The Dwell 24: The Emerging Designers You Need to Know Now
This year, our annual roster of the best new talent is full of offbeat objects and unexpected materials. Call it strange furniture for strange times—surrealism is having a moment.
This year, our annual roster of the best new talent is full of offbeat objects and unexpected materials. Call it strange furniture for strange times—surrealism is having a moment.
When we were scouting for people to include in this year’s Dwell 24, our annual celebration of the best emerging designers in the world, we kept encountering strange things: melting Tiffany lamps, rubber furniture, hairy lighting, and other odd objects. Surrealism is having a moment in design, as it has been in art, fashion, and other creative arenas, and now it’s a twisting thread running through the collection of fresh work we’re featuring here.
Some designers channel dreams. Anna Horváth’s rough concrete benches, which nod to de Chirico, could be the setting for a brutalist fantasy or a monolithic nightmare—not surprising, given that she’s currently working beneath crumbling frescoes in an 18th-century building in rural Hungary. (Take a closer look at the cover.) Meanwhile, Copenhagen duo Christian + Jade make a spooky glass wine fountain with an alluring gloss that might make you think twice about partaking—but, you know, everyone else is doing it.
Photo by Kata Geibl
Other designers on this year’s list call back to the 1990s and insist that discarded objects—trash to the uninspired—can possess a radiant quality. They’re not exactly grunge, but the side chairs of L.A. and Melbourne studio BMDO, wrapped in a patchwork of vintage textiles, and the cobbled-together cast-off household items by Ho Chi Minh City’s Ném conjure a spirit of thrift-store alchemy.
Elsewhere in our feature the work feels a bit Freudian. Isabel Rower says one of her ceramic chairs was inspired by toilets, and Isabel Moncada’s version of an antler chandelier sprouts horsehair ponytails from each of its branches—the furry teacup of lighting.
Photo by Braylen Dion
If all of this seems a little esoteric, remember that austere minimalism once looked suspiciously severe, and cohabitating with too many plants might have caused friends to whisper. Even if you’re not ready to jump on the shaggy-lighting trend, I’m confident some aspect of the offbeat will be coming to your living room soon.
More than anything, the designers in this year’s Dwell 24 are attuned to the psychology of materials, particularly in unexpected combinations: what they evoke and what we recall and bring to them, consciously or not. It’s strange furniture for strange times, and against a scrolling sea of easy-to-apprehend styles, they present the promise of meaning in the weirdness—even if you can’t quite put your finger on it.
Top photo of designer Rich Aybar by Adrianna Glaviano
