DESIGN DIARY

The Persian carpet was not a floor covering. It was a portable room — a complete spatial and cosmological world that a culture carried with it, unfolded, inhabited, and rolled away again. Understanding it as furniture misses everything that matters about it. The oldest carpet in existence was found not in Persia but in a frozen burial mound in the Altai Mountains of Siberia, where permafrost had preserved it for more than two thousand years. The Pazyryk carpet, excavated in 1

Ruins, voids, and what remains — on the long tradition of building spaces whose meaning lies not in what they contain, but in what they refuse to. Sometime around 1830, Joseph Michael Gandy produced a watercolor that his employer had commissioned and that must have given even the client pause. It showed the Bank of England — Sir John Soane's great neoclassical complex in the heart of the City of London, a building still under construction at the time and the work to which Soa

Fact File Project Name: Aster Location: No. 208, 150, Yongyuan Road, Jing'an District, Shanghai Project Date: 2025 Interior Design: RooMoo Design Studio Lead Designers: Tao Zhang, Ray Zhang, Marine Bois Design Team: Gino Wang Construction: Shanghai Suji Decoration Engineering Co., Ltd. Lighting Consultant: Shanghai Baizi Lighting Engineering Design Co., Ltd. Manufacturer: Hafele Furniture: Shanghai YiZhu Decorating Engineering Co., Ltd. Client: Shanghai Rise Pie Catering Co.,

Fact File Project: Resting Pavilion, Osaka Expo 2025 Location: Yumeshima, Osaka, Japan Area: 248 m² Architects: MIDW Structure: Jun Yanagimuro Structure Design, Toshiaki Kimura Furniture: Studio arche Year: 2025 Photography: Benjamin Hosking Yumeshima, the artificial island hosting Expo 2025 in Osaka, sits on reclaimed land with inherently weak ground conditions. Any construction on the site required the removal of a volume of soil equivalent to the weight of the proposed bui

Hòa Vang sits at the edge of Da Nang where the city has not quite arrived yet. The plots are wider here, the pace slower, and the feel of the village is still present in the way people move through their days even as new construction steadily fills in the gaps. For a young family building a home in this kind of place, the question is not simply what the house should look like but what kind of relationship it should have with everything around it. Architect Võ Văn Thành and th

The House of Time by Natura Futura—Where River, Craft and Light Become Architecture The city of Babahoyo in Ecuador's Los Ríos province has always lived close to its river. The water shapes the temperature of the air, the rhythm of the seasons, and the logic of how buildings are made and how long they last. Seasonal flooding is a recurring condition that construction in this city has always had to account for, and the heat and humidity that come with a lowland tropical climat

ARAN Cucine presented Virgola at Fuorisalone 2026, previewing the new kitchen design at the brand's flagship store in Porta Nuova, Milan during Milan Design Week 2026, which runs from 20 to 26 April. The project is the result of a collaboration with architect and designer Massimo Iosa Ghini. The Design Concept Virgola is built around the curve as its central structural and ergonomic principle. The name references both the Italian word for comma and the French word for gold, p

The colours you choose for your home do more than fill walls. They set the emotional temperature of every room, influence how spaces feel at different times of day, and reflect something genuine about how you want to live. In 2026, the home decor colour conversation has moved decisively away from the grey and white minimalism that dominated the last decade toward something warmer, more personal, and considerably more interesting. Whether you are planning a full home renovatio

As summer arrives, Anemos has put together a curated selection of designer fans that work as both cooling solutions and interior objects. The edit spans ceiling, pedestal, wall-mounted, and bladeless formats, each engineered for silent performance and energy efficiency while carrying a finish and form that hold their own in a considered interior. Three pieces lead the summer selection. The Uluru Gold is a ceiling fan with a gold body and warm brown blades, powered by a BLDC m

Ease of installation and long-term performance are two demands that often pull against each other in interior hardware. A system that installs quickly tends to compromise somewhere on precision or durability, and a system engineered for flawless long-term operation often demands more from the installer upfront. Häfele's MatrixBox Premium+ Drawer System is designed to address both without trading one off against the other. The most immediate change in the MatrixBox Premium+ is

Duka has introduced a stainless steel-look finish for the multi-S 4000, one of the most established shower enclosures in the brand's range. The finish is characterized by a brushed surface that adds a warm, sophisticated quality to the profiles without altering the series' fundamental design language. The multi-S 4000 has always been built around a clean, well-balanced aesthetic where the details do the work. The ergonomically recessed handle, the magnetic strip integrated in

In Bhubaneswar, architecture studio Archohm has completed The Shuttle, a badminton academy situated near the renowned Kalinga Stadium whose built form is a direct and deliberate visual reference to the sport it houses. The building's deep amber-orange bowl-shaped envelope, which can be seen from a significant distance above the surrounding treeline, draws its formal inspiration from the cork base of a shuttlecock. The reference is not subtle, and it is not meant to be. The pr

Kelly Wearstler has made her first foray into piano design with Timbra, a collaboration with British atelier Edelweiss, a studio that has long produced custom pieces for her interior projects. Handcrafted in Cambridge, England, Timbra is constructed from layered birchwood veneer, its contours and curves drawn from the movement of sound waves. The exterior is sculpted and rimless, developed using a digital CAD model and produced with CNC machinery. Beneath the surface, the pia

knIndustrie's design approach sits at the intersection of material experimentation and table culture, and the latest work by Lara Caffi for the brand makes that position concrete across three distinct objects: Magic Objects, Sparky, and Rubin. Magic Objects is a candlestick crafted in concrete and available in three colors: yellow, taupe, and brown. The form references the silhouette of antique silver candlesticks but translates it into a contemporary material with a minimal

Sattva is a 1,800-square-foot high-rise residence in Mumbai designed by Vidhi Duggad Bhagat of The Blue Wall Studio, where the design brief was shaped entirely by what the apartment looks out onto: sweeping 360-degree views of the city skyline meeting the sea. The decision made early in the project was to build the interiors around that condition rather than in spite of it. Every material choice, every furniture selection and every spatial decision works toward the same end:

That Design Studio, led by principal designer Piyusha Upadhyay, has completed Seré Resort in Vagator, Goa, a 30,000-square-foot hospitality project that marks the studio's first built work. For a debut, the scale and ambition are considerable, and the images make clear that the execution has kept pace with both. Vagator is a specific kind of Goa. Less commercial than Calangute or Baga, more considered in its pace, it attracts a traveller who is looking for something quieter w

Italian furniture brand Bross has spent over four decades building its practice around natural materials, and its current collection is the clearest expression yet of what that commitment produces when it is paired with designers who have a specific and individual relationship to the materials they are working with. The collection brings together marble and stone, wood and cork across dining tables, coffee tables, chairs, armchairs, and modular accessories, each piece develop

Five years after working from home became a permanent fixture for a significant portion of India's workforce, the furniture industry is beginning to treat it that way. Ergonomic office furniture, long considered a corporate procurement decision, is increasingly being bought by individuals setting up serious home workspaces. Humanscale's entry into the Indian home office segment is a signal of where that market is heading. The New York-based brand, whose products are already i

Intent Made is an Indian furniture brand whose work is built around solid wood and the craft traditions that have developed around it, and the Garden in Woods collection, designed by Swetha Vegesana, is the most complete expression yet of the direction the brand has been moving in. The collection consists of center tables and side tables, all made from solid timber and featuring marquetry work on their surfaces that takes considerable time to appreciate, as the more you look,

Salone del Mobile. Milano returns in 2026 as one of the most anticipated events in the global design calendar, drawing designers, brands, architects, and industry professionals from across the world to Milan for a week that consistently sets the direction for where furniture and interior design are heading. The 2026 edition continues that tradition, with previews and launches arriving from some of the most established names in Italian and international design, each using the