The Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026 are our latest annual nod to the best of the best in design across the worlds of architecture, art, beauty, fashion, interiors, tech and travel, as selected by our discerning global team. Find all the winners listed here, as featured in greater depth in the February print issue of Wallpaper* and on Wallpaper.com.

Architecture

As Architects of the Year, we honoured three change makers and, keen to tap into a mood of hope and optimism in architecture, asked each of them to tell us about a building that makes them smile:

• Je Ahn (Studio Weave), UK
• Lina Ghotmeh, France
• Marina Tabassum, Bangladesh

Meanwhile, our Life-Enhancer of the Year is an architecturally hot Finnish island sauna that we all wish was ours – Puusauna by Jaakko Torvinen is a quiet ode to wood and includes whole tree trunks in its structure.

Our architectural awards would not be complete without a clutch of amazing houses. These three innovative properties all win a nod for Best Use of Material, each making use of earth construction techniques.

• Sombra de Santa Fe, US, by Dust Architects
• Beit Bin Nouh, Saudi Arabia, by Shahira Fahmy
• Rammed Earth House, UK, by Tuckey Design Studio

Art & Culture

Klára Hosnedlová, a Czech artist known for creating spellbinding immersive worlds, is Best Dreamscaper – we spoke with her ahead of her new show, at White Cube Bermondsey in London (11 February – 29 March 2026).

Design & Interiors

Meet our Designer of the Year, Willo Perron, the multi-hyphenate creative behind spectacular cultural moments – from Beyoncé’s Western-themed Cowboy Carter tour and Rihanna’s floating-stage performance at the 2023 Super Bowl to mesmerising Chanel sets – and sublime sofas to boot.

Also defining spaces, our collection of Best Scene Stealers encompasses the year’s space-defining furniture designs – from new items to revered reissues – photographed in a shoot styled by head of interiors Olly Mason. The full list features:

• ‘Fregio L’ sculpture, by Tipstudio, for Visionnaire
• ‘Inga’ chair, by Roberto Lazzeroni, for Baxter
• Tiles, by Muller Van Severen, for Bleo. Flat interior paint, by Tonester
• ’Les Bijoux’ tiles, by Florim
• ‘Topan’ lamp, by Verner Panton, for &Tradition
• ‘Libra’ chair, by Giampiero Tagliaferri, for Minotti
• ‘Grace 05 Octagon’ rug, by Nordic Knots
• Matte paint, by Muller Van Severen, for Bleo
• ‘Moonbeam’ lamp, by Six N Five, for Poltrona Frau
• ‘Andrée’ side table, by Hannes Peer, for Minotti
• ‘Bandra’ moiré fabric, by Dieter Vander Velpen, for Zinc Textile
• ‘Magnitude Grand’ vase, by Lalique
• ‘Loungescape’ armchair, by Antonio Citterio, for Flexform
• ‘Bolda’ lamp, by Kwangho Lee, for Lambert & Fils
• After’ chair, by Michael Anastassiades, for Fritz Hansen, from Chaplins
• ‘Treflo’ dining table, by Ronan Bouroullec, for Cassina
• ‘Coppie di Fatto Black’ vessels, by Nathalie Du Pasquier, for Mutina Editions
• ‘Athina’ table lamp, by Romain Basile Petrot
• ‘James’ fabric; ‘Scratch’ fabric, both by Formafantasma, for Rubelli
• ‘Doto’ rug, part of the ‘Cyprinus’ collection, by Jan Kath
• ‘2093’ chandelier, by Garance Vallée, for Monde Singulier
• ‘Mystone Berici’ tiles, by Marazzi
• ‘Owen’ armchair, by Jean-Marie Massaud, for Poliform
• ‘Stone’ tiles, by Florim
• ‘Tower’ speaker, by Hypnos
• ‘Tact III’ mirror, by Objects of Common Interest, for Tacchini
• ‘Bandra’ moiré fabric, by Dieter Vander Velpen, for Zinc Textile
• ‘Monk’ chair, by Afra and Tobia Scarpa, for Molteni & C

The Wallpaper* Design Awards embrace the whimsical as much as the wonderful. Best Paws goes to this ‘Asator’ teddy bear, by Raf Simons, for Kvadrat and Steiff.

A lot less cuddly but each chosen for their striking, characterful aesthetic, explore our Best Bold Moves, spanning ceramic vessels, a freaky stool and surreal seating.

Designer Stephen Burks and cultural director Malika Leiper have reshaped their lives during the past year, around creative residencies and collaborative projects in Montana, Senegal, Alabama, the Democratic Republic of Congo and rural Japan, using each location as a testing ground for new ways of working at the intersection of craft, community and industry. We acknowledge the pair as Best Helping Hands and explore the fruits of their various projects.

Turning to design criticism, we applaud David Michon for his Substack newsletter For Scale. Quite unlike any formal form of design publishing at the moment, it’s razor sharp, loud, funny, casual, chaotic and intellectual, all at the same time. Its readers revel in its riotously unfettered freedom to tell it like it is. Hats off to our Best Takedown.

In playful mood, our Best Game Changer award goes to Hermès for bringing contemporary cool to the classic pool table, in matte leather with curved lacquered legs and hornbeam and leather cues.

A reimagined Porsche 964 Targa, featuring an oiled teak handbrake, machined brass dials, and Connolly leather interiors, earns Best Ride Pimp for design duo David/Nicolas.

Watches & Jewellery

Dazzled by these ‘Flame’ earrings by Boghossian, where green jadeite is teased into sculptural curves that cradle vivid green tourmalines, we award them Best Gem Wizardry.

A ‘no-hands’ watch, the Ur-Freak by Ulysse Nardin and Urwerk, reimagines a 2001 timepiece and wins Best Time Warp in the process.

Travel

City of the Year goes to Detroit – once a byword for urban distress, the Motor City is undergoing a fresh wave of regeneration, driven by progressive developers, design distinctions and dynamic investment. Detroit looks different these days. Its grand but long-abandoned buildings – vestiges of a bygone era when the automobile was king – have been transformed into galleries and hotels. New glistening towers soar high above the historic skyline. Once blighted neighbourhoods have been redeveloped to keep existing residents while attracting new ones – 12,500 in 2024, according to US census data. There’s a sense of optimism here that’s hard to find anywhere else in the US.

More travel inspiration comes from Orient Express, which wins Best Reinvention as the company best known for luxury train travel enters a decisive new chapter that includes the opening of its first hotel – La Minerva in Rome – and an upcoming yacht.

As for hospitality hot spots of the year, head to new hotel Capella Taipei, designed by André Fu, our Best Opening; and Club Bâtard, Best Social Hub, offering drinking and dining across three floors of Hong Kong’s Pedder building.

Host of the Year goes to Sharan Pasricha, who founded the phenomenally successful hospitality conglomerate Ennismore back in 2011 (brands including Mondrian, The Hoxton and Delano, with its soon-to-reopen Delano Miami Beach hotel, are under its umbrella), and can't stop thinking about ways to upgrade how we live, work and connect. We met him to discuss hospitality’s way forward, at his London private members’ club, Maison Estelle, part of a brand that also includes Estelle Manor hotel in Oxfordshire.

Beauty

Discover the year’s five most transformative beauty launches, designed to elevate dressing tables and daily routines.

The Ziip Halo – our Best Buzz – is a sleek, handheld device that offers the transformative effects of a high-end salon facial in the comfort of your home. It employs gentle microcurrents that promise to firm skin, diminish wrinkles, boost collagen, reduce acne and even out skin tone.

Chanel’s Le Lift under-eye patches – Best Time Turner – are formulated with hyaluronic acid and the brand’s signature eye complex to reduce dark circles and puffiness, while also reducing the appearance of discolouration and wrinkles with prolonged use.

Hermès Beauty’s Plein Air foundation – our Best Base Line – the brand’s first of its kind, is formulated with an 82 per cent skincare base designed to hydrate, nourish and plump the appearance of skin with continual use.

Our Best Tool Kit? Victoria Beckham’s line of make-up brushes are inspired by calligraphy tools and feature synthetic bristles specially developed for exceptional pick-up and easy application of everything from foundation and eyeshadow to lipstick and eyeliner.

For a fragrant finish to our best beauty launches, Loewe’s Crafted Collection is a line of three perfumes – our Best Note Takers – that each takes a commonly used note in perfumery (oud, iris and vanilla) and transforms it into an idiosyncratic new scent.

On another note, we look to Comme des Garçons Parfums and Vaquera for our Best Scent Throwback. Classique Perdu is a fragrance that transports us back in time – drawing on 1990 fashion magazine perfume sample, the nostalgic fruitiness of cheap shampoos, and ‘the metallic sparkle of a summer fountain’.

Fashion

We single out the standout looks of the S/S 2026 collections, with Best Show Case, in a shoot by photographer Sébastien Giraud and Wallpaper* creative director Jason Hughes. Our winners are:

• Ferragamo
• Givenchy by Sarah Burton
• Prada
• Phoebe Philo
• Jil Sander
• Gucci
• Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello
• Versace
• Alaïa
• Celine
• Dior
• Maison Margiela
• Chanel 

Cult London fashion store Jake’s – founded by Jake Burt, one half of fashion label Stefan Cooke – is our Best Retail Therapy. Standing apart for its refreshingly irreverent and relaxed approach, it’s as much a hangout as a store, and each Saturday, friends and customers come to chat, drink free coffee and eat the latest pastel-coloured confections made by pastry chef-cum-model Louis Thompson.

Also among our fashion awards is a show invitation that set our pulses racing. Guests were summoned to Pierpaolo Piccioli’s debut, S/S 2026 runway show as creative director of Balenciaga by a cassette player that played a recording of a beating heart – our favourite invitation of the year and Best Heartwarmer.

Best Party Bag, meanwhile, goes to Louis Vuitton for its ‘Speedy 20 Monogram Origine’, marking the 130th anniversary of the house’s monogram. The celebratory bag sees the mongram rendered in its original form on Louis Vuitton’s contemporary linen-and-cotton canvas.

From Prada comes the Best Sartorial Shapeshifter, a striking mash-up resulting in a hybrid accessory that’s part eyewear, part jewellery, as crystal flowers adorn a pair of metal-framed glasses.

Tech

Of all the tech that crossed our desks in the past year, nothing was more appreciated than the Paper Pro Move from the Norwegian digital paper brand reMarkable. Combining handwriting recognition with a variety of pen and brush types, easy cutting, pasting and resizing, and a handy suite of geometric shape tools, reMarkables are a dream to use – making this our Best Pocket Rocket.

The Wallpaper* Design Awards feature in the February 2026 Design Awards Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 8 January. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

The Louis Vuitton monogram is one of fashion’s definitive motifs: created in 1896 by Georges Vuitton in tribute to his late father – and house founder – Louis Vuitton, it has remained a revered emblem of global luxury for the 130 years since.

This year, the Parisian house marks this substantial anniversary with a celebration of the monogram, beginning with a new version of the ‘Speedy’, perhaps the house’s best-known handbag and an enduring emblem of its own (the Speedy was introduced in 1930 as the ‘Express’ and iterations have been on the shelves since, reimagined by everybody from Japanese artist Takashi Murakami to former menswear creative director Virgil Abloh).

Wallpaper* Design Awards: Louis Vuitton’s monogrammed Speedy is our ‘Best Party Bag’

Adorned with a special label to ensure its collectible status, the new iteration features the original 1896 monogram rendered on the house’s contemporary linen-and-cotton canvas – the type of throughline between past and present which has long defined the house’s oeuvre.

Reimagined in bold pastel hues, the monogram is applied using the traditional ‘pochoir’ stencilling technique, and also features on an array of other reissued classic handbags, from the 1992 ‘Alma’ – an ode to Parisian architecture named after the city’s Alma Bridge – to the ‘Noé’, which was originally designed to carry five bottles of champagne.

Though it is the Speedy which is our award winner: an accessory that, like the monogram which adorns it, has stood the test of time.

Discover all the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026 winners in the February issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 8 January 2025. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

louisvuitton.com

Over the years, we’ve been pretty spoiled by Hermès’ ability to transform every objects, no matter how mundane, into extraordinary expressions of craft, design and artistic originality. The house is constantly finding new ways to express its ingenuity, from lipsticks to light switches.

Cue Hermès’ ‘Off Piste 8 Feet’ American pool table, fitting neatly into this modus operandi as a precious yet simple reinvention of an indoor sporting staple.

Crafted in matte leather with curved lacquered legs, the pool table features four matching hornbeam and leather cues, as well as a discreet drawer to stash away the balls in their bakelite rack when not in use.

As usual, the devil is in the details – a set of balls reinterprets the traditional look with a timeless palette and contemporary graphic treatment, while a billiard chalk comes covered in Regate taurillon grained leather and equipped with its own Hermès case. In the hands of the French maison, pool is a whole new ball game.

‘Off Piste 8 Feet’, $265,400, available from Hermès

The Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026 winners are featured in full in the February issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 8 January 2025. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

There must be something in the water of Winnipeg. David Michon grew up in Canada’s sixth-largest city, as did Wallpaper’s founding father Tyler Brûlé. Thirty years after Wallpaper* launched, quickly coalescing into a modern design tribe, Michon has emerged as an authority for today’s furniture flock with For Scale, his compulsive, subversive décor-concerned Substack.

For Scale is quite unlike any formal form of design publishing at the moment. It’s razor sharp, loud, funny, casual, chaotic and intellectual, all at the same time. Its readers revel in its riotously unfettered freedom to tell it like it is. Michon, like the cool cat in the bleachers watching the cheerleaders perform on the pitch, has his own opinions. And he wields them wonderfully.

Michon launched For Scale as a Substack from LA in 2022. He published a newspapery print edition in 2024 and 2025, with a third due out in May 2026. As happens with upstart charismatic ventures that cut through, big brands are now knocking, seeking a bit of Michon’s flair to spice up their own bland fare. Bring it on. The design industry urgently needs more criticism and character for perspective. Or for scale, you could say…

For Scale: an interview with David Michon

Wallpaper*: Let’s talk décor. Why do you use this word?

David Michon: I find it amusing how people try and professionalise interior design by making it sound masculine. I use the word ‘décor’ because it sounds flouncy and feminine, and I enjoy leaning into people’s fear of the subject. I try to avoid the word ‘design’ or ‘designer’ as much as possible because they are generic terms nowadays. I tangle myself in knots, but I also get to the nub of what I want to say without leaning on these crutches.

W*: And what is it that you want to say?

DM: You can take décor seriously beyond design, trend or status. I try to approach décor as culture, not a retail opportunity. There’s an interesting tension in the subject of interiors. The domestic interior is all about self-expression. It is incredibly serious. At the same time, you can’t take it too seriously and a lot of people do. There is no hierarchy of taste; one chair is really just the same as another and it’s fun to play with that.

W*: Your articles skewer the vapid nature of much design, but there’s more going on, too, isn’t there?

DM: Yes, I’m interested in people having their own tastes or preferences, not feeling like they need to subscribe to trends. I like christening my own faux trends like the ‘twink aesthetic’ or the ‘domestic airport aesthetic’. These are pop-cultural observations, intellectualised to the point of absurdity. With confidence and wit, you can make anything seem rich and relevant.

W*: How do you measure your tone?

DM: Whenever I’m snarky, I’m always careful to build from a foundation of total optimism. Jony Ive described the interplay of ‘love and fury’ in his launch statement of LoveFrom and I agree: we have to be angry when things aren’t good enough and love demands that we make things better. I’m inspired by the campy semiotics of Hal Fischer and Clark Henley; the linguistic flair of Blackbird Spyplane and the non-condescension of Julia Child, who started cooking when she was 40. It’s not only new people who can have new ideas.

W*: You set the conversation in surprising places, from boardrooms to parties...

DM: What we talk about together as editors and industry folk is funny, cutting and acutely observational. There’s a curse of banality in the industry that means we can’t write what we think. For Scale is a small opportunity to call out the gaslighting of being told things are important, when we all know they’re not. I worked for years in magazines and agencies. I would pitch stories that were unusual and be frustrated that they weren’t interested in any of it. Everyone wanted an exclusive product launch or a shoppable trend. For Scale is exciting because I don’t have to worry about that. I can write about whatever I find interesting.

W*: Where do you go from here?

DM: I’m proud of where it is, but it’s hard not to want something you love to be bigger or better. I think the strictness of brand-owned messaging has delivered an industry that is dull and everyone’s searching for something more cultural and entertaining. There is now a machine out there whose one job it is to aggregate and regurgitate. It feels more human to be chaotic. I have good relationships with forward-thinking brands who understand the value of what we do. USM has been an incredible early supporter. We are launching a writing prize for décor criticism and are hosting Verner Panton’s would-have-been 100th birthday for Louis Poulsen in New York. We’re doing nude life drawing at the Ace Hotel during DesignTO in Toronto on some Really Important Furniture.

W*: What is your dream project / dream collaborator?

DM: A décor magazine archive. Showrooms. City guides. A film festival. I’d like to find spaces and partners to break out of the internet and have fun together. For Scale is more than a Substack, it’s a point of view and a contextual tool. I’ve always wanted to interview Miss Piggy. Maybe she reads Wallpaper*. Tell her to call me.

For the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026, we chose a cast of characters that represents everything that's exciting in domestic design right now. Enduring icons and new furniture-making ideas are always on our radar, and this year's new (and newly reborn) furniture designs and home accessories are the cherry on top of a brilliant year of creativity.

A 1970s icon reborn

This globe-shaped vase by Editions Milano was originally designed by leading Italian architect Vico Magistretti, whose quest for purity and simplicity led him to create a series of spherical lighting and curved chairs in the 1970s. Named after the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, the first European to cross the Pacific Ocean, the vase is composed of two hemispheres, one of which features a grid of lines recalling meridians and parallels. The result is not only beautiful, but makes an ideal support for flowers, which can easily be arranged into ikebana-like displays. Below the equator is a solid base engraved with Magistretti’s signature. Crafted from brass with a palladium finish, ‘Magellano’ is entirely produced in Italy by master artisans, and available in two sizes.

An innovative lamp that’s 50 years young

Italian designer Ernesto Gismondi founded lighting company Artemide in the 1960s with Sergio Mazza, and joined Ettore Sottsass’ influential Memphis movement in the 1980s. In between, he used his background as an aerospace engineer and rocket specialist to create some unique lighting designs. The first to be launched was the ‘Sintesi’, an industrial table lamp that resembles a cross between a robot pet and a vintage microphone, with a light source protected by a curved metal grid. Reissued to celebrate its 50th anniversary, this innovative light forms the basis of a galaxy of lighting products, all featuring efficient and perfectly engineered modular components. Adjustable in height and angle, its slim Y-shaped support can be tilted through a simple motion, and folds on itself for compact packaging.

Recycled polystyrene that mimics the expressiveness of wood

For the past three years, Nicolas Zanoni has been transforming expanded polystyrene into unusual designs. Visits to processing plants and a series of experiments led him to discover that, when heated up, the material could revert to its plastic state and fuse, creating homogeneous sheets. With the help of recycling specialist Bel Albatros, the Parisian designer uses a heat press to produce marbled sheets, and then sculpts and burns the polystyrene layers as if they were more traditional pieces of wood or marble. Part of the ‘Chair Brûlée’ seating collection, this delicious-looking but sturdy stool comes with a golden, toasted-marshmallow finish.

A prickly colony of chairs

From their Madrid workshop, Esto founders Amalia Wakonigg and Guillermo Borreguero create unusual objects through craftsmanship and experimentation. The studio’s ‘Disguise’ series, resembling ‘a colony of newly discovered beings’, comprises stools, benches and chairs, all made of a tubular steel structure wrapped in a hand-sewn textile cover, with prickly edges highlighted in a contrasting thread. With their seaweedy spindly limbs and aloe vera-like spike, they manage to look both organic and slightly unsettling – alien shapes that would turn any living room into a new world of possibilities.

Ceramic vessels that look like cardboard

French artist Jacques Monneraud’s creations appear to be flimsy pieces of corrugated cardboard held together with bits of tape, but are, in fact, ceramic vessels that can hold water without any spills or soggy bottoms. Monneraud grew up in a family of artists and makers, and worked as a creative director for years, but only took up pottery five years ago. After a lot of experimenting with different clay mixes, he came across a texture perfectly resembling cardboard. The addition of ‘tape’ – actually two different glazes, applied with a brush in four very precise strokes – completes the optical illusion.

A raw aluminium beauty

This slightly surreal office chair was handmade in the north London workshop of Joseph Ellwood, an architect and designer passionate about championing expressive forms, raw materials and visible imperfections. Ellwood, who founded creative studio Six Dots Design in 2020 and unveiled his debut collection, ‘Contemporary Vanity’, in 2022, works mostly with raw aluminium, and aims to create bespoke pieces that are joyful rather than purely functional. The Six Dots team are keen that the finished pieces reflect the fabrication process: each grind mark, scratch and scuff reveal a story about the tools and hands that created the piece. Made to order, this chair is height adjustable, while the upholstery is available in a variety of colours and finishes. It can be paired with a similarly free-flowing desk and floor lamp that appear to have been drawn into space.

The Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026 winners are featured in full in the February issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 8 January 2025. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

When we sit down to speak with designers Stephen Burks and Malika Leiper – newly honoured in the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026 as Best Helping Hands – they say they are fulfilling a long-held dream by living in Paris, the latest location to serve as their base since 2024, reflecting a practice in which home is less a fixed point than a network of places shaped by relationships and work. Over the past year, the designer and cultural director have reshaped their lives around residencies and collaborative projects in Montana, Senegal, Alabama, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and rural Japan, using each location as a testing ground for new ways of working at the intersection of craft, community and industry.

For Burks, who found international acclaim as a New York-based product designer, and Leiper, who grew up in Cambodia and trained as an urban planner, their nomadic model is a way to rethink what a design studio can be. Rather than sketching from afar, they embed themselves in local communities: sitting with quilters in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, or working with foresters and carpenters in Yoshino, Japan. The goal, as Burks puts it, is to be ‘as close to making as possible’ – and to use design as a conduit between worlds that don’t usually meet.

Stephen Burks and Malika Leiper: rethinking the design studio in a craft-oriented future

Leiper and Burks’ partnership began at Harvard, where Burks was completing a Loeb Fellowship and Leiper a master’s in urban planning. When the pandemic hit, they suddenly found themselves grounded and asking ‘what design could actually do’ in the face of overlapping crises. A parallel dialogue with curator Monica Obniski at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art invited them to consider ‘spaces where design doesn’t typically exist’, from domestic rituals to spirituality and mourning at home. The result was the 2022 exhibition ‘Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place’, which displayed speculative domestic objects that marked the start of their collaborative practice. As Burks points out, ‘Our work and personal lives have always been very intertwined and continue to be so today.’

This period also reframed Burks’ long-running project, Stephen Burks Man Made, which has, for nearly two decades, sought to ‘bring the hand to industry’ by connecting artisans, manufacturers, non-profits and distributors. ‘Our goal is to believe in the possibility of trade, not aid, and to develop products that build upon capacity and move design in a new direction,’ he says. The practice has become increasingly nomadic, shaped by residencies and workshop-based projects.

‘We make no distinction between art, design or exhibitions,’ Leiper says, and residencies have become a structural part of their approach. Recent projects have taken them from Montana and Senegal to filming with contemporary Kuba makers in Kinshasa. Kuba textiles – a centuries-old raffia weaving tradition from the Kuba Kingdom in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo – have become a thread running through their most recent work. Invited by the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, to design an exhibition around Charlotte-based textile designer Wesley Mancini’s collection of historic Kuba textiles, Burks and Leiper quickly realised that they wanted to understand not only the past of this craft but its present. This led them to Congo and to Kuba collective Kilubukila, pushing the technique into new forms, challenging the idea that it is a ‘lost art’.

In Yoshino, Japan, they began exploring how Kuba’s abstract geometries might converse with the local cedar forests and Shinto spatial traditions, creating sculptural pieces that pair cedar ‘bodies’ with ceremonially dressed Kuba surfaces; these were then shown at Space Un Tokyo as part of their 2025 exhibition, ‘Kuba Sugi’. From there, a collaboration with engineered wood specialist Alpi translated Kuba motifs into marquetry and veneer that were presented at Design Miami last December.

What links these projects is less a visual signature than a set of questions: who gets to participate in contemporary design? How can long-established techniques be allowed to evolve, rather than be frozen to fit Western expectations of ‘authenticity’? And what kinds of economic structures need to be in place for this work to move beyond one-off commissions? ‘What really makes it so meaningful is that you have so many different hands and voices playing a role in the process,’ says Leiper.

Burks and Leiper are clear that their role is not to parachute in with ready-made answers. They talk instead about challenging artisans as equal partners, and designing processes rather than simply objects – as with the Gee’s Bend quilts, where they didn’t draw the compositions, but set up the framework within which they were made. The project was developed in dialogue with Sew Gee’s Bend Heritage Builders and informed by Burks and Leiper’s longstanding relationship with Italian textile house Dedar, with whom they have collaborated for nearly 15 years. The resulting quilts appeared in the US Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale as part of Burks and Leiper’s curatorial contribution, ‘Objects of Belonging’, bringing the Gee’s Bend quilting community into dialogue with a global design audience and expanding the contexts in which these traditions are seen and understood.

In this sense, they describe themselves as conduits, or, as Burks jokes, ‘the tube’, connecting small cooperatives in Malawi or Naples with brands such as Dedon and Roche Bobois, who can put pieces into wider circulation. ‘We want to influence the systems of design that define who’s involved, what we’re making, how we’re making it, who benefits from it,’ he says.

The pair draw parallels between their practice and that of Isamu Noguchi, whose refusal to separate sculpture, furniture and landscape design offers a model for working fluidly across disciplines. Burks and Leiper contrast this with what they see as the 20th-century obsession with a singular, recognisable style. Their own output can appear disjointed at first glance – quilts, cedar sculptures, outdoor furniture, museum installations – until you start to see the common threads: a belief in ‘other centres’ beyond Europe and the US, and a reluctance to get ‘stuck’ in any one category. ‘There are always other ways to live, and we should never be getting stuck,’ Burks says. ‘This is what motivates us, the constant search for a new approach and not being defined, not being categorised.’

This runs counter to an industry that, in their view, is becoming more conservative. Big brands tend to return to the same names, especially in precarious times. Burks and Leiper argue that this is precisely when risk-taking is most needed, and when new voices should be shaping the agenda. Their travels only strengthen this conviction: in Brazil, they encountered a self-sufficient ecosystem of local design brands operating far from the industry’s usual centres, reinforcing their belief that ‘many centres, not one’ should define the future. This looks exhilarating from the outside; in practice, it comes with its challenges. Now into their second year of a fully nomadic set-up, they prefer longer residencies – ideally three months or more in one place – which give them the chance to slow down and immerse themselves more fully in their surroundings. One of the biggest learnings, they both agree, has been about looseness: trusting that ideas can emerge from being present, rather than arriving with a finished concept. Their workshop-based model, implemented in more than 20 countries across six continents, has provided them with the greatest education of their lives. For Burks, the lesson has been to keep resisting stasis – creatively, emotionally, structurally. ‘It’s also about finding freedom,’ he says. ‘If there’s really one thing that we absolutely agree on every day, it’s about trying to find that space to be free. Freedom equals fun for me, always.’

The Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026 winners are featured in full in the February issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 8 January 2025. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

This year, our 'houses of the year' share an important characteristic. Striking and inspirational they may undoubtedly be - but they are also pushing the design envelope in a, possibly, unexpected way.

Our three 'Houses of the Year' are all built using earth construction

Our annual Wallpaper* Design Awards celebrate one of the many ways in which we can sustainably diversify building design and construction: working with earth. Once dismissed as ‘backwards’ and unfashionable, building with earth is making a strong comeback. Readily accessible, endlessly adaptable, and honed through generational wisdom, this construction method has many iterations across the world. Polished or textured, geometric or organic, today’s earth buildings look as aspirational as the finest, conventionally built 21st-century villas.

Sombra de Santa Fe by DUST Architects

On the surface, rural New Mexico isn’t the most prepossessing place to build a house. Not only are there extremes of temperature, but the protected environment needs to be carefully managed. This new house, Sombra de Santa Fe, by Tucson-based Dust Architects embraces these challenges, using the environment as a creative springboard from which to launch a refined and sensitive response to a client brief.

Bin Nouh's Courtyard House by Shahira Fahmy

While working on the Dar Tantora hotel in AlUla, Egyptian architect Shahira Fahmy received a call from a long-term client, whose family is known for their large-scale projects across the Middle East, and who wanted to turn a ruin in the old town into a home. ‘He told me, you won’t understand anything unless you visit,’ she says. ‘No drawings can explain what is there.’ The site – a void formed from the remnants of two former houses – was known locally as Beit Bin Nouh, named after the family that had used the space as an open courtyard for gatherings.

Rammed Earth House by Tuckey Design Studio

Tuckey Design Studio’s Rammed Earth House, in rural Wiltshire, was commissioned back in 2019 as a residence that would draw on the owners’ love of British farmhouses and the countryside. The site, a disused former brickworks, offered a ripe opportunity to experiment with ancient earth building methods to bring them into the modern age.

‘A new elegance’ is how Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons described their S/S 2026 Prada womenswear collection, seeking to liberate clothing from its ‘hierarchies’ by shuffling up everyday uniforms – a longtime touch point for the house – with opulent eveningwear, often in the same look.

‘This collection is about reacting to the uncertain – clothes that can shift, change, adapt,’ said Miuccia Prada after the show, held in the sparse Deposito showspace at Fondazione Prada this past October in Milan, the floor flooded with orange-hued lacquer.

Wallpaper Design Awards: these Prada sunglasses are our ‘Best Sartorial Shapeshifter’

A series of clever accessories captured this hybrid, shapeshifting mood, from simple drawstring pouches – like those used to store shoes – rendered in lustrous colourful satin, or kitten-heeled pumps mashed up with the simple elastic plimsolls once worn in PE classes. Though perhaps most striking – and a worthy Wallpaper* Design Award winner – are these glasses, whereby uniform-issue metal-framed opticals are adorned with a surreal bejewelled flourish on their temple tips. As such, they are eyewear and jewellery in one.

‘We started from a sense of freedom,’ says Simons of the collection. ‘There is the license to combine different elements, to compose. [But] there is also a physical liberation, moving away from fashion as a sculptural imposition on the body of a woman. We shifted into the opposite – physical emancipation, but also freedom as a state of mind… Uniform is part of a Prada history – for us, there is the idea that a woman can be beautiful, elegant and strong in a uniform. It is a challenge, to a hierarchy of perception. To free women from this.’

READ: In Milan, Prada seeks freedom as a ‘response to the overload of contemporary culture’

Discover all the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026 winners in the February issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 8 January 2025. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Was 2025 the year everything in design became collectible? The elegant glamour of the secondary market met the rigour of industrial R&D in the same brand, showroom, object, breath. Stands at Salone del Mobile in Milan resembled not just furnished but fully inhabited midcentury houses in Palm Springs. Even the most innocuous dining table belied the simplicity of its form as the culmination of a five-year research project into repurposing waste material from an industrial process.

New furniture looked old, and simple furniture bore sectoral innovations of mind-blowing proportions, all packaged in the cinematic splendour of our experience-obsessed times, where layer upon layer of sensory titillation resulted in reveals so sublime they became surreal. We’re still dreaming of Loro Piana and Dimorestudio’s La Prima Notte di Quiete immersive installation at Milan Design Week. How we all revelled in the rêves.

Against this theatrical backdrop, we have plucked a selection of scene stealers amid the dream weavers. What you see here are the stars from the year gone by, bathed appropriately in a limelight that highlights the beauty of their form and the depth of their material expression. Though it’s hard not to be starstruck, we urge you to pay attention and look closely. You’ll see golden oldies reissued, classics reimagined for modern times and tastes, rising talents invigorating proceedings with a breath of fresh air, and the youthful promise that good ideas exist in the future, not just the past.

The mood in our story reflects the atmosphere of the year at large. We’re calling it dramatic tension. You feel it in the liminal space suspended between various dualities: graphic forms with delicate finishes; industrial heft with fine, crafted detailing; exuberant objects with functional properties; lighting that looks like sculpture, and textiles that resemble paintings. Everything is real but nothing is quite as it seems. There’s a strokeable sensuality in the volume of gloss lacquer, cut glass, brushed metals and leather. It will have been a good year for cleaning products, too.

And what does this design mood say about the times in which we are living? The bygone flavour is comforting in its familiarity, though we’d stop short of calling it nostalgic. It’s Wong Kar Wai more than Baz Luhrmann, seductively indulgent more than cloyingly escapist. A cynic might suggest it’s been a year of plundering the past and burying our heads in the sand because the present and future is too scary for design to address, let alone fix. We don’t agree. What might masquerade as a decadent, filmic flight of fancy is, in fact, a vintage year for design. This is the year the collectible design market became truly dominant within the sector. New records have been set at auction. New collectible fairs have been announced in new markets. Salone Raritas will make its debut as part of Salone del Mobile 2026. You heard it here first: all design is now collectible; old is the new new.

Set builders: London Art Makers Lighting assistants: Nic Bezzina, Charlie Hall Digi tech: Alex Gale Interiors coordinator: Archie Thomson

Discover all the award winners in the February issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 8 January 2025. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Architecture is an inherently optimistic profession – a quality instilled in me through training and flagged to me in many an interview over the years. Architects set out to change the world, often consciously and purposefully, quite literally shaping the environment around us. It helps to remember this essential positivity at a time when it is easy to get caught up in global events that weigh heavily on our minds.

We celebrate hope and optimism in architecture

At Wallpaper*, we are always keen to champion innovations, ideas and designs that bring hope and optimism, including architectural wonders that put a smile on our faces. There have been quite a few of those over the past year. The 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale had its critics, but it also showcased the architecture world’s hunger for change. Meanwhile, Sarah Housley’s new book Designing Hope discussed specific scenarios that nod to a better outlook for us all.

Also in 2025, Finland was named the world’s happiest country for the eighth year in a row; its ambitious sustainability strategies surely play a role here (policy makers, take note). Elsewhere, ingenious initiatives, such as Retrofit House – a live showcase of sustainable homebuilding techniques, by Civic Square, Dark Matter Labs and Material Cultures – landed to give power to ordinary people.

Above all, it’s the plurality of architectural voices and radical solutions by the world’s creative minds that brings the most hopeful message for a sunnier future. And what better way mark what we look forward to seeing more of than our annual Wallpaper* Design Awards?

In that spirit, a series of our 2026 awards – newly announced in the February issue of Wallpaper* and featured over the coming weeks on Wallpaper.com – celebrates one of the many ways in which we can sustainably diversify building design and construction: working with earth. Once dismissed as ‘backwards’ and unfashionable, building with earth is making a strong comeback. Readily accessible, endlessly adaptable, and honed through generational wisdom, this construction method has many iterations across the world. Polished or textured, geometric or organic, today’s earth buildings look as aspirational as the finest, conventionally built 21st-century villas.

Our Best Use of Material awards category spotlights three standout residential examples that use local soil – in the UK, the US and Saudi Arabia – with decidedly contemporary outcomes that show off the age-old technique’s potential.

Also for the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026, we named three Architects of the Year, chosen for having commanded significant attention in 2025. Our winners are Je Ahn, who last year completed a modest yet infinitely glorious home on a British island; Lina Ghotmeh, whose studio is booming with new projects; and Marina Tabassum, who wowed us with her 2025 Serpentine Pavilion.

When we interviewed each of them, continuing in our pursuit of optimism, we asked them to name a building that made them smile. We were looking for spatial expressions of serenity – architecture that brings hope and a visceral twinkle. We also ended up talking about everything from height-specific kitchen counters and spilling wine on light-coloured floors to the revelation that architecture need not take centre stage, and we left feeling inspired. Here’s to a great year in architecture – join us as we raise our always-half-full glass.

The Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026 winners are featured in full in the February issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 8 January 2025. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

When we were thinking of a way to commemorate this year’s Wallpaper* Design Awards winners, we didn’t have to think far: Formafantasma was the first name to come to mind, for their ability to encapsulate the creative zeitgeist of this moment in design.

Our Designers of the Year in 2021, Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin proved to be the perfect collaborators for this special trophy and enthusiastically leapt on the challenge we set them: to create an expressive sculpture made of paper, to be received by this year’s winners in a flat-packed envelope and to be assembled by each honoree independently.

Paper, the designers explain, is often the starting point of their work, as a prototyping material to test ideas. 'This time, instead of being just the first step in the process, paper becomes the final object,' explains Trimarchi. 'Something celebratory, joyful and deliberately simple.'

The studio worked from references including models from past projects, such as Ore Streams and Maison Matisse. The designers’ early moodboards included colourful sculptures whose lightness mimics the effortlessness of paper, artworks by Giacomo Balla, and Bruno Munari’s Sculture da Viaggio (travel sculptures) – these revolved around creating an object as simple as it was expressive, using folded flat sheets in a variety of materials, that could be scaled up or down, depending on its final destination or function, and reproduced by anyone.

'There is a kind of magic in seeing a flat sheet of material turning into 3D just through simple cuts and folds,' adds Farresin.

Their contemporary response is an object made of three parts, crafted from Gmund Colors Matt papers in delicious, textured hues, that intuitively slot together to create a microarchitectural celebration that we can’t wait to deliver to our worthy winners.

In truth, it isn’t really about what makes me smile. It’s about the quiet emotion revealed when you enter a space that brings serenity: a sense of radiance, stillness and presence. It’s not joy or laughter, but a deep, inward smile that emerges when we, as humans, encounter great beauty.

Lina Ghotmeh on Luis Barragán’s Capuchin Convent Chapel, and more

Many places have had this effect on me. I recall visiting Luis Barragán’s Capuchin Convent Chapel in Mexico. Entering the chapel is a profoundly beautiful experience. Light gently fills the space and, because photography is not permitted, you are momentarily disconnected from technology and from the constant choreography of people taking pictures. You pass through a smaller space and then emerge into a larger volume, struck by the coloured light that filters through the stained glass windows.

What is most striking is how discreetly the building is tucked into the urban fabric. It does not announce itself. It feels less like a monument and more like a home for prayer.

A similar sense of awe lives in the Temppeliaukio Church in Helsinki. An unassuming rock outcrop opens suddenly into a carved cavern topped with a dome resting on exposed bedrock. One moment, you are surrounded by the city; the next, you feel as though you have entered the heart of the earth. The copper-clad ceiling of the suspended dome and the soft glow of candlelight create a unique atmosphere.

Álvaro Siza’s Boa Nova Tea House in Portugal offers a comparable experience: perched among rocks at the edge of the sea, it unfolds through movement, revealing landscape and horizon in a slow, deliberate sequence.

What moves me most is not only the immersive quality of these spaces, but their ability to listen to their surroundings and reveal their beauty. The architecture almost disappears, becoming a device that frames landscape and choreographs experience. There is something inherently cinematic in such places, as in Tadao Ando’s Chichu Art Museum in Naoshima, where the building is excavated from within a hill, dissolving the boundary between nature and architecture.

The human experience is always at the centre of my own work. I think of buildings through proportion, movement and the way a body travels through space, as something that gently holds people, allowing them to feel at ease, present and alive. Architecture, for me, is both an extraordinary moment and a quiet part of everyday life.

linaghotmeh.com

Lina Gotmeh is one of three Architects of the Year in the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026, alongside Marina Tabassum and Je Ahn.

Discover all the award winners in the February issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 8 January 2025. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

What do you get a design-minded young woman for her 20th birthday? Well, if you’re Assaad Raphael, the founder of Porsche Centre Lebanon, the only gift that could possibly mark the occasion is a customised Porsche – reimagined by Milan studio David/Nicolas.

Raphael is something of a car obsessive, and for the past two-plus decades has been the sole importer of Porsche in Lebanon – in addition to co-owning a garage that restores classic cars in Dubai. ‘At the time, my daughter Shaha was studying architecture and not really into cars,’ he says. ‘So I thought this would be a great way to introduce her to this world.’

He knew that simply buying a luxury vintage model would do little to pique her interest, so he approached the duo with the idea of letting her shape the project herself. She was already aware of David/Nicolas cofounders David Raffoul and Nicolas Moussallem – both were similarly raised in Beirut – but a chance meeting at a dinner party sealed the collaboration.

‘It was a dream project,’ recounts Raffoul, who, prior to pursuing interior architecture, had planned to study automotive design, going so far as to be accepted into a master’s programme in the UK. For Raphael, there was no doubt that their retro-futuristic style and finely calibrated sensibility would be a good fit. They had already proven themselves adept with sensitive legacy projects. At the time, they were busy reimagining Gio Ponti’s Casa di Fantasia apartment, the midcentury designer’s surrealist Gesamtkunstwerk in Milan.

In terms of the brief, Raphael let them run free. ‘It was really carte blanche,’ he says. ‘I wanted to see how designers who are not from the industry approached designing a car. It was as new for them as it was for me.’

Their canvas was a 1990 Porsche 964 Targa, a pocket-sized two-seater convertible chosen for its versatility. It has similar proportions to older models, which allowed them to echo retro silhouettes, yet the comparatively modern dashboard would enable them to add conveniences such as better air conditioning and Bluetooth audio. ‘This is one of the only Porsche models that can be backdated, yet has the technology for more modern ways of driving,’ says Moussallem.

The pair looked to classic Porsches for inspiration, particularly 911s from the past. ‘The car doesn’t have a specific age, but it now has the lines of a 1970s model,’ notes Moussallem. Because of the complicated engineering, however, there were limits to what could be changed. ‘We had to respect the existing placement of things,’ he adds. ‘The car is engineered in a way that you can’t really remove anything.’

The final palette was deliberately restrained. ‘It was a game of balancing colours, contrasts, finishes and materials,’ continues Moussallem. They chose British racing green to unify both the interior and exterior of the vehicle. The main overhaul was reserved for the interior: reconfiguring the handbrake in oiled teak; recasting the dials and gearshift in machined brass; designing the ladder-stitched diagonal embroidery on the leather seats that recalls the motifs often found on their own furniture; and refitting the central console in aluminium. More than anything, they sought a more tactile, pared-back user experience. ‘We tried to simplify the way you interact with the car,’ says Moussallem. ‘Anything we could remove, we did.’

To get to that point was an eight-year odyssey that stretched between Milan, Beirut and the UK. Raffoul and Moussallem worked with artisans in Treviso (the same team they call on for their interior projects) to fashion the interior joinery and metal details. For the leather seats, they turned to the highly specialised artisans at London-based Connolly, the fourth-generation leather tanner and currier that has been outfitting luxury automotives since the dawn of motoring itself – and the only company Raphael would trust with such an important bespoke project.

Once finished, the car was meant to be shipped back to Beirut, but ‘unhappy events in Lebanon, including the port blast and the Covid-19 pandemic, meant the car remained in Italy for four years’, recounts Raphael. ‘But finally it made it back, where we restored the body, the underbody and the suspension.’

In terms of performance, they took a purist approach. ‘I’m a keen believer that classic cars should be driven as they were meant to be,’ says Raphael. ‘What you want at the end of the day is to smell the burned oil and feel the gearbox as it was at the time.’

While the build itself was an exercise in devotion, for Raphael, the project was always driven by something larger than aesthetics or engineering. It was, ultimately, an act of passing something on. Shaha is now 29 and a successful designer in her own right, with a sensibility shaped by both her architectural training and the world she grew up in. ‘I wanted to transmit my passion to my daughter,’ he reflects. ‘And what David and Nicolas created is a work of art.’

Discover all the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026 winners in the February issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 8 January 2025. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

I can name a few buildings that made me smile. And then there are a few that left me with a sense of awe, such as the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. There’s a difference. I will never attempt to emulate the awe-inspiring ones. They are to be revered and remembered. The ones that make you smile are inspirational. You can embody the experience and make it part of your design thinking.

Marina Tabassum on Geoffrey Bawa’s Lunuganga, and more

For anyone to experience a building, the atmosphere matters, the company matters, the season and the light matters. One very special place for me was Geoffrey Bawa’s Lunuganga. It made me want to build a garden. I had seen images in books and, for a very long time, reminisced about being there someday. Sri Lanka is not far. So after winning the Aga Khan Award in 2016, we went on a Bawa tour in Sri Lanka with all the architects who worked on the Bait Ur Rouf mosque project.

We stayed one night in Lunuganga. I discovered the effortlessness of unpretentious architecture whose main objective is to frame nature and the vistas. Architecture is passive, and nature takes centre stage. Yet, one cannot ignore the beauty of the architecture, which is used as threshold space, transitioning the exploration from one garden event to another. It was a revelation that architecture need not always be theatrical, taking centre stage.

In my design, I’m always trying to think about how one would feel and experience the spaces. So movement through the spaces, feelings and connections matter most to me. One other architecture I can recall that not only made me smile but also made me float is Peter Zumthor’s Therme Vals. I went with a friend on a gorgeous summer day. I enjoy the meditative silence of the mountains. This building, being part of the mountain, exerts calm and contemplative energy. It allows you to connect with the spaces that are an assemblage of caves, water and having private moments and also generous openness, being part of a community.

The building that made me go round and round around it was Le Corbusier’s chapel in Ronchamp. It was a mixture of a sense of awe and visceral joy. The form transcends architecture. I don’t think I can generalise what brings a smile when I visit a work of architecture. It can be the experience of moving through the spaces, the atmosphere created by the light, sound and tactility of the surfaces, or it can be the uniqueness of the form.

How a building connects with the user or visitor is important. Not every building we design can achieve that. Quite often, the functional complexity takes priority. But every building can attempt to have one space that allows that visceral connection. In my opinion, that connection is universal and transcends the boundaries of time.

marinatabassumarchitects.com

Marina Tabassum is one of three Architects of the Year in the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026, alongside LIna Gotmeh and Je Ahn.

Discover all the award winners in the February issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 8 January 2025. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

I recently completed my own home on the Isle of Wight. The budget was limited, but the project had an inherent sense of luxury in that I was in the unusual position of being my own client, so I could respond more nimbly and directly to project demands, such as the site’s conditions, market pricing and contractor capacity.

It was a deeply personal project, where the closeness of the relationship between the makers and the architect-client (me and myself ) meant that normal constraints, such as the realities of a moving-in deadline, didn’t have an effect on the project’s aims.

This attitude is a great way to introduce the building that I wanted to talk about here, as it ties to ideas of flexibility, comfort and looseness – ultimately, having the trust and confidence to be relaxed about the result.

Can Lis in Mallorca was designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon in 1971. It now hosts artist residencies through the Danish Arts Foundation in collaboration with the Utzon Foundation. I stayed there for two weeks in 2014 as part of that programme.

It is interesting to understand the context that it was created in. Utzon had just come back from working on the Sydney Opera House. He had resigned following disagreements with the client, left Australia for good, and was totally distraught. He decided to come to Mallorca and build a home for himself and his family. He first bought a plot up in the mountains, but the authorities at the time wouldn’t allow him to build there. He ended up on the current site, which is an amazingly beautiful place on the cliff near Portopetro.

Now, if you look at other Utzon buildings, they feel really precise and controlled geometric structures, and you have to remember this house was created by the man who had just come out of designing the dramatically modern Sydney Opera House; and the first thing he builds right after is this humble Mallorcan house made using traditional materials.

It’s also very tailored to him. Utzon was tall and cooked a lot, so the kitchen counters, for example, were designed to match his height. He had a great relationship with his contractor and, as a result, the place feels made rather than designed. It was created to bring comfort and relaxation.

He worked with a local builder, and the house is laid out around his everyday movement and rituals. It really doesn’t feel like it was designed on paper. It looks like he was creating it alongside the build, changing elements as he went. I think he must have made a lot of the decisions on-site.

The building itself is very simple. It doesn’t have any insulation. All the windows are simply mounted on the façade with a timber frame. It’s not this highly controlled thing, but at the same time, I really enjoyed staying there; it was very homelike.

A fun fact: you’re not allowed to drink red wine in Can Lis to avoid staining the beige stone floor. But I do wonder what Utzon would have thought about this, having designed the house embracing change and the unexpected. It’s such a comfortable, joyful, relaxed place. I think he wouldn’t have cared.

studioweave.com

Je Ahn is one of three Architects of the Year in the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026, alongside LIna Gotmeh and Marina Tabassum.

Discover all the award winners in the February issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 8 January 2025. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Home to more than 1,000 residents in its heyday, the ancient Arabian city of AlUla had been uninhabited since the 1980s, abandoned when a new town centre was established nearby. Here, hundreds of mud-brick houses, huddled around a tenth-century fortress, sat at the heart of a valley in an area that is today known for its many archaeological sites, including the Nabataean city of Hegra (Saudi Arabia’s first Unesco World Heritage Site), the ancient capital of Dadan and the rock inscriptions of Jabal Ikmah.

Discover Beit Bin Nouh, Saudi Arabia, by Shahira Fahmy

The old town is now at the centre of a heritage initiative by the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU), which is restoring the district through careful conservation and new cultural programmes. Within the complex maze of alleyways, dating back to the 12th century, is Dar Tantora, a hotel that was restored in 2021 by Egyptian architect Shahira Fahmy using traditional construction and passive-cooling methods.

While working on Dar Tantora, Fahmy received a call from a long-term client, whose family is known for their large-scale projects across the Middle East, and who wanted to turn a ruin in the old town into a home. ‘He told me, you won’t understand anything unless you visit,’ she says. ‘No drawings can explain what is there.’ The site – a void formed from the remnants of two former houses – was known locally as Beit Bin Nouh, named after the family that had used the space as an open courtyard for gatherings.

The mud-brick houses had followed a layout that was repeated across the old town: three rooms on the ground floor were used for working, cooking and storage, and private rooms upstairs were for sleeping and family life. It was a simple model that was shaped directly by the region’s climate and conditions: a thick stone footing was there to withstand flash flooding; the mud-bricks, made from local soil, clay and straw, insulated the interiors; small windows controlled heat; narrow alleys created shade; and courtyards brought ventilation.

Fahmy’s team conducted a detailed reading of the topography, identifying original floor levels, thresholds and circulation patterns to ensure the rebuilt structures followed the logic of the earlier homes. ‘It was technical, philosophical and emotional. The bricks had to come from AlUla, and the act of making them connects you to the labour of those who built this town,’ says Fahmy, whose previous restoration work, notably in Cairo, has shaped her sensitivity to historic settings.

Every material and design choice ties the building back to its environment and historic construction methods. Stone was sourced from quarries approved by RCU; the tamarisk wood beams and door frames are treated with natural oils rather than chemicals; and woven palm fronds line the ceilings to create a breathable layer. Any new infrastructure is kept outside the historic walls, with pipes and wiring wrapped in palm rope, while the ancient qanat system of subterranean water channels was partially revived to handle drainage and reduce water consumption.

‘The first lesson was about sustainability,’ says Fahmy. ‘Water management, materials, how people lived with this climate. We followed what the place was already telling us.’ As a result, Beit Bin Nouh is a masterly example of how earth construction, when guided by the site itself, can carry a historic home into a contemporary context without losing its character. sfahmy.com

In a city teeming with members’ clubs, how does one stand out? For Mike Wu and Randy See, the duo behind Hong Kong wine distributor and retailer The Fine Wine Experience, the answer was simply to listen to their community. It was the success of their in-store French restaurant Bâtard that shaped its evolution into a club where members can open serious bottles at retail prices with like-minded friends.

Club Bâtard is Best Social Hub in the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026

The club’s location, in Hong Kong’s Grade I-listed Pedder Building, naturally informed Joyce Wang Studio’s approach to its design. Working with the bones of the 1923 Beaux-Arts structure, the team created a vertical experience across three floors, anchored by a glass-fronted cellar, through which members can access each level.

On the first floor, all-day diner Le Clos serves up a menu of global favourites ranging from char kway teow (Malaysian stir-fried rice noodles) to spaghetti alle vongole, within a space inspired by the concept of the ‘clos’, a French walled vineyard often found in monasteries. Curvilinear double-barrelled ceilings are lit by large chandeliers, while a Joan Miró-inspired mosaic floor is dotted with low-lit booths, and wines are displayed in leather slings set against textured slate.

Upstairs, fluted burl arches frame a dining room lined with Pierre Frey wallcoverings and lush greenery. Built-in marble wine coolers fill up with bottles throughout the night as diners sip on fine wines, paired with dishes such as the restaurant’s signature roast chicken served with ginger fried rice. Also housed within the space is the relocated home of the city’s esteemed Chinese restaurant Hop Sze, and elegant whisky bar OBE. With every floor humming throughout the day and members constantly drifting through the cellar with new bottles in hand, Club Bâtard has quickly become one of Hong Kong’s most convivial meeting points.

Club Bâtard is located at 1/F-3/F, Pedder Building, 12 Pedder St, Central, Hong Kong

This article appears in the February 2026 Design Awards Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

In fashion, 2025 was undoubtedly the year of the debut: over the course of the year, more than 15 designers showed their first collections for the industry’s major houses – including Jonathan Anderson at Dior and Matthieu Blazy at Chanel – marking the start of a definitive new era in style.

For his own debut show at Balenciaga in October in Paris, former Valentino creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli delivered the year’s most intriguing invitation: a portable tape player and a pair of wired headphones, which, when played, reverberated with the sound of a beating heart.

Wallpaper* Design Awards: Balenciaga’s cassette-player invite is our ‘Best Heartwarmer’

The effect was two-fold. On the one hand, it captured the anticipation and pressure such high-profile debuts involve, on the other, it was a symbol of Piccioli’s always heartfelt approach to design – one defined by a generosity of fabric, a bold use of colour and a veneration of handcraft.

‘The heartbeat is the rhythm we share, the pulse that reminds us we are human,’ he wrote in a letter released just before the S/S 2026 show. ‘For every heartbeat there is a name, a moment, a gesture. This collection comes from that place of love and connection. It is as much mine as it is of those who lived it with me – in every way. Perhaps with a different pulse, but always with the same soul.’

READ: Pierpaolo Piccioli makes Balenciaga debut ‘from a place of love and connection’

Discover all the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026 winners in the February issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 8 January 2025. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

On the surface, rural New Mexico isn’t the most prepossessing place to build a house. Not only are there extremes of temperature, but the protected environment needs to be carefully managed. This new house by Tucson-based Dust Architects embraces these challenges, using the environment as a creative springboard from which to launch a refined and sensitive response to a client brief.

Explore New Mexico house Sombra de Santa Fe

Sombra de Santa Fe is located in a turn-of-the-century development in the Galisteo Basin Preserve, about 75 miles northwest of downtown Albuquerque. The site consists of a scattering of plots perched on the edge of a mesa at an altitude of 6,500ft, with far-reaching views across the Northern New Mexico landscape. The design team, led by practice co-founders Cade Hayes and Jesús Edmundo Robles Jr, along with Natalia Zieman Hayes, Jerrick Lee Tsosie, and Jacob Downard, were briefed by clients keen to create a sanctuary in the wilderness.

This sense of sprawling nature was preserved by the design codes and master plan for the site. As Hayes notes, ‘when the land parcels were established, a master plan designated building areas and set the construction limits so that each house on the mesa would not be visible from the Galisteo Basin below, as well as being somewhat obscured from adjacent properties.’ Other restrictions included limits on height and stipulations about colour, as well as the percentage of the plot that could be built upon.

‘We negotiated with the developers to get the house closer to the mesa edge, so the owners could get a better view into and over the basin,’ the architect recalls. But other than that, the new house is woven carefully between landscape and legislation. From the outset, it was decided to use scoria walls, a type of construction material formed from compressed volcanic sand. According to Robles Jr, scoria is less material-intensive than a standard concrete mix, although more attention to detail is needed in the formwork to achieve high-quality finishes.

The compacting process is also less labour-intensive than rammed earth, and most importantly, it absorbs thermal energy. ‘We’re not the innovators, but the facilitators and experimenters,’ says Robles Jr, praising the clients for their support and local pioneers Lava Works, who have developed ways to work with the scoria mix.

Placed atop a concrete plinth with integrated angular windowsills, the superstructure is formed from 2ft-thick walls. These provide effective insulation against heat, wind and cold, with deep window and door reveals keeping the interior shaded at the hottest parts of the day. The rectangular plan incorporates a central living area, which opens out on to the main terrace, flanked by two ensuite bedrooms. The entrance and utility spaces are located to the east, while a west-facing covered terrace offers sunset views. A little way from the house is a separate garage and guest room.

‘The house takes advantage of the landscape; it engages with it on all four sides,’ says Hayes. By aligning each façade to a point on the compass, the outdoor spaces are ‘tuned to light, wind and season’. This allows the owners to use the porches, patios and terraces seasonally and for different parts of the day, explains the architect. Covered terraces are sited to benefit from shade in the summer or provide spots for soaking up warmth during the cooler months. One key reason for this pragmatic approach is the absence of air conditioning. ‘The house is designed with common-sense passive solar strategies, with radiant floor heating and a fireplace for warmth,’ adds Manning Hayes. Cross ventilation keeps the interiors cool.

In addition to its thermal properties, the use of black scoria ties the house to its place. ‘There are many dormant volcanoes in the area,’ the architect notes. ‘The clients also had an aesthetic admiration of our Casa Caldera project, which used red scoria. In this case, we chose black.’ The thick walls were cast in place, with the material poured into a framework layer by layer. This process remains visible inside and out, with stripes of texture that add to the sense of the house being part of the landscape.

Throughout the house are textiles inspired by Shiprock Santa Fe, a long-established gallery that deals in Navajo rugs and blankets, and other contemporary Native American crafts. Their strong geometric presence contrasts with the polished concrete floors, dark scoria walls and pared-back white oak furniture, designed in collaboration with Simrel Achenbach of Desciencelab in Taos. With the Sombra de Santa Fe house,

Dust’s experience of cadence and climate has created a true observatory of the landscape, a sanctuary integrated with the land yet always looking to the distant horizons fringed by the Sandia and Manzanita Mountains.

dustarchitects.com

lava-works.com

Set next to the banyan tree-shaded Dunhua North Road, the Capella Taipei exudes the confidence of a long-overdue landmark. The 86-room property occupies several floors of a new glass tower by Mori Building Group, marking the Taiwanese capital’s first true luxury hotel debut in a decade. In a city of around 2.5 million that blends high ambition with day-to-day practicality – a mix that arguably influenced Taiwan’s title of ‘happiest place in Asia’ in the 2025 World Happiness Report – the opening feels well timed.

Capella Taipei wins Best New Opening at the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026

The interiors, courtesy of designer André Fu, are shaped around the idea of a ‘modern mansion’. Monumental bronze doors open onto a marble vestibule lined with tapestries, a striking archway and the all-day dining restaurant Plume. Then comes the masterstroke: a spiral staircase with a sweeping hardwood handrail that curls around Mexican designer Joel Escalona’s sculptural piece Quiet Dynamics.

Rooms start at a generous 48 sq m, with blond-wood walls, hand-painted silk panels, floor-to-ceiling windows and marble bathrooms. The six 270 sq m pool terrace suites are the showstoppers, boasting vast private decks with plunge pools, jacuzzis and sunbeds, as well as outdoor dining areas. Meanwhile, the 30m-long pool is framed by bougainvillaea, and the spa attuned to lunar rhythms. Sustainability threads through the LEED Gold-certified building via energy-efficient ventilation, motion-sensor lighting and dual-layer automated louvres.

Five dining concepts sharpen the hotel’s profile. They include Ember 28, which glows with fire-cooking theatre beneath twin crystal chandeliers; Mizue, a hinoki counter embracing the omakase ritual; and The Glasshouse, a three-storey bar complex that crowns the ensemble.

Capella Taipei is located at No. 139, Dunhua North Road, Songshan District, Taipei City, 105021, Taiwan

This article appears in the February 2026 Design Awards Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

Save for not building anything at all, building responsibly with what can naturally be found on a project’s site is arguably one of the most sustainable ways to go. Tuckey Design Studio’s Rammed Earth House, in rural Wiltshire, is such an example. The studio was commissioned back in 2019 to design a residence that would draw on the owners’ love of British farmhouses and the countryside. The site, a disused former brickworks, offered a ripe opportunity to experiment with ancient earth building methods to bring them into the modern age.

Step inside Rammed Earth House by Tuckey Design Studio

‘The clients envisaged a low-build house, with strong eco credentials,’ says studio director Jonathan Tuckey. ‘It should also make clever use of the inside/outside spaces, particularly for entertaining, and feel intimate enough for two, but it could host 20.’ Tuckey set about analysing the site’s history (it had an established connection to using earth, and was referenced in William Smith’s 1815 geological map of England) and sketched out a campus encompassing sensitively retrofitted Victorian outbuildings (to serve as guest accommodation, yoga studio, semi-outdoor kitchen and storage), a new-build house and a service quarter.

New built elements were created using an equal ratio of clay excavated from the site, aggregate from demolished buildings, local limestone gravel, and water. The earth, rammed by the builders in layers, produced walls up to a metre in thickness, requiring no joints for more than 100m in length. The result is an earthen house envelope that feels seamless, but also as if naturally emerging from the surrounding land.

The layout is arranged in two distinct wings, set around courtyards awash with indigenous greenery and productive plants, while a series of large openings provide additional connections to the outdoors, offering idyllic views of woodland and an Iron Age fort. Interior finishes consist of clay plaster, limestone, copper, Douglas fir, walnut, oak, terracotta and brass, all blending easily with the smooth earthiness of the walls. Specially designed fixtures, such as door handles and lighting, as well as dramatic vaulted ceilings and a turret-style spiral staircase, underline the bespoke and highly sophisticated nature of the construction.

At 810 sq m, sat on a 63-acre estate, the property is large; yet the studio's clever design and high-spec yet tactile and organic materials afford a comfortably intimate feel – and importantly, form a home that is distinctly of its place.

tuckeydesign.com

I’m really interested in creating my own architecture, rather than working within a historical framework,’ says Czech artist Klára Hosnedlová, ahead of her first exhibition at London’s White Cube (at the Bermondsey gallery, 11 February – 29 March 2026). ‘If you are creating a new world, it’s much more difficult, because everything has to be a completely new visualisation.’

Throughout her career, Hosnedlová has built entirely new landscapes, interweaving architectural elements with expansive embroideries, performances and sculptures, which together form vast installations. In her richly immersive worlds, Hosnedlová is drawn to both natural materials – flax, hemp, sand – as well as colder forms such as glass, For Hosnedlová, it is essential that the environments are welcoming. ‘I don’t come from an artistic family, so it is important for me to create a world that is more familiar. I love to be able to speak to those who have never been in a museum. I’m lucky that I can still speak through quite a realistic language, which is embroidery – you can see what it’s like in your hands. It is not abstract.’

This tangibility was key throughout her epic recent exhibition at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, which used raw materials sourced from what is today the Czech Republic, but formerly Bohemia and Moravia. By drawing on these craft traditions, Hosnedlová unites references to both local folklore and, more personally, childhood memories, creating a general world of the imagination. It is a textural, raw and primal landscape that is always changing, fluctuating, living and dying.

The industrial architecture of Hamburger Bahnhof ’s hall was transformed by six vast, handwoven tapestries, made from flax, hemp and plant-based dyes and reminiscent of animal skin. Their sheer scale became a sanctuary, and one in which the visitor was encouraged to enter, walking among them to discover their own private zones. The experience Hosnedlová created was multisensory, set to a backdrop of music by performance artist Billy Bultheel.

Hosnedlová has worked with Bultheel again for the White Cube exhibition, where her utopian landscape is populated with her large-scale tapestries and sculptures. Throughout, 3D-printed concrete columns are adorned with embroideries, while large floor objects are covered in mycelium (reishi mushrooms), her first time working with the fungi. To support the living elements, the atmosphere is moist.

‘It’s very important for me to be focused on the small details,’ says Hosnedlová. ‘But I also thought in a bigger context, about bringing in new worlds. The contrast is important. I spend some days in a little village, and then I’m in Berlin, which is such a huge city. I am always combining different materials, but it depends on the space. At Bahnhof, it was a monumental hall that used to be a train station. It’s very masculine, full of metal, with a big open space where I always felt a little bit lost. That’s why I started to think about some monumental tapestry, something that’s coming more from nature, and where you can be hidden behind. Sometimes I have a problem in museums where I am standing in front of some artworks and everybody can see me from all sides, so in my installations I create places where you can be a bit hidden.’

She has brought this tension between the heavy-duty industrial and the organic to London. ‘When I saw White Cube, I knew I wanted to create some kind of a laboratory, a stage where I could grow new sculptures,’ she adds. ‘The whole of the space here will appear to be underground. There is no natural light, and usually that’s important for my work. But in this case, it is a space to grow something. The sounds, too, appear to come from underground, with every speaker projecting a different sound. It creates one big one full of many messy noises.’

With new materials and a deeper immersion, Hosnedlová is pushing herself further than she has before. ‘If I can, I’ll push myself into something where I don’t feel 100 per cent comfortable. I love that feeling when I don’t know exactly what I’m doing.’

New work by Klára Hosnedlová will be on show from 11 February – 29 March at White Cube Bermondsey, London SE1, whitecube.com

This article appears in the February 2026 Design Awards Issue of Wallpaper* , available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 6 November. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Orient Express has held a near-mythic place in the globetrotting firmament since launching in 1883, but its recent reinvention – following Accor’s full acquisition in 2022 and its partnership with LVMH in 2024 – signals a decisive expansion into offering a wider remit of luxury travel experiences.

Orient Express wins Best Reinvention at the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026

The reboot began in April 2025 with Orient Express La Minerva in Rome, the brand’s first hotel, set within a 17th-century palazzo on Piazza della Minerva. Designer Hugo Toro’s renovation created a deft dialogue between eras: mineral palettes, art deco-inflected geometry and Roman cues distilled into 93 guest rooms. In parallel, the brand introduced La Dolce Vita Orient Express, a slow-travel statement piece, designed by Dimorestudio, that channels the high-gloss glamour of 1960s Italy. Kitted out with cabins and suites that can accommodate up to 62 guests, the train traces 16,000km across 14 regions and 131 cities through Italy.

Momentum continues with the opening in early 2026 of its second hotel, Orient Express Venezia, a 15th-century architectural feat reimagined by Aline Asmar d’Amman, while another milestone will follow at the end of the year with the debut of Orient Express Corinthian, a sailing yacht conceived by Maxime d’Angeac, the group’s artistic director. The vessel will depart from Lisbon in October for a 14-night transatlantic voyage to Barbados.

Completing the arc, the original Orient Express train – comprising 17 carriages from the 1920s and 1930s, found abandoned on the Poland-Belarus border – will return to service. Thirty artisans have been enlisted to restore the train under d’Angeac’s direction, reviving the craftsmanship and allure that defined its golden age.

orient-express.com

This article appears in the February 2026 Design Awards Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

For our interview with Sharan Pasricha, we were invited to meet him at Maison Estelle, the private members’ club he founded in a Grade I-listed Mayfair townhouse. With its understated opulence, richly furnished rooms and crackling autumn fires, it couldn’t have offered a better prelude to the world the hospitality impresario inhabits. ‘It’s a place that’s thoughtfully curated, not staged, where you can be social or alone without needing to explain yourself,’ says Pasricha, who founded the phenomenally successful hospitality conglomerate Ennismore in 2011.

His entrepreneurial story began when, as a boy, he sold his mother’s sandwiches at his primary school in Mumbai. ‘The sandwiches were fantastic and the margins even better,’ he notes. It was a life lesson that stood him in good stead years later when he had the chance to lead the acquisition of The Hoxton. At the time, it comprised just one hotel in Shoreditch, but he saw a gap in the market. ‘What struck me was the potential to create places that people actually lived in,’ he says. ‘Where locals worked, met and built their businesses in the same lobbies as travellers.’

It was that idea of community that eventually grew into Ennismore. At the time, many hotels viewed restaurants, bars and lobbies as a ‘side show’, secondary to the room product. But by smartly prioritising these spaces, Pasricha turned the traditional model on its head. It was a bold departure from industry norms that felt risky at the time, but it went on to shape the modern lifestyle hotel category. ‘Today, the majority of our revenue is generated outside the four walls of the guest room,’ notes Pasricha.

Sharan Pasricha is Best Host in the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026

The expansion of Ennismore’s Hoxton brand caught the attention of Accor, one of the world’s largest hospitality groups. In 2021, the two companies entered into a joint venture that positioned Ennismore as Accor’s dedicated lifestyle arm and significantly accelerated its global expansion.

‘Accor understood that, to be successful, lifestyle brands need to be run differently from traditional hotels,’ he says. So the two groups built an autonomous brand-led structure that allowed Ennismore to keep its creative independence while benefiting from Accor’s global scale. The partnership now oversees more than 190 hotels in more than 40 countries, with 145 more in the pipeline, and a portfolio of 16 lifestyle brands, including 25hours, Delano and Mondrian.

Running at this scale has required discipline and consistency. Supported by four in-house studios covering interiors, graphics, partnerships and digital innovation, Pasricha emphasises the importance of retaining decision-making at brand level. ‘We obsess over every guest touchpoint,’ he says, referring to details like the scent in the lobby or the key card graphics. This structure allows the group to move quickly while safeguarding the character of each concept.

The effectiveness of this approach is evident in its upcoming openings, such as the Delano Miami Beach, which he says will be a defining moment for Ennismore. ‘It’s a showcase of what we do best: reimagining the brand’s iconic elements – like the glass apples in each room – while creating culinary destinations, introducing two Paris Society concepts in the US for the first time, and bringing back the legendary Rose Bar,’ he says.

Alongside Ennismore’s global trajectory sits the Estelle brand, which remains fully owned by Pasricha. It began with Maison Estelle in London in 2021 and soon after expanded to Estelle Manor, in the Grade II-listed former Eynsham Hall in Oxfordshire. Overseen by Estelle’s artistic director, his wife Eiesha Bharti Pasricha, the project took years of restoration and represents the fullest expression of his ‘hosted home’ philosophy. Next up is Celeste, ‘the mischievous younger sister’ to Maison Estelle and Estelle Manor, which is due to open in a restored townhouse in Notting Hill this year. Members will still be at the heart but, for the first time, the public gets a look-in with the opening of an Italian-American restaurant on the ground floor.

Like any successful entrepreneur, Pasricha acknowledges a tendency for restlessness, especially when it comes to pushing the boundaries of what hospitality can be. ‘I’m always asking: how do we make spaces more human, more connected, more unexpected? There’s always a new way to surprise and delight, and I can’t stop thinking about it.’ Pasricha is currently obsessed with how technology, especially AI, is reshaping the world around us. ‘Everywhere we look, companies are optimising for efficiency, speed and scale,’ he says. ‘It reinforces my belief that we need to go in the opposite direction in hospitality by creating spaces that slow people down, encourage real connection, and foster creativity.’

From hawking sandwiches in the school yard to helming a portfolio that has reshaped global hospitality, Pasricha’s path reflects the impact of a founder who understands how people want to live, work and connect, and whose ideas have helped steer the direction of what a modern lifestyle hotel is today.

ennismore.com, estellecommunity.com

This article appears in the February 2026 Design Awards Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

Collaborations between watch brands can be very successful when each brand brings a strong visual identity of their own to the table, so when the richly traditional Swiss manufacture Ulysse Nardin announced a partnership with avant-garde Genevan watchmaker Urwerk, we were more than a little intrigued – particularly as this is Ulysse Nardin’s first collaboration with a fellow watchmaking brand.

On closer inspection, however, the pairing is not as surprising as it might seem, as both brands have pursued a modern, technical-first approach over the last few years, with cultural moments overlapping on both their timelines. Founded by Martin Frei and Felix Baumgartner in 1997, Urwerk has come to be defined by its futuristic watch design and high-tech principles, as well as its use of a ‘satellite’ system for displaying the time.

Meanwhile, despite boasting a historical lineage, the 1846-founded Ulysse Nardin has increasingly adopted modern sensibilities, culminating in the 2001 release of the Freak, which is defined by its hands-free way of telling the time, displayed by the rotating movement itself.

To mark their first collaboration, the two brands chose to reinterpret the Freak, which was the first luxury watch to incorporate a silicon escapement, significantly improving efficiency, durability and accuracy. Powered by a new movement that the two brands developed together, the Ur-Freak unites Urwerk’s satellite system with Ulysse Nardin’s penchant for silicon. Time is shown by one of the three ‘hands’, which move around the minute indicator on the right side; once an hour has passed, the disc changes and the next hand begins to read the time.

More brands playing with time

Innovative ways of telling the time are proving to be a current trend. For French watch brand Trilobe, traditional hands are eschewed in favour of a system of indicators and rotating rings, with three different rings displaying hours, minutes and seconds. A pointer highlights where the information lines up, thus revealing the time. It is intuitive rather than confusing – the wearer is invited to ‘take’ the time, rather than be led by it.

This philosophical bent is also considered by Swiss watchmaker HYT, which uses fluids to tell the time. In place of the traditional hour hand, a liquid indicator containing coloured fluid shows the time that has passed, and a transparent fluid shows the time to come.

For Ressence, a minimalist aesthetic overrules a complicated display, creating a watch face where all the elements are constantly in motion. It’s a reflection on the nature of time itself, and yet another indication that the act of telling time, heavy in philosophical symbolism, is a work of art in its own right.

The Ur-Freak is available in a limited-edition run of 100, price on request, ulysse-nardin.com, urwerk.com

This article appears in the February 2026 Design Awards Issue of Wallpaper* , available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 8 January. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Detroit looks different these days. Its grand but long-abandoned buildings – vestiges of a bygone era when the automobile was king – have been transformed into galleries and hotels. New glistening towers soar high above the historic skyline. Once blighted neighbourhoods have been redeveloped to keep existing residents while attracting new ones – 12,500 in 2024, according to US census data. There’s a sense of optimism here that’s hard to find anywhere else in the US.

Detroit is City of the Year in the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026

This transformation is emblematic of a new wave of revitalisation sweeping the Motor City, one that stems from the first seeds of scrappy urban renewal that began to emerge here a decade or two ago. Back then, organic farms and replanted urban forests started to crop up on the vacant plots of former row houses. Creatives made good use of disused warehouses and bank buildings, while journalists eagerly chronicled the hardscrabble, bootstrap narrative – perhaps no more so than with the watchmaker Shinola, which marketed itself as a ‘made in America’ brand. (A claim the Federal Trade Commission would later dispute.)

‘When I moved here ten years ago, Detroit’s creative scene was still very raw,’ says French-American culture journalist Margot Guicheteau, who recently released a travel book called Soul of Detroit. ‘It was like a jungle, but in the best way possible. Everyone was talking about their visions for the city. Now they are actually coming to fruition.’

Detroit’s current crop of movers and shakers (artists, architects, designers, gallerists and progressive developers) is taking a more considered approach to urban revitalisation, collectively formulating sustainable, future-proof strategies that other cities with similar conditions could potentially adopt. ‘What we’re doing here, other places will have to do soon as well,’ says Philip Kafka, founder of Prince Concepts, a local developer that’s invested in Detroit’s Core City neighbourhood.

While downtown Detroit has experienced its share of shiny upgrades (notably with Hudson’s Detroit, a 1.5m sq ft development designed by SHoP), there’s been substantial growth in the city’s neighbourhoods, too. New York firms Office for Strategy + Design and SO-IL are currently working on Stanton Yards, a cultural complex along the Detroit River, set to open in 2027. And in November 2025, Detroit mayor Mike Duggan announced a plan to transform the Albert Kahn-designed Packard Plant, one of the city’s most notorious urban ruins, into a 28-acre mixed-use site that includes affordable live-work housing, a museum devoted to Detroit’s electronic music scene, and even an indoor skate park.

‘There’s a misconception that the grassroots, DIY approach left the city,’ says Anthony Curis, co-founder of Library Street Collective, the gallery and cultural platform that’s spearheading the Stanton Yards project. ‘It’s very much alive but has shifted, almost exclusively, to the neighbourhoods.’ The city’s status as a Unesco City of Design and events such as Detroit Month of Design are further securing the Motor City’s status as one of the most exciting places to be right now, and there are a number of projects that are putting it back on the map. Among these is the arts centre, The Shepherd.

Central to the rapidly redeveloping Little Village neighbourhood and completed in 2024, this multifaceted cultural campus makes clever use of a stately Romanesque church, its ancillary buildings and extensive grounds. The complex is anchored by an expansive hall for temporary exhibitions, sensitively converted by Brooklyn-based architecture firm Peterson Rich Office, as well as a public library, curated by Asmaa Walton of Black Art Library, and a performing arts theatre.

The campus also includes a rectory-turned-bed and breakfast; a wine bar called Father Forgive Me; a bakery designed by local practice Undecorated; a skate park that Tony Hawk helped imagine; and a sculpture garden showcasing works by prominent Detroit artist Charles McGee. All of the landscaping was carried out by Office for Strategy + Design. The impressive project was developed by Curis and his wife and business partner JJ, who are also the force behind the nearby OMA-designed Lantern complex and the upcoming Stanton Yards.

Core City, an ever-evolving residential and commercial neighbourhood located north-east of the Corktown neighbourhood, is also blossoming. The project, spearheaded by Kafka, is a new kind of real estate development in which existing residents are kept in place while empty plots are in-filled with experimental dwellings; some are self-built by individual homeowners while others are constructed on spec. The Canopy is one such addition. Designed by LA architecture practice EC3, the multifamily complex was inspired by the styles of Mies van der Rohe and Albert Kahn, architects that had a significant impact on Detroit. The cube-shaped structures are clad in renewable materials and feature colourful details like exuberant rooftop murals.

Development company Bedrock has been integral to Detroit’s redevelopment, especially downtown. One of its marquee projects is the transformation of Book Tower – the Renaissance-style landmark skyscraper originally designed in the 1920s – into one of the city’s first mixed-used destinations. Completed in 2022, it comprises restaurants, retail stores, gyms, co-working spaces, condos and the Roost apartment/hotel. The building is a shining example of adaptive reuse architecture, especially at this scale. Bedrock invested nearly $400m into the tower’s transformation, a signal that historic buildings are not just being celebrated but being put to good use; made relevant again.

And of the Big Three car manufacturers, Ford has perhaps been the most invested in the city’s revitalisation. On top of its investments in Corktown and the 30-acre tech and cultural hub Michigan Central, the company is overhauling its headquarters, located in nearby Dearborn, Michigan. Architecture practice Snøhetta is currently designing Ford’s new 2.1m sq ft state-of-the-art Research & Engineering Campus – when it opens at the end of 2027, the paradigm-shifting complex, a fluid composition of interconnecting volumes, courtyards and sloping green roofs, will reflect the forward-looking brand’s stated mission of fostering collaboration, innovation and community.

This article appears in the February 2026 Design Awards Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

The role of the creative director, at least in the form we know it now – the multi-hyphenate aesthete that dictates everything from imagery to experience – is a relatively recent invention. As culture and media have become more fragmented, these cross-disciplinary figures have risen up to meet the moment — the macro-thinkers able to make sense of all that dispersion and wrangle a brand or an artist into a single, cohesive vision.

No one has been more successful at it than Montreal-born designer Willo Perron. One simply has to take a cursory flip through his recent portfolio to understand his cultural impact. He’s come up with the concepts for some of the most talked about live shows of this era — Beyoncé’s Western-themed Cowboy Carter tour and Rihanna’s floating-stage performance at the 2023 Super Bowl, for instance. He’s designed slick retail stores and pop-ups for Kim Kardashian’s Skims line, as well as for brands like Cartier and H&M, and in 2021, he created the marble-and-midcentury-furniture-filled HQ for Jay-Z’s Roc Nation record label.

His work often takes a simple idea and blows it up to its most extreme or even absurd. Like his set design for the A/W 2025 Chanel runway show, with its giant black ribbon curling skywards towards the glass and wrought-iron ceiling of Paris’ Beaux Arts Grand Palais. Or that for the house's S/S 2025 haute couture show, a similarly maximalist gesture that saw the models circulating along a looping runway in the shape of massive interlocking white Cs. But despite his 20 years of choreographing culture at the highest level, ‘furniture has always felt like the thing I was meant to do’, admits Perron, who only released his first collection, outside of custom builds for interior projects, in 2022. ‘It happened when it was supposed to happen,’ he says.

Willo Perron: a multi-hyphenate's design journey

Perron, who speaks slowly with a slight French-Canadian lilt, pauses to think before he answers questions, his eyes wandering to the ceiling as if he’s conjuring up some kind of cinematic image in his mind’s eye. You can understand why mercurial creatives are drawn to him, perhaps as a grounding antidote to an artist’s naturally frenetic energy. Yet to understand his polymathic skill set, you have to first understand the specific political and cultural milieu within which he grew up.

‘Montreal in the mid-1990s has a lot to do with it,’ acknowledges Perron, who comes from a family of similarly creative minds (his father is a jazz musician and his brother Zébulon is an interior designer). ‘Quebec had just gone through a referendum, trying to secede from Canada, and there was an exodus of people and money from the province – kind of like Berlin after the wall came down. It was quite lawless,’ he says. ‘We grew up with a lot of space and no resources. It forced you to become creative.’

Perron soon began dabbling in all manner of fields. ‘Culture hadn’t fused together as it has now – everything was more segregated,’ he notes. ‘There were the punk and hardcore kids, the club scene, the skateboarders. And I was curious about it all.’ That curiosity provides a bit of context for the dizzying range of projects he undertook in that period. Early on, he was a club promoter and threw parties. Later, he owned a record and audio equipment shop, which segued into becoming the now-defunct record label Audio Research Records. He also founded a snowboard clothing line called Rewind, leading to a brief period designing for DC Shoes in LA.

His experiments with the shop and record label garnered him the attention of Jarret Myer, the founder of underground hip-hop label Rawkus Records in New York, who, after meeting Perron in Montreal, offered him a job in the label’s creative department. There, he contributed to visual campaigns and packaging concepts, but the experience was short-lived. ‘After 9/11, immigration stuff got complicated,’ he says. He returned home in 2002, where he picked up his retail ventures. ‘But then I ran into Dov,’ he recalls, referring to Dov Charney, the founder of American Apparel. Impressed with how Perron had built out his own shops, Charney asked him to help with the bricks-and-mortar roll-out of his then-fledgling brand.

Perron was responsible for the brand’s spare and functional in-store aesthetic. ‘There was this book called High-Tech,’ he says of the inspiration. ‘It showed you how to create a postmodern interior with available industrial materials like ductwork and pipes. We wanted the shops to feel a bit like thrifting at Value Village [a Canadian secondhand clothing chain].’ But the pace eventually took its toll. ‘I would find the location, design the stores, staff them and merchandise them,’ he says of the workload that had him criss-crossing the globe weekly. ‘You realise your capacity when you’re put under that kind of level of pressure.’

Burnt out after several years, he left American Apparel and moved permanently to LA. Following a brief stint designing stores for Apple, Perron then embarked on a much-needed sabbatical. ‘My dad was in his seventies and caught the archaeology bug,’ he recalls. ‘He was on his way to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, so I decided to join him on the fly. It was the first time in my life I had money in the bank and no responsibilities.’

He ended up spending nearly a year travelling throughout Asia. During that period, his longtime friend, Alain Macklovitch, also known as DJ A-Trak, was touring with rapper Kanye West, and he saw that they would be crossing paths in Kuala Lumpur. ‘So I texted him. We meet up and he says, “You should really meet Kanye. I think you guys would get along.”’

Pop culture's favourite designer

That chance meeting on the other side of the world would become a turning point in Perron’s career. West would later become known for his forays into fashion – most notably, his clothing line Yeezy – as well as his interest in architecture and design. But at that point, he was still early in his evolution and looking for the right person to steer his taste to a more refined and cohesive place. Perron began creative-directing West’s entire visual identity, refining his wardrobe to skew more high fashion than streetwear, designing his album art, and conceptualising his stage shows, starting with the 2008 Glow in the Dark tour. ‘We took over a space on Fairfax [in LA] and started a design office,’ he says. ‘We began filtering everything he did – if it came out of Kanye, it had to come through us.’

These mammoth jumps in Perron’s career can feel difficult to fathom. How does one person go from designing retail to honing the image of a major recording artist? But the answer lies in the instincts he honed as a curious young person jumping between underground scenes in post-referendum Montreal. ‘What [Kanye needed was] someone with an intrinsic understanding of the ecosystem and who knows how something should look,’ says Perron, who notes that West was already familiar with his work from his days at Rawkus. ‘And who will fight to the end to see it through.’

Other artists soon came calling. Lady Gaga, Charli XCX, Florence + The Machine and St Vincent (with whom he won a Grammy award for art directing the 2017 Masseduction album) have all turned to Perron to shape their visual worlds. Unsurprisingly, for him, that led to further diversification of his oeuvre. ‘The musicians I worked for began asking me to help them with their homes,’ he says. ‘The “Pillo” sofas we did for Knoll came out of one of those projects.’

Furniture design and beyond

Like many of Perron’s designs, the ‘Pillo’ conforms to a singular idea. The base is made up of two cushions stacked one on top of the other, with two more for the armrests, and one for each backrest. The original model was conceived for a private project ‘at a scale four times as big’, but he also produced a smaller prototype to ‘keep working on’, he says. ‘I wanted it to be this perfectly modular thing.’ It came together almost accidentally.

‘I went to have coffee with Willo,’ says Knoll creative director Jonathan Olivares. ‘I had no idea he made furniture.’

At that point, Perron had self-produced several pieces – the platform-like ‘FKA’ bed, the ‘Dino’ collection with a Moroccan tadelakt finish, and the ‘Sausage’ sofa, essentially a malleable oversized tube – and had collaborated on one-off projects with brands such as USM. But he had never properly developed a product for the high-end furniture market.

Yet when Olivares came across the ‘Pillo’ prototype in Perron’s Silver Lake studio, ‘we shipped it straight to our R&D facility’, he says. In 2025, Knoll came out with Perron’s second piece for the brand, the ‘Bun’ chair, which resembles a doughy cloud perched atop a slender chrome base. The same year saw Perron release a collection of modular furniture for Swedish brand No Ga – a series of colourful, cuboid fibreglass blocks that can be linked together like puzzle pieces.

All of Perron’s furniture projects have a similar DNA: inherent modularity, soft, inviting curves, and an emphasis on unfussy forms that can blend easily with their surroundings. Olivares chalks it up to his macro way of thinking. ‘He’s an ideas man,’ he says. ‘He thinks big and intuitively.’

So, where does a designer who has seemingly done everything, yet remains restless for new problems, go from here? At the moment, he’s developing a series of wellness pavilions with a marble brand, as well as experimenting with furniture purpose-built for sex. But he considers those to be personal projects, separate from the work he does with his firm, Perron Studios. In fact, Perron recently parted ways with his longtime business partner, graphic designer Brian Roettinger – the firm was previously known as Perron-Roettinger – to further streamline his portfolio of projects. ‘He’s still a close friend,’ he says of the split. ‘But we wanted to work on different things.’

Still, streamlining doesn’t seem to have narrowed his horizons. ‘I’m really curious about transportation design,’ he ponders. ‘I love hospitality. I spend a lot of time in restaurants and hotels – that’s probably in my near future.’ At this point, though, there’s nothing he would explicitly rule out. ‘There’s no five- or ten-year plan,’ he says. ‘It’s more about finding opportunities to do what I haven’t already done.’

Discover all the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026 winners in the February issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 8 January 2025. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Call it confirmation bias if you will, but as we were sending our annual Design Awards issue off to press towards the close of 2025, it felt as if the news cycle was mirroring our fascination with the way in which we absorb the world around us through the ideas and objects we create. In quick succession came word that Pantone had kicked up some political dust by prescribing white as its Colour of the Year. Next, the Trump administration ordered the replacement of the Calibri typeface on all State Department correspondence with Times New Roman in a blow to ocularly challenged screen-readers in particular and fans of sans serifs in general. Finally, a hippo-shaped home bar by French sculptor François-Xavier Lalanne broke the global record for a work of design when it sold for $31.4m at Sotheby’s in New York. This is all evidence, if it were needed, that aspects of design continue to agitate, aggravate and astound in equal measure – no mean feat when so much else in life appears to homogenise at an ever-faster rate.

Homogeneity is certainly not something that characterises our annual Design Awards, which launched in 2005. That year, Wallpaper* US director Michael Reynolds styled our story on Miami, winner of Best City; 20 years later, we return to the US to mark a fresh imperative to make Detroit great again through a series of ambitious cultural and architectural projects.

The Motor City is the winner of one of four cross-disciplinary categories given special attention: in addition to City of the Year, our Launch, Designer and Life-enhancer of the Year categories underline the central role that innovation, imagination and inspiration play in our lives, celebrated in the remarkable way in which London’s V&A East Storehouse (said launch) is rethinking the museum model, and the degree to which sauna (life-enhancers don't come hotter) has entered the vocabulary of all but the most cursory of pleasure seekers.

Packed into this issue are the latest and greatest examples of forward-thinking design in the worlds of architecture, art, beauty, fashion, interiors, tech and travel – as always, a measured mix of the zeitgeisty and the downright quirky, made vital by the extraordinary minds of those who help bring them into being. Not least design studio Formafantasma, which took on the task of producing this year’s award – a flat-packed tribute to ingenuity and flair that we feel encapsulates the achievements of all our worthy winners.

Bill Prince, Editor-in-Chief

The February 2026 Design Awards issue of Wallpaper* is available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 8 January 2025. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

The annual Wallpaper* Design Awards returns in 2026 – and we can officially reveal the first shortlisted nominees.

The Wallpaper* Design Awards features an honour roll of outstanding places, products and people, in a celebration of the power of design to lift spirits and improve lives. As well as bringing you the best in architecture, art, design, interiors, entertaining, fashion, tech and travel, we will also reveal the winners of four special categories, listed below, selected by our team of experts.

From inspiring designers and innovative launches to creative hubs and life-enhancing objects, these Wallpaper* favourites are sure to become yours, too.

Designer of the Year

01. Max Lamb, UK

02. Nifemi Marcus-Bello, Nigeria

03. Willo Perron, Canada

04. Gabriel Tan, Singapore/Portugal

05. Faye Toogood, UK

06. Garance Vallée, France

Read more about each of our Designer of the Year nominees

Best Launch

01. Guest suite at Geoffrey Bawa's Number 11, Sri Lanka

02. Orient Express luxury train and hotel brand, by Accor

03. Skin Fetish: Glass 001 Artistry Mask, by Pat McGrath Labs

04. V&A East Storehouse, UK, by DS&R

05. Voce Triennale music venue, Milan, by Luca Cipelletti

06. Yinka Ilori Foundation, by Yinka Ilori

Read more about these innovative launches.

City of the Year

01. Accra, Ghana

02. Busan, South Korea

03. Delhi, India

04. Detroit, US

05. Helsinki, Finland

06. São Paulo, Brazil

Read more about each of the nominated cities

Life-Enhancer of the Year

01. Continent of Play playground blueprint, by 21st Europe and Spacon

02. Ottagono Wellness Gym by Cassina, Technogym and Giulia Foscari

03. Paper Pro Move paper tablet, by reMarkable

04. PuuSauna, by Jaakko Torvinen

05. 'Wake' bedside lamp, by Heatherwick Studio and Tala

06. Rollator walker, by Zeal

Read more about the Life Enhancer shortlist

Look out for the winners of our four landmark awards and lots more in the February issue of Wallpaper* and online from early January.

'Continent of Play' by 21st Europe and Spacon

'Continent of Play' is a blueprint published by 21st Europe, a new think tank founded by Copenhagen-based entrepreneur Kaave Pour (who previously headed Ikea's Space10). The plan calls for significant investment in playgrounds, elevating them to the level of civic infrastructure – every bit as essential as transport networks, cultural venues or energy grids. At its core is the argument that playgrounds are vital social spaces, where families gather, strangers become neighbours and trust takes root.

To create the blueprint, 21st Europe worked with Copenhagen-based architects Spacon, alongside experts in play, infrastructure, and policy, to ensure 'Continent of Play' is a practical framework rather than just a vision.

21st-europe.com

Zeal Mobility Walker

The humble mobility walker has just had a minimalist makeover courtesy of Zeal Lifestyle. After four years of collaboration with users, the young British brand has come up with the distinctive ‘Zeal’ walker, a smart mobility aid ‘designed to promote independence, enhance confidence and provide style’ for the elderly and disabled.

Far from bland and utilitarian, the rollator is not only compact and foldable but also available in a choice of colours ranging from black to pastel shades, with matching accessories such as pared-back bags and backrests.

zeal-lifestyle.com

Tala x Heatherwick

Three years in the making, ‘Wake’ is Thomas Heatherwick's response to pre-bedtime screen consumption. Part bedside lamp, part circadian-aware sleep aid, created with British lighting brand Tala, it pairs hand-glazed ceramic and pressed glass with programmable light and sound sequences designed to help users wind down at night and wake gently in the morning – no harsh blue-light-emitting screens required.

The brief to Heatherwick Studio was deceptively simple: design something tactile and beautiful that helps people reclaim bedtime from their phones. The final design feels simple but hides a surprising amount of engineering. A weighted ceramic base, hand-glazed so each one is subtly different, is topped with a softly rippled glass ‘sun’. Rotate the base to adjust brightness; press once to start a wind-down or wake-up sequence. The display hides behind the glass, glowing only when needed.

tala.co.uk

Ottagono Wellness Gym, by Cassina, Technogym and Giulia Foscar

Cassina Custom Interiors partnered with Technogym and Italian architect Giulia Foscari of studio Una/Unless to create a compact 'room within a room', a space that could be multifunctional and be adapted to several uses. The top of the 1.9 metres column is characterised by a series of recessed LEDs, while the interior of the object also features dimmable and remote controlled lights.

For the object's debut, Foscari and Cassina involved Technogym, the octagonal cabinet-like volume being a natural solution for a compact home gym. When closed, the Ottagono Gym looks like a bold but unassuming element in the room. Once open, it reveals its functionality with a series of elements essential to a complete training session, as its shelves and hooks are fitted with Technogym classics.

cassina.com

PuuSauna by Jaakko Torvinen

This project, created for a private client on Finland's Kaunissaari island by architect Jaakko Torvinen, is an alluring balance of poetry-meets-functionality, immersed in the enchanting Finnish countryside. Puusauna, which means wood or tree sauna in English, is a traditional log cabin with intricate dovetail joints and a contemporary twist thanks to an overhanging handmade zinc roof, large windows, sophisticated wood detailing and treatments, and the use of real trees.

The tree trunks — replete with branches and knobbly bits — act as columns. It is something that had already been explored to great effect by the architect in his project Pikku-Finlandia, but Torvinen (who is also doing a PhD in the topic of naturally shaped wood in architecture and design) has taken things one step further here by using even more of the tree. Bespoke furniture and detailing by contributors such as Helsinki-based COMPANY, manufacturers Nikari and designer brand .TEBIAN, complete this gem of a design nicely.

jaakkotorvinen.com

reMarkable Paper Pro Move

Of all the tech that has crossed my desk in 2025, nothing was more anticipated and appreciated than the compact Paper Pro Move from reMarkable. In the space of just a few years, the Norwegian digital paper company has steamed to the top of the ream, making tablets that capture the gritty analogue feel of writing on paper coupled with a robust, ultra-simple operating system.

Refined hardware and straightforward software are the Paper Pro Move's strong points. Combining handwriting recognition with a variety of pen and brush types, easy cutting, pasting and resizing and a small but handy suite of geometric shape tools, reMarkables are a dream to use. Your docs live in the cloud and can be instantly accessed across tablet, mobile and desktop. New for 2025 is a browser plug-in that snips websites and sends them to your device for reading, stripped of ads and cruft.

Although the 2024 reMarkable Paper Pro increased capabilities – including colour, a backlit screen and improved storage – it was developed alongside this half-sized version. Small enough to slip in a pocket but losing none of the functionality (save for the Paper Pro’s foldaway keyboard), the Paper Pro Move is always to hand.

reMarkable Paper Pro Move, from £399, reMarkable.com

The annual Wallpaper* Design Awards issue features an honour roll of outstanding places, products and people; celebrating the power of design to lift spirits and improve lives. The City of the Year award spotlights the urban locations, making an impact in design, architecture and contemporary culture.

Discover the nominated locations below, and stay tuned for the winner, which will be announced in the next issue of Wallpaper* magazine on 8 January 2026.

Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026: City of the Year shortlist

Accra, Ghana

Ghana’s capital is entering a defining chapter, its creative momentum gathering pace after years of long-stated ambition. This year (2025), the team behind Limbo Accra established a new intellectual anchor for the city with Limbo Museum in Labone: a 600 sq m, two-storey transformation of an unfinished structure into a cultural hub, research lab and exhibition space where architecture and art converge. Across town, the opening of Dot.ateliers | Ogbojo by DeRoche Projects and TAELON7, serves as HQ for a writers’ and curators’ residency dedicated to rest, reflection and cross-continental exchange on Accra’s outskirts. Meanwhile, Lesley Lokko’s African Futures Institute (AFI) continues to evolve and push the trajectory further. And yet, as Ghanaian architect Alice Asafu-Adjaye reminds us in her Wallpaper* local’s guide to Accra, the engine of this rising power city remains its people: ‘You hear us before you see us,’ she says, whether in music, debate or conversation – a vibrancy that continues to propel Accra’s evolution.

New architecture: Backyard Community Club, by DeRoche Projects; Dot.ateliers | Ogbojo, by DeRoche Projects and TAELON7; Limbo Museum, by Limbo Accra.

Hotels and restaurants: Ghana Club; Kempinski Hotel Gold Coast City, by Page and Looney and Associates; La Villa Boutique Hotel; Santoku, by Hubert de Givenchy.

Cultural draws: Dikan Center, founded by photographer Paul Ninson; National Theatre, by CCTN Design; Nubuke Foundation, by Nav_s Baerbel Mueller and TAELON7.

Busan, South Korea

Newly named World Design Capital 2028, Busan is gaining momentum, using design to build on its traditions of civic resilience and cooperation. Under the banner Inclusive City, Engaged Design, the bid reflects a place intent on shaping more connected futures and deepening its cultural landscape, from the vast Eco Delta Smart City plan, a zero-energy, water-smart district built on digital urban systems, to a surge of architectural ambition now reshaping the skyline. Under construction, Kengo Kuma’s Busan Lotte Town Tower rises over the waterfront, Snøhetta’s long-awaited Busan Opera House edges toward reality, and OMA is reimagining hillside living through its Slope Housing model. Seoul may have taken our Best City award in 2024, but Busan, with its blend of ambition and intention, may well be next in line.

New architecture: Cheongsapo Daritdol Observatory; Heungkuk Tower Busan, by Mecanoo; Millac The Market / LJL Architects and 2K1 Architecture.

Under construction: Busan Lotte Town Tower, by Kengo Kuma and Associates; Busan Opera House, by Snøhetta with Ilshin Architects; Busan Slope Housing, by OMA.

Hotels and restaurants: EL 16.52, by JOHO Architecture; Mogua Hotel; Sakae, by Studio Gaia.

Cultural draws: Busan Cinema Centre, by Coop Himmelb(l)au; SCRAB, by JeongChoi Works; Space Lee Ufan, by KAGA Architects & Planners.

Delhi, India

Delhi’s creative momentum is set to accelerate in 2026 with the launch of the Delhi Design District this spring. Born from the collaboration between Wallpaper* and StoneX, the cultural hub, whose facade is inspired by the Rosetta Stone, will be home to multisensory art experiences, installations shaped by various Indian dance forms, and seven galleries that reflect human emotions. Its arrival will co-exist neatly with the annual India Art Fair, hosted every February. Meanwhile, the city’s gallery landscape continues to evolve, led by long-standing heavyweights like Nature Morte alongside a widening constellation of experimental spaces. As Delhi continues to see urbanisation and population growth, its current redevelopment of the New Delhi Railway Station will enhance civilian connections to buses, metro and airport alongside nearby areas.

New architecture: Pendentive House, by AKDA; Yashobhoomi Convention & Exhibition Centre, by IDOM + CP Kukreja Architects.

Under construction: Central Vista Redevelopment; Delhi Design District building; New Delhi Railway Station redevelopment.

Hotels and restaurants: Call Me Ten, by Renesa Architecture Design Interiors; The Lodhi, by Kerry Hill; Zura Restaurant and Bar, by Studiio Dangg.

Cultural draws: Nature Morte; Pradhanmantri Sangrahalaya, by Sikka Associates Architects; Shri Ram Centre for Performing Arts, by Shiv Nath Prasa.

Detroit, USA

Detroit is booming – again. Michigan Central, once a symbol of the city’s collapse, now anchors a high-energy mobility campus and sets the tone for a skyline shifting in real time. Downtown, Bedrock’s Hudson’s Detroit, designed by SHoP Architects, rises like a new marker of ambition, while the revived Book Tower blends contemporary living and culture into its restored historic shell. Neighbourhoods are keeping pace: Little Village is accelerating thanks to the Curis-led arts centre Shepherd and a flurry of creative openings, while Core City’s experimental housing and live-work compounds have turned it into a compelling urban laboratory. The numbers reinforce the sentiment: the city gained 12,500 new residents last year, and since 2011, Design Core Detroit has organised Detroit Month of Design, a yearly, city-wide festival that spotlights local creatives and projects.

New architecture: Bedrock’s Hudson’s Detroit, by SHoP Architects; Lantern complex and PASC building, by OMA.

Under construction: Stanton Yards, by SO-IL and OSD; NoMad Detroit.

Hotels and restaurants: Barda restaurant, by Undecorated; Shinola Hotel, by Gachot Studios; The Siren Hotel, by ASH NYC.

Cultural draws: Downtown Detroit and Library Street Collective, founded by Anthony and JJ Curis; Shepherd art Centre, by Peterson Rich Office.

Helsinki, Finland

As Helsinki Design Week 2025 marked its 20th anniversary, the city leaned into a question it knows well: why does the world’s happiest country stay so content? The Scandinavian nation has been designated the happiest in the world for the last eight years by the annual WEF report. The answer is arguably written across the city itself: modern yet rooted, social yet quietly reflective. Its design heritage and forward-looking attitude form a kind of civic formula, visible everywhere from a new wave of design-led hotels to its constellation of spas, singular restaurants and cultural institutions. Helsinki tends its past while engineering its future: the refreshed Finlandia Hall reasserts Aalto’s legacy, while the forthcoming Museum of Architecture and Design will unite more than 900,000 artefacts under one roof. It’s a city refining its identity with calm assurance.

New architecture: Finlandia Hall, refreshed by Arkkitehdit NRT; Lagmansgården, by Anttinen Oiva Architects.

Under construction: Museum of Architecture and Design, by JKMM.

Hotels and restaurants: Finlandia Hall Bistro, by Fyra; Finlandia Homes, featuring Alvar Aalto’s original designs; Jackie, by Joanna Laajisto; Solo Sokos Pier 4, by Anttinen Oiva Architects.

Cultural draws: House of Culture Vallikallio, by Alvar Aalto; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, by Steven Holl; Oodi, by ALA Architects.

São Paulo, Brazil

Long considered one of Wallpaper*’s original design destinations, hard-working São Paulo is not a city that rests on its laurels. While residential projects remain a defining lure (from Studio Arthur Casas’ Pacaembu House, which won a Wallpaper* Design Award in 2024, to the confident work of established studios), large-scale regeneration is gathering pace; Planta Inc’s revival of the city’s modernist heritage signals a renewed respect for its icons, while Sol Camacho’s transformation of Pacaembu Stadium casts tropical modernism in a refreshed light. Hospitality is keeping pace, with Rosewood, Soho House and W drawing travellers hungry for the city’s creative energy. And this year’s 14th International Architecture Biennale pushed the conversation further, challenging architecture to confront climate change and the extreme events reshaping our urban future.

New architecture: Ibaté Building, by Studio Arthur Casas; Roca São Paulo Gallery, by Fernanda Marques; Pina Contemporânea Museum, by Arquitetos Associados.

Under construction: Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), by Metro Arquitetos.

Hotels and restaurants: Pulso Hotel Faria Lima, by Arthur Casas; Rosewood São Paulo, by Philippe Starck; Santokki Restaurant, by Tadu Arquitetura,

Cultural draws: Edifício Itália, by Franz Heep; Ibirapuera Auditorium, by Oscar Niemeyer; Porto Seguro Cultural Space, by São Paulo Arquitetura.

Explore the shortlist for Life-Enhancer of the Year and Launch of the Year in the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026.

Geoffrey Bawa’s Number 11 sleepover

A new sleepover in Colombo could easily be labelled a time warp; however, it is far more accurately understood as an immersion in the enduring magnetism of Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa. Tucked at the end of a discreet cul-de-sac off Bagatalle Road, the former residence of the godfather of Tropical Modernism, Number 11, has become one of the city’s most intriguing places to stay. The property unveiled its first suite seven years after Bawa’s passing; now, a second room deepens the chance to inhabit his world at full scale. Sleep feels almost incidental when you can drift through spaces lined with original artefacts, sketches and artworks.

La Dolce Vita Orient Express

How does a 142-year-old institution continue to matter in a culture that moves at high speed? Orient Express, founded in 1883, has undergone something of a renaissance since its alignment with Accor (2022) and later LVMH (2024), signalling not reinvention so much as a renewed sense of intent. This summer (June 2025), it unveiled the anticipated La Dolce Vita Orient Express: a study in slow travel dreamt up by Milan-based Dimorestudio, which channelled the glamour of 1960s and 1970s Italy. With 12 carriages, a 62-guest occupancy and spaces that prize intimacy, its routes trace 16,000km across 14 regions and 131 Italian cities. Who said long journeys couldn’t be comfortable?

Yinka Ilori Foundation

Play and joy have always been founding principles of artist and designer Yinka Ilori's practice. In 2025, the British-Nigerian creative announced the launch of the Yinka Ilori Foundation, a not-for-profit initiative to bring play, optimism and empowerment to communities worldwide.

'Growing up, play gave me freedom to dream,' says Ilori as he introduces the foundation's mission. 'It allowed me to turn swings into spaceships and everyday places into worlds of possibility. That sense of imagination and joy is something my mother instilled in me, and it's at the heart of why I launched the Yinka Ilori Foundation.'

The foundation's mission statement mentions co-creation, inclusivity, and sustainability as its founding principles, with an aim to create permanent community spaces across the globe. For its inaugural project, Ilori is creating a playscape in Nigeria (his family's ancestral home) co-built by the local community. The space will be based on modular play structures and will be the stage for a series of workshops and community events that will include training in caretaking to make the project sustainable in the long-term and empower its users.

Triennale Voce

Voce is a new space withing Triennale Milano dedicated to music and sound, described as 'an adaptable and multifunctional soundscape with exceptional acoustic and lighting qualities.'

The 300 square metre space, set within the Palazzo Dell'Arte and adjacent to the Triennale gardens, is the new home of Triennale's music programme. The space was conceived to be adapted into a variety of uses (including as a dance floor!), and features a modular seating system designed by modular system designed by Philippe Malouin and produced by Meritalia. Meanwhile, the sound system was designed and engineered by Giorgio Di Salvo, and the lighting design by Anonima Luci. Architect Luca Cipelletti orchestrated the space, giving it a cohesive, functional and aesthetically bold identity.

triennale.org

V&A East Storehouse

Museum displays are typically the tip of a collection’s iceberg, but this is neatly turned on its head at the V&A East Storehouse in London. The Victoria and Albert Museum family’s newest outpost opened in May 2025 to critical acclaim (and with a Wallpaper* exclusive, no less), designed by New York-based architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) with support from UK-based architects Austin-Smith:Lord.

This is a museum but not as you know it. The V&A East Storehouse is a pioneering statement in museum storage; crossing its threshold is not only a deep dive into the celebrated institution’s vast and incredibly varied holdings but also offers unprecedented public access to all its treasures. The new, purpose-built interior is home to some 250,000 objects, 350,000 books and 1,000 archives. Central to this is the fact that nearly everything is placed within a continuous shelving-grid ‘cloud’, exposed and open for all to see.

Skin Fetish: Glass 001 Artistry Mask, by Pat McGrath Labs

Skin Fetish: Glass 001 Artistry Mask by Pat McGrath is a peel-off, pore-blurring gel containing ingredients such as hydrating glycerin, rose flower water and allantoin. It delivers ‘the same hypnotic, light-catching finish that left the beauty world spellbound’, the brand said in a statement. The mask made its debut at Maison Margiela Artisanal 2024 haute couture show, and went stratospherically viral: a look that transformed John Galliano’s cast of models (including Gwendoline Christie and Leon Dame) into living porcelain dolls with ‘glass skin’ that appeared almost hyperreal.

‘Glass Skin 001 is my love letter to the Maison Margiela runway,’ adds Pat McGrath. ‘This formula captures the brilliance of that iconic moment, delivering hyper-shiny, lacquered radiance and an ethereal glow in minutes. It’s beauty reimagined for makeup lovers everywhere. Wear it, love it, make it yours.’

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

Max Lamb

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

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

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

Nifemi Marcus-Bello

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

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

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

Faye Toogood

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

This approach has been clear in projects such as her 2024 collection for Poltrona Frau, and it was beautifully evident in the booth she curated for Friedman Benda at the last edition of PAD London: dubbed 'The Magpie's Nest', it included her own work alongside a series of objects and furniture that offer different points of view on the natural world, created by the likes of Misha Kahn, Andrea Branzi and Fernando and Humberto Campana. 'The Magpie’s Nest is not a vitrine of trophies, it’s an uplifting and energetic choir of colliding collective voices,' she said of the project.

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

Willo Perron

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

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

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

Gabriel Tan

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

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

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

Garance Vallée

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

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

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

One of the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2025 winners includes a recent collection of eye and lip pencils from Hermès Beauty, named Trait d’Hermès. ‘I vividly remember that I was one of those kids who loved stationery and having a huge palette of colours in front of me,’ Hermès Beauty’s creative director Gregoris Pyrpylis said of the collection upon its launch in October 2024.

Conceived in collaboration with the brand’s packaging creator Pierre Hardy, it reflects on these childhood memories and is designed to resemble a kaleidoscopic set of new crayons. ‘Make-up has become even more joyful and more playful than ever,’ he continued. ‘And Trait d’Hermès is an invitation to explore this to its fullest.’

Wallpaper* Design Awards 2025: make-up collections by Hermès, Dior, Celine, Chanel and Prada selected by beauty editor Hannah Tindle

A grown-up invitation to play with make-up application has felt like a running theme over the past year in beauty. Peter Philips, Dior’s creative and image director of make-up, channelled a similar line of thought into the reimagined Diorshow Mono Couleur eyeshadows and Stylo eyeliners, encouraging spontaneity and experimentation with an array of colours and textures. In the accompanying Diorshow ad campaign, Philips drew abstract black and pastel-toned stripes across model Deva Cassel’s eyes – paying homage to Serge Lutens, whose radically illustrative work for Dior creative director Marc Bohan used every inch of the face as a surface for painting and drawing with make-up.

During his tenure at Celine, Hedi Slimane mined the modernist archives of its founder Céline Vipiana. (Besides clothing, Vipiana produced the brand’s first perfume, Vent Fou, in 1963, alongside accessories and lifestyle objects.) Before announcing his departure last October (2024) Slimane marked a new chapter, launching Celine Beauté with a single product: a satin lipstick in an effortless red dubbed Rouge Triomphe. As quintessential as a piece from Slimane’s ready-to-wear collections, it’s a lipstick so universal that the individual ways it can be worn seem almost endless.

Back in 2022, Chanel set up its Cometes Collective, a group of emerging make-up stars hand-picked by the brand to formulate a seasonal, limited-edition collection – ‘independent thinkers united, above all, by the conviction that beauty comes from the freedom to be and to become yourself in all your richness, complexity and nuance,’ says the house.

The first make-up artists selected were Ammy Drammeh, Cécile Paravina and Valentina Li, with the collective’s debut launching in 2024, courtesy of Li. A painter before she turned her hand to make-up, she sports a blue bob (Li considers the colour to be a ‘reflection of her inner world’). As a result, her Spring 2024 collection traversed a range of blues from cobalt to pale azure in a Les 4 Ombres eyeshadow quad, Stylo Yeux eyeliner and Lumière de L’Océan illuminating powder.

Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons described their vision for Prada’s S/S 2025 collection as ‘rallying call against the internet algorithm’ and a rejection of the ‘derivative and expected’. Casting director Ashley Brokaw assembled a roster of new and eclectic looks for the runway show, with Prada’s global creative make-up artist Lynsey Alexander taking an equally tailored approach to beauty. Using products from the brand’s namesake make-up line – including the Memphis Milano-esque Dimensions eyeshadow palettes, which Alexander described as a ‘juxtaposition of ugly and beautiful, coming together to create something quite extraordinary’ in a 2023 interview with Wallpaper* – each model received a unique look, corresponding to their facial structures and personalities.

As artist Cindy Sherman once said, ‘I’m good at using my face as a canvas. I’ll see a photograph of a character and try to copy them on to my face.’ It’s a statement that speaks to the current mood in contemporary make-up and beauty, where the face becomes a canvas in every sense of the word.

Models: Mouy Onak at IMG, Essoye Mombot at Oui Mangement, Marie Loridan at Women Management. Casting: Ikki Casting at WSM. Hair: Rimi Ura at Calliste Agency. Digital assistant: Farouk at Dope Paris. Photography assistant: Theophile Parat. Make-up assistants: Toma Marandeau, Ekaterina Mignery.

Find all the Wallpaper* Design Awards winners in the February 2025 issue of Wallpaper* is available in print on newsstands from 9 January 2025, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Meet the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2025 winners – the best of the best in art, architecture, beauty, design & interiors, fashion, tech, travel and watches & jewellery – listed here in full and explored in greater depth on Wallpaper.com throughout the coming month. For the hands-on experience, get your print copy to collect and keep – the February issue is on newsstands now and available to subscribers.

Architecture

This year’s winners in architecture are projects that restore, rebalance and renew.

• Best modernist revival: Finlandia Hall, Helsinki, Finland
• Best retreat: El Aleph Guest House by MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple, Canada
• Best urban rethink: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
• Best landscape: Marche Arboretum, Belgium
• Best architectural legacy: Limbo Museum, Ghana

Art & culture

In art and culture, Tate Modern, London, is honoured for its celebration of shapeshifting artists, from Mike Kelley to Yoko Ono and Leigh Bowery.

Charli XCX’s Brat album campaign, realised with Brent David Freaney, was a masterclass in culturally impactful marketing.

Beauty

Our beauty awards honour five brands – Hermès, Dior, Celine, Prada, Chanel – taking a playful approach and painting a new picture in the world of make-up.

Best make-up technique, meanwhile, goes to the Glass 001 face mask, by Pat McGrath Labs, a chance to recreate the make-up artist's hypershine effect, seen on the runway at Maison Margiela’s Artisanal 2024 show.

Design & Interiors

The best furniture and design objects for your home? Our shoot by Leandro Farina with interiors by Olly Mason gathers together some of 2025’s winners, also listed here.

• ‘Serwaa’ chair, by Giles Tettey Nartey
• ‘Philae AL’ shelving, by Raphael Kadid x BWB Surface Technology
• ‘123’ chair, by Michael Anastassiades, for Molteni & C
• ‘Adrien’ table, by Jean-Marie Massaud, for Poliform
• ‘Vessel 2024’ vase, by Soft-Geometry
• ‘Superwire’ lamp, by Formafantasma, for Flos
• ‘Pillow’ chair, by Hannes Peer, for Baxter
• ‘Ethan’ coffee tables, by Giampiero Tagliaferri, for Minotti
• ‘Gathering’ lamp, by Faber Futures and Mitre & Mondays, for Normal Phenomena of Life
• ‘Card’ bookcase, by Michael Anastassiades, for Molteni & C
• ‘Pilotis’ two-light candelabra; candlestick, both by Barber Osgerby, for Puiforcat
• ‘Set’ lamp, by Jamie Wolfond, for Muuto
• ‘Squash’ side table, £1,350, by Faye Toogood, for Poltrona Frau
• ‘Post’ floor lamp, by Anna Karlin
• ‘Vessel No. VII’ in ochre, and ‘Vessel No. IV’ in aged bronze, both by Devin Wilde
• ‘Cornaro’ armchair, by Carlo Scarpa, for Cassina
• ‘Aluminium Cast Connection’ chair, by Sheyang Li
• ‘Kaleidoscope’ side table, by Jialun Xiong
• ‘Cast’ speaker, by Tom Fereday, for Pitt & Giblin

The Anticline stove-top espresso maker by Cultivation Objects is honoured for its defining contours – get it while it’s hot.

Our best comfort zone is the ‘Eri’ armchair, by Fumie Shibata, for Flexform – sculptural elegance balanced with the feeling of giving a good hug.

Best dark material? It’s Lavaforming project, by Reykjavik-based architect Arnhildur Palmadottir, who, exploring sustainable solutions, envisions a future where cities could be built by channelling lava flows into trenches.

New furniture brand Interni Venosta, by Emiliano Salci and Britt Moran, offers a perfectly pitched celebration of craft, quality and nostalgia.

The ‘Spherical’ bed, by Kaare Klint, for Carl Hansen & Søn, is a design reissue that celebrates the past and the future.

Design duo Formafantasma are honoured for their exhibition ‘La Casa Dentro’ (The Home Within) at ICA Milano. Taking to task modernism's inherent masculinity and conservatism, it explored what was left behind – decoration, ornamentation and sentimental charm.

SensiTerre ceramic surface collection, by Matteo Thun and Benedetto Fasciana, for Florim, is an ode to tactility.

MycoWorks is a San Francisco company inspiring beauty with fungal-based biomaterial – we’re taken with its ‘Mycelium Muse’ collection of furniture and artworks.

The Kasper 7 yacht by Nisrine Karagulla and Giorgio Cassetta for Benetti is awash with calm, and just a touch of whimsy.

Our kinetic cover artwork, created for the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2025 issue by London design duo Isabel + Helen is a star turn all of its own. See it in action.

Fashion

These 12 fashion award winners (read the dedicated article to see the looks and watch our editors reflect on the season) have all created S/S 2025 collections that transcend the everyday, prizing experimentation, construction and high-minded design.

• Victoria Beckham
• Prada
• Craig Green
• Alaïa
• Marni
• Hodakova
• Duran Lantink
• Loewe
• JW Anderson
• Louis Vuitton
• Bottega Veneta
• Issey Miyake

Also in fashion, our ‘best doppelgänger’ is Saint Laurent’s S/S 2025 collection evoking its eponymous founder, including his signature glasses.

Loewe’s delicious ‘Squeeze’ bag from the A/W 2024 womenswear collection is our idea of ‘best produce’.

Stone Island receives a nod for its material innovation.

Tech

Representing the very best contemporary technology – these six designs combine traditional tech with a craft and weight and sense of durability.

• Transparent Brutalist speaker
• Marantz Grand Horizon speaker
• Bang & Olufsen Beoplay H100 headphones
• reMarkable Paper Pro paper tablet
• Leica D-Lux 8 camera
• Fujifilm X100VI camera

Travel

These five travel winners comprise year’s places to stay, dine, drink and get together:

• Best opening: Locke de Santa Joana, Lisbon
• Best suites: The Emory, London
• Best slow journey: L'Observatoire Suite by JR at the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express
• Best social hub: The Wilde, Milan
• Best home away from home: Vipp Todos Santos

Also on the travel front, we celebrate a moveable feast – We Are Ona is a culinary creative studio turning the fine dining experience into an art form at pop-ups around the world.

Transport

For thinking big and shunning slavish imitation, we applaud Jaguar’s Type 00 concept car – a controversy-provoking attempt to do things differently.

Watches & jewellery

Best watch reinterpretations as brands enjoyed full-circle moments and revisited their back catalogue:

• Casio marked its 50th anniversary with the rerelease of classics, including the A168WG-9EF, pictured here
• G-Shock Remaster series
• Audemars Piguet [RE]Master02
• Hermès Arceau Chorus Stellarum
• Piaget Polo Date watch
• Patek Philippe Golden Ellipse

A collection of JB Blunk rings – each one a wearable sculpture – is reproduced in a collaboration between LA jewellery designer J Hannah and the JB Blunk Estate.

Also find the Wallpaper* Design Awards winners in the February 2025 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands from 9 January 2025, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

There was a feeling of circularity to Anthony Vaccarrello’s S/S 2025 show for Saint Laurent, held at the house’s Left Bank headquarters for the first time since the Belgian designer staged his debut there eight years prior. In the time between, Vaccarrello has proved increasingly adept at translating the codes of the Yves Saint Laurent – a mood of powerful sensuality and gilded opulence, a clash of the masculine and feminine, an unabashed use of colour – into a sharp, contemporary vision which often centres on the impact of a singular silhouette.

Design Awards 2025: Saint Laurent’s designer doppelgangers

For S/S 2025, Vaccarrello evoked Yves Saint Laurent more directly, sending out a cast of models wearing riffs on the couturier’s personal uniform: louche, often double-breasted tailoring, wide across the shoulders and fluid in shape, worn with a tie. Among them was the model Bella Hadid in a rare runway appearance, donning a pair of Yves Saint Laurent’s signature thick-rimmed glasses.

‘No other house is as linked to a quintessential female archetype as Saint Laurent, whose ideal woman is more complex than the seductive perfection of classic muses,’ said Vaccarello of his era-spanning homage, a collection we’ve chosen to award for its dramatic doppelgangers. ‘As Yves Saint Laurent could have said: I am the Saint Laurent woman.’⁠

Find all the Wallpaper* Design Award 2025 winners in the February 2025 issue of Wallpaper* , available in print on international newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

A good armchair, we feel, is one that balances crisp elegance as a sculptural object with the feeling of a good hug when in use, and this is why Japanese designer Fumie Shibata’s debut creation for Flexform is a winner in our books.

Inspired by the uplifted lapels of a jacket (so demure), the leather-upholstered shell is cradled by a turned wooden base in either walnut, ash or oak, with die-cast zama feet in a range of finishes. Down-filled seat cushions and backrests complete the comfort factor.

‘Eri’ means ‘blessing’ in Japanese, and we applaud the friendly character and careful detail of Shibata’s design, which will surely win hearts and behinds across residential and commercial domains. In a sea of more angular chairs that proliferated on the stands of international design fairs last year, with hard edges and exposed construction, ‘Eri’ was a welcome rock against the flood – albeit a graceful and extremely comfortable one.

flexform.it

Find all the Wallpaper* Design Award 2025 winners in the February 2025 issue of Wallpaper* , available in print on international newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

A forest is more than an outdoor space filled with trees: it is a model for how we can live our lives and create architecture for the future. Growing up in northern Japan, I spent my childhood days playing in the forest. It was a place of intimacy, with many diverse areas yet nothing divided, everything softly interconnected. As we move into 2025, I see the forest as a model for architecture and society. It shows us how distinct identities can thrive in diversity while still being connected – and how harmony between humans and nature can be rediscovered.

Today feels like the dawn of a new modern age. It is a time of profound change – and change always sparks new ideas, concepts, designs. Our values are shifting, societies are evolving and this moment in history feels similar to the start of the 20th-century modern age, when new ideas deeply shaped how we went on to live and think.

Sou Fujimoto on 2024 and what's coming in 2025

Now, after more than 100 years, many “modern” mindsets and “modern” concepts are irrelevant. The COVID pandemic made us realise how outdated much of it is. We now have new situations, points of view and questions to answer: about sustainability, diversity, biotechnology, AI, over-connection and nature. The year ahead is likely to be an exciting time, particularly for younger generations thinking about the world around them. I see creative revolutions across every category – architecture, art, music. My hope is that the young designers of tomorrow will be brave and honest enough to continue driving this change forward.

For me, 2025 is all about the Osaka Expo, which opens in April. I have been working intensively on this for the past five years, creating a large timber ring structure. It’s a truly global event, a wonderful integration of different pavilion designs and international activities. Many countries – including Japan – are trying to explore future architecture based on sustainability. There are many wooden structures and I sense a real push across the world to create more sustainable architecture. I’ve noticed, from monthly visits to my Paris office, that in the last 10 years, there has been a strong global shift towards wooden construction, natural materials or reusing and recycling. This has become even more active since the pandemic.

Now, the Osaka Expo sets the stage for realising the newest and most innovative trials into wooden construction. One can wonder: ‘What does sustainability look like in the current climate?’ As a Japanese architect, it’s interesting for me to think about this, because Japan is quite far behind globally in terms of sustainability. The Expo is a great opportunity for Japanese society to think more deeply about sustainability in a global context. When we revealed our proposal, many Japanese didn’t understand the wooden ring we designed for the Expo.

For many, wooden construction is for private homes, temples or shrines – it’s not thought of as a showcase for the latest building technology. But recently, the ring has been widely published at the same time as other large-scale wooden constructions are also being noticed – and I feel that Japanese people are starting to understand our vision. It's all about opening people’s minds to the different possibilities of wooden construction – and hopefully, this will be emphasised through other structures such as the Italian Pavilion and Czech Pavilion.

In many ways, Japan is behind global standards. But we have good quality of design and architecture; plus, society is very well organised. We also have a tradition of living together with nature, an important aspect of Japanese life. We need to push this to the world, as for more than 1,000 years, we have been living with nature in Japan. Daily life and philosophies have evolved in harmony with nature. We see this in the traditional Japanese house, with its sliding paper walls and blurred boundaries. The architecture itself is very light: the garden and surrounding nature are the main focal points of a home. The built structure is part of a wider living environment and nature. So how can we integrate nature further into design? It’s not just about bringing greenery onto buildings – this is always nice, but it goes beyond that.

The important point about nature is that we cannot control it. In the 20th century, humanity set out to control everything – we learned this wasn’t possible. Earth is bigger than us. It has dynamism, power, diversity of animals and plants, and beautiful ecosystems. This moment in human history is an opportunity to open our minds – and sometimes be exposed to the uncontrollable. This is not a negative state because the uncontrollable is unpredictable, bringing inspirational surprises. Of course, sometimes we need to control nature, but we have to find a better balance between enjoying it, embracing its surprising aspects and living in harmony with it.

The pandemic is the perfect example. Until the last century, we developed and built a very efficient system for society – this was important but maybe too controlling. It had a hugely negative impact on nature, Earth – and humankind. We can see this in our buildings. We have tried to make buildings as functional as possible – but if you make them too functional, it limits people’s minds and ultimately their lives. Human life is like nature: it is flexible and ambiguous. If humans try too hard to control everything, they create negative pressure – we need space for freedom.

Having spent a lot of time in Paris, I admire European countries – there, society is based on the idea of individual freedom. In Japan of course we have this – but the idea of harmony in society is also very important, so people often repress their personal freedom and follow societal consensus. This can be both positive and negative.

Japan is becoming more diverse – but the economy is not in a good state and Japanese society unfortunately tends to become more conservative when this happens. Having said that, there are still many visionary individuals – many of my clients, for example, are founders of companies trying to do something different and more suitable for the future and the Earth. I am interested in how we can combine the ideas of “diversity” and “unity”. We need to enhance diversity – but avoid people being divided and clustered against one another. We should help create a sense of unity, with interactive relationships between different points of view and attitudes.

This is discussed in the masterplan at the Osaka Expo. This is extremely important in light of a very divided and complex global situation. As humans, we need to be generous – and accept different values and viewpoints and the fact that people are uncontrollable, just like nature. Otherwise, we will never finish fighting one another. The first quarter of this century has witnessed huge revolutionary changes – not just physical, in the form of wonderful design products, but also conceptual. Now, people understand the importance of public spaces – places for gathering. We need to slow down.

One way to explore this dynamic is through materials. Over the next 50 years, biotechnology – which hovers somewhere between nature and artefacts – will become increasingly important in architecture. Architectural revolutions have always gone hand-in-hand with materials. Modern architecture was established on steel, concrete and large-sized glass. Now, wooden construction is coming back. This marks the start of a new phase. And biotechnology will be next. Can we use materials that have healing qualities, and that can self-renew?

The idea of localised design is also becoming more important. Since last year, I’ve been on the advisory board for the Serpentine Pavilion’s selection of architects. Their global research into what is happening around the world is fascinating. It is exciting to see so many architectural trials underway, based on different cultures, traditional materials and climate situations. Younger generations seem proud of their countries and cultures and are increasingly trying to develop unique answers for the future. It's localised but universal.

One region that many will be watching in 2025 – not only for its political developments but in terms of creative growth – is the Middle East. We have several projects underway in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi. The region seems to be passionately active in developing architecture and design, with many global architects involved. No one knows how this will unfold, but it’s an exciting time, it feels like a place where the boundaries are being pushed in unexpected directions.

I’m curious and optimistic about changes brought by AI technology in the creative industries. In our studio, AI makes us look at what we are doing – it’s like a reflective mirror, generating drawings and images which pose the question to ourselves: ‘Is this Fujimoto?’ We understand this may or may not be part of our creations – what is most important is the discussion it activates. It’s through conversations that I find new ideas or new meanings to existing ideas. I feel this technology can stimulate creativity. However, many ideas originate from the human form. This physical body experience reflects our thinking and philosophies. For now, AI doesn’t have a body – so I am curious, if they obtain knowledge and data about the body, can they think about it like humans? Either way, I am optimistic – because if different ideas and perspectives emerge, this can be inspiring and interesting for us.

Finally, how does one connect all these ideas, thoughts and places together? For me, it comes back to the forest. This idea of a conceptual forest can be an architectural model for the future. It is timely and timeless – and as the world continues to change and surprise us, I hope that younger generations can understand the beauty of trying to create a world where there is harmony between diversity and unity, humans and nature – just like a forest.

sou-fujimoto.net

We are delighted with the prevalence of texture and tactility in material surfaces of late. In place of veneers, coatings and treatments that divorce the sensorial experience between hand and eye, we welcome the return of natural materials bearing their natural characteristics. Perhaps counterintuitively, we have technology to thank for the ability to scale artisanal properties into architectural materials.

Here, we celebrate Italian architects Matteo Thun and Benedetto Fasciana’s SensiTerre collection of ceramic flooring and cladding surfaces for Florim. Comprising six earthy shades, four textured finishes and a variety of shapes and sizes, the collection offers a multitude of possible configurations. In all arrangements, the primal pleasure of environments that feel ‘made’ more than manufactured is undeniable.

SensiTerre collection of ceramic flooring and cladding surfaces for Florim

SensiTerre is derived from Thun and Fasciana’s limited-edition collection of terracotta vases ‘Venere Bianca’, which they made with Bitossi in 2014. In the decade since they were launched, we’ve seen the embrace of craft’s properties extend from objects of singular beauty into environments of mood through materials that bear the marks of their maker.

The effect is to feel a far greater sensory engagement with our interiors; they bring to life our animal qualities. Florim attained B Corp certification in 2020 and, impressively, 100 per cent of its raw production waste and wastewater is recovered. The SensiTerre collection is part of the CarbonZero project, whereby all CO2 emissions are offset throughout the lifecycle of the surfaces. Beauty is more than skin deep.  

florim.com, matteothun.com

Find all the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2025 winners in the February 2025 issue of Wallpaper* , available in print on international newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

Deliberating on how we might encapsulate the year in design for the cover of the Wallpaper* February 2025 issue – dedicated to the annual Wallpaper* Design Awards – we quickly settled upon the joyfully imaginative work of Isabel + Helen. Isabel Gibson and Helen Chesner met while studying at Chelsea College of Arts, London, and, since graduating in 2012, the pair have taken their kinetic performance sculptures to festivals and design fairs, photo shoots and runways.

The easy appeal and readable artistry of their work is the very embodiment of light relief. This year has been a big one for the London-based duo, who took their Power Suits – ‘wearable energy generators’ – to Vienna for Cartier; collaborated with Chanel and Porsche; and conducted a ‘human firework’ workshop with students at ÉCAL in Switzerland.

For our cover, they sought to capture a lightbulb moment, with a pulley mechanism manually operated by two people to create a bright yellow version of our Wallpaper* asterisk. ‘We love that it celebrates people and design – it’s about a collective coming together to turn ideas into reality,’ says Chesner, while Gibson adds: ‘A lot of what we do is trial and error. It’s wonderful to see people’s responses to our performances – a mix of escapism and engagement, but also feeling part of something; a happening in real time.’

As we teeter on the brink of an AI-generated creative landscape, Isabel + Helen’s work is a welcome reminder that we still have magic in our own minds and hands.  

@isabelandhelen_studio

A version of this article appears in the February 2025 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on international newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

The presence of Formafantasma within the design industry reached levels of near-ubiquity in 2024. Cynics might say the breadth of their involvement demonstrates a lack of courage and imagination on behalf of brands. We heartily object. The rigour and quality of Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin’s work is consistently relevant, always fascinating, urgent, even. They stand apart and, excitingly, their mode of critical digging into the systemic forces of life is inspiring a new generation of design progeny to follow suit. For brands, working with Formafantasma is like therapy: the past is mined and overturned to pave the way for a leaner present and a cleaner future.

So Formafantasma’s place on the Wallpaper* Design Awards podium this year was never in question. The project that we have chosen to award was a curiously moving exhibition at ICA Milano, curated by Alberto Salvadori. ‘La Casa Dentro’ (The Home Within) took to task the inherent masculinity and conservatism at the heart of modernism, no less. Modernism was celebrated for its radical departure from what came before; a post-war world needed a new ideology and it had the appetite, imagination and industrial capability to realise it. Modernity meant efficiency, sobriety, rationality. At the crux of ‘La Casa Dentro’ was the question: what was left behind?

Formafantasma's ‘La Casa Dentro’ exhibition wins a Wallpaper* Design Award 2025

The answer was presented as decoration, ornamentation, idiosyncratic detail and sentimental charm. Across furniture and lighting, constructed principally with tubular steel – that enduring emblem of modernism – Formafantasma introduced wooden planks and silk upholstery, embellished with surprising colour, in places embroidered with dainty floral motifs. These moves represented the intrinsic warmth of domesticity, holding space (if you will) for the personal within the essential or universal that those modernists strove to achieve. The designers described their impetus to ‘queer the codes of modernist design’. The juxtaposition was powerful: emotional, intellectual and profoundly memorable.  

formafantasma.com

A version of this article appears in the February 2025 issue of Wallpaper* , available in print on international newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

What do awards mean? In the last couple of years, I've been on a lot of juries. I’ve come to realise that it’s getting harder and harder to judge fairly, partly because contexts vary so radically. To be truly cognizant of other contexts, especially when thinking about representation and equity, you have to go deeper than what a building looks like or what its function is or how it was procured. Increasingly, I'm finding the competitive angle of competitions, awards and prizes quite difficult to assess and I have a feeling that that's also reflected in Gen Z’s approach. That aspect of continuously pitting people against each other is somehow at odds with their ethos. At the same time, though, I've had some really interesting conversations around the point of awards and juries and I think people do understand that the cultural capital that you get from an award or a prize is invaluable.

Lesley Lokko: reflecting on the past year

Reflecting on what’s been changing in the past year, it’s strange to be talking about that today [Lokko’s interview took place on the day of the USA elections, 5 November 2024]. Although I bristle at the idea that what happens in the United States is more important than anywhere else, their elections are on everyone’s mind at the moment. I sent an email this morning to somebody in the States and I said, ‘I wish you a peaceful week’ and I don't know that I would ever have thought that would be a phrase I would say about America.

When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, adults often used to refer to something called ‘peacetime’, which of understood as having something to do with the fact that there’d been two world wars in relative proximity to one another, which grandparents and parents had lived through. I understood my generation (and by implication, subsequent generations) was a so-called lucky generation because we were born in, and lived in, this ‘thing’ called ‘peacetime’, heightened for those of us from Africa by the independence movements that began in the late 50s and more or less ended in the late 60s, with a couple of exceptions. So, in terms of the grand ideas about freedom and peace, in the environment I lived in at least, the hard work seemingly was done.

Nowadays, the idea of a global ‘peacetime’ seems almost quaint. I see how younger generations are far more able to connect the dots across multiple and often contradictory fields — environment, extraction, occupation, and exploitation. I would say that’s been the biggest change in the last decade, accelerated by the events and audiences I’ve been involved with in the past couple of years. And bombs falling on your head is an incredibly visceral way to understand trouble, but it's not the only kind of instability.

I remember vividly the day Mandela was released. I was in London, in my first year at the Bartlett [School for Architecture, where Lokko graduated with her first degree]. I rang my father who was working in Saudi Arabia at the time and he was having a party with his fellow surgeons at the hospital where they worked. We were both crying with happiness, although neither of us is South African. I got on the 73 bus from Marble Arch to UCL and the bus conductor waived my ticket, saying it was a great day for Black people all over the world. That same sense of pride and joy was evident in the Giardini in Venice last year, and at the RIBA in May at the celebration party [for the Royal Gold Medal]. All three were goosebumps moments that were collective, not personal, and so much more powerful for it.

The one thing that's been really at the forefront of my mind throughout 2024 is a new sense of confidence amongst a younger generation of architects, academics and practitioners. It was really brought home to me at the tail end of the Biennale, in its last week in November 2023. The atmosphere, the joy, the sense of achievement…it was palpable. I have a friend who is half English, half Nigerian, who was in Venice at the same time. She's got curly hair, but we don't look alike at all. During that last week, people kept asking her for a selfie, mistaking her for me. With Venice, it felt as though our epistemological equity grew exponentially. There was a collective pride in having brought new and different perspectives to the table that had nothing to do with charity or tolerance, but everything to do with excellence. Although we don’t often think of knowledge in the same way we think of climate, environmental or social justice, knowledge equity is vital. Learning to see and act differently with and in the world seems to be the only long-term hope for change.

Values change, language changes, perspectives change . . . there were so many questions in Venice that focused on ‘is this architecture?’, which seems to me to be the wrong question. ‘How is this architectural?’ is much more interesting, opening oneself up to the idea that terminology can be expansive and fluid, rather than fixed. As a general rule, I do believe that the more voices we hear, the more ways we have of seeing things, the richer the world is. It's not about replacing knowledge; it's about adding to it. The question of equitable knowledge is very interesting to me — as an educator, knowledge is my material, my ‘thing.’

What is not yet 100% clear to me is how this energy, optimism and self-confidence can be translated into actual projects, not just buildings. That's still an open-ended question. There's a part of architecture that still relies on a client commissioning an interesting or innovative project — we can’t escape that hard edge. Who commissions, who pays, who develops? In that context, more than ever, it’s down to other forms of architectural culture — education, journalism, publishing and exhibitions — to keep that optimism alive. In that context, the word ‘platform’ has been at the back of my mind now for a good 18 months. A platform is a structure that allows other people to climb aboard and fashion a space or moment in which to rest. I’m seeing that happen more and more.

Newer, younger, ‘other’ voices are bursting onto the scene and there’s a generosity in the cultural zeitgeist that I find really inspiring. I’m contacted every other day by young, highly educated, highly motivated young women whose voices are now being sought, who’re looking for advice or mentorship or guidance. There are new territories coming into our orbit that have historically been considered off-limits or too marginal to count. Social media gives people a platform and access that didn’t exist ten years ago, although I do think the relationship between social media and cultural capital (not financial or popularity capital) hasn’t been fully explored or exploited.

If you ask me what is no longer relevant, I think binaries hold far less sway than they once did. Binary thinking, along with aggression and arrogance, should be firmly left behind. You can see it in the more nuanced ways people are beginning to describe themselves: male/female; black/white; queer/straight . . . they seem at odds with our times.

There’s still confusion and uncertainty about what to replace those certainties with, but there’s no question that we’re firmly in an era of experimentation. It can sometimes feel threatening — in spite of our protestations, human beings are usually uncomfortable with too much change — but I see this desire to question our assumptions as a positive thing. And it extends far beyond the personal — binaries like North/South; developed/underdeveloped. Every time I hear that word, the ‘developing’ world, it makes me insane, like, developing into what? Our vocabularies no longer seem sufficient for our circumstances. I always remember somebody saying to me that if you can't articulate it, you can’t imagine it.

Looking ahead, I have a novel to finish and an institute to build which are at opposite ends of my ambition spectrum. I would say the African Futures Institute (AFI) is one to watch for the next year, particularly our new Nomadic African Studio which kicks off next year. There are so many new ‘voices’ that I’m following or watching, too many to name-check here. In other areas to look out for and explore, Latin America and South America are phenomenally rich places to watch, even though they might have a whole set of other issues. The number of armed policemen walking around Mexico City [during a recent visit there] was shocking to me. But there was an energy there, a relationship between politics and the urban environment that I haven't seen anywhere else. An institute that comes up a lot on my feed is the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS): I find what they do really interesting.

I’m hoping architectural education will seize the moment, especially in my part of the world, and be bold enough to propose credible and creative alternatives for students who, for different reasons, struggle to find existing models relevant.

And on a different register completely, there’s a pair of stiletto boots from Berlin-based Aeyde that I’ve been coveting for a couple of months, assuming my knees will hold out long enough to actually wear them.

africanfuturesinstitute.com

For all the variety there is among the restaurants of the world, the experience remains, at its core, almost always the same: eat in one space, with food dictated by one chef and a menu that, even if it rotates, adheres to a particular style. So Luca Pronzato’s creative culinary studio We Are Ona has been captivatingly conspicuous for its offering of a new alternative to this model.

Show time: We Are Ona

‘The idea was to form a creative culinary studio where we can gather a community of fine dining and restaurant talents: chefs, sommeliers, baristas and waiters, of course, but also a lot of different creatives,’ says the Paris-based Pronzato. ‘Interior stylists, floral designers, artists, we want to let them all express themselves through the art of food.’

Since 2019, Pronzato and his team have rolled out pop-up restaurants worldwide, from the Turkish seaside to Manhattan skyscrapers. At each event, they work with a different chef, a different group of creative directors, a different set of local suppliers, and a different group of guests around the table. Emphasis is placed on recruiting Michelin-starred chefs alongside rising stars that have generated significant buzz but haven’t quite reached stardom – yet.

We Are Ona alumni include Adeline Grattard, head chef of the Michelin-starred Yam’Tcha in Paris; Atsushi Tanaka, known for his strikingly minimalist take on Japanese cuisine; and Mory Sacko, who fuses French, African and Japanese influences. The creative talents that the team decides to collaborate with are there to add the visual components of the evening, whether that’s having artist Paul Créange create a series of light sculptures or Harry Nuriev, of Crosby Studios, designing a set of plates.

When it comes to location, Pronzato is always thinking about how to reintroduce guests to the place they call home. Attendees at We Are Ona events tend to be writers, designers and artists – often the people who make a city a cultural hub. Pronzato aims to surprise even those most familiar with their hometown by inviting them to unexpected venues, such as an old stable in Arles or an unknown tennis club in Milan.

Running a restaurant is notoriously difficult, and operating multiple restaurants, each more complex than the next, is exponentially so. But thankfully for Pronzato and the teams he assembles, the challenge is part of the thrill.

The year 2024 proved to be particularly challenging. At Art Basel Paris 2024, We Are Ona teamed up with Carsten Höller’s Stockholm restaurant Brutalisten to create a unique dining experience that adhered to its strict food preparation classification scale. The menu, which featured dishes categorised as ‘semi-brutalist’ (a few ingredients), ‘brutalist’ (one ingredient plus salt and water), and ‘orthodox brutalist’ (just one ingredient), aimed to highlight the natural flavours of the produce, either by serving it raw, quickly heating it or applying intricate cooking techniques. The black and white interiors of the old train station where the event was held matched the brutalist influences of the food.

More recently, the team celebrated a collaboration between Pharrell and Evian by transforming a private home in Bel Air for a dinner. And in Milan, the studio collaborated with scenographer Laura Floor, photographer Mark Borthwick and Scottish-born, Marseille-based chef Megan Moore on a pop-up inside Fondazione Sozzani, the new art foundation created by former Vogue Italia editor and 10 Corso Como founder Carla Sozzani.

Meanwhile, in New York, the studio invited French sculptor and architect Marc Leschelier to create a building within a building. It was held at the WSA building, the financial district office tower that has been repurposed as a cultural hub (built in 1983, it all but sat empty during the pandemic, but now hosts tenants such as fashion designers Luar and Bode and food collective Ghetto Gastro, alongside A-lister parties). Here, guests were surrounded by and ate on a series of brutalist architectural structures that Leschelier had designed for the occasion, with food by Dalad Kambhu, the Berlin-based head chef of the stylishly innovative Thai restaurant Kin Dee.

‘These are huge projects that deserve a lot of creative energy,’ says Pronzato. ‘We’re creating a functional restaurant where guests eat seven to ten courses each, and there is all this production before, and then it’s show time. I think designers like the exercise because it asks them to create a living piece – not just an object you look at but one you dine with. That is the art of food – it creates these souvenirs you can keep in your memory.’

‘The art of food’ is a significant concept for Pronzato because he believes that the culinary world has always been viewed as a separate creative field, and that is a perception he wants to change. If we define art as an act that evokes emotions from those who experience it, then the chefs, designers and guests at every We Are Ona event can be seen as artists. Everyone involved, from those preparing the meal to those enjoying it, is participating in a collaborative alchemical happening that is far greater than the sum of its component parts.

‘What makes We Are Ona exceptional are the memories you create with the people you share these moments with,’ says the studio’s chief of staff Alix Randriana. ‘It’s more than just the food or the tablescape – it’s the entire experience. From the minute you arrive at the venue to the final bite, every detail is carefully considered to craft a timeless, immersive moment. I have fantastic souvenirs for each pop-up I’ve been to.’

We Are Ona offers a new blueprint for the future of fine dining. Before launching the studio, Pronzato spent years at Noma in Copenhagen. Working at the restaurant that redefined fine dining gave him the experience and network he needed to launch his own project. And, as Noma now shutters its doors after more than 20 years, it feels like a precedent sign of the change that is occurring in the industry at large. The mode of fine dining that Noma’s René Redzepi and his contemporaries pioneered is, as Redzepi himself has acknowledged, ‘financially and emotionally unsustainable’. The system needs to change for both the people in the kitchen and the people in the dining room. ‘Fine dining now is about the experience, about how you can create something you will remember,’ says Pronzato.

‘In a digitalised world, at We Are Ona, we believe in human moments – long, shared tables where people meet other people, where they eat food that is really thought about. That is fine dining to me: a human moment that guests will always remember.’

weareona.co

Artist and stage designer Es Devlin works across mediums, celebrating public participation in exhibitions, large scale performances and immersive installations. Here, she reflects on her personal and professional highlights of 2024 and shares her predictions for 2025

I have spent the last few years thinking extensively about the word ‘home’.

The forces which shaped my work in 2024 have been building for the last couple of years. I spent much of 2022 making closely observed drawings of 243 of the 15,000 species that call London home, learning as I progressed through close encounters with our city’s resident moths, birds, bats, insects, amphibians and fungi, the continuity or line and form between us and the biosphere. I began to understand, through a daily practice of observing and drawing, the urgency of Joanna Macy’s invitation to us to ‘relinquish our separation, come home again to our mutual belonging’.

In 2023 I sought a home for my own 30 year long art and design practice as I charted it into An Atlas of Es Devlin: a book and an exhibition that gathered the strands of a multi-faceted practice into a continuous thread of intention, stitched and anchored into the context of the past three decades. While writing the book and composing the exhibition I discovered that many of the concerns that preoccupy me today are rooted in marks and gestures I began making as a teenager: the exercise of looking back and assembling the fragments and traces, has helped guide and root the forward trajectory of my practice.

Throughout 2024, and always, I have valued the ability to practice in a range of mediums and registers - it expands the potential reach of the work. A single train of thought often weaves through an array of contexts.

Looking back at 2024, a few lines of enquiry, many ongoing from earlier years, progressed through a sequence of projects. I have already begun to consider how they might continue to evolve in 2025. If I had to give them a single name it would be: an ongoing attempt to see through the eyes of others.

I spent much of 2024 in one room in South London drawing the faces of strangers in chalk and charcoal as I continued the ongoing project of learning to see the world through perspectives that are not my own. Meanwhile, marks and gestures that I and my studio team had made and expanded into designs and schemes were being realised by talented teams of fabricators and programmers around the world.

In January I sat in St Mary Le Strand church on the Strand in London listening to the potent string cacophony of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge by candlelight in preparation for Congregation, an installation of portraits of those who come to London seeking sanctuary which would open in the church in October.

While writer/curator Ekow Eshun and I discussed collaborating on the project in April, a white horse and a black horse, Vida and Quaker, were seen running along the Strand, one streaked in blood. In the following days the image caught our collective imagination across the country, like a Shakespearean portent. I think we are unnerved when we see animals run wild in the city, because it reminds us at once of two things: 1: the city is not designed for animals to run wild in: they are vulnerable to its sharp edges and corners. 2: We too are wild animals, trying to remember our running roots amidst the stones and slabs of the city.

When London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan secured an historic third term, and as we awaited the date of what we assumed would be an autumn general election, it felt like a political shift was underway. At this time, I had completed about a third of the charcoal portraits and and emerged from the studio later in May, cycling back over the river to 180 Strand to help compose the arrangement of 365 sketchbooks on a wall deep in its subterranean labyrinth as part of the Reverb exhibition with Theaster Gates, Jeremy Deller and Julian Knxx. When it opened, we gathered around our small screens to witness Rishi Sunak’s rain soaked declaration of a surprise summer election.

By now I was making up to 5 portraits a day to complete all 50 by the end of the summer .During the first week of August some of my portrait participants cancelled their visits to my studio: they did not feel safe to leave their homes and cross the city as rioting unfolded in the wake of the tragic stabbing of 3 young girls at a dance class by a 17 year old in Southport. As reports filled the radio of attacks on refugee hostels around the country, accounts began to surface of local communities bringing brooms and bin bags to clean up the streets, and counter protests around London and the rest of the country holding calmly courageous banners: ‘Refugees are welcome here.’

When we began the Congregation project with London’s refugee community we thought that its October opening might coincide with an ever hardening discourse on migration in the lead up to an anticipated November election. We didn’t predict that 12 year olds would be kicking at the doors of hostels harbouring those who come here seeking sanctuary.

By now the portraits were nearly complete and we worked with a team in York to print and prepare them for installation while composing the soundtrack with London choirs singing Bruckner’s sacred motet Locus Iste in Latin, Zulu, Xhosa and Bulgarian - it translates as ‘This Place'.

I spent a lot of the year on my bike, cycling over the river between St Mary le Strand church where we were installing the 50 double life sized portraits over an 8 metre high tiered structure, and the National Theatre where we began rehearsals with David Oyelowo for a new production of Shakespeare's Coriolanus - another story of exile and study of societal structures, which opened on 11th September.

And I continue to sit with these 50 portraits - now installed at Somerset House as part of Face to Face: 50 Encounters with Strangers until 12 Jan 2025. I now receive every news story through the lens of these resilient and resplendent Londoners that I’ve got to know. When I awoke to the result of the American election I heard it through their ears. As news flows to us from Syria today, I try to perceive it through the eyes of the five magnificent London Syrians who met my gaze this summer.

I have noticed changes in the last year. I think we become ever less tolerant of lack of meaning. I think we listen out for a clear top line melody that permeates the noise. I think we sense that curiosity means care. We feel anchored to the earth when we make things with our hands. Artists and artisans' studios are accessible through countless videos of people making things online.

My Instagram is a curated stream of timelapse videos of the making hands of ceramicists, painters, paper sculptors, woodcarvers. It encourages me because it communicates the sense that the process is as much the work as the final object, that objects are vessels of time and life.

I think we will become ever more curious about the creative process and how making helps us thrive, and ever less preoccupied with accumulation.

I think we will become ever more keen to understand the etymology of each object we encounter: who made it, who mined it, where was it sourced, how far did it travel, how old were the hands that stitched it or carried it, how many hours did they work in a week.

I think objects will begin to behave like Dorian Grey’s portrait: not fixed at the point of completion, but mutable and eloquent of the processes beneath them.

As we continue to recognise that humans are neither the centre nor the apogee of intelligence, we will perceive that there have always been intelligences other than our own - the intelligence of plants and mountains and rivers and roots and seeds.

As we look towards 2025, I think each of us will continue, with ever greater urgency, to seek devices of orientation and sources of solace amidst the ever noisier torrent of stimuli, information and crises in which we find ourselves encompassed and entangled.

I and many of my colleagues seek guidance and clarity in each book we read, each work of art, each audience we are part of, each encounter and conversation. We are planning to spend much of 2025 collating these illuminating phrases into a freely available reference resource - creating a home for them, a library that behaves like a navigational compass to help us chart our paths.

Here are a few of the phrases that are guiding me into the coming year:

Rituals are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable.

Byung Chul Han

Thing number one is that the Earth is madly in love with you and you need to participate in the romance.

Lean Penniman

Es Devlin's first monograph, An Atlas of Es Devlin, is out now

The February 2025 issue of Wallpaper* is available in print on newsstands from 9 January 2025, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

The Wilde ushers in a new era of elite private member clubs in Milan’s chic Brera district. Located at leafy Via Dei Giardini 16, the former residence of Santo Versace, a discreet iron gate opens to a refined cultural hub where intimacy and discretion are the new cool.

The Wilde wins Best Social Hub at the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2025

Set in a 1950s modernist villa by architects Carlo De Carli and Antonio Carminati, the club has been conceptualised by designer Fabrizio Casiraghi, known for pairing Milanese lyricism with unexpected contrasts. Art Deco touches – ubiquitous symmetry, geometric harmony, and stylised elements – infuse the design, while materials like pink lacquered wood, velvet, travertine, and American walnut balance sophistication and warmth. Local textiles by Arjumand’s World and an eclectic art collection from Ed Tang’s Art Bureau – featuring Andy Warhol, Nikolai von Bismarck, and others – reflect Milan’s cosmopolitan spirit.

Dining is the beating heart of The Wilde, with three restaurant concepts at its core: The Club Room and Garden, serving all-day Italian dishes, international classics, and craft cocktails; Nina, proposing Latin American cuisine with Japanese influences; and Ava, offering seasonal Mediterranean dishes from its rooftop perch. Also at hand is Arturo’s, an extensive cigar lounge, and The Library, a serene corner for ‘thinkers and doers’ combining breakfast, casual lunches and evening tipples.

Private dining rooms on every floor cater to intimate gatherings, with other public areas reserved for cultural programs, panel discussions, live performances, and exclusive events. Led by Gary Landesberg, former executive chairman and shareholder of London’s The Arts Club, The Wilde plans to expand to cities like New York and London, tailoring each club to its locale.

The Wilde is located at Via dei Giardini, 16, 20121 Milan, Italy, thewilde.com

Find more Wallpaper* Design Awards winners in the February 2025 issue of Wallpaper* is available in print on newsstands from 9 January 2025, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

While artists have long worked at the intersection of theatre, fashion, performance, activism and film, to name a few mediums, it’s a cultural shapeshifting that is often sidestepped by the traditional exhibition format. Recently, however, as fluidity is increasingly celebrated, institutions and spaces are unveiling the chameleonic nature of the artist, something the Tate Modern has demonstrated to brilliant effect with its programming in 2024 and 2025.

Recent exhibitions, such as last year’s ‘Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind’, the current ‘Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit’, and the upcoming ‘Leigh Bowery!’, have included works across a broader context. Three different artists working in three different mediums, Ono, Kelley and Bowery are united by their fascination with other worlds beyond the narrow confines of art, which take shape in their work through ritual and conversation. Specifically, threads are woven together through the lens of music, which also becomes a way of connecting the community.

Watch: Hannah Silver on a year in art and culture, and the trend behind Tate Modern’s award win

‘All three artists have roots in music subculture and performance,’ says Catherine Wood, Tate Modern’s director of programme. ‘Part of what I’m trying to do with the Tate Modern programme is to make space for the kinds of art-making that have been excluded from the mainstream canon, but which have a real influence on younger artists today, who often think much more openly about the flow between music, art, fashion and activism.’ Wood points out that it is traditionally Western narratives that have formalised a separation between art, dance, theatre and music – something she is keen to address.

We saw this integration in the Yoko Ono show, which explored the eclectic facets in her work through the channels of instruction, performance and film, a radical entry into her world of participatory art. Creating this immersive world was also crucial for Mike Kelley, whose dark pop art comes to life in experimental multimedia installations flicking between the spiritual, the uncanny and the sinister. Leigh Bowery, too, forged his own way through an array of mediums, with his clothing, make-up and performance art directing the gaze back to the body, which itself becomes a tool, situated in a space that could be a club or a gallery.

‘It’s interesting because each of these artists had a connection to pop artists who were more well-known than they were,’ adds Wood. ‘Mike Kelley with Sonic Youth, Leigh Bowery with Boy George, and Yoko Ono with John Lennon. But despite this proximity to fame, and creative exchange with those individuals, each of them was, in different ways, inspired by processes of composition, collaboration and “jamming” that come from a musical experience: whether being in a noise band [Mike Kelley], mastering the classical piano [Yoko Ono] or organising a club night or performing in a drag band [Bowery].’

These artists, working in the late-20th century and into the 21st, championed the subversive subcultures of the music that inspired them, reacting against earlier ideas that dictated music must be enjoyed in its pure form only. Here, music is more than a sound, but rather encompasses the aesthetics of everything around it, a winning formula for the freer, non-binary agenda of the future.

‘Music creates a kind of architecture that allows us to experience the passing of time in an aesthetic way,’ says Wood. ‘This is something that has inspired artists and choreographers particularly, because it enables them to create sequences of images, or moving images, that we can experience through duration. With these shows, we’re bringing subcultural activities – performance, sound, activism – to light in a new way. It feels relevant to what our audiences are interested in today.’

‘Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit’ is on show until 9 March 2025; ‘Leigh Bowery!’ is on show from 27 February-31 August 2025, both at Tate Modern, London SE1

tate.org.uk

The February 2025 issue of Wallpaper* is available in print on newsstands from 9 January 2025, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

After the pink moondust has settled and the reactionary howls have tailed away, what to make of Jaguar’s Type 00 concept? Is it the most finely crafted piece of comment-bait ever created? That’s undeniable, given the scale of the pile-on from social media and traditional commentary when the car was unveiled at Miami Art Week last December.

Its progenitor, JLR’s CCO Gerry McGovern, has been widely quoted as saying that ‘Jaguar has no desire to be loved by everybody’, to which some wags swapped ‘everybody’ for ‘anybody’. In fact, the backlash has helped cement our appreciation for this attempt to do things differently. Not intended for production – a point widely missed by those who misunderstand the entire raison d’être of a concept car – the Type 00 is a Jaguar from an alternative timeline.

Squint at the side profile and you’ll see a hint of the original fixed head coupé E-Type. Imagine that the company’s troubled years under British Leyland ownership never happened, and car design followed the baroque and winding path of pop culture, not slavish corporate imitation. That’s the world the Type 00 occupies. We rather like it.

jaguar.co.uk/copy-nothing

The Wallpaper* Design Awards 2025 winners are also featured in full in the February 2025 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands from 9 January 2025, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

A master of raw forms, the late JB Blunk sculpted primarily in wood and ceramic for works that took their cue from salvaged natural materials.

It was an organic philosophy that extended to the jewellery that Blunk enjoyed creating for his family and friends. Wearable sculptures in their own right, the miniature pieces were also a way for Blunk to work on a small scale, exploring keyhole silhouettes or uneven circles, which were then translated into his larger pieces.

Now the JB Blunk Estate – which also runs the Blunk Space exhibition programme – has paid tribute to this heritage, for the first time issuing reproductions of four special rings, in collaboration with LA-based jewellery designer J Hannah. Each ring is produced in a limited edition of 50 in silver and recycled 18ct gold. Three are reinterpretations of gifts that Blunk created for his partner Christine Nielson, including Continuum, crafted from a single piece of ivory for Valentine’s Day 1975. Presence was a gift for Nielsen in 1980, its form reminiscent of his 1977 work, Entry Arch (Presence), while Muse was a Christmas gift in 1974, a piece Nielsen wore as her wedding ring.

Also rethought is the ring Blunk made for daughter Mariah in 1988 when she was 11 years old, with Crown cutting a symmetric shape, a refined foil for Blunk’s usual rawness.

Shop the rings at blunkshop.com

The February 2025 issue of Wallpaper* is available in print on newsstands from 9 January 2025, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

As reissue stories go, the ‘Spherical’ bed is an award-winning fairy tale of design, because it celebrates both the past and the future in one fell swoop. Originally designed by Kaare Klint, the single bed was presented in 1938 at the Danish Cabinetmakers’ Autumn Exhibition as part of Klint’s showcase, titled ‘A Lady’s Boudoir’. The show attracted criticism that making furniture for a woman living alone was profligate. Klint is said to have responded that the world could do with more elegance and love.

With its curved ends, the bed has a cocooning cosiness to it. Such was the complexity of its construction that it proved near-impossible for the still-evolving, machine-led production. Fast forward to the introduction in 2019 of Carl Hansen & Søn’s apprentice programme The Lab, in which the Danish brand mentors 18 trainees, divided into traditional and machine cabinetmakers. This influx of minds and hands dedicated to achieving meticulous levels of perfection proved to be perfect for bringing Klint’s bed back into existence.

We commend Carl Hansen & Søn’s reissue of a complexly constructed Kaare Klint bed

‘We asked permission from Klint’s family to turn the single bed into a double,’ says Jeppe Ravn Frederiksen, who heads up The Lab. ‘When we input Klint’s drawings into our 3D-modelling software, it came to life perfectly.’ Each bed takes four people around ten weeks to make. All the wood comes from a single tree, and only six beds can be made each year. ‘Such a creation does not suit high-volume production, but it’s perfect for education and training within a small workshop.’ And we all slept happily ever after.  

The KK55761 Spherical Bed is available exclusively by order. For more information, write to: webshop@carlhansen.dk

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Find all the Wallpaper Design Award 2025 winners in the February 2025 issue of Wallpaper* , available in print on international newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

Plants are among Philippe de Spoelberch’s biggest passions. The Belgian businessman and dendrologist has a professional background in brewing but is now mostly dedicated to his lifetime fascination with trees – not only by stretching his own green fingers but also by being active in the scientific field of botany. His latest project is Belgium’s newest plant ‘museum’ in Marche-en-Famenne, in the region of Wallonia. The site, which has been many years in the making, includes a new visitor centre by local studio AW Architectes and has just opened to the public.

Take the tour of Marche Arboretum

Marche-en-Famenne is the second scheme of its kind initiated by de Spoelberch, who started informally planting trees in his family estate in Wespelaar, Flanders in 1966. An extension to an initial ten hectares in 1986 allowed him to further his collection. The entire 20-hectare extension was donated in 2003 to a dedicated foundation, the Stichting Arboretum Wespelaar.

The arboretum is now managed by executive director Dr Koen Camelbeke, under the supervision of the board of directors headed by chairman Guy de Broqueville. Blending trees collected during travels (by the team and external contributors), with purchases and gifts by major botanical gardens across the globe, Wespelaar thrived and by 2020 reached capacity. Now the foundation intends to repeat its success in the new, 76-hectare site.

‘We were lucky to find an exceptional site on a rare limestone formation that complements the collections of more acid loam of Wespelaar. Poor soils allow for rich meadows. Ten of Belgium’s native orchids were found on the site. Meadows have been sown with seed from sites of Natagora [a nature conservation NGO]. Fifteen hectares of the 76 have been fenced to keep wild boar out of the more precious areas and the visitor centre. Roe deer and beavers do find a way in!’ de Spoelberch says.

An invited competition between three architecture studios led to the selection of the winning team headed by Gauthier Wislez. The practice designed the visitor centre to contain the curator’s accommodation, a small auditorium, a café, a glasshouse, offices, and service areas for the gardening and maintenance staff. Its accessible green roof, semi-buried in nature, clever geometry and orientation mean it’s near-invisible from several angles, allowing nature to take centre stage.

‘I wanted the architecture to be contemporary, but also responsive to its site and function,’ Wislez says. Sustainable architecture strategies such as a ground source heat pump system, energy recovery ventilation, high-performance insulation and solar panels help the limestone-clad concrete building be sensitive to its context. The site was perfected with the help of landscape architect and head gardener at Arboretum Wespelaar, Christophe Crock, who worked on the parking lot, building the access route, roof and surrounding environment.

Water from a well on site is used in the building and for irrigation, while rainwater is stored in reservoirs for the drier months. Local stone artisans helped create the building’s façade and farmers from the region are engaged in subcontracted upkeep throughout the year (some of its meadows are naturally maintained by local sheep and donkeys).

De Spoelberch’s vision for Marche springs from a respect and deep interest in nature. ‘I don’t want this to become a “Disneyland”, but rather a key scientific tool for botany,’ he explains. Introduced plants are labelled throughout, native species are studied and managed, and doors open one Sunday per month from April to October, and for specialised groups by appointment.

More than a tourist attraction, the arboretum was designed as a place for experimentation and study. Still, it is early days for Marche Arboretum. ‘It takes a while for something like this to grow. Many trees are still young and it might only be of real scientific interest in 20 years,’ de Spoelberch says, adding that he intends to keep adding species and trying new things. ‘[But even as a work in progress], it feels very natural. It is definitely worth a visit.’

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See more 2025 Wallpaper* Design Award-winning architecture projects

All of the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2025 winners will be celebrated online over the coming month and are featured in full in the February 2025 issue of Wallpaper* , available in print on newsstands from 9 January 2025, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today