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Inside Monument, a Temple of Archival Design in East London

After five years in business, Monument, the London-based shop and gallery owned by Leah Forsyth-Steel and Victoria Spicer, is moving to bigger and better digs. Photos: Genevieve Lutkin

There are several aesthetics that feel very “of the moment” in the year 2025. One is a kind of Surrealism-inspired, iron-heavy romanticism, as exemplified by galleries like Bruises in Montreal or Oculus in London. Another is a strict, ‘80s-era industrialism shot with a whiff of tenderness — think Ron Arad’s rugged, tubular steel beds, Bernard Dequet’s undulating chrome-plated sconces, Mario Bellini’s floral rice paper lamps, and lots of Royalton-era Philippe Starck. This is the look codified by London’s Monument, a gallery and shop run, since 2020, by founders and longtime friends Leah Forsyth-Steel and Victoria Spicer, which this month moves to the larger, newly renovated space we’re featuring here today.

Forsyth-Steel and Spicer originally met and bonded over a shared love for collecting, and in the five years since Monument opened, they’ve grown their stash of archival designs into a full-service sourcing and styling business. But for the average design person visiting London, the new Monument is also indispensable, adding as it does to an ever-growing circuit of hugely inspirational furniture archives — one that includes the V&A East Storehouse as well as fellow galleries like Béton Brut and Spazio Leone. I’d go just to ogle a felt-covered daybed by the recently deceased German designer Christoph R. Siebrasse, one of five ever produced, and just maybe think about buying these delicate leaf-form vases by Shiro Kuramata. Here, the design education goes down easy.

This is How You Announce Yourself As a Studio to Watch

The primary bathroom at the Kingston Design Showhouse, designed by Methods of Assembly, featuring a metal shower screen by Jesse Groom (left). Photos by David Mitchell

Taking place over 16 days in October in an historical brick cottage in the Hudson Valley, the Kingston Design Showhouse boasted many lovely rooms. But there was one that was such a knockout, so thoroughly convincing me of its designers’ talents, that I hardly needed to see their other work. The primary bathroom was designed by Methods of Assembly, and it was described as “historical fantasy meets handmade Modernism,” taking cues from everything from Alexander Calder to the score from Twin Peaks.

Methods of Assembly — a Catskills-based studio run by Omar Aqeel — wrapped the bathroom in pine paneling and terracotta tile by Fireclay. But the biggest showstopper was a hand-forged metal shower screen pierced with American quilt motifs by artist Jesse Groom. Excuse me, shower screen? Yes to this complete reinvention of a category. But we also loved the cabinet hardware by Heath Wagoner, the expressive custom mirrors, the beautiful In Common With lights — this is how you take advantage of a showhouse, bringing your work to life in the kind of environment it’s eventually destined for, and creating a jewel box that announces you as a studio to watch.

At Kilzi’s Solo Exhibition, One Table on Feet Seems to Be Walking Away

The Syrian-Spanish designer Jorge Suárez-Kilzi recently wrapped a solo exhibition at Licht Gallery in Tokyo.

As a child, the designer Jorge Suárez-Kilzi moved around a lot — an experience that lent the furniture that often traveled with his family a kind of heightened significance. “Wherever these objects went, any new place could feel like home,” he says. In a life on the move, furniture was an anchor. Perhaps that’s why Kilzi’s pieces often feel animate — he’s given them the soul of a living thing because to him, a piece of furniture is a friend. The designer recently wrapped a solo exhibition at Licht Gallery in Tokyo where he debuted several new pieces that continue to explore these ideas: the Barefoot table, which resembles a small bear or elephant in motion; the Hug chair, whose Urushi-lacquered back looks like two hands reaching for one another; and several vaguely anthropomorphic lamps. Taken as a whole, the collection offers a glimpse into the mind of a designer “who sees furniture not as static objects, but as companions in the unfolding story of human experience,” the gallery notes.

In a New Exhibition, Chen Chen & Kai Williams Go Hyper-Local

Top: installation view of Basic Instinct by Chen Chen & Kai Williams at The Future Perfect. Bottom: Geology wall cabinet (left) and Stone Mask. Photos: Joe Kramm

Chen Chen and Kai Williams might be the very definition of a hyper-local design practice. When the Brooklyn-based duo debuted their Geology series back in 2019 — for which they cut and polish stones by hand, then affix them to glass — they often sourced rocks from neighborhood stone yards, or beaches along the north shore of Long Island. (They’ve since moved to a procurement method, but you can still see all of the stones they’ve used catalogued in a Wiki on their webpage — fascinating for the materials nerds among us.) Now, in a new show at The Future Perfect in New York, the duo are debuting not only an extension of their Geology series but also the results of their first foray into woodworking, for which they gathered felled trees from the area around their studio.

Called Basic Instinct, the exhibition treats the natural world as both collaborator and subject: Rather than milling the wood, the designers allow each log to retain its natural silhouette, often contrasting the organic forms with a more precise scaffolding. In their Torso of a Young Man cabinet, lumpen trunks are embedded in a grid of Norwegian maple and patinated copper; each piece of wood in the exhibition is engraved with the name of the street on which it was found. Elsewhere in the exhibition are highly sophisticated versions of their Geology series. In one wall-mounted cabinet, a door opens to reveal the craggy, unpolished butts of each rock, a view typically afforded only if you look underneath the surface of one of their coffee tables. A series of stone masks — not unlike the natural-world version of Sight Unseen’s Instagram avatar, by Bertjan Pot — round out the exhibition. On view through January 1.

Editor’s List

Clockwise from top left:

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A comment left on my recent Substack sent me down a rabbit hole that led me to the Bow chair by Danish designer Laerke Ryom. To be honest, I probably saw this chair when it debuted as part of the annual Mindcraft exhibition last year, but sometimes it takes pulling a piece out of the context of a group show to really understand its power. This piece could have gone too flirty and feminine, but the decidedly earthy, textural brown fabric grounds it in a really beautiful way.
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I still had pewter on the brain last week after my talk with Svenkst Tenn at Salon 94, and I would be extremely tempted to buy these postmodern pewter candleholders from The Window in LA if they weren’t $650. But someone should!
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I can’t be the only person in New York who perused the Instagram of artist Rama Duwaji — the wife of our new mayor — last week. Duwaji, an illustrator, does monthly dumps of all the things that have inspired her to make art, and you know what? She’s an incredible curator. She introduced me to Hawa Al-Najjar, the British-Iraqi artist who made this sculptural blackened birch chair — a new fave — as well as this incredible candlelit music stand?! We, as a culture, are not paying enough attention to music stands, I guess.
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I’ve long been a fan of Natalia Criado, who draws on her Colombian heritage to make beautiful pieces in metal, studded with semi-precious stones. She recently released a capsule collection with Vesper Voyage of four pieces in silver-plated brass embellished with red Jasper. There’s something vaguely witchy about this piece, which I appreciate.

News

The Co-Exist credenza by Arielle Assouline-Lichten of Slash Objects in onyx and aluminum, one of several refreshed pieces launching at the new Slash Objects showroom next week.

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Arielle Assouline-Lichten of Slash Objects has spent the last few years toggling back and forth between Paris and New York, but next week she’ll debut a New York showroom at 224 Centre Street, launching four updated pieces in an exhibition called Between the Lightness and the Darkness, on view to the public until December 19 by appointment. Her Co-Exist credenza, above, gets a major upgrade in brushed aluminum and onyx.
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A genius new column idea called Style Detective debuted on T Magazine this week, and the first installment is dedicated to tracking down the wavy-backed antique sofa Timmy Chalamet sits on in Call Me By Your Name. TBH the solution given here is slightly unsatisfying since for this piece, you’d have to set an alert on auction sites for something like “classical walnut Italian sofa,” but there’s nothing we love more than tracking down hard-to-find objects, so we’re excited for this column.
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Speaking of how to track down hard-to-find objects, Laura Reilly and Xavier Donnelly published a guide on Magasin recently on to how to shop for antiques in Europe — and, crucially, how to get them home. The column introduced me to a bunch of fairs I’d never heard of — including one in my home away from home, Stockholm — so I know what I’ll be planning my travel around this year.
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As Thanksgiving, our most eating-centric holiday, approaches, it’s time to get your table setting in order. This year, a new set of dishware joins the party, and in harvest tones, no less: Tortugaware, a collaboration three years in the making between Office for Tangible Space and Tortuga Forma, launches next week and is available for pre-order now. The pieces — a serving platter, dinner plate, salad plate, and bread plate, with more to come — have a curved, rolling rim and come in hues like bone, lichen, and a rusty tierra. Your sweet potatoes will look extremely chic on these — don’t sleep on them!

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