Providence, benandajablanc.com The Providence duo launched a standout line this year featuring one of our favorite recent objects: a geometric mirror with a hairy fringe. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? It’s a great moment to be working as an American designer. The field is full of incredibly talented designers, which we find inspires a higher level of quality and makes for a more idiosyncratic field that doesn’t just follow trends. It’s not to say American designers aren’t aware of trends, but we also like to play with them, push them, or enjoy the self-given freedom to ignore them entirely. The designs themselves don’t ask for permission. American design today is less preoccupied with defending itself and instead has a mature assertion of its own worth. Maybe it’s that American pioneering spirit coming out, but it feels like there is a freedom to be who you want to be and make what you want to make. American design, particularly with the design cohort that gets us most excited, is also placing a well-aimed focus on materials, and thinking critically about how to work with and manipulate them. There’s a wonderful duality in American design where some designers are creating beautifully powerful, monolithic statements and others are evoking a lighter, otherworldly transience through more obtrusive material, pattern, and color. This diversity only serves to prompt authentic individual expression in a field that could easily be swayed into one “fashionable” direction. There’s space for a diverse field of work, while also demanding a consistent level of quality and workmanship that will always set American design apart. All in all, there’s an incredible energy and openness around American design right now. It is a generous field with strong, open dialogues, interesting collaborations, and good vibes all around. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year? The upcoming year is shaping up to be pretty fantastic, although in all honesty we’re still catching our breath from this past year, which marked the beginning of the formal collaboration between Aja and I in the studio. It feels like we accomplished a crazy amount in a very short period of time — two new collections, multiple shows, awesome press, a new studio space, a partnership with our heroes at The Future Perfect, and we’re still married and really dig each other! Next year we will be debuting a … Continue reading Ben & Aja Blanc

Los Angeles, brianthoreen.com Thoreen catapulted into the spotlight with the debut of his first collection in 2015, pairing super-sleek forms with natural materials. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? American design is fundamentally about risk taking. We are a relatively young country and all of our ancestors came here seeking something: some freedom, some possibility, some newness, some unknown. It was often at great risk, physically, financially or otherwise. I think American design at its best is still driven by this pioneering instinct. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year? This year has been quite special for me since the success of my first show in May, and I now have quite a few irons in the fire. Currently I’m working on several furniture pieces to show with Patrick Parrish Gallery during Design Miami, plus myriad custom commissions: I’m finishing up the design of the House of Guvera offices in Los Angeles, working on a sculptural collaboration with Kristin Victoria Barron in the old Coca Cola building in the Arts District in LA, plus a couple other projects which I can’t mention yet. What inspires your work in general? Longing, desire, melancholy, play. It’s all in there. I intuitively gravitate towards a material, idea, or form. When something captures my imagination I spend a lot of time with it, mulling it over to see how it can best be expressed formally. It’s a rigorous process, equally intuitive and technical.  

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.

New York, calicowallpaper.com With their killer aesthetic, their savvy design-world collaborations, and their mix of digital know-how and time-honored fine-art techniques, the husband-and-wife duo of Nick Cope and Rachel Mosler have, improbably, made wallpaper cool again. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? American design is undergoing an amazing time of dynamism and change. Let’s talk about the designers themselves: Every month it seems that the American design landscape is being reconfigured by bright new studios opening their doors and sharing their aesthetic vision with the world. Small teams or individuals are trailblazing down the design path and imaging their own systems to develop, refine, produce, deliver, and service their work. We would even dare to say that new American designers are working with great courage because of the great leap of faith that’s required to believe in your work and have the ability to bring it to market. Perhaps the pioneering spirit that America is known for has taken hold of the design scene. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year? When we wrapped up design week in New York last year, we thought that we were out of steam and had planned to regroup and start early on collections for 2016. But that’s just when things began to get interesting, and we realized that our year was not over! We showed our new Inverted Spaces collection at “Precious,” an exhibition curated by French designer Elizabeth Leriche at Maison & Objet in Paris. We were also in a private exhibition there for the celebrated French silversmith Christofle, where we unveiled a massive amount of contrasting Aurora gradients in two salons alongside work by Tomas Libertiny. During the London Design Festival, we showed at Design House by Mallett Antiques, which was celebrating its 150-year anniversary. Now we have time to fully focus on wrapping up a new collection to launch during New York Design Week, as well as a very special collaboration that we can’t disclose just yet. What inspires your work in general? Our work is inspired by creating a mood and an experience. The goal at Calico Wallpaper is to immerse the viewer in pattern and to leave an emotional impact. We feel that it’s important to create something that’s not only aesthetically pleasing, but visceral, or else the work sits only on the surface. Design work should linger and … Continue reading Calico Wallpaper

New York, chriswolston.com Working between Brooklyn and Medellin, Colombia, Wolston made a splash this year with his sand-cast glass and neon Fetish Lights. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? Right now there’s an exciting landscape of designers ignoring the limitations of their own field and bringing critical thinking back into the mix. I feel free to go through the steps of a designer out of chronological order, pulling in inspiration though varied methodologies. For me it starts at a factory, getting to know its possibilities. I love to build a piece around what’s typically the fault of a production system. Building on what’s usually a glitch opens up a whole other method of producing, and down this path I find my next product. Is that being a designer? Maybe? Shouldn’t American design be a rough and tumble landscape that’s defined by mavericks? What’s exciting about this new motion in American design is the possibility of ignoring the label “designer” and making objects that don’t sit comfortably in any category. As people tire of the lazy qualifier that art has to be nonfunctional, and that design is meant to make our lives more comfortable, this huge territory is opened up, and many young creatives are beginning to explore it. I think we saw this attitude shift beginning with the huge revival of more playful objects inspired by Memphis, but are really only just entering the true spirit, which involves more in-depth material uses. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year? I have a new gallery in Berlin, Johanssen Gallery, where my Fetish Lights are included in a show and a solo show will soon follow. I’ve been invited by the Museo de Antioquia in Medellin to do an installation at the MD15 Biennale. The Museum of American glass is working on acquiring a Fetish Light for their permanent collection; one of the lights is currently installed there in a long-term exhibition. The interiors department at Bergdorf is also interested in doing an installation of Fetish lights — TBD. And I’m working on a new collection of side tables at the studio in Medellin that combines sand-cast aluminum and foamed aluminum sheeting. Finally, The Future Perfect in San Francisco is going to be carrying my new Terracotta Furniture this fall. What inspires your work in general? The inspiration for my work often comes … Continue reading Chris Wolston

New York, codyhoyt.tumblr.com A Brooklyn-based artist, represented by Patrick Parrish Gallery, whose striped and mottled ceramics have put him at the vanguard of the design-art scene. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? I wasn’t sure what excited me about American design, so I read through everyone’s responses on the 2014 Hot List before realizing how awesome it really is. My personal take on what makes it exciting, as opposed to just special, is a trend of emphasizing quality, like aesthetics and materiality. It’s good to be obsessive about form and detail, and I think that’s fun. Part of the reason that’s possible is the fecund American economy. The plentitude of wealth means more work for young designers and more freedom for those designers to be singularly focused on their projects. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year? I’m showing some new work in Miami during Art Basel this year. And I’ll have a solo show at Patrick Parrish Gallery in mid-February. I’m working on some ceramic vessels that have jumped up to an enormous scale, with more ambitious surface inlays. There will be some functional pieces in the show too, like tables and tiles which evolved out of the patterned slab process I use for the vessels. I’m also making some drawings and non-ceramic sculptures. What inspires your work in general? I think it boils down to elements of wonder and idealism. I’ve always drawn inspiration from sci-fi and fantasy artists like Phillipe Druillet, Roger Dean, and Moebius. Music and album art has been the most important thing in my life at various times. I was excited to discover that architecture can offer the same sense of reality-shifting escapism, but on an accessible scale. Finding a way to channel the influences into something tangible and cohesive is the ultimate challenge.

New York, farrahsit.com Her planters and light fixtures have long had a following, but a recent furniture collab with Chiyome took the Brooklyn designer’s portfolio up a notch. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? American design is free and bold, both in aesthetics and in business. There is a fun attitude and a lot of energy, and, at least in my community, an amazingly supportive feeling that’s more collaborative than competitive. The smaller production practices here align with my values of “own less and own well.” As a country with historical roots in manufacturing, so much was lost when American production relocated overseas. The shift back towards local, independent production gives this country’s design players a freedom and edge to focus on creativity. It feels a bit like the forest of industry and production burned, and we’re the little sprouts of ingenuity and creativity coming up afterward. I specifically love working with craftspeople and fabricators in their senior years who have survived that global shift. As their peers may have abandoned post, they stick around to do the work for fun. Sharing with me the days of yore, their wisdom, calmness and passion for their craft is unwavering. I experienced the shift firsthand when I designed home objects for fashion labels. As the conversations changed from nit-picking quality to the bottom-line numbers, things changed for me internally. I left designing for the masses years ago with the dream to start my own line and to keep production high-quality and domestic. It’s wonderful to see that it’s happening; people are fed up with fast production. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year? I’m really excited to have recently joined Colony, and I’m designing a new line to be launched this coming year. Light + Ladder, my home accessories brand, is doing well and we’re expanding our studio space. I’m also collaborating with the brilliant designer Mark Grattan on a new tabletop collection. Stay tuned. What inspires your work in general? I’m inspired by science, and by the perfection that’s only found in nature. I’m intrigued by mankind’s struggle to dissect and manipulate the natural world. In all of that, it’s important to also just observe and find stillness. I’m looking for that gentle harmony between man and nature — whether in mathematical proportions, or in a gesture captured in a form. Our … Continue reading Farrah Sit

Brooklyn, fortmakers.com Nana Spears, Naomi Clark, Noah Spencer, and Elizabeth Whitcomb are the creatives at the core of this artist collective, whose work encompasses everything from woodworking to block printing to hand-painting and beyond. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? American Design is going through what we feel is a really exciting change and movement. Makers are popping up all over the place, a movement we feel is a reaction to people’s somewhat new distrust of mass production. When products are made very far away, and we don’t know who’s making the products, and we hear awful stories about exploited labor, and toxic materials and pollution, we return to our roots. We do it ourselves, and we make it ourselves. The American market is demanding design that tells a personal story, and in reaction to this demand, more and more small, independent design firms are being created. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year? This year, we’re focused on growing and expanding our online shop. We want the shop to act as a Bauhaus-inspired gallery, and we plan to add new one-of-a-kind pieces to it every month. For example, we’ll soon sell papier-mâché masks by artist Jacey Hanson. The masks have a cartoonish, George Condo–meets–Primitive Art quality. We’ll also be selling textiles by Christian Joy, one of the most avant-garde costume designers working today, who collaborates with Karen O, Marcel Dzama, and Alabama Shakes. We’ll also sell in our shop vintage and modern club chairs that have been reupholstered in hand-painted canvas by FM member Naomi Clark. Keith Simpson, the ceramicist who made our Primary Resist Vase series, will make a limited edition run of ceramic plates that will debut in November. Outside of the shop, we’ll contribute to a Planned Parenthood fundraising project called Craftswoman (date TBD) curated by Jocelyn Miller, which will convene artists and objects inspired by the female body and experience. (We’ve noticed all these boobs and vaginas showing up in American Design lately, and we can’t wait to add our own version to the trend!) And Naomi and Noah will continue to work on commissioned pieces for high-profile clients’ homes. Naomi recently created a wallpaper mural in Anthony Sperduti of Partners and Spade’s new dining room, and Noah has plans to make a large outdoor sculpture that will also function as a light for a client’s … Continue reading Fort Makers

New York, mattermatters.com Most know Gray as founder of the influential New York furniture shop Matter, but few know that some of the store’s best designs are his own. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? Ten years ago my answer would have been so different. American design has really evolved since then and become an integral part of the international design landscape. So much so that I would say American design, more than anything else, is this growing group of designers, makers, and manufacturers who have uncompromisingly invested themselves in putting — and keeping — contemporary American design on the map. And while there are definitely moments that contextually make references to American design history, it no longer feels as though we’re having a separate conversation than designers elsewhere in the world. As one of the people who’s championed American design and manufacturing since opening Matter in 2003, I find that pretty exciting. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year? There are a number of commercial projects that the studio is currently immersed in which incorporate our existing lighting collections and some new custom fixtures as well. I continue to (obsessively) tinker with, refine and re-engineer things, so next year during design week I’ll introduce the latest iterations of the various lights I’ve developed. On top of that, I’ve started a new project, Wherewithal, with my girlfriend Olivia Sammons. We’ve always wanted to work together creatively and are finally finding some time to explore that. We’ve yet to define exactly what it is we do, but for the moment we’re collaborating on some product, furniture, and interior projects. What inspires your work in general? Form is the first thing I always respond to, whether in something manmade or something found in nature. I’ve always had this very physical reaction to the things that shape the world around me, but I’d have a hard time saying one thing or another informs or inspires my work. It’s more broad strokes. After form comes materials and assembly. I have a great amount of respect for things that are manufactured with a reverence for materials and are engineered to the highest degree. Swiss watch movements are a current obsession. The parts are so fragile and precise; it seems almost impossible that inside such a small object are these tiny springs, ratchets, jewels, gears, and a … Continue reading Jamie Gray

New York, jamiewolfond.com; goodthingny.com In 2014, only a year out of RISD, the Toronto-born, Brooklyn-based designer launched Good Thing, a suddenly of-the-moment design brand focused on the development and manufacture of small goods and housewares. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? In the US, designing a product seldom ends with the object itself, but continues all the way through the process of bringing that thing to an audience. When I was in school I wanted very little to do with American design. I’d been closely following the work of several European designers (in particular the Dutch, with Droog and the many other designers making process-based work there) and was a little jealous of them for being in a part of the industry with a great infrastructure for licensing. In Europe, there are so many manufacturing companies, and there’s such a strong market for unusual objects, that a designer doesn’t have to think about much more than the creative process. A manufacturing company handles production, sales, and all liability, leaving the designer with a tidy quarterly royalty check and the free time to move on to another idea. And yet, after I spent two summers working with designers in the Netherlands — first DHPH/Maarten Baas, and then Studio Bertjan Pot, two of the very best experimental designers in the industry — I found that the licensing model in Europe doesn’t leave very much opportunity to experiment beyond the design of the object itself. The flip side of a strong infrastructure for licensing design is that the companies that operate in this way have long since formulated their own ideas of what will and won’t sell. This makes it really difficult to introduce completely new ideas to the market. For example, I really hoped to find an opportunity to license my Sticker Clock design with a Dutch company, but consistently received feedback that customers would not buy something with the perceived value of a sticker. There was something really unnatural about ending the design process by simply taking someone’s word for it. The way a designer creates a product is by repeatedly testing ideas, and reacting to the result. I realized I could get a great deal more imperial feedback from trying to sell the clock than from trying to license it. The truly amazing thing about American design is the newfound prevalence of the designer/businessperson. … Continue reading Jamie Wolfond

New York, material-lust.com Christian Swafford and Lauren Larson are the dark horses of American design, skilled at making the unusual look chic, from zoomorphic chairs to a line of home accessories informed by pagan rituals. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? There’s a quote about The Ramones being “American Primitives” that really resonates with us. That raw, primitive, creative energy is still alive in the US, waiting to be tapped. American design to us is stripping down, reinterpreting, and going all out. There is no expectation to pay homage to past designers or follow any guidelines. Originality and innovation are celebrated. The American design scene is also hyper-focused on the “New.” This perpetual search for the “New” really pushes and drives us to do collections that go in totally different directions from our past work. There’s a tendency to think of American design as market- and sales-driven, but in reality, there are some American designers who are really pushing the boundaries and challenging consumers to spend money outside of the big-box home goods stores. The home goods and furniture markets in America are supersaturated with poorly-made, margin-driven, made-in-Asia, disposable home goods. We have seen a backlash to this where American consumers are looking for artisan-crafted goods that will stand the test of time. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year? We are collaborating with world-renowned tattoo artist Tamara Santibanez on a small collection of highly ornamented, handmade carved-wood pieces, a departure from our hard-edged geometric work. We will also be expanding our children’s collection for Kinder Modern, and we’re currently working on a tabletop porcelain collection that’s inspired by some surrealist drawings. The most exciting venture on the horizon, though, is the Material Lust Gallery we’ll be opening in 2016. It will be an intimate space to display our work along with antiques in fully realized vignettes. We want to show consumers and interior designers how to use our pieces in design schemes. The gallery will have revolving installations and further collaborations with other designers and artists. What inspires your work in general? Our influences change month to month, and that’s by design. Our process has always involved looking at what’s happened in the past and reinterpreting or editing it to fit the current world. What constantly changes is our reference material. For our first collection, it was Pagan and Alchemical … Continue reading Material Lust

Los Angeles, michaelfelix.com The designer is creating cool, contemporary upholstery pieces that leverage the capabilities of his family’s mass-market factory outside L.A. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? American design to me is constantly trying to be innovative, and I think it’s really competitive and exciting in that way. A “what will the kids think of next” kind of thing. At the same time, I feel like there is freedom to work outside of the box, and people will get or appreciate your work. The design scene itself is very friendly, which is really refreshing. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year? I’m excited about collaborations and working with new people. I’m also thinking about design outside of the design context, like how a table can be more than a table. I’m still working on that answer. What inspires your work in general? I really enjoy looking at assemblage and collage from the ’60s, and reading old issues of World of Interiors is like getting a history lesson. I also have a desire to be different, which I hope to achieve in my work.