Los Angeles, brookandlyn.com
Husband-and-wife duo Brian Hurewitz and Mimi Jung this year launched an understated new line of furniture and small goods, harnessing their painstaking attention to detail and their sensitivity to shape and color.

What is American design to you, and what excites you about it?
We’re not able to define American design using a single style or statement. Currently it seems quite varied, and one of the biggest contributing factors to the variety of styles we see is the vast differences in our educational backgrounds as designers. Many of us have trained outside of industrial design. Some of the best American designers we know today studied architecture, sculpture, and even literature. We are all interpreting functional design in completely different ways.

What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year?
We have some ambitious commissions in the works for a new group of clients in 2016. Our clients come to us looking for one-of-a-kind statement pieces to help inform their physical branding. We’ve been given more freedom than in the past to not only challenge ourselves but also our clients as well. We’re also hoping to carve out some time to explore our own individual work as well. This will ultimately help to further shape our collaborative studio work. We would also like to travel a bit to explore innovative and historical materials, but this has been a plan of ours for the past 4 years. More of a reason to press pause and go!

What inspires or informs your work in general?
Mimi: When left alone, I’ll create work that embodies 10% functionality and 90% abstract form. Brian designs in the reverse. Our conflicting views, when merged, often bring a distinct aesthetic to our work, while other times we just get lost in endless debates. This process has been challenging, yet it’s a crucial component to the development of our own perspective and contribution to this new form of American design.