DESIGN

Our Favorite Moments at Design Miami/ 2022

Returning with high-concept presentations by an exciting crop of creative talents, the collectible design showcase readies a hopeful eye to the future with thought-provoking pieces united in their optimistic mood. Below, our editor rounds up ten of the fair’s unmissable moments.

Cristina Grajales Gallery: Leopard Skies by Mark Grattan

After winning the second season of Ellen’s Next Great Designer and departing Vidivixi Studio, the closely watched talent returns with a cohesive collection of familiar pieces and new forms alike in chrome, speaking to his maturation as one of the industry’s most buzzed-about creative forces.


 

USM Modular Furniture and Pin-Up Home: USM NYC by Ben Ganz

The creative director of Pin-Up Magazine debuts the venerable publication’s inaugural home collection, a series of limited-edition USM Modular Furniture storage objects inspired by New York’s urban design typologies in joyous powder-coated steel colors such as Uptown Blue, Soho Yellow, and Downtown Pink.


 

Objective Gallery: Black Dawn Vanity by Nicholas Devlin

The up-and-coming New York furniture designer often experiments with bright colors, but his Black Dawn Vanity is simultaneously a departure and his most personal work yet: a “romantic surrealist dreamscape” intended as a love letter to his mother, capturing the memory of him sitting on the edge of her bed watching her get ready for work.


 

Photography by Joe Kramm

Emma Scully Gallery: Freestanding Mirror by Simone Bodmer-Turner

Long inspired by the organic architecture of Savin Couelle and Valentine Schlegel, the Brooklyn sculptor’s recent forays into furniture design continue with a giant eight-foot-tall mirror adorned with the signature graceful shapes that make her ceramic pieces so compelling.


 

Tuleste Factory: Through and Through

It’s difficult to select one standout piece from the New York collectible design gallery’s standout booth, a radiant study into the color blue’s infinite possibilities that received Design Miami’s coveted “Best Curio” award thanks to a medley of lustrous works by Quincy Ellis, Ian Alistair Cochran, Julia Tonconogy, and Yonathan Moore.


 

Crosby Studios: The Trash Bag Sofa by Harry Nuriev

Nuriev knows how to fashion a viral moment, with his previous Design Miami outings embraced by Balenciaga and Bella Hadid. This year, he elevates a mound of Hefty trash bags into a throne-like sofa formed of foam-stuffed fabric pouches, elucidating the beauty of the mundane.


 

Room57 Gallery: Tropical Goth Candle Holder by Roxanne Jackson

The most memorable candle holder we’ve come across in recent memory, this seven-foot-tall tour de force sees the wryly funny New York sculptor stack her signature amphoras adorned with severed witch parts and a funfetti cake, all crowned with an iridescent cockatoo.


 

Gufram: The Shroom Cactus by A$AP Rocky

The multihyphenate rapper, entrepreneur, and actor’s design studio HOMMEMADE teams with the radical furniture mainstay to craft a utopian forest of fluffy clouds, rolling hills, and Guido Drocco and Franco Mello’s inimitable Cactus taken over by a patch of hand-painted mushrooms.


 

Bottega Veneta: Come Stai? by Gaetano Pesce

Matthieu Blazy tapped the Italian rule-breaking designer to create a spectrum of one-of-a-kind resin-coated chairs for Bottega Veneta’s spring 2023 runway show, which stole Milan Fashion Week. A selection is available for purchase at the fair, which also celebrates a newly published book featuring a behind-the-scenes look at Pesce’s creative process and an incisive interview between him and Hans Ulrich Obrist.


 

Photography by Sean Davidson

Superhouse: Armoire by Sean Gerstley

Working at a larger scale than ever before, the Philadelphia sculptor continues his foray into fashioning whimsical furniture with a six-foot-tall freestanding armoire clad in ceramic tile blocks in jagged shapes. 

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