Dwell 24: 5 Emerging Design Studios Exploring Hard and Soft Edges

This year, we broke our list of the 24 most intriguing emerging designers into five thematic categories: Riffing With History, Hard and Soft Edges, Serious Play, Ornamentation With Intention, and Natural History. To read the introductory essay by market editor River Davies, click here.

Atelier Orúe
Oeiras, Portugal / @orue.atelier

The Argentine designer Eduardo Orúe Barceló blends wood and marble to create furniture with sinewy edges. They’re sprightly despite the heft of his materials. Orúe has been working with wood since he was a teenager, but stone is a newer, harder material for him to manipulate, so his process often begins with settling on a marble first. He then matches the rock against various woods until he finds a pairing he’s excited by. Since Orúe doesn’t dye the woods he works with, the color combinations of the two natural materials guide his selection process. A bookshelf made with a reddish African wood and a white Portuguese stone is sculpted, sanded, and polished by hand at his workshop, with rings of cool marble seamlessly encircling the inner three shelves. "When you see the furniture pieces, I want them to feel like they are alive and expressing something," Orúe says.

—Jinnie Lee

MOT Studio
Mexico City, Mexico / @mot.studio___MOT Studio

Gabriela Delgado and Ana Lucía Santoyo embody the old idea of acting locally while thinking globally. As MOT Studio, the Mexican designers created their first tableware collection to accommodate meals from all the culinary traditions recognized by UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list. "I kept thinking about how we can be the same but different," Santoyo says. "What do we all have in common?" The pair’s monochromatic ceramic tableware has simple shapes accented with bulging rings that would be equally at home on a table in Kyoto or in Mexico City. But Delgado and Santoyo haven’t forgotten where they are from, as they celebrate the talent among the Mexican artisans and workshops fabricating their designs. "We want to appreciate that," Santoyo says, "and understand that it’s bigger than us."

—Jack Balderrama Morley