This year marked the fifth time I've attended the Stockholm Furniture Fair, so at this point I consider myself something of an armchair expert in the machinations of this small but mighty fair. All over town this year, there were conversations about the future of SFF, which has contracted in recent years due to a mix of factors — including the pandemic, a protracted recession, and the rise of fellow Scandinavian fair 3 Days of Design — and now seems to be in a transition period, with a new director at the helm (Daniel Heckscher, formerly of Note Design Studio) and a ticking clock at its heels. (The fair was recently sold by the city of Stockholm and the current fairgrounds are due to be demolished in 2027 to make way for housing). And while I still maintain that an imminent location change ought to push the fair's organizers to move the dates to a more welcoming time on the calendar (would love to never Google "is there snow on the ground in Stockholm" again), I also began to reframe my thoughts this year about what success really means against the backdrop of a global design calendar.

Traveling to last month's FOG Design+Art fair was a particularly charged experience for me this year — held two weeks after the wildfires that devastated Los Angeles, where I've been hibernating all winter, it was something of a reprieve; a chance, both literally and figuratively, to take a breath after all that happened here. Of course I only had the privilege to do so because I was unaffected materially by the fires, unlike so many others facing horrible loss, but it's just to say that traveling to a fair in the wake of a tragedy was not such a frivolous event as it may have been in past years. I was eminently more grateful just to be there. Seeing good work was merely the icing on the cake.