

[This cat] was produced by Naef, a great Swiss toy maker. But the thing is, you have to build and put it together by interlocking these six-sided cubes with these plastic clips, and it's really, really hard. So it failed as a product; it was supposed to be marketed to kids and the adults couldn't even put it together – it takes hours, and they're very fragile. It's harder than Lego, and so in a couple of years they stopped producing them. We have original boxes. We have original instructions. Obviously, if you can make the cat, you can make another shape. They came in different colours. Evan and I have been buying them for years, and we keep buying them if we find them – they’re that rare. We have sold them too and we've tried to buy them back. We have clients that bought them from us even in the '90s, and we've tried to buy back, and they won't sell them to us. No one wants to get rid of the good Verner Panton. – Zesty Meyers

3. 'African' Chair by Garry Knox Bennett

This chair is wild, and he was wild. Garry Knox Bennett was one of the early American studio furniture makers. He's a contemporary of Wendell Castle. He lived in Oakland, California. Coming out of school, he made very elaborate roach clips, like in the ‘60s, and jewellery. What he was selling became popular, and that's when he went into the furniture-making world. You can't see it in the photo, but there are these silver hand-hammered little nails that are on top of the seat. So it's very much like a combination of furniture and jewellery. A lot of his work has this kind of detail, this level of like very fine metalwork combined with eccentric, wild woodwork. He was quite a character. Most people don't know who he is, but I just find it really exciting. This is my own personal chair. I used it in my office for many, many years, but I just retired it because I didn't want to destroy it. – ES

4. Flat file by Poul Kjaerholm

Paul Kjaerholm mostly worked in Denmark, that was the country of wood carving, and he was a teacher at the Royal Academy. I don't know if he coined the term, but he called himself an interior architect. I've never seen a flat file executed by Danish cabinet makers. And the handles are so beautiful, and everyone that's ever bought them from us are only art collectors. And it makes so much sense. The handles are pine. Danish cabinet makers were able to do this. – ZM

5. 'Paramount' lamp by Lapo Binazzi

Lapo Binazzi is my favourite of the Italian Radical designers. He's the coolest person. He lives in Florence. He's 85 or so years-old now. He started Grupo UFO and was one of the most radical of the Radical designers. He did this series of lamps between 1972 and 1973. They were statements about Hollywood movie companies and the American dream. This one is about Paramount, with the mountain from the Paramount logo. This is part of our permanent collection. The base is ceramic, handmade by him, and then the umbrella is custom-made by an umbrella maker in Florence. He works with all these old artisans and people in the neighbourhood. These craftsmen are going away – like the handmade umbrella, this kind of thing doesn't really exist anymore. As pop-y and and funny as they are, Lapo’s lamps are also completely crafted. – ES

6. Model 4088 table lamp by Joe Colombo for Kartell

The top part of this lamp turns. This is a lamp in my own personal collection, but I've never had in one of my houses – it's just been in a box. There's a second version of that lamp that's much shorter, that was more heavily produced. I've only ever seen a couple of [this model] in my lifetime, so I bought it. I'm a giant fan of Joe Colombo. I'm a giant fan of the late '60s into the '70s and that sort of pop era. I love that he was that far ahead of his time, and it's great that we can put it in a vignette. – ZM

7. 'Codependent' light fixture by Katie Stout