A Year In, K'ab Juun Widens Its Reach in Contemporary Mexican Design

In 2025, Mexico City natives Ilana Goldberg and Dafna Puszkar opened a small storefront in the Meatpacking District with a name most New Yorkers couldn’t pronounce: K’ab Juun—Mayan for “hand” and “unique.” The idea was to give Mexican design a place alongside design from Milan and Copenhagen. Goldberg, who has spent a decade running her own interiors atelier, and Puszkar, a former logistics executive, make an unlikely but effective pair, one focused on material and narrative, the other on the discipline of getting things where they need to go. Together, they’ve built a space that sits between an artist’s studio and a salon.

As the gallery marks its first anniversary this fall, it’s adding five new names to its roster. Acoocooro, a design lab founded by Martín Diego Salido-Orcillo, focuses on aesthetic and historical research and objects’ narrative and emotional relation to people and space, composing with stone and palm weave. Amalgame works at the intersection of territory and material culture through research, experimentation, and making, using ceramic and marble. BASA Atelier is rooted in material exploration and craft traditions, balancing irony and concept with pragmatism and an object’s lifespan of use. Comité de Proyectos works closely with local craft workshops to create sculptural, contemporary pieces, working heavily in metal and wood. And Ollin draws on the concept of transformation and change central to ancient Mexica philosophy, working in volcanic stone and leather.

Pieces from these studios will arrive throughout the fall, closing the season in November with Bandido Studio‘s first solo show at K’ab Juun—a beautiful coincidence, given the Puebla-based lighting practice is marking its own tenth anniversary.