New York, sunfish.nyc
Julia Eshaghpour and Kevin Hollidge had worked together for more than a decade in a fine art practice called Tenet before they founded their furniture studio Sunfish in 2021 — and before we discovered that studio through an exhibition design they created for Sophie Lou Jacobsen this past spring. Whereas Tenet explores the fake materials often used in architecture and interiors, like marble-pattern laminates, Sunfish is all about craftsmanship and material integrity, from painted-wood folding screens to cast-bronze chairs.

What is American design to you, and what excites you about it?

Someone once described to us that the greatest culture shock of coming to America from abroad was going to an American grocery store. With an abundance of products to choose from, one product in twenty different permutations, and all of them distinguished through packaging, advertising, boasts of health benefits, historic record, or technological innovation, brands in America are tasked with re-inventing a familiar good again and again. To a consumer, these choices can be overwhelming, but to a creator they’re exhilarating.

American design falls into this tradition of insistence that something from the past can always be invented anew, with the right flourish, technique, and perhaps most importantly, narrative context. What we’ve gained from a culture of heavy consumerism is a firm belief in the power of narrative. As a young country, not tied so strongly to ancient craft traditions or a singular, unifying aesthetic, American design has become very skilled at inventing context. Some of the best American designers are remembered not for one famous chair or material employed, but for the world they invited people into. This world-building is something American designers are pre-disposed to do — it’s ingrained in our culture, from all the brands you see at the supermarket to all the movies that come out of Hollywood. Creating a life with and through your work is very motivating and exciting to us.

What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year?

Our foundations are in fine arts, and we’ve been making sculptural works as a somewhat separate practice from Sunfish. However, in our home, our furniture and artworks live together. Following in the footsteps of many architecturally minded sculptors, we have plans to bridge these practices more fully, presenting artworks and furniture pieces together that are researched from the same place.

What inspires or informs your work in general?

Our studio is informed by historical examples of modernism, whether it be a material or wood joinery, something that’s clear and concise and makes sense to us. But also, beyond specific furniture pieces, we’re inspired by the focus on details that artists embed in their home, whether it be painting a window a color, laying out a kitchen in an unusual way, displaying an eclectic array of collected housewares or craft objects, building in nature in ways that would ordinarily be seen as inhospitable, or a vernacular object with personal history to it. It’s been deeply formative to us to visit historical homes of makers across disciplines to see how they lived and produced objects for their own environment, and to see how those objects might interact with a world outside of their own production.