Onna House Expands To SoHo, Honoring Female Designers

In 2021, Lisa Perry saved a Japanese-style mid-century home in East Hampton, Long Island, from being demolished—and decided to fill it exclusively with the work of female designers. The following year, she opened the space to the public, curating her first show at what’s now dubbed Onna House (onna is Japanese for woman). When she later sought to expand to a Manhattan location, the ideal site serendipitously presented itself: the SoHo loft in which she’d launched her womenswear line nearly two decades ago.

“I kept it all these years, but why?” she recalls wondering. “I think it was always meant to be Onna House.” The urban equivalent of the Hamptons showroom, the space is outfitted with pieces by mostly local creators. Nadia Yaron hand chiseled her Peach Magnolia totem of walnut and alabaster at her home studio in upstate New York, A Woven Year is from Brooklyn-based Jessie Mordine Young’s daily weaving series, and the delicate mixed-fiber wall hangings, Continuum I and Continuum II, are by fellow Brooklynite Hiroko Takeda.

8 Designers Bringing A Jolt Of Joy Indoors

From a wooden chair with a carved bow to a gravity-defying credenza, discover how these designers craft furnishings that feel soulful and alive.

Interior Accents With Personality

Emiliana Gonzalez and Jessie Young of Estudio Persona

Product: Abrazo.
standout A chicly relaxed lounge chair—its moniker Spanish for hug—by Los Angeles–based Uruguayan duo Estudio Persona embraces the sitter in creased, tucked, and pleated espresso leather. Through Verso.

Roman Alonso and Steven Johanknecht for Christopher Farr

Product: Big Poppy Winter.
Standout: The Commune Design principals’ fourth collaboration with the heritage rug maker Christopher Farr is a trip, introducing a hand-knotted wool rug with technicolor blooms referencing 1970’s California counterculture.

Jane Yang-D’Haene of D-Haene Studio

Product: Untitled, 2025.
Standout: Ceramicist Jane Yang-D’Haene’s debut solo show in Mumbai, India, included a stoneware vessel modeled on the traditional Korean dal hang-ari (moon jar) but with contemporary flourishes. Through Nilaya Anthology.

Stine Aas for Herman Miller

Product: Land.
Standout: Traditional timber construction like mortise-and-tenon joinery informed Norwegian designer Stine Aas’s clean-of-line trestle-base dining table for Herman Miller, available in umber-stained or natural white oak. stained or natural white oak.

Ferréol Babin for Cassina

Product: Polyshape.
Standout: Its stacked geometries available in four metallic colorways, the dimmable LED table, or floor, lamp by French designer Ferréol Babin for Cassina explores rationality versus playfulness.

Sam Klemick of Studio Sam Klemick

Product: Trumpet.
Standout: Former knitwear designer turned sculptor Sam Klemick exhibits her fashion and woodworking prow­ess with the limited-edition dining chair, its back donning a carved-wood bow.

Arielle Assouline-Lichten of Slash Objects

Product: Coexist.
Standout: A gravity-defying credenza by the architect and Slash founder, who just opened a downtown New York showroom, steadies a brushed-aluminum storage unit on an onyx base.

Charlie Dumais for Nickey Kehoe

Product: Cuvette.
Standout: The cofounder of Connecticut-based Dumais Made hand-built the pendant fixture of clay sourced from Massachusetts for Nickey Kehoe, and textured it with an antique rolling pin used for making spaghetti.

Celebrate Mexican Design At This Manhattan Showroom

Mexican design is on every in-the-know New Yorker’s radar (just this month, in fact, Héctor Esrawe was inducted into our Hall of Fame). But until now, there was no showroom in the city dedicated to our southern neighbors. This new Meatpacking district hotspot called K’ab Juun (its name Mayan for hand and unique) remedies the matter. The brainchild of Goldberg Interiores founder Ilana Goldberg and operations guru Dafna Puszkar, the space offers furniture, lighting, and home accessories from the country’s contemporary makers as well as reissued modernist archival pieces from Clásicos Mexicanos. 

Siembra 03, Oaxaca-based photographer and artist Javier Reyes’s rust-red rug, is a K’ab Juun exclusive, made from wool by Zapotec artisans. Egio and Kakaw resin vessels from Barón y Vicario push the medium to its artistic limits, often varying the opacity level within a single piece. Bandido Studio’s lighting includes clay-and-glass Humo pendant fixtures and the mottled glazed-steel Aura lamp. Raúl de la Cerda and Ónice’s Materia stools and table are crafted of solid local stone. Peca Estudio’s ingenious Refugio in rosa morada hardwood is a sofa on one side, a desk on the reverse—ideal for hotel guest rooms, perhaps? Peca’s director, Caterina Moretti, is also behind Aurum: plinthlike cabinets of sandblasted wood, partially swathed in mystical-looking gold leaf that transmits the delicate whorls of the grain beneath.

York University In Toronto Expands With A 10-Story New-Build

York University, one of Canada’s largest, is a public research institution in Toronto known for its commitment to social justice, diversity, and equity. Late last year, the school expanded its footprint approximately 20 miles northeast with the Markham Campus building, a 10-story new-build by Toronto architecture firm and longtime collaborator Diamond Schmitt. An academic building focused on technology, entrepreneurship, and experiential learning, its 400,000 square feet able to accommodate 4,000 students, it’s phase one of the satellite location intended to serve the region’s rapidly growing population.

“Because it’s such a compact site, we worked hard to create a vertical space that still feels collegial and communal,” principal Donald Schmitt says. And innovative, which is evident upon encountering the exterior, wrapped in bronzed aluminum panels that reflect sunlight throughout the day. Curved glazing and organically shaped skylights bring that sunshine inside, where a diverse cluster of programs—lecture halls, labs, and lounges for classes ranging from engineering and financial technologies to sports management—is organized around a curvilinear spine that weaves seating and visual connection throughout the first five floors. At ground level, a soaring atrium is the building’s social heart, where a sculptural stair in Jura Grey limestone and interlaced commons form what Schmitt describes as a “vertical quadrangle,” a stacked, light-filled reinterpretation of a traditional campus quad.

Tour The York University Markham Campus Building

Sustainability and inclusivity are evident throughout. Quarter-cut white oak details soften the envelope of polished concrete, epoxy terrazzo, and glass. Felt ceiling panels and recycled-content carpet tile in gray and York red—go Lions!—help with acoustics. Desks are height-adjustable, tiered lecture halls have ramp access, and signage is Braille. Outside, the three-level campus green is a serendipitous solution to poor soil conditions. Diamond Schmitt transformed the grounds into terraced spaces—including an Indigenous talking circle—connected by gently sloping pathways.

The tower, where departments are mixed throughout to encourage interdisciplinary interaction, balances specificity with flexibility. Levels nine and 10 remain shelled for future growth, while modular classrooms, an experiential education suite, and integrated assistive listening systems support evolving needs, offering students an inspirational academic home shaped by daylight, movement, and sensitivity.

Class Is In Session At This York University Markham Campus Building

FROM FRONT
STEELCASE: TABLES (ATRIUM). ANTAMEX INDUSTRIES: FACADE PANELS, WINDOW MULLIONS (EXTERIOR). PPG INDUSTRIES: PANEL COATING. MAXXIT GROUP: CEILING BAFFLES (LOUNGE). INTERFACE: CARPET TILE.
THROUGHOUT HERMAN MILLER; TEKNION: CHAIRS. CORIAN; KRION: SOLID SURFACING. CHERRY FOREST VENEERS: VENEER. C.R. LAURENCE CO.: CUSTOM GLAZING SYSTEM. SMITH + ANDERSEN: LIGHTING CONSULTANT, MEP. RJC ENGINEERS: STRUCTURAL ENGINEER. STANTEC: CIVIL ENGINEER. ALLWOOD CARPENTRY MANUFACTURING: MILLWORK. STUART OLSON: GENERAL CONTRACTOR.

Design Reads: A Closer Look At The Influence Of Vitra

But the volume goes beyond furniture, with nearly a quarter of it devoted to the 61-acre Vitra campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany. In 1981, lightning started a fire that burned down the factory along with half the buildings on the complex. The company’s response was to rebuild commissioning the world’s leading architects, Tadao Ando Architect & Associates’s conference center and Zaha Hadid Architects’s fire station among them. Photographer Iwan Baan provides a tour of these structures via a 68-page gallery of images. Of course, the campus features the Vitra Design Museum, which began in 1986 as a showcase of the younger Fehlbaum’s mid-century furniture collection and has since become a leading design institution, partly due to it being housed in a wildly contemporary structure of interconnected curving volumes also by Gehry. A poster sold in the museum store shows a grid of 224 chairs, which only represents a small percentage of Vitra’s offerings.

Shipping Containers Take The High Ground In the Czech Countryside

Repurposed shipping containers and architecture have had a relationship since the 1980’s, the structures often used residentially or in the workplace, and almost aways in a contemporary context. Until recently. On a hilltop in central Czech Republic, home to the 16th-century Litomyšl Castle and other examples of Renaissance architecture, is the Lookout Above Litomyšl, an industrial, spare, crosslike composition of two discarded Cor-Ten shipping containers by Atelier-R.

The project is part of Destinations of Journeys, an initiative by Litomyšl officials to inspire residents to take advantage of area hiking trails. Atelier-R founder Miroslav Pospíšil’s selection of the 45-foot-long containers adhered to budget constraints while also addressing ecology and consumption. “They make people consider the influence of globalization, which simplifies things at the cost of uniqueness,” he says about the two volumes, which maintained their original surface condition, including the logo for the brand of coffee they carried, “and the way goods on which we depend are transported.”

These are unique, however. Pospíšil, colleague Martin Karlík, and their team sliced off a 5-foot section of the horizontally oriented container and left it open to the elements for an expansive, immersive viewpoint. Not wasting anything, that section was then added to the top of the vertical container, making its observation platform, reached by a new steel staircase inside, 50 feet high and its views unobstructed. Then, after each was stabilized in a reinforced-concrete foundation, the tower also grounded by a massive stepped slab, the containers were connected and protected by Mikado, Czech sculptor Jan Dostál’s steel-pole artwork that functions as a lightning conductor.

Crème De La Crème: Must-See Design Moments Of 2025

Massive outdoor installations, pink-infused coworking, bio-based pavilions—those and more are among 2025’s highly original work by artists, architects, and designers.

Check Out These Mesmerizing Designs From The Past Year

For Art D’Égypte’s fifth annual “Forever is Now,” Echoes of the Infinite by StudioPROBA and SolidNature drew from such regional symbols as the Eye of Horus with an interlocking sculpture in marble, onyx, travertine, and quartzite, backdropped by the Pyramids of Giza.

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Resulting from her recent residency at Spot Home Gallery in Naples, Italy, the photographer Kourtney Roy’s Failed Postcards of Napoli, Piazza Mercato, a Baryta inkjet print mounted on aluminum, was among the staged self-portraits in Paris.

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Cast concrete, Finnish oak, and two-toned Dekton surfacing yield a clean, crisp environment at BBA Bnei Brak Active Sports & Leisure Center, a 43,000-square-foot public swim facility in Israel by Studio Shira Lavi BD.

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In addition to being actor Jude Law’s sister, the graphic designer and painter Natasha Law is also known for her high-gloss, pared-down silhouettes of female figures, including, from top left, Reach in Red, Lean in Blue, Tilt in Red, and Redine in Pink, all featured in “Bend Here,” her solo show at Voltz Clarke Gallery in New York.

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For a Laatzen, Germany, outpost of coworking brand Brainhouse247, inviting, unconventionally conceived amenities, like this collaboration area by Ippolito Fleitz Group, where ceiling-hung textile strips tamper acoustics and Claesson Koivisto Rune’s W151 pendant fixture hovers above custom furniture, entice member usage and retention.

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Power Portal, in jacquard-woven polyester, silk, wool, and other fibers, is among 80 works in “Motherlode,” artist Liz Collins’s first U.S. survey, at RISD Museum in Providence, Rhode Island, through January 11.

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At Expo 2025 Osaka in Japan, the Null2 pavilion by NOIZ and Yoichi Ochiai centered on a mirrored-body concept: Steel-framed cubes surfaced in a flexible mirrored membrane powered by blockchain and AI scanned and digitized visitors to create their virtual alter egos.

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The woven elements of the timber-framed Eclosion in Cabin Fever, by Dorottya Kiss and Matthew McArthur, an annual summer-school, design-build event conceived by Hello Wood studio to bring students and architects together to create socially engaged, sustainable projects, nodded to the history of the site, a former textile factory in Česká Kamenice, Czech Republic.

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Agnès Baillon and Éric De Dormael, the sculptor and lighting designer, respectively, teamed up for the eyeglasses-esque Lunettes Marron brooch in resin, oil paint, and gilded brass, presented in Galerie Negropontes’s “Architectural and Design Landscapes” at the Venice Design Biennial, where Baillon’s 22 carat gold–leaf Camée pin also appeared.

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Last spring, the wares of Los Angeles–based jewelry designer Sophie Buhai jumped the pond to Galerie Anne-Sophie Duval in Paris debuting a 20-piece collection, including Sun Sperm Tear Magnifying Glass, in brushed sterling silver, bronze, rock crystal, and blackened sterling silver.

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“Landscapes and Constellations,” at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in New York through April 26, features Constellation III, Constellation II, and Constellation IV, among the screen prints from the late American artist Allan D’Arcangelo’s 1971 series, Constellation I–IV.

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For the 11th annual Winter Stations outdoor exhibition in Toronto, the American designer Jesse Beus’s Parade was among the six winning installations interpreting the competition’s dawn theme by reimagining lifeguard stations on Woodbine Beach as portals to metamorphosis.

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The 35,000-square-foot Blake School Early Learning Center in Hopkins, Minnesota, by HGA is the state’s first all-electric, zero-emission facility of its kind, making it LEED Gold certified and an Interior Design Best of Year Award honoree.

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Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury’s Silver Rain, in fiberglass resin and vinyl, was displayed in “The Impermanent: Four Takes on the Collection,” the inaugural exhibition at the new permanent home of the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw by Thomas Phifer and Partners, the firm’s first European project.

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Currently on view at the Glenstone museum in Potomac, Maryland, is conceptual artist Alex Da Corte’s Rubber Pencil Devil, his 2018 film that explores themes of humor, satire, violence, and tenderness.

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A collaboration between the late Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Balkrishna Vithaldas (B.V.) Doshi and Studio Sangath, cofounded by his granddaughter Khushnu Panthaki Hoof, the Doshi Retreat is a sensory, contemplative addition to the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany, that, formed from weathered low carbon–emission steel, is part architectural pavilion, part art installation and Doshi’s final built work, his first outside India.

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The 4,000-square-foot Hybrid Flax pavilion in Wangen im Allgäu, Germany, by University of Stuttgart Cluster of Excellence Integrative Computational Design and Construction for Architecture has a roof of locally sourced, cross-laminated timber panels reinforced with robot-wound, flax-fiber filament, demonstrating that bio-based materials can be used for permanent, load-bearing structures.

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Cofounded by Joy Herra, the Milanese project space, THE GREAT DESIGN DISASTER, presented “Uniforms on Chairs,” a series of collectible seats provided by Nilufar, including Afra & Tobia Scarpa’s 121 from 1965, dressed in items from Older, a Danish/Italian company specializing in sustainable uniforms that expand the architectural spaces in which they’re worn.

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These 1960’s production diagrams for Totems, a suite of conceptual drawings mapping designer Ettore Sottsass’s sculptural explorations in stacked form, were in “Et Tu, Ettore” at Galerie56 in New York.

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Ghislaine Thesmar and dancers of the Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris, a Bettina Rheims photograph from 1982, is included in “Imagination at Work,” fashion and costume designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac’s retrospective at Les Abattoirs, Musée-Frac Occitanie Toulouse in France through August 23.

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For Arc’teryx’s Jilin City, China, outpost, a ski season–only repair hub by Still Young is housed in a 10-sided, steel-framed tent capped with a waterproof tarpaulin made from upcycled clothing scraps, crowned by a steel skeletal fossil of the archaeopteryx, the Jurassic-era creature that inspired the brand’s name.

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At the eight-floor headquarters of a Los Angeles finance company, two stacked stairways Gensler carved out of the 1965 building’s floor plates are backdropped by a towering expanse of preserved moss by Garden on the Wall and encourage connectivity.

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The rivers in Kenny Nguyen‘s hometown in the Mekong Delta inspired such mixed-media paintings as Eruption Series No. 91, in hand-cut silk and acrylic on canvas, in the Vietnamese artist’s “Confluence” exhibition at the Branch Museum of Design in Richmond, Virginia.

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In reception at the 225,000-square-foot headquarters of finance company Co-operators in Guelph, Canada, designed by HOK, the custom rug’s pattern was derived from an aerial view of the city.

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At Doris C. Freedman Plaza in New York through August 2, the Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri’s site-specific First Sun, in cast aluminum, steel, and iridescent automotive paint, is a 17-foot-tall hybrid human-scarab figure that reimagines the Egyptian sun god Khepri as a contemporary monument to explore nature, gender, and spirituality.

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At Burning Man in Black Rock City, Utah, Ukrainian artist and Expolight founder Mykola Kabluk integrated anodized aluminum and sand with a system of mirrors for Point of Unity, a 20-foot sculpture that connected sky and earth, creating an illusion of infinite space, allowing visitors to see themselves in the context of the universe.

Sabine Marcelis Designs Chromatic Tiles For Blēo

Blēo, the Copenhagen color and surface house, introduces Tiles by Sabine Marcelis, a fresh offering from the New Zealand–raised Dutch designer/artist known for her explorations of light, chroma, and translucency. (You may recall her popular Ikea donut lamp, mesmerizing tinted mirrors, and pastel resin Candy Cubes tables, to name a few.) Here, she reinterprets traditional glass mosaic tile by offering a more modern scale and expression. They come in 13 hues, three sizes (4 inches wide by 4, 8, or 12 long), and two finishes (glossy, frosted matte). Colors like Butter, Bubblegum, Raisin, and Harissa are applied to the backside of the glass, lending depth, while beveled edges catch the light. Produced in a region of Italy with glassmaking traditions dating to the 13th century, the tile is suitable for wall, ceiling, and certain floor applications, and pairs well with Marcelis’s 20-shade Saturated Palette paints, also by Blēo.

Ceramicist Felicia Hwang Unveils An Ethereal Lighting Collection

Florals for winter? Indeed! With Bloom, ceramicist Felicia Hwang explores the emergent moment of the titular organic phenomenon via palette and form. “It mirrors early stages of self-discovery,” she states. “To me, this is where the magic lives.” After traversing Iceland by camper van in 2023, the Hwang Bishop founder conceived matte glazes in elemental colorways like Meadow Moss, Arctic Sky, and Golden Hour that evoke glacial haze, luminous lagoons, and inky lava fields.

A more recent trip to Namibia shaped Bloom’s undulating silhouettes, a translation of the landscape’s craggy mountains and windswept savannas. Shades are slip-cast then bisque fired, glazed, and kiln fired, a process that preserves the subtle ridges and asymmetries. The series spans hardwired pendant fixtures, table lamps, sconces, and chandeliers, the latter in compositions such as vertically cascading Garland and sparsely multipronged Ikebana. They’re handcrafted in Warren, Rhode Island, and available with hewn or unlacquered satin-brass hardware.

Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger Envisions Eras Beyond Colonialism

Just five years after earning his BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts, Cannupa Hanska Luger sold Nature, his 8-foot-tall ceramic figure, to the Denver Art Museum for $30,000. But soon after, the artist, who was born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, began to create sculpture, performance, and video that explore Indigeneity, the environment, and eras beyond colonialism, such as his 2016 Mirror Shield Project for Standing Rock community members who opposed the construction of an oil pipeline nearby, and his ongoing Future Ancestral Technologies that embraces the role of imagination in shaping cultural narratives.

These and more are showcased in “Dripping Earth,” at Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, the 46-year-old’s most expansive museum project to date. Among the more than two dozen works are Luger’s Midéegaadi, life-size regalia named after the Hidatsa word for bison, which ranged the American plains in abundance before settler colonialism rendered them nearly extinct. “For us, the buffalo are an emblem of survival, and these celebrate that—and our—resilience,” Luger says of the ensembles, which he crafts from such materials as found Afghan blankets, used bike helmets, industrial wool felt scraps, and jingle bells. “Luger’s objectives are serious, pursued with deference to the wisdom and ingenuity of his ancestors,” curators Karin Campbell and Annika Johnson add, “but also maintain good humor and a sense of whimsy.”