Here, we ask designers to take a selfie and give us an inside look at their life.
Names: Julia Eshaghpour and Kevin Hollidge
Occupation: Designers and founders of Sunfish
Instagram: @sunfishnyc
Hometown: Brooklyn, New York
Studio Location: New York City
Describe what you make: We are a decorative arts studio focused on made-to-order furniture, custom commissions, and interior projects. Our materials and processes tend to incorporate carpentry, painting, lacquering and fine finishing, ceramics, and, most recently, straw marquetry.
Describe the problem your work solves: Our work aims to bridge the demarcated fields of art, design, and commercial projects that contemporary life has designated. We’re always considering how to encapsulate material richness, expressive details, and meaningful research with everyday utility and longevity. We desire our work to exist at the highest quality and intention and to be enjoyed widely.
The most important thing you’ve designed to date: Our first room divider, which we produced in 2023. It was the first piece that really felt like a successful marriage between our interests in art and design, where a detailed oil painting was met with a distinctive form as a functional object. It opened the world of what’s possible for Sunfish.
Describe the project you are working on now: We are launching Entwined, a new collection that will debut at Assembly Line Annex this month and remain on view through the end of the year. Our most ambitious work to date, it explores straw marquetry, a meticulous hand-applied technique popular during the Art Deco era. Borrowing from the period’s interest in ancient forms and symbolism, recurring motifs like the coiled snake and the Herculean Knot appear as intricate compositions of cut and laid straw. Both have served as symbols of love, devotion, and enduring bonds across different periods and cultures, and reflect our broader interest in how symbols are inherited, reinterpreted, and given new meaning over time. We are also newly married, so these themes have special resonance at the moment.
A new or forthcoming project we should know about: We are currently working on a large painting commission for an expansion of a historic restaurant in New York that we could not be more excited about.
What you absolutely have to have in your studio: 80 – 2000 grit sandpaper, blue shop towels, GOJO orange pumice soap, sharp tools.
What you do when you’re not working: We work a lot, but when we have time off we like to go to the beach, mosey around the neighborhood, and see friends and family.
Sources of creative envy (dead or alive): In no particular order: Jean Dunand, Eileen Grey, Paul Frankl, Charlotte Perriand, Gabriella Crespi, Jean Michel Frank, Andre Groult, Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann.
The distraction you want to eliminate:
Kevin: Trading coins on my phone.
Concrete or marble? Marble
High-Rise Or Townhouse? High-rise
Remember or Forget?
Kevin: Forget
Julia: Remember
Aliens or Ghosts? Ghosts
Dark Or Light? Light
