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In an exclusive conversation with Shweta for Design Diary International, Celia Sawyer speaks about designing for objects in motion, the discipline behind the glamour, and why true luxury has nothing to do with noise. She left school at fifteen in Bournemouth with almost no qualifications and a certainty that she was not going to spend her life being told what she could not do. She worked as a dental nurse. She tried modelling, briefly and by her own admission unsuccessfully.

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

Something is changing in the wardrobes of India's most discerning dressers. Walk into the right room in Mumbai, Delhi or Bangalore today and you will notice it not by what people are wearing but by what they are not wearing. The monograms are quieter. The logos are smaller. The statements, if they exist at all, are made in the quality of the fabric, the precision of the cut and the knowledge required to recognize what you are looking at. India's luxury fashion consumer is gro

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

Lori Morris wrote this in an email, in response to a question about the long minimalist years, the decades when the design world had collectively decided that restraint was the only intelligent position and richness was something you either apologized for or quietly dressed down, and what is remarkable about the line is not its content but its temperature, because it is completely room temperature, no heat in it, no score to settle, just a person stating something so settled

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

In Goa, UNIIFYY, led by principal designers Ar. Ashish Batra and Kavita A. Batra, has completed a series of 4,000-square-foot villas where the site itself was the first design decision. Before the layout was fixed or the massing studied, the existing trees on the plot were mapped and retained. The architectural plan was adjusted around this mature vegetation rather than the other way around, allowing the built form to sit within the landscape rather than beside it. The exteri

In Primrose Hill, London, New York-based firm Archi-Tectonics has transformed a historic brick townhouse into a contemporary residence for a family of four, doubling the original building's floor area to 210 sq. mtr. within an existing and constrained urban plot. The project addresses a condition common across European cities: how to expand a protected historic structure without betraying the character of its street or its own material history. The street facade reads as two

Portside House La Jolla Portside is a residential project in La Jolla, California, completed in 2025 by architect and interior designer Daniel Joseph Chenin. The original building, a 1950s structure sitting directly on the Pacific coastline, could not be demolished and entirely rebuilt due to restrictions imposed by the California Coastal Commission. The house was instead stripped back to its essential structure and reimagined entirely from within, working within the original

Adam Goodrum's studio in Sydney is where things get reduced. A piece begins as a concept, gets drawn, modelled, prototyped, and cut back until what remains is only what the object actually needs. He is interested, he has said, in objects that express how they are made, and it is a principle that runs through everything that leaves the studio, from the Stitch Chair produced by Cappellini to his work for Thonet and Artifort, furniture that looks simple until you understand it,

A-Class Marble has spent more than five decades sourcing the world's finest natural stone for India's most demanding spaces. Its Director Rajesh Bhandari speaks to Design Diary International on quarries in Africa, the technology remaking stone processing, and why marble, in the end, always wins the argument. A-Class Marble has been importing stone into India for more than fifty years, which means it has been doing this longer than most of the architects and designers who spec

There is a moment most people who care about clothes eventually arrive at. It usually happens while standing in front of a wardrobe full of things and feeling like there is nothing to wear. The problem is almost never quantity. It is almost always quality — or rather, the absence of a philosophy behind what was bought and why. Building a luxury wardrobe is not about spending more. It is about spending with intention. It is the difference between accumulating and curating. Bet

She studied economics at Warwick, spent years reading spreadsheets in a multinational, and then walked into the décor industry and quietly remade it. Neha Jain, co-founder of UDC Homes, speaks to Alisha of Design Diary International on transforming a paint retail business into one of India's most ambitious wall covering brands, and what it takes to design surfaces that outlast the moment they were made in. In 2014, a paint retail company that had spent a decade selling color

South Asia is one of the most sun-intense regions on earth. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal — across the entire subcontinent, UV index levels regularly reach extreme highs, humidity is significant for most of the year, and the combination of heat and pollution creates daily skin stress that most globally marketed sunscreens were never designed to address. Add to this the fact that the majority of international sunscreen formulations were built around lighter ski

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

If you have spent any time in Asian skincare communities, you have come across it. In Korean beauty forums it is called a grail, meaning one of those rare products that people swear changed their skin permanently. In Japanese department stores it outsells products that cost a fraction of its price. In China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan it has had a waitlist at various points in its history. In India, where SK-II officially launched in 2026, the first question most skinca

Michael Kors has opened a new flagship store at Beijing China World, one of the Chinese capital's most prominent retail destinations. The 3,500-square-foot store introduces the brand's latest global retail concept to Asia and debuts the world's first Jet Set Lounge café — a format previously seen in Michael Kors flagships in New York and London but never before in Asia and never before with a café component. The Store The Beijing flagship spans 3,500 square feet and is design