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

Play.Room
Atlanta, Georgia / @playroomisfun

Robby Simon’s Toadstool is a prince of a chair. Above squat wooden legs and a broad seat, parallel posts rise like a tuning fork covered in shiny green fabric. The chair looks like a toad. Though, more like its amphibious cousin, it offers you a spherical throw pillow, a ball covered in golden velvet. Robby is having fun—the Atlanta designer calls his studio Play.Room—and his woodwork combines unusual joinery with sometimes off-kilter structures. He speaks with a smile about his influences: Nakashima, Black fashion, and European high modernism. But that Wegner chair excludes a lot of people. "My wife is plus size, so every single chair or everything I make has to at least fit that body." He also embeds small metal details into his wooden pieces, coded nods to Black American culture. "Physical double entendre are a literary element that you find in a lot of Black American craft," he says. Simon’s references are apparent but not heavy handed. The figures are playful, but they stop short of cartoonish. He’s having a well-edited good time.

—William Hanley

I-JŌKŌ
London, United Kingdom / @i_joko.xyz 

By drawing on the material heritages and traditional practices of different African cultures, British Nigerian designer Richard Adetokunbo Aina has created his own design methodology, which he calls Afrorevivalism. For him, the translation of these references isn’t just an aesthetic exercise but a reassessment of how traditional objects facilitate behavior. Developed through his practice, I-JŌKŌ, the Te.riba chair is inspired by the chief’s chair of the Baluba people, indigenous to the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Katanga region, but it also has Western influences. Its tall backrest and unified assembly suggests strength, almost like a throne. Its curved form, however, denotes deference and humility. "[My] designs converge multiple lines of cultural, formal, and material references," Aina says. In this confluence, a new design language emerges.

—Adrian Madlener

"I am interested not just in what things look like but in how and why they function: how people sit, gather, move, and interact."

—Richard Adetokunbo Aina, I-JŌKŌ

Studio B.C. Joshua
London, United Kingdom / @studio_bcjoshua

Blake Carlson-Joshua’s design trajectory was self directed: from drawing monsters as a child to teaching himself CAD in his 20s to earning an MA in product design at the Royal College of Art in London. He established his studio in 2022 and began creating furniture that has aesthetic and narrative roots in his family’s story. For his Harlem Cottage collection, he made the Vincent chair "to celebrate the beauty of the architecture and design within the African diaspora." It echoes Mission style furniture but with a softer silhouette that references curly hair. The inspiration comes from his family: his mother is white and of Swedish descent from Minneapolis, and his father is a Black man who grew up in Harlem. "I started to envision how the inside of a vacation cabin might look like if it were designed in a different context," he says.

—Sarah Archer

Top photo by Matilde Viegas

Selection curated by River Davies and Adrian Madlener

Return to the Dwell 24 introductory essay

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