Dwell 24: 5 Emerging Design Studios Riffing On History

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.

Hammerspace
Beirut, Lebanon / @hammerspace.world

"Research is what’s happening your entire life," Beirut designer Hamza Mekdad says. His Essence of Home vase collection, made in collaboration with Beit Collective, has its roots in his childhood. Mekdad’s family home came with a fake Corinthian capital, which his family used as a meat mincer before his mother turned it into a planter. It’s an instance of what he calls "our tendency as Lebanese people to reinterpret things and reuse them." The collection turns the Corinthian capital into vessels done in nine different materials and styles. Some outline the filigree in bent caning, others in fabric with Palestinian tatreez stitching. A recent canvas design that swells as water is poured into it has become a crowd favorite. "Reinflating life into it as if you’re bringing it back from memory," he says—an apt metaphor for his work overall.

—Jack Balderrama Morley

"We’re not interested in mass-producing any product. We’re interested in spreading stories."

—Lucrezia Papillo, Macheia

Macheia
Lisbon, Portugal / @m_a_c_h_e_i_a

Macheia cofounders Iany Gayo and Lucrezia Papillo may be expats—Gayo is from Mozambique, Papillo from Italy—but their work is in deep conversation with the handcrafting community in Portugal. "The first spark of inspiration for any project is either a material, technique, or place," says Gayo. For their Bulrush collection, the pair linked up with a weaver, Manuel Ferreira. Gayo and Papillo went to the countryside with him regularly, helping him harvest the bulrush plant he would use for the Cadeira chair. The weaver fashioned strands of the dried plant into a shrimplike spiral for the backing, contrasting with the chair’s iron frame. It was a design the weaver was initially unsure about, as the unusual loose bulrush flair at the tip of the chair makes it more fragile. "Sometimes it’s good that we’re not the master ourselves because then we come with questions that push the artisans. It’s always a compromise," says Papillo.

—Jinnie Lee