For our new subscribers:

The Design Release started in 2016 when Leo Lei of Leibal and I (Julia) were working in NYC and travelling to overseas furniture trade shows to discover new designers for the fair I was producing, and for Leo’s store. We quickly realized the most interesting designers were often presenting work outside the larger shows, and there was no single resource for tracking design exhibitions and smaller events. So, with our third co-founder, tech genius Zack Kollar, we built one. Today, TDR is a global calendar and newsletter built around the idea that community turns design lovers into design insiders.

If you want to learn more, one of our favorite Substacks, Departing Now, written by brilliant travel writer Imogen Green, recently featured an interview with me about the story behind TDR, navigating the global design circuit, my favourite design cities, and more. Read it here.

On to our newsletter!

September Events

Summer is a very slow time for us here at TDR. Typically, there are barely any exhibitions after 3daysofdesign in Copenhagen in June, until September comes along and slaps us awake.

However, summertime is starting to feel a little less sleepy: along with bigger shows like PAD St Tropez, Villa Noailles, also in the South of France, as well as Chart in Copenhagen, more exhibitions are popping up in summertime tourist destinations. We get into that a little further down.

The calendar continues to grow, which is unfortunate for me because I’ve just enjoyed the first summer of my life without panicking daily over what to do during the slow months. I leaned tf in!! I’m writing this from the caves of the Algarve after a few weeks in Mallorca visiting family, getting spoiled and fed. It’s been wonderful!

My emails have started up again (as well as my palpitations upon seeing my notifications) as we prepare for a big start to the design year kicking off with Frieze Seoul, and the bigger official launch of Design Miami Seoul.

If you’re in Seoul for the fairs, I’m extremely jealous, and be sure to also check out So Koizumi Collection, the designer’s first solo exhibition in South Korea.

Moving on: September 10th is the start of Paris Design Week, which is still finding its international footing after the pandemic, and the trade show we are hearing about less and less as the industry starts to favor more curated shows: Maison&Objet.

There is a lot more happening in September - and you can find it all on TDR, updated daily. I am adding the entire year of trade shows and design fairs to the calendar from now until the end of the month. There are over 100! And the hundreds of exhibitions will follow.

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Our upcoming newsletter (not today’s - I’m trying to re-grow my attention span with this one) will focus on the new Shoreditch Design Week in London, taking place September 15-20.

London’s larger, city-wide Design Festival, which runs most of September, has been the subject of our newsletter a few times, and in our explainer last year I got into how it used to be a great month of dynamic fairs and satellite events throughout the city. All the fairs closed down - most of them pre-Brexit and pre-pandemic, for what I presume was the good old-fashioned reason that they simply weren’t profitable - and the big trade show (Decorex) that barely anyone talks about anymore either, moved to October.

London Design Festival is organized across a network of independently run neighborhood design districts, each with a dedicated opening night. While some have been interesting (Brompton aka South Kensington, Mayfair, and Shoreditch being my favourites), there are 100s of events that aren’t relevant, which makes it easy to waste your time trekking all over the city.

There has been some tea about the larger organization taking sponsors away from the smaller districts, and not being the easiest to work with. From personal experience, they don’t seem collaborative :-/ sad!

So I was very excited to hear that Shoreditch Design Triangle (one of the district names) has rebranded to Shoreditch Design Week, becoming “LDF’s Largest Official District,” a more cohesive neighborhood of trade fairs, exhibitions, and pop-ups.

This gives LDF what it’s really needed all these years: an anchor location. Shoreditch is such a fun part of town, and very tourist-friendly, which helps the community grow. It also has an A-list of designers presenting work: Jasper Morrison, Lee Broom, Rio Kobayashi, Andu Masebo, Bethan Laura Wood, and many more.

Next month we will publish an interview with Shoreditch Design Week’s creative director Duncan Riches, where we discuss the new format, the challenges of coordinating events in a city as large as London, and what Shoreditch can offer as a more concentrated destination for both the local and international design community. Plus a guide for what to see.

We look forward to sharing that with you!

On View Now

If you find yourself in Tuscany or California, we have two exhibitions presenting design in a beautiful outdoors setting:

In Tuscany, Don’t Call Me Collectible! takes over Villa Marie in Vorno, presenting contemporary design and sculpture. The exhibition questions the limitations of what we call “collectible design” as a category, bringing together practices that explore studio craft, material experimentation and research.

You can read more about Don’t Call Me Collectible! in our journal here.

Verdant Phenomena is the first group exhibition hosted by Sonoma and Los Angeles-based interior and architecture studio The Bureau. Taking place in founder Sarah Giesenhagen’s Sonoma garden, the show brings together more than 13 artists and designers from Los Angeles and the Bay Area, with over 60 works of art, sculpture, and design.

And if you find yourself in Copenhagen at the end of the month, the annual art fair CHART is taking place from August 27 - 29. The city lights up as it does for 3daysofdesign, and there is so much fantastic art to discover.

Aligned with that time frame is friend of TDR, Innenkreis, presenting two side by side shows: Vanitas in Use II and Extrude, Bridge, Fill.

Innenkreis is located right across the street from the new Copenhagen Soho House, so if you find yourself in that area make sure to pop in and say hi to Zeynep.

To close things off - did you hear about how Substack is allowing you to scan for AI use in newsletters? And did you notice Pinterest allows you to filter out AI? Thank god!!!

I just read this article by NYT (gift link here) that spells it all out.

TBH: if you need to rely on chatgpt to write a listicle, I respectfully ask that you please stick to posting on instagram!!!

We are proudly using our own words here, for better or worse. (We do use Grammarly, which is set to British English for my other work, so that can explain our spelling inconsistencies. Grammarly is great, highly recommend!)

And finally, a reminder: If you are a designer or producer with an upcoming exhibition, we would love to have it listed on TDR. Our base price for a listing is $10 (and it’s best to upload before the show goes live so it stays on the website as long as possible). $10 adds up and helps us keep the website alive. We wanted the most democratic price possible, so the support can go both ways. We also offer add-ons, like adding a link to your press kit (helpful for journalists who use our site to create their event picks), plus featured listings on the home page, etc.

As always, we are grateful for your support - Thank You!!!

Big abrazos

Julia and Leo

Preparation for the next edition happens the moment the previous show ends: the exhibitor sales, floor planning, attendee lists, press strategy, budgets, partnerships, the endless decisions. You work all year for a week-long event.

I’ve spent enough of my career in and around fairs to know that the most interesting part is often not the event itself, but the people behind the scenes making it all happen.

With London’s Treasure House Fair, the “behind the scenes” is particularly interesting because the fair is operating between two identities at once: it is new in name, but not new in context. Its arrival followed the cancellation of Masterpiece London, the cross-category fair, after its owner MCH Group cited rising costs and fewer international exhibitors. Treasure House has since stepped into that London summer slot, carrying forward parts of Masterpiece’s world, while working to define what comes next.

The fair itself brings together fine art, antiques, design, jewellery, books and objects across periods and categories. But what interested me most was the team behind it: a group of women who appear to have been given a rare degree of autonomy in shaping what this fair can become.

I spoke with Polina Usenko, Exhibitor Manager; Michalina Franasik, Communications Manager; and Dorothea Meath Baker, Associate Director, about the work of building a fair from the inside. With the show returning to the Royal Hospital Chelsea from June 24 to 30, I asked each of them how Treasure House is balancing inherited credibility with the work of building something new.

Polina Usenko, Exhibitor Manager

Polina Usenko has been with Treasure House Fair since its first edition in 2023. As Exhibitor Manager, she spends much of her time speaking directly with dealers, galleries and specialists.

TDR: Treasure House brings together objects across many periods and categories. From an exhibitor's perspective, what makes that cross-category model compelling now?

PU: One of my favourite things about the fair is watching somebody arrive with a very clear plan and then completely abandon it. They come in looking for a painting and leave obsessed with a piece of silver. They spend twenty minutes discussing a rare book with a dealer they’ve never met before. Somebody who collects contemporary design suddenly finds themselves staring at Japanese bronzes.

I think people collect more freely than they used to. People are building homes and are collecting more instinctively. For exhibitors, that’s exciting because their audience becomes much larger than those immediately interested in their field. Some of the best conversations happen between people who have absolutely no business talking to each other.

TDR: Treasure House is in an unusual position: it has the standards, setting and expertise of an established fair, but the identity and momentum of a newer one. How do exhibitors respond to that balance, and what has helped build trust around the new fair?

PU: Treasure House is one of those things that is simultaneously new and not new at all.

The name is new. The tradition of art fairs in London is one that began in 1934 with the Grosvenor House Fair, continued through Masterpiece and somehow survived wars, recessions, Brexit, Covid and prevailed against predictions that people would stop wanting to look at beautiful things in person.

Quite a few of our exhibitors have been part of that story for years. Some are second or third-generation dealers. There are people at the fair who can tell you where their stand was in Grosvenor House in the 1980s. There are collectors who remember buying from the same dealer forty years ago.

Trust comes from that continuity. Fairs are ultimately made of relationships and memory, and we have inherited a great deal of both.

The other greatest advantage is that the art at the fair is really good, and people can see that.

TDR: How do you think dealers’ expectations of fairs have changed in the last few years?

PU: Dealers have become less interested in activity and more interested in meaning.

Nobody needs another crowded room. Nobody wants to come home exhausted with a tote bag full of business cards. Dealers are asking much harder questions now: Who is actually coming? Who will I meet? What conversations are likely to happen?

The economics of fairs have also changed. Shipping is more expensive, customs and sales restrictions are tighter, and everybody’s time feels more precious. If you’re going to transport a 50,000-year-old mammoth skull across Europe, or fly in from Indianapolis with a group of paintings, there has to be a reason beyond simply being seen.

What hasn’t changed is that people still want to look at things in person. The art world constantly predicts its own digital future, and then somebody finds themselves standing in front of an object they’ve only ever seen in books and remembers why fairs exist.

Michalina Franasik, Communications Manager

Michalina Franasik is a Polish art professional whose work bridges decorative arts, antiques, design and contemporary art. Active in both the British and Polish art scenes, she is engaged in photography, the Polish avant-garde and contemporary artistic practices.

TDR: Many fairs are still marketed in a fairly conventional way: exhibitor lists, highlights, press previews, VIP days. What do you think a fair’s communications strategy needs to do differently now?

MF: All of these elements are crucial. However, I believe they need to be approached in a more personalised way. When exploring the displays of a fair today, visitors are not just looking for a simple introduction through a list of categories: dates, periods, dimensions, valuations. They want to experience each object as a myth: understand why a piece is exceptional, why it matters, why someone might have chosen to acquire it, collect it or write about it.

In a world where consumers have become exhausted by constant promotional offers and informational overwhelm, marketing is becoming increasingly personal. Instead of simply consuming images, people want to connect with and resonate with the stories behind the objects they encounter. They are looking for context, expertise and human narratives that allow them to relate to what they see.

The challenge is to create a strategy that resonates across generations. It should combine clear, informative messaging with more approachable, engaging and visually dynamic content. While some audiences seek depth and scholarship, others respond to personality, storytelling and a sense of discovery. The most effective communication balances both, making art and design accessible without compromising on expertise or quality.

TDR: Are there any brands, events, publications or cultural spaces outside the art fair world that have influenced how you think about Treasure House’s communications?

MF: I have always admired Ralph Lauren’s marketing campaigns. It is a global brand that is already firmly established in people’s minds, yet it continues to invest in storytelling rather than simply promoting products. I believe this can be achieved even without a large budget or extensive equipment. Ultimately, it comes down to having an eye for beauty, a strong narrative and a creative vision.

What I find particularly compelling is the way the brand connects itself to places, culture and lifestyle. Ralph Lauren represents an American interpretation of elegance, but its campaigns go far beyond showcasing clothing. Whether set in New York, London or elsewhere in the world, they display all locations through a cinematic lens. The result feels less like advertising and more like watching a beautifully crafted short film.

Personally, I have never been drawn to products photographed against a plain white background. I am far more interested in campaigns that are created by genuine creatives, filmmakers, photographers, stylists, writers and artists, who understand how to build an atmosphere and tell a story.

That is something I have tried to recreate, on a smaller scale, through my work with Treasure House Fair. Rather than simply presenting objects, I have always wanted to showcase the people behind them. I enjoy visiting exhibitors in their galleries, capturing behind-the-scenes moments from their daily lives, and sharing the stories that shape their expertise and collections. For me, those human narratives are often just as fascinating as the works themselves, and they help audiences build a deeper and more meaningful connection with art, antiques and design.

TDR: What is the biggest misconception about fairs like Treasure House and how are you trying to challenge that?

MF: I think one of the biggest misconceptions about art fairs is that they are somehow exclusive, and that if you’re not “posh”, whatever that may mean, you are not welcome. In reality, everyone is welcome, whether you’re a serious collector, a student, an emerging professional, or simply someone who loves art and wants to learn more.

My own journey with Treasure House Fair began three years ago when I was still at university. It was one of my first visits to an art and antiques fair, and I was amazed by how much I learned simply by being there, looking closely, and speaking with exhibitors. The knowledge, passion and generosity of the people I met left a lasting impression on me.

What I particularly love about the fair is that there is no need to rush. You can spend time with a piece, ask questions, return later for another look, take photographs, and continue conversations throughout the day. It’s as much about discovery and learning as it is about collecting. You can enjoy the experience with friends, meet fascinating people, and perhaps find something that sparks a lifelong interest.

Dorothea Meath Baker, Associate Director

Dorothea Meath Baker is Associate Director of Treasure House Fair and has worked with the fair’s founder since 2019. After what she describes as a somewhat misplaced couple of years studying physics, she transitioned into arts events. Her motivation is rooted in a deep interest in heritage and conservation, though her day-to-day work focuses on the often unseen elements that bring a fair to life, from construction management and design to digital systems.

TDR: How do you balance heritage and reinvention, preserving the trust and expertise associated with the fair model while keeping the experience current?

DMB: Staying true to our heritage and the expertise offered by our exhibitors is the foundation of the trust people place in us as a fair. If we lose that, we lose the fair and what it stands for.

Being current for us is less about reinvention and more about how we present ourselves and communicate with audiences, both new and existing. We have to think about how people experience the fair as a place and as a moment in their summer calendar, not just as a marketplace for art. This is where elements like the hospitality experience or even our online presence become more important. This is how we engage with our audience and create experiences that feel “now”.

We aren’t interested in reinvention for the sake of it or chasing a trend. Our focus is on the relationships that form the heart of the fair. The key for us is finding ways to present them that feel relevant, engaging and welcoming.

TDR: What does success look like for Treasure House Fair now, not just commercially, but culturally?

DMB: In basic terms, success looks like our exhibitors doing good business and coming back year on year to exhibit with us. But while that is essential, for us culturally speaking, success is becoming a staple in the summer calendar.

We like to say in the office that we’re “perfectly placed between Ascot and Wimbledon,” and that is genuinely where we see ourselves and want to be: as widely known and culturally significant as those two fixtures in the British summer.

That’s the ambition. We’ll see what the future holds, but that’s the dream.

Thank you for reading.

If you’re planning to visit Treasure House Fair, our contributing editor Esther Kroes Weizman, founder of WEIZ&CO, will be leading curated design tours through the fair, with a closer look at selected galleries, collectible design, furniture, and the decorative arts that are much better understood in person.

Tours take place on Friday 26 June from 12–1 pm and Saturday 27 June from 3–4 pm, with an additional members-only tour on Thursday 25 June. Tickets include access to the fair. More information available here.

See you next month!

Julia

Case in point: I left Milan’s Design Week (in April) feeling anxious and uninspired, largely because of the overwhelming number of soulless exhibitions and the feeling that, as a design writer (especially one who runs an exhibition platform), you need to see everything in a rushed panic. Years ago, I promised myself I wouldn’t work that way anymore, yet the self-imposed pressure was there, and stronger than ever.

Journalists were grumpy, the energy was strange, and the sheer volume of people added to the stress. Many of the writers I spoke with shared a similar sentiment, adding that they may take a break from attending next year.

June’s 3daysofdesign - which I wrote an explainer about earlier this month, making the case that a broader, unowned “Copenhagen Design Week” is inevitable - was one of the best industry events I’ve been to in 2026, along with Madrid. The main reason: its human scale.

I’ll explain!

When I visit fairs and exhibitions, I view things from two different business perspectives:

1. Writing about the design-world ecosystem for The Design Release (which includes consulting with brands on where to present work)

2. Connecting with brand partners and makers through Leibal, where I oversee retail and sourcing for the minimalist furniture platform.

My observation about Copenhagen’s 3daysofdesign is that it’s currently the most productive design week for both categories, which is rare for me (typically my design travel is mostly for TDR).

It has the B2B nature of a trade show, but without the ticketing or oppressive environment (Copenhagen being the most walkable and least oppressive place on earth). Aside from the official tour, it’s really about popping into showrooms you’re familiar with, which are sprinkled in proximity all around the city, and discovering lesser-known brands.

The latter does require a bit more research, and luckily, we do that for you.

It’s less “see and be seen” than Milan. There is also less of a rush to visit exhibitions simply to post them on Instagram (which I do too, I’m not being judgemental!). Rather, it’s about making actual connections with dealers, wholesale retailers, reps, owners, and directors.

3daysofdesign may disappoint out-of-towners looking for the same wow factor they get from the installations in Milan, but I think that also helps keep out people who aren’t there for business reasons, which is fine and keeps things somewhat contained in such a small city.

Although there is always an independent design presence (more so than collectible design presence, although the excellent Innenkreis Gallery has that covered), when I think of Copenhagen and why people attend, it’s largely for the heritage and mass-production furniture brands showcasing their novelties, and for the conversations around material innovation happening among younger designers. There’s plenty in between, but that’s my simplified view of the event.

Copenhagen was great for Leibal because we connected with our vendors at dinners and more intimate events. We talked shop, exchanged ideas, and made plans to collaborate. All real actionable things that left me feeling motivated and inspired, rather than drained or anxious.

I met new cool friends, including some I’ve been talking to for ages and never met IRL. Shout out to Resident’s Charlotte Malherbe, Frama’s Lucy Chen, journalist Will Speros, and Lila Allen, design consultant and creator of Wrong House substack.

I crashed with design consultant and bestie Lola Wang and her husband, the talented architect (and wonderful human) Johannes Torpe, in their beautiful home, which you can rent next time you’re in Copenhagen.

I also got to spend more time than expected with everyone’s favorite (and my TDR co-founder) Leo Lei.

So now, here are the best things I saw!

This issue is presented with support from GANNI.

Special thanks to GANNI, our Copenhagen Design Week brand partner.

Beyond its distinctive Scandinavian point of view, GANNI continues to invest in the future of fashion through its Fabrics of the Future initiative with new material developments, including leather alternatives made from orange and olive oil production waste, and recycled nylon engineered from discarded ocean fishing nets.

Explore GANNI’s latest collection here.

Portrait of Korean Living

Designed and art directed by Swiss creative studio Gini Moynier, Portrait of Korean Living explored contemporary Korean design through the lens of daily life. The exhibition imagined the home of a Korean individual living abroad, using furniture, lighting, and objects to highlight both the similarities and differences between Korean and European cultures.

My favorite thing I saw in Copenhagen was the series of paintings by Jieun Lee on view at the exhibition, and seen above. Sold out of course 😭

Project Materia x Mater

Project Materia was founded by TABLEAU and Edition Solenne, which explored the creative potential of Matek™, a material developed from waste streams including coffee shells, sawdust, and recycled plastics. Julius Værnes Iversen, curator of Project Materia and founder of TABLEAU, invited 9 international artists and designers to create new works using the material, treating it with the same level of experimentation as traditional materials such as stone, wood, and metal.

Julius also hosted a dinner which was a major highlight of the week, where I sat next to architect and participating designer Filippo Andrighetto, Secolo’s Sacha Andraos, and NYT journalist Laura May Todd.

Also in attendance were Collectible Fair founder Liv Vaisberg and interior designer rockstar Joern von Scheipers. A great crowd!

Compositions

My favorite 2026 design “trend” is no more obvious luxury design. The year’s best exhibitions focused on tasteful collections of anonymous antiques (Milan’s best was L’appartement by Antoine Billore, which you can see here).

Compositions, presented by aarticles, was staged like a collector’s home and a gallery, bringing together found objects, contemporary works, and pieces from both past and new collections. The exhibition focused on how objects change in relation to one another, how older pieces can carry memory into a room, while newer works alter the composition again.

Founded by Kasia Sznajder and Fred Aartun (Head of Creative at Frama), aarticles reflects their shared background in design, culture, art direction, and exhibition design. The presentation featured new and returning work by artists including Vince Skelly, Sharlen Nozawa, Juliette Pénélope Pépin, Verre d’Onge, Hannah Kuhlmann, Patricia Perales García, Christian+Jade, Agnieszka Owsiany, Shane Gabier, Yeodong Yun, Louie Isaaman-Jones, and Anna Fiedler.

And now for my favorite object that I want:

I thought I was cured of “wanting” things (I think it’s related to the death of luxury), but I want this lamp so bad!!!! It’s the Loft Lamp by Louise Roe, and it’s available here and I’ll be really mad if you buy it.

Ok that’s it! A short recap, as you’ll likely see many more in the next few days!

Next week, we explore how London’s Treasure House Fair is balancing the credibility of an established event, but with new ownership and new energy. We hope to see you there next Friday (and reach out if you’d like tickets).

A big hug,

Julia (and hi from Leo)

With showrooms in New York and Los Angeles, Marc Phillips Rugs is a leading resource for handcrafted rugs, antique heirlooms, contemporary collaborations, and custom commissions, all grounded in beautiful design and craftsmanship.

Marc Phillips Rugs will be presenting a new collection with interior designer Jamie Bush at Copenhagen’s most talked-about independent fairs other circle - an event playing an increasingly influential role within Copenhagen Design Week (more on that below) and it will be one of our first stops this week.

We hope you enjoy this one!

Hello friends!

We are approaching the last stop on the 2026 Design Grand Tour: Copenhagen!

A lot of people have been asking about 3daysofdesign, Copenhagen’s annual design event, so here’s a quick explainer:

The event began in 2013, when four brands came together to present new work in a Copenhagen warehouse. It soon expanded into a citywide program.

Today, brands pay 3daysofdesign - the organisation behind the event - to participate in its official program and tour schedule.

That fee (a democratic model based on revenue) helps fund a huge international press tour, which brings hundreds of journalists to Copenhagen for three packed days of showroom visits, presentations and (if you know the food scene in Copenhagen) fabulous dinners.

The tour is considered “the trenches” among some journalists. There are lots of funny stories about militant tour leaders (many are school teachers who do this as a side gig, so there is a lot of that “ok kids - pay attention!” energy). During the three days that they own you, you meet a ton of brand execs and fabulous fellow design journalists from all four corners of the earth. My tour had editors from the Financial Times, Elle Decor Japan, The New York Times, and many more. There were maybe 12-16 of us on the tour, and I have no idea how many tour groups there are, but I presume there are a lot.

The tour has expanded significantly, and I believe more than one hotel is completely bought out. 3days has expanded to Professional Tours for buyers and interior designers (Leo is trying that out this year, for Leibal). And last year, my interior designer friend was on that tour (she’s with a huge hospitality firm). She was reprimanded for sneaking off to handle urgent work emails and, as a result, didn’t enjoy the experience.

I have done the tour about five times, and it was very tough. Early mornings to midnight all three days. Jet lag or no jet lag. The downside is that you can end up in a bunch of showrooms that don’t align with your coverage, but generally speaking, the 3days people do a great job sorting out your group’s schedule. It must take a crazy amount of coordination.

Since each brand is paying for your time, you are required to sit at presentations attentively until they are finished. So if there is a delay, it sets off a domino effect that is corrected as you’re about to have a bite of a sandwich during lunch, and you’re rushed out the door to the next showroom. It’s a funny experience, one that many of us dread, but simultaneously feel sad about if we aren’t invited back because we were possibly the bad kids the previous year, or because they are cycling through new journalists.

So in a nutshell, 3days is a press event, but now it has exploded, as all good things in our industry have, and many more interior designers (especially from the USA) are making the big trek to Denmark.

The truth about the event is that you don’t really need to be super prepped for it like Milan - just walk the city, and you’ll see a zillion things, especially on Bredgade, where many showrooms have their permanent locations.

But because the event is becoming so expansive, many independent exhibitions are presenting without being officially on the 3daysofdesign itinerary, to the ire of 3days’ founder, who said in last year’s review of the event on Business of Home, it risks “destroying what’s so beautiful about 3 Days of Design now.”

Unfortunately, you can’t control an entire city, and I am seeing a lot of press kits eschewing the name “3daysofdesign” altogether in favour of the more general “Copenhagen Design Week.”

This is where we are heading.

And for those wondering: Unlike Milan, the fashion world has not yet capitalized on the focused attention on Copenhagen, but surely it will happen soon. But - this should not come as a surprise - Anthropic (Claude) has gotten involved and is hosting a big dinner with 3daysofdesign. There goes the neighborhood!

So with all that said, there is an incredible array of events happening in Copenhagen, and I wanted to spotlight a few that I found most interesting, some of which are off-tour and harder to find. Remember - all our picks for Copenhagen are up on The Design Release’s calendar. Copenhagen’s listings can be found here.

You can also become a user and save events to route from place to place, as well as revisit exhibitions from previous design weeks. A great tool for curators FYI.

We are also so happy to be working with interior designers who are unfamiliar with the landscape on their Itineraries, which include a daily schedule, private openings, parties, cocktails, personal introductions, and brand dinners. We really love creating those, especially specific to people’s businesses and interests. Reach out if you’re interested.

And as a thank you to our paid readers, we have a shortened itinerary below the paywall of some great parties (and RSVP links - of course!!!! Anyone who does a design week round-up that includes private events without RSVP links should be locked in a basement.)

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A NOTE FROM OUR SPONSOR

MARC PHILLIPS RUGS × JAMIE BUSH FIELD STUDIES

A new collection exploring the rug as landscape, artwork, and architectural element. Inspired by aerial views of cultivated terrain, Jamie Bush’s painted compositions are translated into richly layered surfaces of wool, silk, hemp, and allo.

Handcrafted with variations in fiber, texture, and pile height, each piece reflects Marc Phillips Rugs’ commitment to materiality, global craftsmanship, and enduring design.

Discover FIELD STUDIES at other circle during 3daysofdesign, and follow them here.

Copenhagen Top Picks

Everything below is open during the 3daysofdesign official dates of June 10-12, some independent exhibitions open on the 9th. Please visit the linked listings for individual dates and hours.

Independent Design Exhibitions

Vanitas in Use I
Vanitas in Use I, at the new Innenkreis gallery, reconsiders the vanitas tradition through functional objects and lived environments, asking how ideas of transience, fragility, and value are carried through things made to be handled and used. Bringing contemporary works in glass, metal, ceramic, and wood into dialogue with historical design, the exhibition treats objects from different periods as part of the same ongoing present.

Display / Displayed: A Group Exhibition
Display / Displayed, presented with Simone Book Services, examines objects made for display across books, design, and photography. The exhibition challenges the idea that decorative objects are frivolous, proposing instead that visibility, use, and meaning often strengthen one another.

PHOENIX PHORMS
Phoenix Phorms brings 19th-century Danish furniture from 14 Furniture into dialogue with Kajsa Willner’s contemporary practice, tracing how forms, materials, and ideas return, transform, and acquire new meaning over time. Curated by Marie Jacobi, the exhibition presents history and the present as part of an ongoing cycle of change, allowing unexpected connections to emerge across eras.

Japan Creative Association
Japan Creative presents an exploration of washi, the traditional Japanese paper with a 1,400-year history, tracing its material origins, making process, and role across everyday life. The exhibition brings historic uses into conversation with new applications, showing how this deeply rooted craft continues to evolve within contemporary design.

Portrait of Korean Living
Korean design brands rareraw, ILKW, and flat point come together for a collaborative exhibition of furniture and lighting, each bringing a distinct approach to how everyday objects shape the way we live and inhabit space. Exhibition paintings by Jieun Lee.

Knife, Fork, Spoon Curated by Dung Ngo
Marta and curator Dung Ngo present Knife, Fork, Spoon, bringing together 12 contemporary flatware designs by leading artists and designers, each 3D-printed in stainless steel.

For Scale Only
For Scale Only, conceived by Frederik Nystrup-Larsen and Nick Ross, pairs six chairs with six artworks to examine how scale shapes the way we see. By using the chair as a physical point of reference, the exhibition exposes how art is measured, positioned, and absorbed into the domestic interior.

Independent Fairs

other circle
Launching its second edition from June 10–13, other circle brings together art, design, fashion, food, and music in a curated, cross-disciplinary setting. The exhibition responds to a growing appetite for independent formats with a distinct cultural point of view.

Ukurant
Ukurant’s 2026 edition unfolds at Fabrikken for Art & Design, a working creative hub that brings together makers across disciplines and generations. Centered on community, experimentation, and process, the exhibition reveals the tests, decisions, and craftsmanship behind each finished piece.

Museum

Japan Modern Poster
Japan Modern Poster brings together 110 works tracing the development of Japanese graphic design from the 1950s to today. Organised with the DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion, the exhibition reveals how poster design has reflected, and often playfully questioned, Japan’s changing cultural and historical landscape.

Showrooms

North Quarter
During 3daysofdesign, A-N-D opens its first European flagship in Copenhagen with North Quarters, a three-floor exhibition of Canadian lighting and design. The presentation moves from gallery-style installations and large-scale brand imagery to prototypes, floor lamps, and a top-floor café setting illuminated by the brand’s Column and Vale collections.

Room for Resonance
Room for Resonance presents furniture, lighting, and textiles by New Zealand design house Resident as a cohesive exploration of craft, material, and atmosphere. Curated by Asca Studio and Relief Gallery, the installation considers how design can shape an environment that is not only seen, but felt.

FRAME STUDIO
FRAME STUDIO presents an immersive dinner setting shaped by conversation, materiality, and the heart of the home. In collaboration with DM GROUP partners, the installation brings together rugs, sculptural lighting, handmade porcelain, and curated lifestyle objects to create a layered environment centered on connection and shared experience.

And with that, one more very big thank you to Marc Phillips Rugs for supporting this special issue. They will be presenting their new collection at other circle, so be sure to visit them while you’re there.

TDR is not typically a sponsored publication, which makes the support of an established brand especially meaningful. We are very grateful.

Up next for our paid readers: our personal Copenhagen itinerary, complete with parties, addresses, and RSVP details. See you there!

Read more

I don’t think I can do the April-May-June design week trifecta again, but since relaunching TDR it feels so necessary to grasp the industry, understand the landscape and ecosystem and power players and etc etc etc. It’s worth it, but it’s difficult and comes with downsides.

We don’t really talk about that so much - how keeping up with your industry can cause burnout or cause edginess that hurts those around us too. That we hold ourselves to unseen pressures that actually don’t exist, but ambition holds you to it. I am tired of being ambitious sometimes. One time, I got so tired of it that I got my master’s in furniture history.

That’s just where I am right at this moment now… feeling a little shell-shocked and also overwhelmed by how fantastic TDR’s new phase has been. But that’s the other thing - when business gets good you can’t just chill and enjoy it, you have to keep the trajectory moving forward. And onward and onward.

With that said… yes I am going to Copenhagen, and really it’s just a good excuse to see one of my favorite people in the world, where I don’t feel pressure to see anything. I am only interested in intimate moments at design weeks - personal connection. And snacks.

With that said, below is what I wrote just coming down from the last day of NYC Design Week, May 19th.

As I’ve mentioned in past newsletters, I was asked by Claire and Odile, the brand managers of ICFF (for those who don’t know, the USA’s largest furniture trade show), to come on as the program curator for the 2026 edition. Along with bringing in a cohort of old friends and new discoveries to present their work at the fair, I also decided to put my money where my mouth is.

Together with Leo, through our other company, Leibal, we presented a booth of work that we consider emblematic of contemporary minimalist design.

The week itself felt incredible. Seeing old friends, feeling the camaraderie of the trade show, being in the same room as so many people I admire, it felt familiar in the best possible way. I felt lucky to be there.

Setup was, as expected, difficult. Extreme. That is the tough reality of presenting work on a big stage in New York City. But the camaraderie, the connections, the reconnections - it makes it all worth it. (not sure if my almost-hypothyroidism agrees, however.)

During New York Design Week, I felt like I (we - me and Leo) reached a new and incredible high point in our careers. Meeting people who already knew about The Design Release, who use it and love it, was one of the most incredible feelings. Meeting people who were fans of Leibal was incredible.

I couldn’t be happier with the result. It makes me emotional, of course. Hard work does pay off in the end.

In the lead-up to ICFF, the exhibition I curated at Host on Howard, and the Leibal booth, I kept thinking: what was I thinking? I got my first grey hair (not bad at 40!). I’m not sure I would do all three things again, but I would certainly do at least two! With a year of rest in between.

As an aside - I want to say a big thank you to AvroKO for teaming up with us on the Look Book offsite, for being yes people in the best possible way. Their beautiful space, Host on Howard, gave a platform to select exhibitors from Look Book, and the designers were so thrilled. The exhibition looked beautiful. Here are some of my favorite photos as well. Look at these beautiful people!!!

Of course, there were ups and downs. I did receive feedback that some people were upset by my critiques of NYCxDesign (the organizers of New York’s design week) in our last newsletter, which made me anxious and second-guess myself. They asked my bosses at ICFF to reel me in (🤣 can you believe…)

But other journalists I respect echoed my sentiments, which truthfully made me feel vindicated. That my opinions were coming from a thoughtful place, with knowledge of the situation, not simply being critical for criticism’s sake. I don’t want to be a snarky, critical person without good reason.

I actually don’t want to be snarky at all (but I know it can slip out).

NYCxDesign board members accused me of critiquing something I don’t understand or don’t know well because I don’t live in NYC. (🤣 the audacity yet again…)

What they may not know is that I lived in New York for 15 years, and spent 10 of those years helping build a community of independent design at the Architectural Digest Design Fair (blood, sweat and tears literally).

During that time, I got to know - and really understand - the business of design. Especially independent contemporary design, my first love in this industry. My second love is the design world ecosystem. Which I also know very, very well.

It is interesting that our industry constantly asks for critique, yet when critique is actually given, people are scandalized.

Anyways! Regardless of NYCxDesign’s own activations, which looked really great when I saw them posted after the fact, I did feel that there were beautiful activations in New York and strong works on view by emerging designers.

That is what makes a design week interesting: the events that surround the trade show. The trade show is the anchor, and emerging design and exhibitions are the ocean of cool stuff around it.

New York Design Week felt like coming home in the best way possible.

Reconnection and community are everything to Leo and me. They are the reason we built The Design Release, and the reason I write this newsletter. We are so proud of what we have built, and we are even prouder when you tell us you love it.

So thank you to everyone who made us feel like our work is valuable. Thank you.

I would normally add my top picks for Copenhagen here, but I am going to rest now.

But perhaps you can visit our Instagram and engage with us there instead. Send us a DM if you’re a reader here so we can follow you back.

Tomorrow I’ll post my top picks for June exhibitions, and later this week I’ll post our top picks for Copenhagen. There is so much happening there it’s unbelievable - but this is the best curated list you’re going to find!!

And another small reminder - we can help you with your design week itineraries. If you’re trade, traveling somewhere for the first time and want to cut the lines and meet the important people, just reach out. We can help.

And a not-so-small reminder: The Design Release has everything you need for your design-world cultural discovery! In general, and year-round. Enjoy, and find your people.

A big hug,

Julia and Leo

Oh PS: I forgot to mention such a high point of May (and my career in general) was being invited on Business of Home’s excellent podcast.

I had the best time chatting with the lovely and charismatic Dennis Scully. He is wonderful and made me laugh so much. A big thank you to show producer (and the best damn design journalist there is) Fred Nicolaus, for making it happen.

I think it was a great episode in which we discussed the design industry's ecosystem (my favorite topic). You can give it a listen here:

If you haven’t seen the news, The New York Times and Business of Home have both reported that ICFF is moving to November, after almost 40 years anchored in May.

As you probably know, TDR is first and foremost a discovery platform for design exhibitions and fairs. We’ve made it our business to understand the industry’s global calendar, visiting major fairs around the world to advise on where to show, and to track how the landscape is changing.

For the past 5 years, we have not made it to New York Design Week (I hate calling it NYCxDesign) because of the bad timing: Milan is in April, and now everyone goes, and Copenhagen is in June, and now everyone goes. As we’ve mentioned before, and as reported by Fred Nicolaus at BOH, covid all but killed trade shows, and European brands (most of which are showcasing in Milan and/or Copenhagen) are less motivated to do three major shows all in a row.

ICFF moving to November is a great call. It gives international brands breathing room to present at the trade show, and gives international trade the space to breathe between shows in the spring. It gives independent designers the option to show abroad.

As you can see TDR’s Design Week listing here: There is nothing significant happening in the USA or EU in November. Dubai is in November, as well as Mumbai. And Design Miami / Art Basel Miami open December 1st and 4th, respectively.

My hot take is that the New York design community deserves better than what NYCxDesign currently offers. The week has changed hands over the years: in 2019, the New York City Economic Development Corporation handed operations of NYCxDesign to Sandow, the media company behind Interior Design, and other design-industry properties.

Should a magazine own a design week? Not sure. Actually, wait, that’s a no from me, dawg, because in a time when magazine survival depends on advertisers, there is a clear influence on what will get the most attention (this is also the reason why pointless Fashion exhibitions get so much press during Milan Design Week).

According to sources close to Sandow, they eventually divested because they didn’t know what they were doing, and NYCxDesign is back to being a nonprofit now. Another NYC-based source in PR told me: “It’s funny because I don’t know who owns it. I think Ilene Shaw runs it. We honestly don’t even formally support it. Don’t use the name, etc. Some clients do things that week, but we don’t even advise it half the time.”

NYC is obviously a Very Cool City, with what I believe is one of the strongest communities of independent designers globally, supported by excellent design schools Pratt, Parsons, and RISD.

NYCxDesign needs a rebrand. The “x” was once trendy because it suggested collaboration, but now it feels dated and techy. The logo looks like a construction barricade. It also feels visually hostile, there’s no elegance. It doesn’t feel like a destination.

In the BOH report, NYCxDesign confirmed it will continue in May - a mistake in my opinion. From my perspective, the trade-show pendulum may be starting to swing back. As the cost of presenting work independently in New York City continues to soar, and as press and foot traffic become harder to capture (ask anyone in PR), the value of a centralized trade platform becomes much harder to dismiss.

However they are perceived alongside the city’s cooler independent exhibitions, trade shows remain essential to the design ecosystem.

Maybe the real opportunity is not to mourn May (I mean, really, who is?), but to admit that New York’s Design Week needs a reset. NYCxDesign can be rethought as something more culturally ambitious and more worthy of the city’s design community.

Our New York Design Week picks

You have probably seen about 10 round-ups already - but you should know all the best New York Design Week selections are already on TDR!!

Quick tips for using the mobile web app:

Tap the hamburger menu and select Explore Maps, then choose New York City (or tap that link) to see where events are clustered. You can scroll sideways to browse what’s happening.

Create an account to save events by tapping the ❤️. Your saved events will appear on your profile page, where you can keep everything organized.

Click into any event to add it to your calendar, get directions from your current location, or route from one event to the next.

It’s VERY useful. I use it every time I travel to visit local design exhibitions and for every design week. Try it out and let me know what you think.

Here are our TOP THREE Design Week Picks:

HOUSE OF SANTAL - all details here
Open House hours are 10am–5pm on Thursday, May 14 and Friday, May 15. RSVP here.

ONE NIGHT STAND EXHIBIT - all details here

DUDD LITE - all details here

And of course, I need to promote the following!!

I’ll be at ICFF the whole run-time (May 17-19) as curator of Look Booth 2026, and within Look Book, Leo and I put together a Leibal booth of independent design.

Last week I previewed the Look Book section, and here is a preview of works on view at Leibal’s booth:

Clockwise from top left: Kalon Studios material studies chair, Mock Studios (stacked tables and stick lamp), Thomas Yang lamp, Kalon Studios materials studies tables, one of HB-AS Berea Sandstone Lamp, Vy Voi lamp, Ramulus floor lamps by Onibi.

(I look forward to sleeping the entirety of summer)

And Look Book has an exhibition at Avroko’s space Host on Howard, with show runtime and opening event details here, and on TDR as well if you want to ad to your calendar.

That’s all! Jumping off to get my chat on with Dennis Scully for Business of Home’s podcast in 15 mins! Tune in on the 14th here.

And see you in New York!

Julia + Leo

The Milan think pieces started driving me a little crazy last week, but they were also impossible to ignore. I thought Sight Unseen did a fantastic job of articulating what’s happening there, but bad news, guys: this is just the beginning. Brands will only find it harder to sit out Milan when the entire design world’s attention is focused in one place.

Oh, and as an aside - one roundup said, “we need a sommelier for Milan events,” which nearly made me fall out of my chair because THAT’S WHAT WE DO HERE. The Design Release is a curated calendar of the best design exhibitions around the world. On our mobile web app you can save your favorite exhibitions, route from show to show, add events to your calendar, and discover the best events.

I only went to exhibitions that I personally added to the site, and it was extremely easy and productive. Highly recommend. Join us, and I’ll be sending some fun private NYC events to our registered users.

Back to my Milan rant. The fashion conversation:

We brought this up last year when these pointless, shallow exhibitions started popping up, leaving you feeling more empty than when you arrived (unless you’re there for the pics only), but frankly, and think about it, who is paying most of the bills of all the design magazines? Who is likely one of AD Magazine’s biggest ad buyers? It’s probably LVMH or Kering up there, so why wouldn’t Gucci do an exhibition (which was literally a vending machine) with all that guaranteed press?! Fashion pays for design in our world, we have to accept that, but they have to try harder to be part of the cultural conversation in a more meaningful way, or at least in a more interesting way.

A few independent studios (including friend of TDR Lulu Lafortune) expressed interest in showing in Milan, feeling the fomo months in advance. But it’s clear that it’s no longer the right place for a self-funded solo exhibition. And this is exactly why Alcova will continue to become a better and better show. Alcova is becoming a required stop for emerging and interesting independent design in Milan, allowing it to continue to become more selective and better.

Professionals in the industry are feeling the fatigue, and so am I. And I’ll give you my final post-Milan trend prediction:

I think we will start to see less and less “cool/weird” furniture in interiors and go back to - yes! - brown furniture!!! Antiques are so cheap right now… I shouldn’t even put people on to it, because that’s how I am furnishing 90% of my apartment… and with the high ass cost of living (pardon my French), outrageous costs of mid-range furniture for yee average person, I have no idea how one would do it otherwise!! I get my contemporary furniture wholesale (I’m director of Leibal store, that’s why), and I have to buy one item per quarter to afford it. It’s crazy!

So if you are an independent studio in the USA, start thinking about Acova Miami perhaps… or maybe ICFF!!

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Ok that is my segue into the topic at hand! ICFF.

I am thrilled and excited at the opportunity that presented itself last November (a big thank you to Fernando Mastrangelo, who helped connect the dots).

I was asked to be program curator for Look Book - the section for independent design studios within ICFF - for this upcoming edition, and it’s been an absolute pleasure to be back in the fair game.

The real reason this felt like a good fit (because after 7 years at AD Show, I swore I wouldn’t put myself through this kind of stress again) is the craziness of the design market and what I am seeing around me.

In a nutshell: Covid killed fairs - some completely, and most, if not all, financially. Eyes went straight to Instagram, and collectible furniture, by nature of being unique and visually interesting, got a lot more attention. More design galleries opened, leading to greater success for collector-focused design fairs that mostly exclusively host gallery exhibitors, such as Design Miami, which has expanded to other cities, likely due to demand.

This left behind, in my opinion, an excellent category of furniture designers who aren’t necessarily looking at their practice through the lens of collectibility, but through the lens of collaboration, especially with interior designers. They’re making stunning, craft-based, and artistically driven furniture that deserves more attention.

So it’s been wonderful to work with ICFF to bring together some of these studios, including designers I’ve followed/worked with since my early career days in NYC, and help position them on a platform that, to an outside reader, may read as emerging, but from my perspective is incredibly sophisticated - and also VERY FUN.

I have a few of my featured designers here in Look Book, and I hope you will come join us May 17-19!!

Free tickets at the end of this newsletter.

Clockwise from top left: Lantern and ceramic lamps by Vy Voi, chair made of post-consumer pulp by Samuel Aguirre, art nouveau-inspired vessels by Sivim Ly, vessel with tassels by Karen Gayle Tinney, sculptural wooden chair by Maha Alavi, decker sider tables by Mary Ratcliffe, and Brera Stone lighting collection by Hank Beyer and Alex Sizemore for Leibal.

Magma lamp by Simon Johns, marble coffee tables by Matt Castilleja, yama table lamp by Coil + Drift, rubber mirror by Kate Danessa, rock stool by Thomas Yang Studio, stick light by Mock Studio, desk with lamp by Austen Morris Furniture, Materials Study chair by Kalon Studios.

Legat Sconce by Marx Et Al, blown glass lamps by Anna Dawson, wood lamp by Aaron Getman Pickering, another one by Sivim Ly, outdoor chair by Sun Set, and upholstered vanity chair by Cuff Studio.

More to come! Free tickets below.

News News News 🚨

I wanted to send this little rant out without too many bells and whistles, but there’s a lot of juicy news, here we go:

Personal news!! I’ll be on Business of Home’s Podcast, recording May 11 (not sure when it goes live). I am soooo excited!! I can’t wait to get my chat on with my bestie Dennis Scully! (Besties in my imagination but maybe in real life soon 🥹)

In Smart Ideas news, 3daysofdesign - as we know - Copenhagen’s major design event that continues to expand meaningfully every year (likely by way of Milan), is offering an opportunity for those wanting more personal connection on their visit, and it’s prepaid dinners at very nice venues, with other design world people. This is very smart! If you have 600 - 900 DKK to expense on tiny Danish food, I think it’s a nice idea and clever way for them to get a new revenue stream.

Speaking of podcasts - I really enjoyed Design Discord’s latest ep with Laura Anne Young of The Future Perfect. She’s very funny and candid, I loved it. And Fernando’s a fantastic interviewer.

“NY Now has new owners—and a plan to rebuild” NY Now was one of the first fairs I would scout exhibitors for AD Show, and I loved that cool design section, and the Japanese homewares. I hope they get it going again. Business of Home

“The Venice Biennale jury resigns amid tensions over awards ban, Russian participation” NPR

Instagram’s 2026 fabric of the year (mohair) is being banned across retailers. Home Textiles Today

“Authentic Brands Group Is Bringing Barneys Back” Business of Fashion

Ok that’s it!

Next issue will be around May 12th, along with some BIG news for New York design community.

Here are the free ticket details:

ICFF returns to New York City May 17–19, 2026 during NYCxDESIGN, bringing together the global design community for three days of discovery, learning, and connection.

With this all-access pass, attendees can:
Explore 400+ international design brands and independent designers
Attend 25+ ICFF Talks hosted by industry leaders and innovators
Experience immersive designed spaces across the show floor
Celebrate the best in contemporary design at the ICFF Editor’s Awards (champagne served)

Network with 13,000+ industry professionals throughout the event

Register at the link here and use code TDR100 on the checkout page.

See you there!

Julia and Leo

My last Salone was that random June 2022 edition where I probably got covid and spent the week trapped in a nightmarishly small Airbnb. That, and the astronomical prices of hotels, left me with less of a desire to go, but as all the changes in the industry continue to zoom by us, I was motivated to check out the landscape and see what was happening from this extremely macro-to-micro perspective (and crashing with a friend in a 5-star hotel was a hard yes as well).

It’s magical to see the entire city light up, completely dedicated to the love of design. As a design lover (and I presume you are too) it makes you feel a bit protective to see it all expand into the type of event you might see Bravo reality TV characters traveling to for an episode.

Everyone is looking to get a piece of it, and ironically, those who have been successful in breaking into design are planning to jump ship to fashion to make real money (that’s a blind item for you!).

Every fashion house was involved this year (except Loewe notably wasn’t, the craft prize made an interesting decision to sit this out) and there were more fashion influencers strolling around than ever before.

The recurring topics that kept coming up in conversations and in recaps I’ve seen this week are:

• Craft is making a comeback. (we wrote about this in March)

• My publication nemesis D*z**n wrote about how collectible design has taken over Milan (we wrote about this this back in February, in our newsletter “What Makes a Great Design Press Tour?”).

• Fashion is taking over in a way that feels like a money grab and brand FOMO instead of in support of the industry. We wrote about in our two most widely-read substacks, “The Fashionization of Milan” from May 2025, and Fashion Declares Design as the Next “Consumer Obsession” from Jan 2025.

• Too many influencers (I wrote about this in June 2025 in our article “The Cult of Copenhagen”)

So what makes Milan worth it? Intimacy.

Not the big shows with the huge lines, not Louis Vuitton and Hermes (although they are beautiful), but the exhibitions where you are invited into a designer’s home, or their office, and really see the gorgeous way these incredibly tasteful people live. Even the exhibitions pretending to be residential environments were some of my favorites there.

Small dinners and being introduced to new friends.

Big dinners, something that comes with experience and relationships, where you meet thoughtleaders in the industry.

Here is my recap of my best intimate moments in Milan:

david/nicolas and dinner with StudioDanielK

A visit to the offices of architect and designers david/nicolas, who presented La Boiserie, a showcase of decorative wood paneling developed by the duo. A gorgeous product, in a beautiful setting. A big thank you to Giulia Castelli for the invitation and the warm welcome. Ran into Kelsey Keith on my way out and had a nice little chat.

After checking out a few more openings, I popped into David Michon’s party (and got some merch!!) and caught up with Monica Khemsurov, and Sean Santiago. Admired both their fits.

Later that night with the beautiful two, Daniel Kolodziejczak - of StudioDanielK - and his partner Rado Nicgorski, of Danielle Siggerud Architects. Daniel has a fascinating background designing jewelry for Saint Laurent, before diving into his design practice inspired by jewelry, with works on view at Nilufar. Our fourth dinner attendee was Charlotte Perrier, of Perrier Communications - representing some of the best in the collectible world - and someone I had been meaning to connect with for ages.

We had a fantastic meal at A Santa Lucia, Charlotte and I both had the penne mantecate.

Yves Salomon Editions, Convey Building, and When Apricots Blossom

An “at home” exhibition: Yves Salomon Editions presented a collection in collaboration with Michael Bargo. Takign place as a fictional home within Casa Mascagni, the presentation featuring blankets and upholstery in archival mink and skunk, among rare vintage pieces, including a set of Frank Lloyd Wright dining chairs.

Later that day, I popped into CONVEY BUILDING, a takeover of studios within each room of a building. Organized by Martina Gamboni and Simple Flair, this is the kind of immersive experience we love to see: independent studios taking over a room and making it their own.

This was the busiest day with all the major openings, so there were lots of run ins with design world compadres I havent seen in ages. It seemed like “everyone” was at Jil Sander’s Reference Library opening, like pal Nick Nemechek, and instagram friends, now IRL friends like Joern von Scheipers.

Dinner deserves its own post. When Apricots Blossom was the exhibition to see this Design Week, and an outstanding example of how design can bring culture and craftsmanship into focus while giving independent designers center stage.

The show highlighted the Aral Sea region and Karakalpakstan through a thoughtful dialogue between contemporary design and traditional craft, using objects, textiles, bread-making rituals, and material culture to bring awareness to a region shaped by one of the world’s most devastating environmental disasters.

The show’s communications were masterfully led by Judy Dobias and Adnan Abbasi, two people who know how to frame culture with depth and intelligence. I was honored to be seated at the opening dinner, next to London-based designer Rio Kobayashi and Adrienne Luce, director of the Charles & Ray Eames Foundation. Adrienne and I had an amazing and random connection via my husband’s company, and I will be covering some incredible Eames Foundation news on TDR’s editorial. Judy - what a connector. Thank you.

Kelly Wearstler, Veronica Speck, and Amy Brandhorst

I fell in love with design twice: when I visited the Musée des Arts Décoratifs during an unemployment sojourn in Paris in 2009 and discovered their chair collection, and when I moved to LA in 2010 and discovered Kelly Wearstler. She is everything to me, and she is also very nice.

H&M represents what I don’t personally want to see at Salone, which is why I didn’t include her collab with them on TDR’s calendar – and for all the fashion complainers, this was probably the event covered the most in every single round-up. However, this counts as an intimate moment in Milan because I got to meet my hero.

Up to this point, I haven’t mentioned Veronica Helen Speck, one of the best in hospitality and design comms (IMO) and one of my dearest friends. We jumped from place to place, with little sneaks into shops in between, and her energy always lifts me up.

We traversed the city to see L’appartement by Antoine Billore for L’Artisan Parfumeur, which was hands down my favorite exhibition, in terms of aesthetics. It’s a bit related to what I am doing in my own home, the style I love, but what I loved most about it was that it was for the love of antiques, beautiful furniture, and nothing was “iconic” or Design with a capital D. It was just a beautiful, warm and welcoming interior, that allowed you to imagine yourself living in such a beautiful way.

Later, Veronica and I went to visit the home of Vincenzo de Cotiis, and caught up with the lovely Adele Ferruzzi.

Of course so much more happened but I’ll wrap up this newsletter by featuring the lamps of talented interior designer, dear friend, and certified baddie as the kids say, Amy Brandhorst. Amy was a big part of my salone trip but in a shady way so I’ll tell you that in person 👀 😌

Thank you our lovely readers for taking the time. See you in May for New York Design Week! Then that marks the end of working on weekends 😵‍💫

Take care.

Julia (and hello from Leo - who sat this one out)

In 2016 I was three years into my job working for the Architectural Digest Design Show in NYC (a 15-year-running trade show that ended at the start of covid). I was 29, producing their section for independent design, managing 200 exhibitors annually. It was a big and exciting job.

AD Show was a huge career step, and the baseline for everything I know in the industry.

Working for a fair introduces you to the entire world of design: the makers themselves (whom I was responsible for), big brands and manufacturers, the trade attendees, and the press who covers it.

I was also lucky enough to work with two of the best bosses I’ve ever had (and my only bosses since then!), who gave me the freedom to discover the world of design by allowing me to travel internationally to see what was happening at other fairs and design weeks.

That same year, while scouting exhibitors online, I came across Leibal - an online magazine and store for minimalist design - and reached out to see if the founder, Leo Lei, would be interested in presenting at AD Show.

I met Leo over lunch at Cookshop, down the street from my studio in Chelsea, NYC. He was super funny, cool, and relaxed, and I liked him immediately (everyone does). We became fast friends, and a few months later, I pitched him an idea.

“I want to create a calendar for the design world. I’ve been traveling to all the trade shows, but the cool stuff happens off-site, and I can never find the info in advance, and magazines only cover it in retrospect. I think other people would find this useful.”

Leo, feeling like he owed me one after I’d shuffled him into a free booth at AD Show when an exhibitor didn’t show up, said: “Let’s do it - I know the perfect guy who can build it.”

Over the next few years, we built what would become our calendar and editorial website as we know it. We traveled to almost every trade show in North America and Europe, made connections with PR and independent designers, and the growth began.

Not without its moments, though. In 2017 or 2018, we met with Dezeen’s founder, Marcus Fairs, who wanted to partner and launch TDR within Dezeen. We loved the idea. Talked for months, and then nothing. No response. And then, shortly after, Dezeen Events launched.

We were frustrated. But we also took it as a sign we were onto something if Dezeen saw the same opportunity. And honestly, there’s enough going on in this world of events, but we were more curated and weren’t limited by the need to feed the beast of a media company during a time when ad sales were dwindling.

We kept moving forward.

Then covid hit and events stopped entirely. I kept getting calls from former AD Show exhibitors asking to be connected with PR consultants to get the work they made for the show published, so it would be seen in the world. I said to Leo: “I have a creeping feeling we are going to become a PR agency.”

We quickly began working with some of the best consultants in our business: Anna Caradeuc, Veronica Speck, and Go Kasai, and the agency grew. It was our first real revenue and an exciting period. We kept it going until 2021, when we realized PR wasn’t for us. It was too intense, and the work never ended. We needed to get back to the calendar.

Post-covid arrived with a design landscape that looked quite different.

I always say that working at a trade show makes you good at reading where things are headed. You talk to enough people, and patterns emerge. But for the first time in years I felt like my finger was off the pulse. I suspected many people felt the same way. I needed a break.

In 2022, I moved to London for a master’s in Design History at Sotheby’s Institute. From 2022 to 2023, I passively managed TDR, helped Leo with Leibal’s store, and focused on school. As an aside, school was kind of lame for a few reasons, but it reactivated my writing brain, and I began TDR’s substack thanks to advice from David Michon, which took off.

After graduating, I thought maybe I’d move into the auction world, or work for a museum, but things picked up with TDR in ways I couldn’t ignore.

The post-covid world led to a wave of new design galleries opening, and – as the NYT put it – revenge travel, which meant more and more American trade were trekking to Copenhagen, Paris, Brussels, and Milan.

Trade shows had hit a slump and never truly recovered from covid cancellations, and off-site activations were becoming more important for international brands (funny enough, the opposite is happening now).

More galleries were opening, taking advantage of the huge amount of experimental work coming from independent designers – stuff too weird for traditional showrooms. Events were becoming a much bigger market. Design fairs focused on collectors shifted toward super-contemporary work (aka collectible design) more so than historical, giving these young galleries a place to show.

The market was exploding, helped along by the parallel NFT moment happening in the tech world.

The industry had just grown big enough that everyone was feeling it now.

Now it’s 2026. A decade in, and Leo and I have finally built the version of TDR we always had in our heads.

A beautiful highly functional website where users can upload events, save them, map and route, and add openings to their calendar. An actual tool, not just the same list you see in every editorial round-up. A platform that brings the ecosystem closer together, which was always the point.

For our VIPs, we go further: High-touch itineraries for the big design week destinations, built around who you are, what you’re there for, and who you want to meet.

Ten years is a long time to stay invested in what was essentially a passion project. But the idea kept being right, and the world kept catching up to it.

This post is for you, our readers, to understand our story as we move into 2.0. We want to thank you for growing with us. We hope you enjoy the new website and find it useful! Any feedback is welcome :)

A big hug to friends, and a big thank you to supporters.

Julia and Leo

THE DESIGN RELEASE

A note: TDR calendar has been a free service, but we will slowly start charging for certain events - $10 per event (Dezeen charges $250) - which keeps our website’s lights on. As we learned from this substack, a little bit always adds up, and we thank our paid readers for helping us keep our passion project moving forward.

They’re rarely “bad” (although I’ve heard stories). Schedules can be extremely back-to-back, morning to midnight. Presentations you’re required to see might be pointless for your coverage… your tour guides could be kinda mean and militant… they could forget to feed you, and someone faints… that type of thing.

But even then, the benefits far outweigh any feeling that your time is being wasted. You’re meeting other journalists in your field, networking, making friends, eating delicious food in glamorous restaurants, and typically staying at wonderful hotels. And being flown there and home.

Most of my design week press trips have been great. Leo says his favourites have been Miami and Singapore, mostly because they gave journalists a lot of freedom while still ensuring they saw great things. Stockholm is up there for both of us. I loved Antwerp because it was intimate and relaxed, and I got to know the wonderful coordinators very well.

The best one yet was for Madrid’s Design Festival last week, and I’ll get into the reasons why.

I was invited to discover the inaugural Forma fair, which ran from March 5th to 8th. Marketed as the city’s first collectible design fair, I was initially sceptical. How many more “collectible” fairs can exist in the world? And more importantly, would the works on view actually live up to the title? Would they truly be excellent examples of design-art, worthy of being collected?

Well, it was great. The fair, the city, and the off-site activations.

The conditions for collectible design in Spain are very different from places like Paris, Brussels, or New York. Rather than plugging into an established ecosystem, the organisers are creating one. It’s a risk, but according to them, the timing feels right. Madrid Design Festival now attracts around 300,000 visitors, and the broader Spanish design industry is clearly gaining momentum, with support from major cultural institutions and brands like Cosentino, Amazon, and Loewe.

The first edition functioned very much as a test case. There were around 50 exhibitors, alongside Forma Extramuros - a programme of off-site projects “beyond the walls” of the fair. In total, roughly 200 participants took part, mostly independent designers, with just seven galleries represented.

The curators described the fair through three guiding principles: contemporary craft; art-furniture (where form transcends function); and collectible pieces produced in limited editions or as uniques. Some of the work occasionally drifted into familiar territory, maybe a bit reductive: burnt wood, brutalist gestures, chains, cube-ish chairs, plenty of concrete. But the works that leaned more into the craft and artisanal side of things really stood out beautifully.

For me, one of the most meaningful parts of the trip are typically the people. As mentioned, press tours are usually made up of other journalists, but this group included curators, directors of other fairs, gallerists, and design thinkers, which made the conversations more diverse and created a collaborative environment.

I spent time with people like David DeValle, the Colombian architect/designer and co-founder of Medellín Design Week; Emily Marant, a design consultant and curator; and Fahad Al Obaidly, director of the Design Doha Biennial.

Unsurprisingly, our conversations kept circling back to collectible design itself, and how the term has increasingly become more of a marketing label than a meaningful, definable category, and that the market conversation is changing. B2B relationships are increasingly where the real activity happens

We also kept returning to craft.

It reminded me of when I first started working on the AD Design Show. The first “cool” New York designer I invited declined immediately. She told me, “I don’t want to do a craft fair,” and in my mind immediately gave craft a negative connotation (I was 23 - so very new to all this). I began focusing on pushing the show to feel as contemporary as possible.

But the tides have shifted. Craft - once described to me as Vermont-gift-shop-aesthetic - is now arguably the most interesting space in design.

Forma’s focus on craft, through their excellent off-sites and fair, gave me a preview of where they are heading. Craft is becoming the more desirable side of design, with a focus on material intelligence, process, and the kind of mastery that only comes with time - rather than avant-garde gestures for the sake of novelty.

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In this Issue

News News News 📰

Exhibition of the Month⚡️

Fair of the Month 🇧🇪

What we can learn from Matter & Shape 🪑

News News News

Dudd Haus and The Future Perfect are collaborating on DUDD LITE, a group exhibition of artist-designed nightlights. Submissions are open until the end of March. Jonald Dudd

The Barbican Centre is approved for a £231m renovation. The plans look incredible. BBC

The rise of the destination art fair. The Art Newspaper

A new seminal chair is in reach: BD Barcelona is celebrating the centenary of Antoni Gaudí by reissuing a selection of his furniture designs. Hypebeast

Could this Sotheby’s design auction be the most valuable of all time? Wallpaper

Fair of the Month:

COLLECTIBLE Brussels, one of our favourite shows for discovering avant-garde designs and talent, opens today in Brussels! Wish we were there.

Espace Vanderborght
Rue de l’Ecuyer 50, 1000 Bruxelles, Belgium

On View March 12 - 15

Exhibition of the Month: Lima Charlie

For those in Brussels, be sure to visit Laurids Gallée new solo exhibition presented with one of the most exciting design galleries today (in a stunning space worth seeing), Objects With Narratives.

The exhibition presents a new body of Gallée’s resin light works alongside a series of aluminium wall pieces, forming the studio’s largest light sculpture installation to date.

Opening on March 11 at 6 PM
Place du Grand Sablon 40, 1000 Bruxelles, Belgium

What we can learn from Matter & Shape

Matter & Shape might be the most interesting fair happening right now. In just three editions, the Paris-based event has carved out a position distinct from the gallery-collector model dominating the design calendar.

Below, I break down why Matter & Shape’s B2B structure, brand curation, and exceptional production make it stand out. Speaking with founder and managing director Matthieu Pinet and creative director Dan Thawley, two themes quickly emerged: a structure that expands beyond the collector-driven fair model, and an aesthetic approach that prioritises minimalism over branding.

Read more

Built on years of event research, industry relationships, and on-site experience, we’ve finally launched TDR Itineraries: a high-touch travel guide for design professionals and design-minded travelers.

Itineraries helps you navigate major design weeks with more access - and guided recommendations tailored to you.

If you’re headed to a city-wide fair, and looking for:

• Priority access to openings

• A daily itinerary, tailored to the dates of your trip, including walkable routes, if preferred

• A curated mix of must-see exhibitions and smaller, lesser-known presentations worth discovering

• Recommendations shaped by our editorial perspective and your needs

• Hotel bookings at vetted stays

We will be launching with Milan in April, then Copenhagen for 3daysofdesign in June, and NYC in May. If you’re from out of town and want to make the best of your visit, send us a note.

Email TDR

Also - something we’ve done for years but worth mentioning: if you’re a manufacturer or product designer, we consult on which fairs are best for you and the outcome you need for your business.

And if you are a design world traveller or expert and you’d like to get involved as a guide for a design week you know well, please be in touch.

Leo and I are so excited to officially get TDR 2.0 up and running, starting with Itineraries and a big website refresh: the next phase in design exhibitions, travel, and editorial.

(As we move into this next stage, we want to say a big thank you to the people who have guided us along the way, namely Nils Becker, Chad Phillips, Veronica Speck, Anna Caradeuc, David Michon, Ryan Duffy, Nitika Choraria, Rebecca Goldberg, and of course, our subscribers)

We’ll dive into regular content now!

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In This Issue

News News News 🗞️

Exhibition Focus: Shared Ground 🐴

Collect Fair London - A Recap 🏺

News News News

Statement stands were the norm at art fairs in the 2010s, but “buzzy booths” are no longer in vogue, and that might be due to the overwhelming number of fairs galleries participate in. The Art Newspaper

NOMAD makes its American debut at the Hamptons in 2026. Fairs have come and gone in the Hamptons, but perhaps NOMAD this one has enough hype and credibility for attendees to make the trek to Watermill Center. Nomad Circle

Check out Gwyneth Paltrow’s fashion and furniture for auction. Lots of great things, lots of random things! Juliens Auctions

Logos are back, in a new way. High Snobiety

Karl Lagerfeld’s distinctive stainless-steel home is now available for rent through High Stay. Wallpaper

Bottega Veneta enlists Max Lamb to design chairs for their runway. Hypeform

Exhibition Focus: Shared Ground

The American West has become a recurring design reference: leather, woven textiles, simple forms, and antiques with visible age. The style is familiar, yet the context is less so.

Shared Ground, the latest exhibition from Emerson Bailey in collaboration with Shiprock Santa Fe, enters that conversation. Founded by Susan Weiss, who established Emerson Bailey in 2016 as an evolution of her long-running interior design practice, the gallery has built its reputation on a distinct blend of European antiques and Western living.

The show places 19th-century European furniture alongside Indigenous works from the American Southwest, positioning them as contemporaries shaped by parallel systems of trade, labor, and material knowledge.

As founder Susan Weiss puts it:

“When you place 19th-century European furniture and 19th-century Indigenous objects in conversation as contemporaries, the room changes. It stops being about contrast and starts being about shared values.”

Rather than treating European antiques as historical works, and Indigenous works as decor, the exhibition insists on specificity - clear authorship, provenance, and context. “I want each object to be understood as something made by real hands, from a particular place, for a particular purpose,” Weiss explains. “The visual impact matters, but it cannot be the whole story.”

The horse becomes a connective structure across the exhibition - not symbolically for effect, but materially. In the 19th century, it shaped labor, mobility, and status across cultures. Follow that thread through saddle blankets, silver headstalls, and folk armchairs, and the divide between luxury and utility starts to dissolve. As Weiss notes, “Utility is not the opposite of luxury. It is often the source of it.”

Set against Bozeman’s evolving collector culture, the exhibition feels very much of its place. Weiss describes the local market as “thoughtful and increasingly sophisticated, but grounded,” with buyers who live with their pieces rather than treating them as display. “People want to understand what something is, where it came from, how it was made, and why it matters,” she says.

Read our full interview with Susan here.

Shared Ground is on view through May 20, 2026

Collect London - A Recap

As we mention every month, the fair landscape continues to expand - particularly within the collectible design / functional art categories. Alongside that growth is a renewed emphasis on craft, often operating in similar territory but with deeper ties to vernacular traditions.

To better understand where this movement is heading, our newest contributing writer, Esther Kroes-Weizman, founder of design procurement and consultancy studio WEIZ&CO, reports from London where she visited Collect 2026 at Somerset House. She shares her reflections below, with a longer-form analysis publishing later this week on TDR’s Journal:

I arrived at Collect with my usual agenda: check in with the go-to galleries, discover new talent, and meet the people behind the works. Design fairs are my playground for serious work. The difference this time? I took the tube to Charing Cross instead of flying to Paris or Milan.

A bit of context. Collect 2026, now in its 22nd edition and presented by the Crafts Council at Somerset House, positions itself as the leading international art fair for contemporary, museum-quality craft and design. That level of institutional backing may be exactly what the craft sector needs in order to grow and compete at scale.

At Collect, there was no shortage of beauty or materiality. The conversations with artists and gallerists felt meaningful. But most striking was the global range of craft disciplines and styles on view. From Japanese lacquering techniques and traditional African craft to Polish experimental material practices, the fair felt like a reflection of global exchange. It also underscored why London continues to matter as an international design hub - layered and culturally interconnected.

A few standouts:

My go-to leading design gallery, Mia Karlova Galerie (Amsterdam), delivered as always. Karlova’s curatorial vision is bold - the kind of global positioning the Dutch design industry benefits from. On view were iconic chairs and lights by Vadim Kibardin, alongside Anna Kunst’s Primal Awe Bench, composed of raw honey calcite crystals and hand-woven deadstock linen yarns.

Max Radford Gallery (London) offered a different perspective, presenting furniture made from discarded materials. Tessa Silva’s stool in deadstock cotton and Lewis Kemmenoe’s patchworked pieces incorporating exotic timber offcuts demonstrated how sustainability can be embedded in design rather than applied as an aesthetic or marketing tool.

Max Radford shared his experience showing at Collect for the first time:

“We are very into the new director TF Chan’s vision for the fair. We work in the greyscale between Design, Art, and Craft, and the re-engagement with design at this year’s Collect aligns with our own outlook. We were also keen to engage with a new audience in our own city that already understands a key element of what we do.

As digital platforms and AI dominate visual culture, the value of human-made work and physical presence grows. Design fairs are evolving into strategic ecosystems where design professionals and institutions assess cultural authority, and collectors follow. We are entering a chapter where design operates as a serious asset class, a focal point of differentiation in a market saturated with sameness.

With that in mind, I look forward to what Collect has in store for next year.

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Tomorrow I head to Forma, the new collectible design fair in Madrid, and Leo and I meet in Paris for Matter & Shape, the trade show with compelling fashion and design collaborations. Recap to come in two weeks, along with more news.

Thank you for reading!

Julia and Leo

Leo just got back from a week-long trip to visit ZSONAMACO and the surrounding exhibitions. It was his seventh time visiting Mexico City, one of his favorite destinations. I have a recap below with gorgeous photography, where he explains why it’s become such an important destination for those following the global fair circuit and who it’s really for.

In other news, Leo and I are gearing up for a busy March: I’m heading to Madrid Design Festival (running now until March 8) to see the events and to check out Forma, “a fair positioned between the contemporary and the functional, collectible design not only for practical use but also for aesthetic enjoyment.”

Friend of TDR and founder of the excellent Barcelona gallery Il·lacions, Xavier Franquesa, was the first to tell me about Forma and set me up with their team to visit. He is participating under a new name, Difusions, and aims to draw on the momentum generated by the ARCO fair and other parallel fairs in Madrid in March to attract collectors as well as local visitors.

After that, Leo and I are meeting in my favorite place (to go shopping) - Paris! - for Matter & Shape (March 6-9), a small and great fair that is wonderfully undefinable.

The new-ish fair is semi-avant-garde, with bespoke furniture mixed with cool mass-produced items, unexpected collabs, and a cool fashion element. We look forward to seeing De Troupe, Georg Jensen, Pott x Charlotte Taylor, Marimekko, Ann Demeulemeester — Serax, and NM3).

After that, we head back to London and start work on updating The Design Release - we are overdue for a redesign! - and designing Leibal’s booth at ICFF.

And if possible, we’ll grab a last-minute train to see Collectible in Brussels (March 12-15). I always meet the most interesting people at their dinner, and the fair is always so much fun to see.

Keep reading for Leo’s account of his visit to Mexico City, along with some truly inspiring photos of the beautiful exhibitions he saw there, and then further down, I get into a response to Jaime Derringer’s provocative take on Post-Algorithmic Modernism.

In This Issue

News News News 🗞️

Leo’s Mexico City Recap 🇲🇽

In Response to “Post-Algorithmic Modernism” 🤖

News News News 🗞️

Nilufar and Sabine Marcelis have been announced as exhibitors in Salone del Mobile’s new Salone Raritas section of the trade show. Again, this is interesting because it’s showing that gallery-level design aka collectible design is powered by B2B, not just collectors. Salone del Mobile

Austria is asking visitors to some of its busiest ski resorts to sign NDAs promising not to reveal what they’ve experienced to combat overcrowding. Departing Now

Havenly has acquired The Expert in an all-equity transaction. BoH

Nordic Knots’ new rug collection with Studio Mellone inspired by Brazilian modernism (the installation photos are worth the click). Wallpaper

“Signature Looks From Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s Wardrobe Resurface at Auction” (including that Prada camel skirt / boots combo look I love so much) artnet

Another fee recallibration by Sothebys. The Art Newspaper

Leo’s Mexico City Recap

Over on Leibal’s substack, Leo went into detail of his recent trip to Mexico City and why it was so good. In his words, the vibrant city was more energized than usual, with all the exhibitions happening alongside the fair, now feeling like an essential stop on the annual design calendar.

Says Leo: “Not unlike Copenhagen during its design week, the whole city activates, the weather is perfect, and venues are close enough to walk between on foot.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ 3daysofdesign has never failed to send me home with new inspiration or insight, and ZSONAMACO has felt the same.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Young designers bring their best new work, beautiful spaces are activated in unexpected ways, and the spirit of design and art comes alive, something not always felt in a larger art week or fair.”

The sophistication and experimentation made each exhibition feel truly artistic and unmissable, with notable Mexican gallery Difane presenting Alejandro Ramírez Orozco's architectural photography in context with a collection of works by Manu Bano, Federico Stefanovich, among others, of which Leo said were incredibly captivating pieces.

Masa, a well-known Mexico City design gallery, crossed over to the unfunctional with their collaboration with the Museo de Arte Moderno.

A collaborative exhibition in partnership with ballet and performance art studio Studio 84, taking place at the incredible venue Escuela del Ballet Folklórico Amalia Hernández, was another standout.

Sabine Marcelis, in collaboration with cc-tapis, 6AM, and Úno Gallery, presented work on a stage in an experimental presentation, with an initially bad but progressively improving mariachi band playing the soundtrack.

And finally (at least here) Leo met up with Federico Stepanovich at his new space in Centro, where he showcased a lighting and furniture collection inspired by marine morphology, made of transluscent fiberglass.

Post-Algorithmic Modernism

I love a little design history lesson, and with the speed of trends, AI, and social media, the Mid-2010s already seem deserving of a retrospective.

One of the best things I read this month was “Post-Algorithmic Modernism: Algorithmic Design is already dated, here’s what’s next” by Design Milk founder, and design-meets-tech entrepreneur, Jaime Derringer

She writes that around 2016, more people flooded social media, but the real escalation happened in 2020 during COVID lockdowns - as we all know.

During this time, there were two dominant interior design visual “modes” in our feeds: catalog design: calm, minimal, white and grey, enhanced by colourful, “blobby” accessories, checkerboard prints, and Camaleonda sofas. Homes became the primary space people could control, so the impulse was to create joyful environments, and in my opinion, easily replicated without the need for a professional designer.

As social platforms leaned harder into recommendation algorithms, these aesthetics were no longer just trends - they became standardized taste. This is what Jaime calls Algorithmic Design - and it’s the last era “designed entirely by human beings” before AI began shaping aesthetics at scale.

Now this is why the article clicked for me:

I’m working on designing my home in London, and for the first time, I have felt “writer’s block” with practically every decision. Suddenly orange - a color I literally never cared for - was all over my vision board, and I felt internally pressured to upholster the sofa in mohair lest the space lack the luxurious look required for publication (I went with wool).

I hate to admit: I was thinking more about the photography than the livability (and I believe design culture writer Sean Yashar wrote about this in his brilliant substack The Culture Creative).

Well, we have now reached what Jaime calls “Post-Algorithmic Design,” which she states stems from the culture’s movement towards traditionalism (in all aspects, but that’s a whole other conversation). Cozy traditionalism with rich patterns, strong texture, luxe fabrics.

My thought is that this is also a result of interior design becoming so easily copied during the “catalog phase,” and designers are now leaning into elements that aren’t as easily replicated by laymen with a ChatGPT account and a glue gun (see: walnut-paneled walls, sophisticated color schemes that require a professional eye, and the British-style of finishing every visible surface).

In the past year-ish, I also noticed a move away from another COVID-prevalent look: very avant-garde “collectable” design (i.e. un-functional design), and easy-to-spot historical design, in exchange for bespoke, original furniture or lesser-known-by-the-public art deco collectibles. It all tracks.

As design becomes increasingly automated and algorithm-driven, having a distinct brand aesthetic will become harder and more important. In response, as Jaime writes, designers may begin to shift how they use social media - gatekeeping real projects more carefully, sharing more process and fewer finished reveals, and being more strategic about visibility overall.

This recalibration feels inevitable in a moment when so many people are already exhausted by content, overwhelmed by feeds engineered for endless consumption. Add to that the epidemic of mid interior designers reposting the work of more talented peers, and the incentive to protect originality becomes even stronger.

I had a musician friend tell me that he won’t listen to music when recording a new album as to avoid being influenced. In this era of algorithmic design, it might not be the worst advice for designers either.

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Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed.

I’m going to start ramping back to two newsletters per month. I needed a few months to catch my breath!

Until next time…

Julia (and hello from Leo and Zack)

I hope you’re well. I’m not ok because every single email I’ve received in 2026 has had the word “quiet” and “shift” in it. I am sad that ChatGPT is quietly sabotaging you.

I kid! I’m doing great because I’m excited about everything happening as outlined in this month’s newsletter. Including some juicy news about Design Miami and Salone Del Mobile, below.

Further down, we had a quick chat with the team behind ZSONAMACO, the Mexico City fair that has transformed how we view the city and its contemporary art and design culture. Everyone who goes becomes obsessed with Mexico City, and nearly every design journalist I know is heading there this week. During our chat, founder Zélika García explained their focus on the local and why they refuse to expand for expansion's sake.

We also spoke with Friend of TDR, Judy Dobias, about New Delhi, a city long overlooked for its craftsmanship but now in the midst of a real moment, with the upcoming India Art Fair and the impressive project she’s leading there.

And finally: we have a fantastic interview with Daniella Ohad, design historian, educator, and longtime advocate for design literacy. Daniella began teaching Collecting Design: History, Collections, Highlights with Phillips in 2014, and on February 18th, she renews the 8-session online course with an excellent lineup of academics and experts (you can still register here).

In our exclusive interview below, she dives into the importance of reading objects, how taste is evolving, which areas of design are currently undervalued, why re-issues are a big no-no for collectors, and - of course! - the misuse and overuse of the term “collectible design.”

Daniella was incredibly generous, candid, and thoughtful with her responses. I loved reading it!! And I hope you do too!

And on a personal note, I have a few more spaces left in my curated area within Look Book at ICFF, taking place in NYC in May, and it’s shaping up beautifully. Next month, we’ll spotlight some exhibitors and big updates to the show. If you are a North America-based designer looking to showcase lighting or furniture to a very large trade audience, get in touch. Interior designers are furniture’s gatekeepers; remind them you exist. The time is right! Fairs are back and as important as ever.

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In This Issue

News News News 🗞️

ZSONAMACO: From Local Experiment to Cultural Anchor 🇲🇽

New Dehli’s New Energy 🇮🇳

TDR’s Exclusive Interview: Daniella Ohad: Learning to Read Objects 🪑

News News News

Design’s move towards the Middle East, long predicted, is finally happening in a big way.

Salone Del Mobile recently made three big announcements:

An Italy–Saudi Arabia partnership, starting with a mini B2B Italy-focused fair in Riyadh that happened at the end of last November to pave the way for a full-on Salone del Mobile.Milano in Riyadh in 2026. I am not 100% sure if this is for Italian brands only, but gurl, take your furniture to Riyadh or Dubai if you have the cash flow. Just do it.

Their second big announcement is that they are getting into the collectibles game, smartly avoiding that abused phrase, presenting “limited editions of design, unique pieces, antiques and fine craftsmanship” in partnership with Formafantasma, with the goal to “bridge the gap between highly-skilled creative production and the B2B contemporary design market.” Aka to bring more people to the fair. Smart.

And freaking finally, you may have heard, or we may have mentioned, but Salone has entered a three-year partnership with Art Basel Miami Beach and Art Basel Hong Kong to design their Collectors Lounge using only Italian-manufactured furniture.

Who is working overtime over there?! Crazy.

Ok and finally finally, Design Miami announced a multi-year partnership to bring the fair to Dubai. This is actually the show worth going into temporary debt for. I’d suggest looking into a Curio if you are a furniture designer not represented by a gallery. I also saw they dropped any mention of “Basic Space” in their press release 👀

Phew ok, moving on.

ZSONAMACO: From Local Experiment to Cultural Anchor

Earlier in January, Leo and I spoke with the founder of ZSONAMACO, Zélika García, who founded the fair right out of college, just about 22 years ago.

Zélika was studying to be an artist, so her initial interest was in contemporary and modern art, but the show then began expanding to include design, first through a handful of local galleries, then through universities, emerging studios, and institutions that wanted in.

Mexican galleries have been the constant thread, which is part of what gives the fair its distinctly local feel. The design component remains rooted in Mexico and Latin America, with vintage, antiques, and contemporary work all sharing space, and of the founding designers and galleries of the DISEÑO platform have also become very established names in their own right, including CGN and Hector Esrawe.

Initiatives like Emergentes and Forma gave young designers room to grow, sometimes starting with just one square meter, and fashion and jewelry have been added to create a cash-and-carry shoppable experience (with Carla Fernández leading the path).

The fair has become a must-see event, as well as infrastructure for the city. Today, over 60 international museum boards, institutional groups, countless architects and interior designers, circulate alongside collectors. And although their programming continues to expand organically - ZSONAMACO refuses to “get fat” - to grow without meaning and reason.

Perhaps most tellingly, the fair has reshaped how people experience Mexico City itself. A city once approached with hesitation is now a place people return to again and again.

ZSONAMACO
February 4 - 8, 2026
Centro Citibanamex, Mexico City
Tickets

If you’re there, make sure to also visit these exhibitions: Listening Room by Monolith Studio; Inner Stage featuring UNNO Gallery and 6:am; and Unique Design Fair.

New Dehli’s New Energy

February is always a big month for India, thanks to India Art Fair, now hosting its 17th edition. The exhibitor list is especially strong, including Carpenters Workshop Gallery, David Zwirner, Vikram Goyal, and, now, Shakti Residency.

I had a conversation with Judy Dobias, a longtime force in design communications, who has been working in and out of India for some time now, advising Shakti Residency, a first-of-its-kind initiative that bridges Indian craftsmanship with global design, by bringing exceptional international independent designers together with master artisans through a month-long residency.

Participants work with some of India’s most respected ateliers, guided by a serious advisory board spanning design, craft, culture, education, and entrepreneurship. As Judy told me, the magic lies in only working with the best.

With this project, Judy is less involved with the PR side, focusing instead on helping shape the residency by assembling the impressive jury and steering its direction. This month marks a turning point, with Shakti making its debut at India Art Fair and setting the stage for exciting projects later this year.

India Art Fair
February 5 - 8, 2026
NSIC Exhibition Grounds, Okhla, New Delhi
Tickets

If you’re there, see also: Launch of the Aranyani Pavilion by Sunder Nursery
February 4 - 13, 2026

Daniella Ohad: Learning to Read Objects

Design historian, educator, and longtime advocate for design literacy, Daniella Ohad has spent the past two decades teaching collectors and curious observers how to look more carefully at objects. On February 18th, she renews her acclaimed course Collecting Design: History, Collections, Highlights, an eight-session series that brings together market experts to examine what truly makes a design object collectible.

In the conversation below, we speak with Daniella about why this course feels especially meaningful now, how she defines “collectible design” in a market saturated with the term (a topic we love to revisit) and what it means to develop an educated eye in an era driven by trends. We also touch on the market vs tastes, rediscoveries, and how institutions, scholarship, and the market shape the objects we value.

TDR: You’ve been teaching Collecting Design: History, Collections, Highlights in various forms for over a decade. What felt important to rethink for this season?

DO: I started teaching ‘Collecting Design: History, Collections, Highlights’ with Phillips in 2014 and taught it continuously until three years ago, as the only program devoted to this territory. I recently moved my virtual program to other themes, but it feels that now it is time to go back to it.

I am a collector and have lived with collectible design since I was 25, before the term was coined. I have grown together with the market and have witnessed closely the evolution of the field and the shaping of design connoisseurship in recent years, as my interest is twofold - as a collector and as a design historian.

The world’s best interior designers work exclusively with collectible design, and today the field of interiors is largely divided into two camps: those who create curated, sophisticated interiors at the forefront of contemporary practice, the kind that appear in shelter magazines for their personal and distinctive concepts, and those who rely on furniture produced industrially and sold through shops.

While the market is becoming increasingly educated, there remain important issues that are not fully illuminated by galleries or auction houses, and therefore remain less known to collectors. These are precisely the areas that need to be revealed, discussed, and critically analyzed.

The market itself is constantly evolving, shaped by shifting tastes, new scholarship, economic changes, discoveries, museum exhibitions, and collectors’ engagement. It is also essential to remember that the design market differs fundamentally from the art market: it is rooted in interior design and architecture, in enhancing how people live. Design is acquired to be lived with - not stored away.

TDR: The design market feels both more visible than ever. How did the current moment shape the way you structured this course?

DO: You are correct. Auction results and design fairs are now widely covered by headlines and social media. Collecting Design addresses themes at the forefront of the design market, with content closely connected to recent events, exhibitions, and auction results. At the same time, we study design history because it is impossible to understand design or evaluate contemporary work without a solid historical foundation. And while the market is highly visible, there are still many grey areas that are rarely discussed and need to be made more transparent and critically illuminated.

Brazilian mid-century furniture is a good example. It is one of the hottest areas in the market today, yet authenticity remains a major issue due to the flood of forgeries, fakes, copies, re-editions, and frequent misrepresentation. Brazilian design first came to the attention of American collectors nearly twenty years ago, when R & Company began bringing vintage pieces from Brazil to New York. At the time, it felt fresh and undiscovered - often described as the last overlooked mid-century movement, following American, French, Italian, and Scandinavian design.

Since then, the market has evolved, been reshaped, and prices have risen, introducing new challenges that must be addressed. Some dealers now offer Brazilian design without sufficient knowledge, while changes in tastes continue to affect value. Whereas Joaquim Tenreiro initially emerged as the star for his elegant, classical designs, attention has more recently shifted to Zenine Caldas, valued for a bold aesthetic and its sustainable approach to wood. Every segment of the market deserves this kind of analytical discussion.

TDR: This season brings together a wide range of topics, from Japanese ceramics to American interwar design. What connects these seemingly different areas under the idea of collectibility?

DO: What connects all of the topics covered in the program is that they stand at the forefront of the world of collecting design today, none of them is outdated. The course is also sensitive to current events. For example, our discussion of Verner Panton coincides with the centenary of his birth on February 16, 1926, with many related events and publications taking place this year. Not everything I include is a blue-chip category; in fact, I prefer to focus on themes that are more accessible to my audience rather than those that feel less approachable, although there is certainly much to say about blue-chip design.

TDR: You talk about learning to “read” objects. What does that mean in practice, and why is it such a crucial skill for collectors today?

DO: “Reading” objects means learning to look at them with a trained, knowledgeable eye. It is the only way to develop a critical eye and, honestly, the only way to fully enjoy design at its highest level by distinguishing between greatness and mediocrity. This skill is what makes someone confident and proficient in design. Like any skill, it has to be learned and practiced, and developing it is a lifelong journey that requires real investment of time and attention.

If you are serious about understanding design, about developing passion and personal taste, even if you do not live with design, you must be able to analyze and interpret objects by looking beyond appearance, understanding context and meaning, and cultivating objective observation. As a collector, the experience of living with design becomes far more substantial, interesting, and real when you can truly “read” objects. You have to look, and look, and look, but you also have to study.

TDR: There’s a lot of conversation right now around what actually counts as collectible design. From your perspective, what truly qualifies an object as collectible? Or do you feel its meaning has expanded?

DO: It is a super important question. The term ‘collectible design’ has been misused and overused, becoming a ‘brand’ name and a tool of sale. But a lot of what I see in the press and elsewhere which is termed ‘collectible design’ is in fact far from this definition. What makes a design object ‘collectible’?

One thing that we have to remember is that objects enter the prestigious pantheon of collectible design for a reason and the reason is that they are historically significant, that they represent vision, originality, the spirit of their time, and they were forefront of design when created. They represent technological advancements, political ideas, lifestyle of their time, and something new and fresh. Objects of the past do not become collectible if they were not among the greatest of their time. Same with contemporary design. The fact that a fair is called itself ‘collectible’ or artists presented their design objects as ‘collectible,’ or that an object is offered at a gallery – all of these cannot turn object ‘collectible.’

TDR: Today, design is often judged by taste, trends, or market value. When you evaluate an object, what factors matter most to you beyond whether you simply like it?

DO: You are correct about the central role of taste and trends in determining market value. However, there is a common misconception about collectible design, and it relates directly to your question. The single most important quality of any collectible object is that it represents the best design of its time. It must be born from an original vision, that of its designer or architect, and embody not only a personal philosophy, but also the spirit of its era.

Design does not become collectible if it is derivative or created outside the values of its time. For this reason, one of the most beautiful aspects of collectible design is its quality, the fact that it represented the highest level of design when it was created. When I advise interior designers or collectors, I always consider budget, but I never compromise on quality. Good design has inherent value, and even if its market value is low at a given moment, it has the potential to grow precisely because of that quality. A design object may fall out of fashion, but it should still be considered collectible if it possesses these traits. Rarity, of course, is also extremely important.

Let me give you an example. The steel furniture pieces by Danish modernist Poul Kjærholm were once highly prized, attracting global collectors and commanding very high prices. Today, they fetch significantly less. Why? First, the taste for pure modernist forms is no longer what it once was. Second, it later emerged that two years after Kjærholm’s death in 1980, his trustees entrusted Fritz Hansen with the production and sale of The Kjærholm Collection - designs originally created between 1951 and 1967. Pieces from the original postwar production will always remain prized, and truly collectible.

TDR: For people starting to collect now, what are the most common misunderstandings you see about historical or cultural significance?

DO: The most common mistake I see, again and again, is collectors or interior designers entering auctions or galleries without the guidance of a professional advisor. There are many factors to consider before acquiring a piece of furniture or lighting, and making a purchase without proper expertise is often a recipe for disaster. While the advice offered by gallery staff is legitimate, it does not necessarily represent the client’s best interests.

This is equally true in the realm of contemporary design. When visiting a solo exhibition by a designer or artist, one needs a trained eye to identify the strongest work - something that cannot be expected from the dealer. I frequently see acquisitions that are simply wrong: pieces that have been improperly restored, lack proper provenance, or are missing original parts, all of which significantly diminish their value. The same principle applies to designers creating contemporary collectible design, who should also be supported by professional advisors throughout the process.

TDR: How should collectors think about re-editions today? Are they a useful point of entry?

DO: Re-editions are a no-no. Under any circumstances. When you buy a re-edition, you do not bring authenticity into your home. Furthermore, the piece will never hold its value; it is no different from buying a piece of furniture in a store, which loses value the moment it leaves. But re-editions have many more faults.

In many cases, re-editions are actually more expensive than the originals, simply because furniture is more costly to produce today. There is also something immoral about re-editions - and I am fully aware of the enormous industry behind them - because they interrupt the natural flow of design evolution. Manufacturers prefer to buy rights from estates rather than hire designers to create new and innovative work. Why? Because it is cheaper and safer. The result is a lack of visionary furniture in the industry.

We also have to remember that the entire re-edition industry is a byproduct of the thriving market for collectible design. It is the popularity of mid-century design - Scandinavian, French, American, Brazilian - that has encouraged companies to reproduce furniture from the past. The final and perhaps most damaging consequence is that re-editions distort public taste. Many people no longer understand what is truly contemporary in design and mistake a mid-century look for something current.

I always say that if you want to buy a new piece of furniture of today, buy an original and not a copy of something done in the past because it is no longer relevant, no longer connected to the spirit of the age as it was when it was first designed.

TDR: You mention the rising interest in the work of newly-discovered stars, notably Judy Kensley McKie, Line Vautrin, and Shiro Kuramata, which weren’t always the market’s focus. What does their rise tell us about how taste evolves?

DO: Judy Kensley McKie is the new star of the collectible design market, particularly for her bronze furniture from the 1980s and 1990s, which is now fetching up to half a million dollars. She is an American designer, and her market is almost entirely based in the US. Although McKie is still alive, her work is considered “vintage” because she is no longer producing. Trained as a painter and sculptor, she began creating her art furniture in the 1970s, producing highly sculptural pieces often shaped as real or imagined animals.

The rediscovery of McKie’s work is a strong indicator of today’s taste, and of the growing desire for furniture that can truly transform a space. Collectors are drawn to pieces that are unique, crafted, and expressive, but also institutionally recognized; McKie’s work, for example, can be found in numerous museum collections. At the same time, we are seeing less furniture rooted strictly in the ethos of the Modern Movement, following Mies van der Rohe’s mantra of “less is more.”

Line Vautrin is not new to the market, but the rising value of her work, particularly her mirrors, crafted in her Marais atelier and sold through her boutique on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris, points in the same direction. Collectors today are looking for objects that are personal, dramatic, and original: pieces that are crafted, expressive, and unmistakably non-derivative.

TDR: What role do auction houses, galleries, and fairs play in shaping - or sometimes confusing - the idea of collectible design

DO: The auction houses, galleries, and the design fairs act today as the tastemakers of the collecting design world. They are the curators.

TDR: Looking five to ten years ahead, do you think the category of collectible design will become more precise or more diffuse?

DO: Collectible design is a relatively new territory and like anything new, it is evolving, changing, and constantly reshaping itself. I can say that it is dynamic and will keep moving.

TDR: What’s one grounding principle you hope students take away from this course?

DO: I would be happy if those taking my programs became more confident in their knowledge and taste, because the knowledge they gain through my programs is the foundation of true confidence. Taste is not something we are born with, but a cultivated skill that you have to work hard to define and perfect over time. It is developed through exposure, critical thinking, and the ability to judge aesthetic quality.

TDR: What still excites you about teaching and collecting design today?

DO: Living with collectible design excites me every day. Seeing my kids living with collectible design because this is how they were brought up fills me with joy. It is an unparalleled design experience to be surrounded with good design and with objects I love. In terms of teaching, I always tailor new contents according to the spirit of the moment. The content is based on my research and my constant presence in the marketplace.

TDR: Are there regions, materials, or typologies you think are currently undervalued or misunderstood?

DO: Absolutely. Japan is currently one of the world’s most important and intriguing centers for the production of cutting-edge crafted contemporary design. Across the country and particularly along its west coast are dozens brilliant artists of all generations, who have turned traditional craft materials– clay, lacquer, bamboo, fiber, wood, metal – into new and innovative, daring, and fearless design expressions. By achieving the highest level of originality and by introducing new perspectives to the crafts, while at the same time referring to and respecting historical precedents, these artists have made an immense contribution to the design culture of the 21st century.

Yet, despite the prominent achievements and presence in Asian collections of some of the world’s best museums, and despite the growing design conversation and showcases that are increasingly global, I’ve puzzled over the limited attention paid by Western collectors, auction houses, and galleries to the extraordinary production of Japanese Kogei (crafts). Why don’t we see Japanese objects in leading design galleries? Why are they rarely included in the world’s finest interiors celebrated in European and American shelter magazines? Why have those sensual, beautiful pieces, which have the potential to make an enduring impact on spaces, exclusively remained within the territory of Japanese collections and galleries? We explore more in a session of my course devoted to Japanese contemporary design.

I hope you enjoyed this month’s letter. A big thank you to Daniella for being so generous with her responses. If you have any questions or suggestions, reply to this email. I’d love to hear from you.

Until next time,

Julia (and hi from Leo and Zack)

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I hope it’s been a refreshing start to the new year for all of you. Although I haven't seen the sun for 3 weeks, I am feeling good and energised, and I hope you are too.

January marks the start of the design fair season that will last until July, starting with Maison&Objet’s winter edition aligned with Deco Off, a city-wide tour of fabric showrooms. If you’re heading to Paris, don’t forget to check out one of the best exhibitions in recent memory, Minimal at La Bourse de Commerce. It’s outstanding and closes next week.

Speaking of Maison&Objet, our subject of this newsletter is Ariane van Dievoet, whom I first met over 10 years ago when she was interning for the Brooklyn-based design studio Bower. She’s now back in her home city of Brussels, where she runs a design studio and gallery, both focused on sustainable design.

As an aside - Ariane will be at Maison&Objet presenting in Belgium is Design, which will be a fantastic section. You can find that exhibition in Hall 3 Decor & Design, Stand D84/E83.

But back to the topic at hand:

A through-line of my writing and interest in our wonderful world of design is the tension that runs through the industry. My career took off around the time “collectible design,” as both a term and a practice, began expanding beyond the walls of Design Miami’s twice-yearly shows, roughly coinciding with the launch of Collectible Fair in 2018. I explored this evolution in a curated exhibition at Collectible’s 2021 fair titled Tension!, which looked at the move away from strict functionality, and toward furniture that is experienced more like art: distant, and often less tactile, prompting the familiar question, “can I touch it?”

There’s also ongoing tension around whether “collectible design” is even the right term, as the category continues to expand, especially in its most emerging forms. We’ll revisit this question (among others) next month with the design historian, curator, and advisor Daniella Ohad.

And finally (and there are more, but we don’t have all day), there’s the tension around whether a gallery can help a designer succeed.

A few years ago, many designers told me their ultimate goal was to be represented by a gallery. When it happened, for some, that representation brought credibility, confidence, and institutional recognition. For others, it brought disappointment: their work didn’t sell, and when it did, it earned less than they expected.

That tension becomes especially pronounced when the designer–gallery relationship collapses into a single role. The two positions aren’t as naturally aligned as expected, and often pull in opposite directions.

This philosophical clash shows up repeatedly in how Ariane talks about her work: wanting to show process and research while running a gallery, loving pieces she knows won’t sell, and treating sustainability as an ethos rather than a marketing tool.

Keep reading for our interview with Ariane below. And for our VIP subscribers: a Q&A on what sells, the Brussels design scene, and what makes a designer attractive to represent.

In This Issue

News News News 🗞️

Exhibition of the Month 🤌

Festival of the Month 🍁

TDR Interview: Ariane van Dievoet ♻️

News (and good reads)

Leo and I are proud of our Leibal newsletter! Here we showcase the top four interiors from the past 12 months on the platform, as well as thoughts on what should have been 2025’s color of the year. Leibal Substack

Paris Moves to Protect Its Café and Bistro Heritage with UNESCO Bid. Departing Now

Alessandro Mendini comes to London! A solo show of one of post-war Italy’s brilliant designers is on view at the Estorick Collection. Opening Jan 16. TDR

Sandow acquires Architonic. Ya know… one of the founders helped us conceptualize TDR in the very early days. A big congrats to them. BOH

“Boston Hotel Roasted for Using A.I.-Generated ‘Warhol’ Portraits as Decor.” Good. artnet

White Lotus heads to where I wish I were heading to: St Tropez. Hypebeast

Train travel is now the luxury set’s favorite mode of transportation. Mine too, but that’s because I’ll do anything to avoid an airport. NYT

Exhibition of the Month: From the Upper Valley in the Foothills

On January 7, 2024, the Eaton Fire broke out in the San Gabriel Mountains, burning for twenty-five days, taking nineteen lives, and destroying more than nine thousand structures, making it the second most destructive wildfire in California’s history. At the same time, the Palisades Fire raged to the west, claiming twelve lives and nearly seven thousand structures over thirty-one days, becoming the most destructive wildfire in the history of the City of Los Angeles.

In response to these events and their lasting impact on land and community, Marta, together with co-organizer Vince Skelly and material partner Angel City Lumber, presents a group exhibition that honors loss, resilience, and the regenerative potential of wood. Working with salvaged trees cleared from Altadena, the area most affected by the Eaton Fire, two dozen artists have transformed species native to the region into functional works intended as sites of rest and contemplation. Installed organically throughout Marta’s Silver Lake gallery so visitors move among the pieces as they would through a forest, the exhibition marks the one-year anniversary of the fires as both a collective act of remembrance and a gesture toward renewal.

On view in LA until January 31, 2026
More information here

Festival of the Month: DesignTO

Our friends at DesignTO are back at it, organizing another excellent design festival in Toronto from January 23 to February 1. If you’re in town or local, here’s where we’d make a point to visit.

Jan 22 – Feb 27: Air Assemblies
Jan 23: DesignTO Launch Party (tickets here)
Jan 23 – 24: NORM AT MJÖLK
Jan 24 – 25: Life Drawing Workshop with FOR SCALE (tickets here)
Jan 30 2026: STUDIO SESSION: JAMIE WOLFOND

The full schedule can be found here.

The Tension of Being Both:

Ariane van Dievoet on Designing & Running a Gallery

Ariane van Dievoet began her design practice in 2014, when she launched her studio AVANDI in Brooklyn. She was interested in quality and longevity, an approach that shaped both her material choices and her production decisions. While based in New York, she made a point of prototyping locally and manufacturing in the United States.

Reclaimed materials were present from the beginning, though not as a formalized strategy. Leather scraps from her internship at Bower became the base material for a series of brass objects. Stone offcuts were used for small side tables. Packaging was also treated as part of the design process, with attention paid to reuse and recyclability rather than convenience.

The question of sustainability became more urgent after she relocated to Brussels in 2018. The move marked a reset of her practice and clarified several priorities. She wanted a more direct relationship with fabrication and to spend more time in the workshop. She also no longer wanted to contribute to what she describes as the excessive consumption of raw materials. At the same time, working on interior architecture projects exposed her to the scale of material waste generated on construction sites.

That realization pushed her toward self-prototyping and experimentation with reclaimed materials. She joined a shared workshop in Brussels and began working primarily with materials sourced from construction sites or production waste. Local, ethically sourced wood became part of her material palette as well, allowing her to produce larger furniture pieces when needed. The process was slower and less predictable, but it aligned with how she wanted to work.

Before founding Augusta Gallery, visibility was a persistent challenge. Like many designers running independent studios, Ariane relied heavily on fairs, group exhibitions, and markets to be seen. The system emphasized novelty and frequent new releases. Promoting long-lasting designs while being expected to produce new collections each season felt contradictory.

That question eventually led to the creation of Augusta, a gallery she co-founded with her sister. Rather than focusing exclusively on her own work, Ariane wanted to create a collective exhibition space that could present a range of approaches to high-end sustainable design. Representing multiple designers felt like a way to increase both visibility and impact.

Research was another motivation. The gallery allowed her to stay closely connected to emerging practices, sustainable processes, and new materials. It also created an environment for collaboration, where designers could learn from one another and develop work in conversation rather than isolation.

A gap was also becoming clear. While there was growing interest in zero-waste and eco-conscious products across many sectors, and a growing number of designers working with reclaimed or bio-based materials, but few galleries in Belgium were making sustainability a central focus. Augusta was conceived as a space that would both exhibit and sell high-end sustainable design.

Defining sustainability was essential. From the beginning, Augusta focused on material-driven practices, reclaimed and bio-based materials and designers whose work is shaped by their relationship to those materials. The gallery has remained focused on designers based in Belgium, with plans to expand to Europe more broadly. However, shipping work long distances, Ariane notes, can quickly undermine the intent.

The gallery’s first exhibition included work by six designers, each focused on a limited material palette and its specific properties. Fabric scraps were transformed into large-scale hangings. Sea salt became the basis for furniture, objects, and lighting. Damaged clothing was felted into wall pieces and interior objects. Ariane also presented a sculptural collaboration developed with ironworker Didier Henry, using brass scraps combined with reclaimed stone, wood, or brass bases.

Across these practices, imperfections were not hidden. Material inconsistencies were part of the final outcome.

Running a gallery as a designer has shaped how Ariane approaches representation. She sees the designer’s perspective as a defining part of the gallery’s identity. Her goal is to give designers as much freedom as possible while maintaining a clear artistic direction for each exhibition.

Working directly with collectors has also adjusted her perspective. Seeing how buyers respond to work provides insights that designers often miss when they remain focused solely on production.

The biggest tension between the two roles emerges around process. Ariane would like to show more research and experimentation, but as an independent gallery, Augusta must prioritize work that visitors can imagine using in their own spaces.

That’s where sustainability, taste, and economics start becoming a negotiation.

Read more

We missed our early December newsletter due to a move and a project that briefly took over my life (more on that below), so today’s letter is doing double duty – a look at the next four months of fairs, from Paris in January (and March, and April), Mexico City in February, Brussels in March, and ending with Milan in April - and so much in between. For any planning beyond that, you can always check our calendar (updated weekly), and we’ll keep you posted right here as well.

We asked Brecht Wright Gander - both a designer and journalist - to detail his Art Basel experience, and it’s published below. It’s the kind of dispatch that really only belongs below a paywall, as it’s sharp, unfiltered, and deliciously forthright about what Basel actually feels like from the ground, from someone who has seen all sides of the fair ecosystem.

Some updates on my new gig as Program Curator for Look Book at ICFF: I am so thrilled with the feedback and the new exhibitors joining. We’ve added 30 new booths, and my working concept is Craft Elevated: refined forms, strong material intelligence, and a sense of restraint that feels grown-up and elegant. The younger studios show experimentation; the mid-career designers show refinement. Together, they reveal how processes develop over time.

As mentioned repeatedly on these pages, trade shows are so important to our community. There are the glamorous fairs we all love (or don’t), aimed at collectors and the galleries who court them, but we tend to forget the real gatekeepers of design - collectible or otherwise. It’s interior designers, and they will be at ICFF (and I hope to see you there).

In other other news, Leo and I are working on Leibal Residence Kensington, a showroom to mark Leibal’s official entrance in the EU / UK market. You can follow our substack on that side to check out what’s going on, and I’ll be documenting the process and progress. We will be working closely with our incredible vendors to create a space in the beautiful Kensington area of London, if you’re in town, we’d love you to visit.

In This Issue

News News News

Your 4-Month Fair Guide

Brecht let’s it out

Share

News News News

Salone del Mobile is going big in 2026: First, they announced they will include a limited edition design section called Salone Raritas, in partnership with Formafantasma within their Rho fair (see below in April), and then they announced a three-year partnership with Art Basel Miami Beach and Art Basel Hong Kong to design out their Collectors Lounge, designed by Lissoni & Partners (a big deal imo), presenting “the best of Italian design.” Sounds random, but art fairs are always looking for furniture, so it makes sense.

Congrats to friend of TDR Stephen Markos of Superhouse, whose presentation American Art Furniture: 1980–1990 took home Best Curio at Design Miami, spotlighting a radical decade in American design. The space was designed by Studio AHEAD, in collaboration with Farrow & Ball, and it looked awesome:

Coco Chanel’s Mediterranean villa is being restored by who else? Peter Marino. I admire their loyalty! The Guardian

Online Antiques scams are getting sophisticated. BoH

Your 2026 6-month Guide to Design

January 2026

Maison & Objet Paris
Jan 15 - 19
The large bi-annual trade show’s winter edition is focused on hospitality and luxury brands, plus Deco Off - see below. January (I am told) is a better time for international interior designers to visit.

Paris Déco Off Paris
Jan 14- 17
Paris Déco Off is a city-wide celebration of textiles and wallcoverings, where over 100 showrooms across the Right and Left Banks open their doors to visitors. From Liberty to Pierre Frey, the event offers a chance to explore new collections via a walking tour, or by shuttle, which you can catch from Hotel Bel Ami.

Ceramic Brussels
Jan 21 - 25
An excellent showcase of unique ceramics from established and very collectible artists. Go if you love ceramics in general, and go if you’re a collector.

The Decorative Fair, Winter London
Jan 20 - 25
My favorite antique fair, very low-key on the larger calendar but well-known by interior designers here in London.

FOG Design+Art San Francisco
Jan 21 - 25
45 leading international galleries, including prominent 20th-century and contemporary design dealers

DesignTO Toronto
Jan 23 - Feb 1
Despite the frigid winter, Leo and I always have the best time during DesignTO. As I’ve mentioned before, the team that organises this event is incredibly passionate, and they always throw a great party. The trade show IDS also takes place during this time, but is probably best suited for Canadian trade rather than international visitors.

See also: The Winter Show NYC, Jan 23 - Feb 1

February 2026

Stockholm Design Week and Stockholm Furniture Fair
2027
Update: this is now a biennial fair, the next one is in Feb 2027.

ZⓈONAMACO CDMX
Feb 4 - 8
TDR Director Veronica Speck tells us that Zona Maco has long been one of her favorite fairs because it carries a spirit entirely its own: a rare mix of art, design, architecture, and culture that unfolds with an energy unlike any other global gathering. The week becomes a citywide celebration, with galleries, studios, and even architects opening their private homes and workspaces, offering visitors a glimpse into the intimate heart of Mexico City’s design community.

Nomad St Moritz
Feb 12 - 15
The winter edition of NOMAD returns to St. Moritz for its ninth Swiss chapter – the fair’s flagship destination – celebrating architecture, nature, and design in the Engadin Valley. Leading gallerists, curators, collectors, and purveyors of cutting-edge art and design will gather in the newly reframed Villa Beaulieu.

Frieze Los Angeles
Feb 26 - Mar 1
The sceniest of all fairs, so instead head to Felix Fair. There will likely be many as-of-yet-unannounced design activations, so we’ll keep you updated here.

March 2026

Matter & Shape Paris
March 6 - 9
Really enjoyed this fair last year which defies convention - very curated, potentially leaning more commercial than limited edition, but both are certainly in context. And speaking of context, it takes please during Paris Fashion Week, and is attached to Premiere Classe, a fashion fair I enjoyed walking. Leo and I will be there!

COLLECTIBLE Brussels
March 12 - 15
Always a favorite fair to visit to discover emerging designers working in the context of conceptual art and design.

TEFAF Maastricht
March 14 - 19
A fun adventure from Brussels if you find yourself there. A very elegant fair with everything from old masters to contemporary furniture. Worth going to see the attractive Dutch oyster shuckers on the preview day :)

See also: Art Basel Hong Kong March 27 - 29

April 2026

PAD Paris
April 8 - 12
What’s better than Fashion Week in Paris?! April in Paris! PAD Paris is always worth a visit, in my opinion (although you’ll run into more or less similar presentations at PAD London in October). One of the more elegant fairs.

Salone del Mobile
April 21 - 26
The biggest furniture fair in all the land.

Milan Design Week
Pretty much the last two weeks of April
I don’t make this a page because it doesn’t feel ownable due to how huge it’s gotten. Many smaller fairs - Alcova is top of mind - have yet to announce their 2026 dates, but if you plan on going and you’ve never been, it is the design world mecca. But make sure to plan your stay in advance, as many of us have been priced out (and I recommend going early, before all the corporate furniture industry people with corporate credit cards arrive, and before the fashion brands send influencers). We will have a big Milan newsletter and sub-events on TDR closer to April.

See also: Art Paris April 9 - 12, miart April 17 - 19

OK, that’s it for that, I hope it felt useful and see you most likely in Paris, unless Leo, Veronica and I find a reasonable stay in Milan!

Now up, Brecht Wright Gander gives us his hilarious and unfiltered take on Miami Art Week and advice for Design Miami. The good, the bad, the annoying. Enjoy!

Read more

Happy Thanksgiving for those who celebrate. I’ll be enjoying turkey and stuffing in London, and if there are fellow Americans celebrating here, might I suggest TG dinner at my favorite spot, Ffiona’s in Kensington, it’s the best home cooking in the area.

NOMAD Fair rolled out its first-ever Abu Dhabi edition last week - a major Middle East debut - following quickly on the heels of Dubai Design Week. We heard great feedback about the latter from our American friends who presented, including Ceramicah and Calico Wallpaper. As we reported last year when The Crosses brought us out, there’s so much opportunity in Dubai, and Downtown Design (the design-week anchoring fair) continues to impress.

And as for the former: if anyone knows how to pull out all the stops, it’s NOMAD. They staged the show inside Terminal 1 of Zayed International Airport - a 1970s architectural landmark - with a Bottega Veneta partnership and presentations from some of the best international galleries, including Nilufar (Milan), Gallery FUMI (London), and Galerie Gastou (Paris).

Lots of positive feedback from exhibitors on the ground, including lighting designer Nader Gammas and furniture designer Daniel Kolodziejczak, who told us that excellent connections were made, and the galleries were happy with the results. Looks like this might become a regular venue for Nomad.

Spotlighting Nader’s piece, he created a large-scale light inspired by Bottega’s emblematic intrecciato, which he dissected and re-stacked into a volumetric weave, finished with a ceramic surface treatment with a leather-like effect. We are huge fans of Nader and his work!

In This Issue

The TDR Gift Guide 🎁

A Kuramata book launch in Paris 🌹

Exhibition of the month 🌼

Below the paywall: An AMA with design consultant and founder of Dada Goldberg, Rebecca Goldberg 🚨

The TDR Gift Guide

You can’t have a substack without a gift guide! And plus these are so fun to make… here are some of my favorite finds from the past year and personal wishlist items. Details below…

1. My pal Jeffrey started a mirror company, and this chrome tomagochi-shaped one is so 70s cool.

2. My wishlist isn’t complete without something from Santa Maria Novella. The Tobacco Toscano candle is always at the top of my list. It’s giving cathedral sensuality. A really stupid description, but you probably get what I’m saying.

3. The cap I haven’t stopped wearing, from Slancha Gallery.

4. A tray is always a welcome gift, and this one by Studio Vraco is beautiful.

5. Friend of TDR Akane Komuro is responsible for the reprint of Shiro Kuramata’s monograph. This book is very expensive on the secondary market, so it’s a great opportunity to get your hands on this iconic book. Probably best thing on this list tbh.

6. An elegant glass decanter is an easy and great gift!
   

   

7. I love the work of Brooklyn-based ceramic artist-designer, Christopher Merchant. This lamp comes in a few sizes and colors.

8. Casa Shop’s tourmaline gold link bracelet is perfect.

9. I couldn’t pick just one… this ruby citrine ring is gorg (and a great price).

10. I want this leather necklace via Savette.

11. Probably sold out by now, but the coolest bookstore, the Saint Martin bookshop in Brussels, has an incredible collection of design and art books. This Donald Judd collection of essays is at the top of my wishlist.

12. Was thrilled to discover Kate Dannessa’s collection of rubber mirrors via friend of TDR Dara Benno. You can see them in person at ICFF in May.

13. Anna Monich Galley is low-key the place to find the best ceramics in London… I kid you not. I love this collection of ceramics made in the Ukraine with this iridescent oil-slick finish. It’s absolutely gorgeous in person.

14. So sue me, I love Zara Home, and this Murano-esque water jug is on my wishlist.

15. I have about four of these floating around half empty, and it makes the best gift: Christophe Pouney’s all-natural leather cream. Christophe is a Brooklyn-based furniture restorer and this cream can be used on basically any leather you own. I use on my leather shoes and handbags. I promise, it’s a miracle.

16. A game changer for anyone who sleeps on their face (me) Weighted eye masks changed my sleeping habits. Love this one by nodpod.

17. A blend of two of my favorite things: Japanese food and French anything: Sarbre’s chopsticks in Bistrot Green.

18. Celebrating Tekla’s opening in London! I just checked out their showroom today, and at the top of my personal wishlist is the broderie anglaise bedding collection, but a more reasonable gift would be these wine-colored fuzzy slippers.

Happy holidays!

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*there might be one or two affiliate links on here because we are a business after all, but that would never impact selections.

Kuramata Reissued

Akane Komuro, founder of Apesanteur and a Paris-based art and design consultant originally from Tokyo, has been working to bring Shiro Kuramata’s universe back into wider reach.

The long-out-of-print Deyan Sudjic monograph was trading for over €2,000 on vintage sites, putting Kuramata’s legacy out of reach for young designers, so Akane approached Phaidon about re-publishing a new edition.

Akane secured institutional support, organized the Paris launch with Librairie Galignani and Galerie Gastou, confirmed Deyan’s participation, and arranged a video message from Philippe Starck. The event gathers rare perspectives from the UK, France, and Japan, and the people who actually knew Kuramata, to reintroduce his world.

The launch takes place on 26 November 2025, from 7 PM to 9 PM at Galerie Yves Gastou, Paris. RSVP: contact@apesanteur.eu.

More information here, and get your book copy here.

Exhibition of the Month: Chris Wolston: Profile in Ecstasy

Chris Wolston gets his institutional flowers, and brings them to life, in his major exhibition at Dallas Contemporary. Based between New York and Medellín, Colombia, Wolston is known for a vibrant, conceptually sharp practice that moves fluidly between furniture, lighting, installation, and sculpture. He mixes traditional techniques and materials with realism, creating an aesthetic that is both impressively tactile and playful.
On view until February 1st. More details here.

In-Sites Exclusive

And now, our In-Sites exclusive: An AMA with design consultant and founder of Dada Goldberg, Rebecca Goldberg.

Read more

It’s been a crazier month than most, and I’m so excited to share all that’s happened since our last letter in early October. Plus, an exciting new role that I'll get into below.

A big thank you to our recent In-Sites subscribers: Claire, Matt!, Amy (thank you for the kind note), Tracy!!, Victoria, Llewellyn, Meara, Carina… thank you so much for the support!

On to our letter…

In This Issue

Recapping PAD London and Design Miami Paris 🐑

The collectible conversation continues on Fernando' Mastrangelo’s podcast 🎙️

A big announcement 👀

Exhibitions of the Month 🌳

Fair of the Month ✈️

First: Is Avant-Garde Design Dropping Off?

Last month was a big one in London with Frieze Week, which, for us design people means PAD, followed by a jump over to Paris for Art Week, which means Design Miami. PAD was wonderful and elegant as always. We had some great chats with dealers there and gained insight into current industry trends.

A few contemporary dealers (who preferred to stay off the record) told me they’re now working with clients - or, more accurately, their clients’ interior designers - on a bespoke basis. Editioned pieces aren’t moving the way they used to. To me, that signals that the limited-edition bubble might be deflating, and more conceptual work could be on its way out as the market adjusts to new economic realities.

I also noticed that many dealers came in with exact copies of their booths from last year, or even years before. Maybe dealers are leaning into reliable, proven sales rather than presenting more challenging work.

My most compelling conversation was with Sebastian Holt, director of Modernity Gallery, who told me, “There was far more interest in seating than in purely sculptural works. The Valet chair usually draws attention, but this year it was the sofas and daybeds – pieces people can actually live with. Upholstered, comfortable furniture, and warm leather seem to be what people are leaning toward. Collectable liveability might be the answer right now.”

I hopped over to my most favorite place on earth (call me basic) - Paris - for a bit of design but mostly some vintage hunting (read up on that on my personal substack here). I was excited to check out Design Miami Paris since I’ve missed the first two years, which took place in the gorgeous former home of Karl Lagerfeld, where, instead of booths, galleries set up in spaces throughout the property.

It was beautiful, it was incredibly packed. My partner in crime Veronica Speck noticed many public-figure collectors in the crowd, including Alexandre Arnault, Dasha Zhukova, and Stavros Niarchos.

I found Carpenter’s Workshop Gallery’s booth to be the best in show, and a mix that (to me) indicates what collectors are really looking for (read more here). Lots of Lalanne throughout the fair, especially in Gallery Mitterrand, which also featured works by their granddaughter, jewelry designer Julie Hamisky.

So, lots of pros: stunning space, in-situ design is always nice to see, and makes for much better press photography. But it was extremely crowded on the opening day, which made it hard to take in the work, hard to photograph work, and as some people noted, easy to overlook smaller objects (including some Succession pieces in the show's entryway. Disappointed I missed that.)

If you’re interested in my deeper dive for Treasure House Fair Magazine, you can read my article here.

The Collectible Design Conversation Continues…

Last month I recorded a podcast for Design Discord, with hosts Fernando Mastrangelo (artist-designer) and Alyssa Gerasimoff, founder of Erria.

It was my first podcast, and it was so much fun, the conversation flowed, the questions were thoughtful, and we really got into it all.

We started with my past life at the Architectural Digest Fair (and how those felt to me like the golden years of independent design in NYC) and how that led to creating The Design Release. We discussed Leo and my pivot to PR, advice for designers, and our thoughts on the Collectible Design bubble - which some felt were a bit controversial 👀

The three of us agreed that Collectible Design should be narrative-driven. As Fernando put it in an earlier podcast, it’s work that “uses its medium to express ideas.” Labor-intensive and costly to make? That alone doesn’t make something collectible.

Too many people are using the label Collectible Designer without engaging with what that term is supposed to mean, or earning it through the depth of their work. Dupe companies are starting to use it too, which is never a great sign.

We also got into the category of “bespoke design” or “independent design,” which is contemporary lighting and furniture, often handmade, often studio-based, and, most critically, without a proper stage to show on.

Right now, the fair ecosystem mostly caters to two extremes: design galleries and ultra-luxury, or avant-garde work where functionality is beside the point. The big fairs that remain are wrestling with lagging reputations, while the smaller ones struggle to attract enough foot traffic to justify the spend.

And with that… I’ll jump into my big announcement.

Announcing new role at ICFF

Last June, I texted Leo (TDR co-founder, Leibal founder) and said we should get a booth at ICFF and bring some new designers into the fair.

Apparently, the manifestation powers of a WhatsApp chat are real, as I just wrapped a month-long conversation with Odile Hainaut and Claire Pijoulat, the brand directors (and founders of Wanted, now absorbed into ICFF).

Initially, Claire and Odile had recruited Fernando Mastrangelo to create a new section for the fair. When I joined the conversation, I made my case: we don’t need another section, we need to strengthen the existing.

Around 2013, when I started at AD Show, I attended ICFF for the first time and discovered Lindsay Adelman, Apparatus, among others. Their booths were stunning, the work was exciting and fresh, and I felt like … wow…if I could get this level of design in MADE at AD, I would be so proud. A full circle moment.

I put my heart and soul into MADE and am so excited to help Wanted and Look Book grow into a larger and more dynamic section. I feel so good about it, and I think the timing is right.

I want to help curate a section that focuses on contemporary craft and beautiful handmade furniture. It’s already shaping up to be a very chic roster of exhibitors, and proud to say Leibal will be participating with a curated booth of minimalist design.

I am so excited to bring more of that discovery and excitement back to the fair, to what has always been the anchor of NYC Design Week (or NYCxDesign if you’re paid by Sandow).

If you’re interested - reply or send me an email!

(Also: Fernando ended up stepping away for another project, but I owe him a very big thank you for looping me in, and a big thank you to Claire and Odile for their trust.)

Exhibitions of the Month

There are many great exhibitions happening this month all over the world. Haas Brothers at Cranbrook, Elizabeth Browning Jackson at Superhouse, Irene Cattaneo at Galerie Gastou - oh, and don’t miss out on Minimal at La Bourse de Commerce if you find yourself in Paris.

This month’s featured exhibitions are:

Alice Gavalet: Pattern Play introduces American audiences to the French ceramicist’s work, featuring sculptural pieces in playful tartan patterns.

Twenty First: 76 Franklin Street, New York, NY 10013
On view now until January 30, 2026

Just down the street from Twenty First, Joyce Lin: Hypernatural showcases Lin’s mastery of trompe l’oeil, featuring elements like furniture overtaken and replaced by kudzu, an invasive plant native to the Southeastern U.S. Will certainly be a show worth seeing.

R & Company: 82 Franklin St, New York, New York
On view now until January 9, 2026

Fair of the Month

For its landmark Middle East debut, NOMAD will take over Terminal 1 of Zayed International Airport on the 19th of November, launching its global season and marking a new chapter in the fair’s evolution. The Abu Dhabi edition reflects the region’s growing influence on the cultural landscape, where a deep respect for heritage meets bold, forward-looking ambition.

Terminal 1 Zayed International Airport
On view until November 22

Thank you for reading! I hope there weren’t any glaring errors. I’m moving through a horrible flu and was half delirious writing this 😵‍💫

For our mid-month In-Sites issue, we will hop on the gift guide bandwagon as there are too many great product launches not to share, and we have another AMA with a very special guest Rebecca Goldberg Brodsky, genius strategic consultant and co-founder of DADA Goldberg.

We are still taking questions if you have any!

See you then amigos!

Julia (and hello from Leo and Zack!)

A quick intro: The Design Release started in 2017 when my pal Leo Lei (of Leibal) and I (Julia - hello) were working in NYC, traveling internationally to scout new designers for Leo’s store and exhibitors for the Architectural Digest Design Fair, where I was working at the time. We began keeping track of major design fairs and exhibitions across cities and realized that the resource we were building didn’t exist.

So we built it! Along with our third co-founder Zack Kollar (our tech genius), we created TDR as a calendar platform to track design shows and exhibitions around the world. And now … our newsletter:

Since our last newsletter, have you noticed more - or less - “quiets” in ig captions and Substacks? I counted four “quiets” in a well-known writer’s Instagram caption. FOUR! There’s your blind item!

Anyways! We are back in action for our latest IN-SITES newsletter. With PAD and Frieze Week in London this week, and Design Miami and Art Basel in Paris next, there are tons of great exhibitions happening. We have some of our favorites listed below.

Further down, for our paid readers, we have a special AMA where we ask some consultants in our TDR network to answer some of your design-business questions. We had inquiries from interior designers looking to get published, product designers seeking launch advice, and a design consultant wondering how to get their business off the ground. Keep reading for more!

In This Issue

News News News 🚨

Frieze Week Favorites 💂🏼‍♂️🇬🇧

Paris Exhibitions 🥐🇫🇷

TDR AMA 🗣️

News News News

After years of conceptualizing, Kelly Wearstler is finally launching her gallery, Side Hustle. The roster is great and unexpected. Opens October 16th in Beverly Hills.

What to see at the Frieze sculpture garden in Regent’s Park. Wallpaper

“Why Can’t Fashion See What It Does to Women?” NYT

Have you leveled up your wellness travel? Maison You, a new London-based platform, “is Conde Nast Traveller meets Mr & Mrs Smith, but with animal therapy and integrative health specialists.” A new article up on TDR

What To See During Frieze Week

When we started TDR Leo and I wondered if there were enough design events to keep our calendar nice and full. Well yes there is!! It’s unbelievable now much is always happening, and I love how the art fair rotation is bringing so many wonderful and interesting exhibitions. Here are some favorites in London:

PAD London

My favorite fair, and the design anchor during Frieze Week. Elegant, avant-garde, incredible historical design. Something for every design lover.

Oct 14 - 19
Berkeley Square Mayfair, London, UK

Rust Never Sleeps

Carpenters Workshop Gallery presents a new exhibition by Rick Owens Furniture inspired by London’s brutalist architecture. The show features sculptural seating, tables, and beds that celebrate the transformation of metal through time and environment.

Opens Oct 14
Ladbroke Hall 79 Barlby Rd, London W10 6AZ, UK

Two Rooms

Casa Milana, the Milan-based studio founded by Mario Milana and Gabriella Campagna, presents Two Rooms, an immersive installation opening mid-October at LAMB 32 St. George in London. Recreating part of their Milan home, the show transforms the gallery into a dialogue between living and working spaces, inviting visitors to experience the sensory and emotional dimensions of feeling at home.

Opens Oct 14
LAMB Gallery St. George Street, W1S 2EA, London

Gilbert & George: 21ST CENTURY PICTURES

Not TDR, but one I would like to see. A “showcase [of] Gilbert & George’s artistic journey, highlighting new pictures created since the start of the millennium.”

Hayward Gallery at Southbank Centre

(More events added daily to TDR)

What to see during Basel Paris

A ton is happening next week… here’s what I’m most excited to see. And for any avid vintage shoppers, I have a walking guide here for you, too.

DESIGN MIAMI.PARIS

Our Paris anchor. Beautiful contemporary furniture in a classical setting, in the former home of Karl Lagerfeld.

October 21. Tickets here
L’hôtel de Maisons Rue de l’Université, 75007 Paris

CONTRIBUTIONS

The real reason we are going to Paris. CONTRIBUTIONS Festival #2, by Anna Caradeuc (one of TDR’s founding comms directors) and consultant Elise Daunay, is back with a spectacular design biennial.

The show has multiple locations:

Listening Room by Nifemi Marcus-Bello and Rodrigo Amarante
Presented by VERSO in collaboration with La Boîte concept

Union Internationale de la Jeunesse 2-4 Blvd Marguerite de Rochechouart 75018 Paris

Sleeping with Ghosts by Pauline Esparon, Juliette Teste and Michelle Blades

Lucid Interval 94 R. Quincampoix 75003 Paris

The Bells by Emily Thurman and Kevin Morby

Atelier Alterio 57 bis, Blvd Rochechouart 75009 Paris

Una Lunghissima Ombra by Harold Mollet and Andrea Laszlo De Simone

Out of the blue 9 Rue Saint-Maur 75011 Paris

Next to Us by Sylvia Corrette, Luna Paiva, Valerie Name Bolaño, Jeanne Tresvaux du Fraval and Adrian Edeline

La Pièce 24 Rue Camille Desmoulins 75011 Paris

IM ZWISCHEN by CØR Studio

IM ZWISCHEN is a group exhibition bringing together the Parisian gallery CØR Collectible, consultant Harold Mollet, and the London gallery Monument.

Translated as “in-between,” IM ZWISCHEN explores the areas of dialogue between historical and contemporary design, structures and materials, functionality and expression. The selected works invite reflection on how space is shaped by objects that resonate as much emotionally as they do functionally.

Opens Oct 21
CØR studio 28 Rue du Petit Musc 75004 Paris, France

Charlotte Perriand & Saint Laurent

”Coinciding with Art Basel / Design Miami Paris, Galerie Patrick Seguin has been entrusted with the exclusive presentation of a rare collaboration between Saint Laurent, under the artistic direction of Anthony Vaccarello, and the estate of Charlotte Perriand.“

Opens Oct 24
Galerie Patrick Seguin 5 Rue des Taillandiers, 75011 Paris, France

Un Souffle de Vent

”Yves Salomon Éditions presents a new installation in its Parisian showroom, created in collaboration with Dimorestudio. Titled Un Souffle de Vent, this immersive presentation continues the creative dialogue between the two houses, unveiling new pieces from the collection while reintroducing works first shown at the Salone del Mobile in Milan.”

Opens Oct 21
Yves Salomon Éditions Showroom 5, rue Castiglione, 75001 Paris, France

Les Nouveaux Ensembliers

This first edition explores The Embassy of Tomorrow. Designers are invited to reinterpret spaces such as bedrooms, offices, and meeting rooms to reflect values of representation, exchange, and collaboration. The theme calls for projects that balance tradition and modernity, merging functionality, craftsmanship, and sustainability. Ten architects and interior designers were given full creative freedom to express how design embodies cultural dialogue and the enduring excellence of French savoir-faire.

Opens Oct 14
Galerie des Gobelins 42 avenue des Gobelins, 75013 Paris, France

Visit The Design Release’s calendar for more worldwide exhibitions.

And now, for our paid subscribers, a TDR AMA.

From a new reader who is getting into the design consulting game:

Q: I would love to hear from your experience: what are the most valuable first steps for learning, and for connecting with collectors, dealers, and emerging makers and studios in this world? How can someone learn and find a new role in this industry?

Read more

So we built it! Along with our third co-founder Zack Kollar (our tech genius), we created TDR as a calendar platform to track design shows and exhibitions around the world. And now - our newsletter :)

September was the perfect month: I was so happy to host Leo at our flat during London Design Festival in between his stay at Templeton Garden (book it - it’s amazing, dinner too). We had a great time walking from show to show, especially in Shoreditch, which has become the hub for the festival. If you plan to visit next year, I recommend booking a stay in East London.

A big thank you to our friend Judy Dobias, who extended invitations to her client’s magical dinners and openings during the week. I am still new to the London design world (I moved here two years ago) and it’s a little different from NYC, a little harder to penetrate, so to speak. Therefore, introductions are incredibly appreciated, and we love Judy for adopting us.

I attended a beautiful lunch at Faye Toogood’s studio in Camden to celebrate her collaboration with Noritake. Can report that Faye is as lovely as one could hope, and the collaboration of hand-painted roses on ceramic really spoke to me. As a June baby, roses are my favorite flowers, and I am always drawn to interpretations and paintings of them. Speaking of interpretations, the food by Spring was a dream (add to your lists). Look at this cake!

Later that day, with a rosebush in tow, Leo and I went to dinner to celebrate Lee Broom’s collaboration with our friends at Calico. We sat across from our buddy Wai from Dezeen, Lee’s lovely husband and company CEO Charles Rudgard, and Calico’s head of branding, the hilarious Ahsen Nadeem. A great crew, great stories, and lots of laughs.

Typically (and including the above), most bigger launches taking place in London were already presented in Milan, so it can feel repetitive for someone who goes to all the design weeks. However there were a lot of great launches and exhibitions, especially two galleries:

Grain Pile, by Max Radford Gallery was on view at Clerkenwell Fire Station, showcasing a collection of commissioned work that looked incredible against the Fire Station backdrop.

Slancha, a newer contemporary design gallery dedicated to curating art-furniture, homeware, and sculptural objects by some of the UK’s most exciting independent designers and makers. They very cleverly included merch, and I can never say no to a cap, and I’ve been wearing mine nonstop.

One of my personal favorites (yet not directly related to LDF) was the incredible auction exhibition for the collector of surrealist art and design, Pauline Karpidas, at Sotheby’s. More on that in News, below.

In this issue:

Blind Items 🙄

News News News 🚨

Exhibition of the Month 🪑🧥

Fair of the Month 🎡

Anna Monich’s City Guide 🍽️

Blind Items

After a long flight and jet lag, my grumpiness caught up with me, and I was in the mood to name names… but this might be more fun.

Which NYC art and design fair continues the ill-conceived strategy of adding random celebrities to its Honorary Committee as a strategy to make itself more relevant? It’s cheapening the brand.

Did you think you could avoid the AI slop on substack? Nope, it’s here too, and it really pmo. As more and more design celebrities join the platform, so does the word “quiet” - used up to 6 times per post. The pleonasm is a dead giveaway of GPT use (I suggest everyone avoids that one).

Speaking of AI, which well-known interior designer has been posting generated interiors for years now, insisting they are real projects, even when called out in the comments?

News News News

Following the news of their Miami expansion, Laura Young has been promoted to Managing Director of all The Future Perfect galleries. Congrats Laura! 🥂

Back to the auction: Lot 36, Claude Lalanne’s Unique Structure Végétale bed, sold for £889,000, more than double the estimate of £200,000–300,000.

Limewire acquired Fyre Festival for $245,000. LimeWire COO Marcus Feist acknowledges that they “bought a meme.” Fast Company

Demi Moore stars as the owner of both Gucci and California in Spike Jonze and Halina Reijn‘s short film “The Tiger,” and also features the latest Demna collection. Variety

“WhatsApp billionaire Jan Koum accuses star designer of ‘brazen fraud’ overcharging him millions for fake luxury goods at his mansions and yachts” Daily Mail

My favorite project of the month, via sister publication Leibal.

Exhibition of the Month

With Uniforms on Chairs, the design duo OLDER Studio playfully explores the split identity of their practice: the impersonal seriality of uniforms in fashion versus the intimate, handcrafted uniqueness of their furniture pieces. In a surprising twist, they dress iconic chairs and rare design objects from Milan’s Nilufar collection in uniforms -transforming them into “furniture in uniform.”

Uniforms on Chairs by OLDER Studio curated by Valentina Ciuffi

September 26 to October 24
Monday to Friday 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM / 2:30 PM - 6:00 PM

The Great Design Disaster: Via della Moscova 15, 20121, Milano

Fair of the Month & Anna Monich’s City Guide

PAD London is my and most of my London design friends’ favorite fair of the year, taking place in Mayfair, mid-month, on October 14 - 19. You can see details here.

For friends in town or anyone interested in a fancy little London guide, I enlisted a friend of TDR's (and fellow Substacker), London-based interior designer and gallerist Anna Monich, to create a list of places to visit in October.

Anna is one of my favorite new friends here in London, and an elegant fair such as PAD deserves equally elegant suggestions, and Anna’s taste is sublime. Anna is an international interior designer based in London, where she’s lived for over two decades. She is also a proud supporter of Ukrainian craft and design, and runs a gorgeous gallery in Chelsea (next to Manolo’s flagship 👀) where she presents a new rotation of Ukrainian ceramics, glass (vintage too), art, and design each month.

When she’s not at the gallery, Anna can usually be found wandering the streets of London, the city she calls her greatest muse. She’s partial to spontaneous detours into historic churches and landmarks, followed by a glass of champagne at Claridge’s or The Lanesborough. For dinner, it’s often a table at Noble Rot (Mayfair, ideally), or a return to perennial favorites like The River Café and newcomers like The Park, The Arlington, or Josephine in Chelsea.

Depending on her mood, you might find her at the Royal Opera House, Sadler’s Wells, a West End musical, or an avant-garde production in a fringe theatre.

Design-wise, she shops Pimlico Road, Alfie’s Antique Market, and the Battersea Decorative Fair (also taking place in the next two weeks!) - and draws inspiration from architectural gems across the city. She highly recommends the guided tour at the Houses of Parliament, and visiting converted power stations like Tate Modern and Battersea Power Station.

When it’s time to get out of town, she heads to Arundel, an old market town steeped in charm and free from chain store monotony. She suggests staying just outside at The Pig Hotel, where the food is locally sourced, the wine list is exceptional, and the countryside views aren’t bad either.

Thank you to our readers, and a big thank you to Anna! I hope you enjoyed this one.

In two weeks, we will publish our In-Sites newsletter (for our VIP subscribers), and this special issue will be more of a Q&A advice column (my favorite format). If you have any questions, including marketing, business development, PR, social media, or breaking into galleries, we have someone on our agency team who knows that world inside and out. Hit reply and send us your best question!

Thanks again, and until next time --

Julia (and hello from Leo and Zack)

A quick intro: The Design Release started in 2017 when my pal Leo Lei (of Leibal) and I (Julia - hello) were working in New York, often traveling to scout new designers for Leo’s store and exhibitors for the Architectural Digest Design Fair, where I was working at the time. We kept trying to track big design fairs and exhibitions across cities and realized the resource we needed didn’t exist.

So we built it! Along with our third co-founder Zack Kollar (our tech genius), we created TDR as a calendar platform to track design shows and exhibitions around the world. And now - our newsletter :)

From our experience coming up in the NYC design scene, we know that going to exhibition openings and connecting with the community is how design lovers become design insiders. That’s still our ethos: we want TDR to be your compass for navigating the global design ecosystem. Where to go, what to see. Discover new design, be your own trend reporter, but most importantly, make new friends.

Every month we send out two newsletters: This one, which touches on something big and global happening in the design world, and then a mid-month newsletter for our paid subscribers who support our deeper dives. We explore topics that we would cover if we were consulting (social media in the design world, how to build a business, navigating fairs as an exhibitor, and stuff we deem important that might be a little more “inside baseball”).

Thank you for subscribing and thank you for you’re support! We are so happy you’re here!

Subscribe now

It’s been a big week since our last newsletter exploring the term Collectible Design, which was late and therefore timed with Collectible Fair in NYC. A big congrats to founders Liv and Clelie for bringing an overseas show to NYC and bringing back community where it was needed, and absolutely crushing it. From my POV, everyone was there, and I’m sure that also had a lot to do with their PR, one of the best in the biz, Dada Goldberg.

In my personal life, and why our new subscribers are here, I had my first viral experience on Instagram in ten years, which was all but dead to me as of last week. Back in 2014, a popular account reposted a photo of my apartment in Chelsea, NYC, which gained me 3,000 new followers overnight, a shock at the time. It’s been a slow burn of growth since then, and a topic I revisit often: are we wasting time trying to create businesses on social media, and screaming into the void? (The answer is, mostly, yes.)

I tried many strategies over the years, as recommended by social media expert and TDR pal Julia Lola Wang, and it felt frustrating and pointless. When I created recap reels of fairs or exhibitions I visited, everything was overthought and looked amateur, basically no one cared (lol). I lack the natural hooks and video editing skills of a 14-year-old.

But it happened. My husband and I have been shopping around for a new (rental) flat in London and came across the most magical little house. Natural and low-effort filming, along with a non-scripted voice-over, helped it reach over 200k views in a week. Julia Lola was right. Reels are the only way to grow.

I’m not sure what to do on Instagram with this influx of new followers. I’m not convinced I can suddenly become the type of person who keeps it up regularly, or digs up more adorable little cottages that my husband can barely stand upright in (also - that house was truly one in a million, in terms of interior style and adorableness, and I’ve seen dozens of flats since August).

Then, thanks to a repost of our reel on Saturday night by the Men’s Fashion writer Die, Workwear, and his sharing of my husband's shoutout of this Substack, we have a lot of new readers!! And which, to be honest, means way more to me than Instagram followers. I’m a words person, after all.

So thank you, Derek. And thank you to our new readers. I hope you’ll grow with us.

And: More nice news from the week, one of our favorite international design trade newsletters, Interior Daily, wrote a nice feature about TDR, Leo, and me. TDR is truly a passion project, so the exposure the week has felt incredibly meaningful; a big thank you to them. Check it out here, and sign up for their daily newsletter for global design news.

For those in London or readers who happen to be in town, keep reading for an explainer and breakdown of what to see at the London Design Festival next week.

But first, NEWS.

In this issue:

News News News 🚨

LDF Explainer and Guide 🎡

James Malcolm Green’s Little City Guide 🍽️

NEWS NEWS NEWS

”Should designers worry about Google’s new AI tool?” No, we embrace it! A Fredrticle. BOH

Sothebys Institute (where I got my master’s lol 👀) is under federal monitoring due to questions about financial stability. Also I don’t think enough people know that SI is a licensing thing, and not really as connected to the auction house as one would be led to believe. ARTnews

'Behind Closed Doors, ' co-curated by a friend of TDR, Jillian Choi, showcases the work of 24 Korean designers that blur the boundaries between art and functionality. Wallpaper

A First Look at the Gustaf Westman x IKEA Collection. Domino

Dyson introduces its largest wave of new products to date. Yanko

As I’ve been predicting for a while, design galleries might be due for a contraction after the collectible design category exploded in popularity during COVID, as we dissected last week. Here, Kenny Schachter gets into the art world side of things. I always love his take, and he gets into the art fair ecosystem, too. Read here on artnet.

A follow-up, Leo just sent me this one. “The Storm Hits the Art Market.” artnet

The Future Perfect opens in Miami. TFP

London Design Festival Explainer and Guide

LDF is next week, and it’s a lot to cover if this is your kind of thing. About five years ago, when I attended the festival for the first time (I now live here), I was truly taken by the energy and all the great events happening simultaneously. The event was anchored by a few major trade shows (London Design Fair, Design Junction, Decorex was also happening during this time, and more). Post-covid, all these shows shut down, and Decorex moved to a different month. This left the event feeling somewhat disjointed, lacking a clear anchor point to bring people together.

To explain, LDF is an annual event that is also comprised of ten design districts (neighborhoods in London) hosting their own events within their “district,” which they organize. The smaller districts take it upon themselves to support and create activations in their neighborhoods, find sponsors, and pay for it all. I have been hearing mixed reviews of LDF and their support as a larger entity. There’s my sneaky critique of the month.

OK: 10 design districts. There are only three I will visit: Brompton Design District (South Kensington, Knightsbridge area), presenting 35 events (from my last count); Mayfair Design District, presenting 17 events; and Shoreditch Design District, which feels like the main hub now, presenting over 60 events.

If you include all ten districts, you have about 200 events. Some of them are semi-pointless, for example, showrooms showcasing whatever they debuted in Milan, basically business as usual, which is not what I care about. You want to go to the openings and events and meet cool people, and see new cool things.

Another thing to note is the introduction of a new fair concept, Design London Shoreditch. This new event takes place in three different locations. I’ll get into it below.

15 September

Mayfair Design District stays open late tonight, so this is where we will be. This neighborhood is home to most of the collectible design galleries, so anyone interested in seeing artistic furniture and more high-end design will find what they are looking for here. All their programming can be found here.

Crockery by Max Lamb + 1882 Ltd. at Gallery FUMI
Sketch Art + Design As part of its annual Art + Design exhibition, Sketch - renowned for its eclectic art-filled interiors, innovative cuisine, and extraordinary dining experiences – presents a dynamic installation of AGO Projects with Mestiz.

Also in the neighborhood: Apparatus, Holly Hunt, and Sarah Myerscough Gallery.

16 September

Shoreditch Design Triangle’s events stay open late tonight (click here for their entire programming. Here’s what we’ll be seeing:

Design London Shoreditch and its three events anchor the neighborhood (click for descriptions)

• Design Culture - ​A curated exhibition that explores the impact of culture through design.

• Design at Work by OnOffice - ​An exhibition that focuses on workplace design.

• House of ICON - Where you’ll find design brands occupying rooms within the Grade II listed Shoreditch Town Hall. This one has a lot going on, including:

  • Emerging British designer Abid Javed unveils his new sculptural lighting collection. Abiogenesis: Vol. 1 reimagines forms from cellular life through hand-crafted ceramic table lamps with modular shades.

  • An exhibition by graduates from the MA Design Products programme at the Royal College of Art.

  • The British Council’s exhibition Ancient Futures

  • The Green Carnation, an installation by 2LG Studio

  • An exhibition by the independent design fair Isola

Gallery Exhibitions:

MRG x ERCOL by Max Radford Gallery - Max Radford Gallery collaborates with heritage British furniture maker Ercol on a special exhibition at Clerkenwell Fire Station, as part of Shoreditch Design Triangle. Seven designers reimagine Ercol’s archives through new works, from stools and chairs to cabinets and loungers, all produced in close partnership with the factory.

Unbound: A Salvino Marsura retrospective by Béton Brut - ‘Unbound’ explores ideas of nature uninhibited and the human impulse to restrain it. Organic metal forms – roots, tendrils, stalactites – vie against shackles and chainlink in this curated Marsuran underworld. Spanning six decades of Marsura’s furniture, lighting and sculpture, the show brings unseen works from his Treviso forge into Béton Brut’s interior landscape, celebrating the gallery’s 10th anniversary in Hackney Wick.

17 September

Material Matters returns for its fourth edition from 17-20 September 2025 at a new venue, Space House – a Brutalist icon in central London.

Launched in 2022, the fair brings together over 50 established brands and emerging designers. The event is a must-see destination for architects and designers, showcasing the latest in material intelligence and the people, products and ideas shaping the future of design.

18 September

Brompton Design District night (South Kensington area), so everything stays open until 9. Here’s what Leo and I will see. You can see all their events here.

Curious Habits at the RCA - an exploration of how design practice itself is a process of discovery and transformation.

Exhibitoins at The Lavery at Cromwell Place:

• Rooms - Designers Nata Janberidze and Keti Toloraia draw on Georgian heritage to create their distinctive contemporary design language. Rooms merges ancient, medieval, and late Soviet motifs with Western European influences, reinterpreted through natural materials such as wood, stone, and metal.

• Soft Worlds, Sharp Edges by Studio Charlotte Taylor - Charlotte’s first solo exhibition at Brompton Design District showcases the work of 30 female designers within the frame of a single bedroom.

• Mirroring Dialogue - Fresh from collaborating with Solange Knowles earlier this year, Tione Trice exhibition at The Lavery features works by Myles Igwebuike, Darren Appiagyei, and textiles from artists within the African diaspora.

A Little City Guide

Last week, I interviewed James Malcolm Green, co-founder of Mayfair Design District, about his thoughts on the term Collectible Design. James is a man of good taste, so as part of last week’s interview, I had also asked him for a short and sweet city guide, here you go:

Favorite restaurant in London: Riva in Barnes

Favorite Mayfair restaurant: Somssi the chefs table restaurant at Mandarin Oriental, Mount Street Restaurant (great interior design here).

Favorite pub in Mayfair: The Audley Public House

Best coffee in Mayfair: Kiss the Hippo

Favorite museum or cultural spot: Royal Academy

Thank you for making it to the end!

As we mentioned, for the next In-Sites newsletter due mid-October, we will be taking your questions - any questions - relating to the design world. An advice column issue if you will.

Are you curious about how to get published, how to market yourself, which fairs align with your business goals, how to be your own PR, how to get into international markets?

On our team we have Veronica Speak (PR), Julia Lola Wang (social media), Leo Lei (retail, editorial), me (marketing, fairs), and friends and collaborators in the gallery world, production world, growth marketers, established designers, journalists, collectors, interior designers, and more, so it should be a fun one.

Send us any burning questions and we’ll get it answered!

And next month’s business-as-usual newsletter will focus on PAD in London, and Design Miami in Paris. Looking forward to seeing both.

See you soon!

Julia (and hello from Leo and Zack)