With so little time (and so much to browse!) it's always a good idea to arrive with a shopping plan. For some, that might be deciding on decor styles ahead of time. Then, of course, there are those who are simply looking for the best value: items made with high-quality materials and excellent craftsmanship that are built to last.
The Ancora collection, now in production by Italian furniture maker Magis, includes rectangular and round dining tables along with low tables and side tables. What makes them special isn't just that they're made from concrete (though that's certainly part of it) but how Bouroullec has reimagined what this humble material can actually do when treated with a little finesse. Designer: Ronan Bouroullec x Magis
We've covered lovers of vintage style who favor analogue over digital, without forgetting the avant-garde futurist. There's a gem for serious 20th-century design collectors and ideas for admirers of cutting-edge contemporary crafts. Color enthusiasts who embrace bold graphic design are catered for and those who prize the cachet of the one-of-a-kind or limited edition have options. Pragmatic aesthetes' needs are met with items that serve a purpose, while still easy on the eye.
FAR Workshop's Folio Bridge in Huzhou, , draws its concept from the structural behaviour of a folded sheet of A4 . The project examines how a simple crease can reinforce a lightweight material while retaining its inherent thinness and visual delicacy. After testing multiple folding configurations, the design team focused on a single-crease strategy to achieve the required span. The form was defined by fitting three construction curves and one construction point to the crease line.
The Evening Sky Residence is a vineyard home in the foothills of McMinnville, Oregon. The house is placed in a natural clearing at the vineyard's highest point, sited to overlook the Willamette Valley to the East and the Coastal Mountain Range to the West. The architecture's linearity, contextualized materials, and indoor-outdoor living create a place that is inviting and timeless.
The scheme features a retractable roof and a movable pitch, allowing it to accommodate both sporting and non-sporting events. The bowl is configured to bring seating as close to the field as regulations allow, with a steep profile intended to enhance spatial intensity. Acoustic performance was a central consideration, with the design aiming to concentrate sound within the stadium while minimizing noise impacts on the surrounding neighborhood.
Finding a decent-looking office chair is surprisingly hard, especially if you work from home and stare at it all day. Most of the large ergonomic office chairs are brilliant for posture but look like they belong in a boardroom, not next to your linen sofa or walnut desk. So for this round-up, I focused on design-led options chairs that actually add to your space but still offer proper support.
What makes this project so interesting is how it completely ditches the traditional opera house playbook. You know the type: imposing facades, grand staircases that separate the cultured elite from everyone else, buildings that basically scream "not for you" to anyone walking by. BIG's approach flips that script entirely. The 450,000-square-foot building is designed as what they call "a public building within a park," where the roofscape is fully walkable and the structure has no defined back side.
Creative professionals live between the tangible and the imagined. Their tools need to keep pace with ideas that arrive at odd hours and demand immediate capture. Finding gifts that match this rhythm means looking beyond generic stationery sets toward objects that respect both craft and practicality. These five selections balance functionality with thoughtful design, each priced under fifty dollars and built to earn permanent desk space.
On a hot autumn day in southern Texas, monarch butterflies flit around the gardens of Houston's new Ismaili Centre. Fragile and gaudy, they are on their way south to overwinter in Mexico, travelling up to 3,000 miles in a typical migration cycle, an epic feat of insectile endurance. Their combination of delicacy and stamina is an apt metaphor for the Ismaili Centre, a building that has taken seven years to realise and is designed to last for a century or more.
Early humans scratched lines on stone walls with rocks, and that primal act sits at the root of every sketch we make today. Most modern pencils are optimized for control and detail, shaped like sticks to give you precision over every line and curve. Alberto Essesi's unnamed pencil concept takes a deliberate step back toward that raw, gestural way of drawing, translating it into a highly refined spherical object that looks more like a polished pebble than any conventional pencil.
Anthropologie is one of my top five favorite spots to shop for gifts during the holidays. It doesn't hurt that I'll usually find a little gift or two for myself there, too. The best kind of presents, in my opinion, are the little luxuries - upgraded everyday essentials that you already know they'll use, but would probably never buy for themselves - of which Anthropologie has plenty.
The greatest feat of smart design is when an itty-bitty apartment's floor plan is transformed into a spacious-feeling home that truly makes you think, "How did they do this?!" In cramped studios and compact one-bedroom apartments, space-saving techniques are key, especially when it comes to living rooms. Designing a great living room in a tiny apartment requires a special approach: Rightsizing furniture, utilizing vertical wall space, and investing in key multipurpose furniture, along with having tonsof storage.
Here's something you don't expect to sit on: surgical masks. Nearly 10,000 of them, to be exact. But that's exactly what Design PY created in Hong Kong's Tai Kok Tsui neighborhood with Tidal Stories, a spiraling urban installation that quite literally traces where the ocean used to be. The concept is brilliant in its simplicity. Tai Kok Tsui was once a coastal area, but over a century of land reclamation pushed the shoreline further and further away.
Public spaces remain some of the most dynamic sites for unbuilt architectural experimentation, revealing how cities and architects can imagine accessibility, gathering, and civic identity. In this curated Unbuilt edition, submitted by the ArchDaily community, the selected proposals examine parks, pedestrian corridors, cultural landscapes, and open-access urban environments that invite people to meet, move, rest, and participate in collective life. Rather than treating public space as leftover terrain, these projects position it as essential infrastructure-shaping urban health, memory, and social interaction.
Fernando Andrade understood this intimately when he began designing the Amazon Bus Station in Belém, a project born not from architectural ego but from genuine public consultation with the people who would actually use it. They asked for four things: protection from the weather, environmental comfort, durability, and reasonable cost. What they got exceeded every expectation: a soaring, sculptural shelter that treats public transit users as deserving of the same design attention typically reserved for museums and corporate headquarters.
The Reverend Joyce McDonald says a pastor once told her to "ask God what type of artist you are." She says God responded, "You're a testimonial artist." McDonald's testimonies come in the form of mostly unfired clay sculptures, sometimes embellished with glitter, nail polish, fabric, or paper towels. These figures are very small and simple (a mother and child, a woman praying) and almost naïve in affect (they carry titles like
A piece of decor that some might have once snubbed has come back in style, and that's the TV tray. First advertised in 1952, TV trays were typically sold in folding sets of four. Though it is tricky to track down exactly who invented the moveable object, the invention soon permeated all layers of society, even reaching the presidential household, before falling from grace.
A process for thinking Inputs (Your brain (senses Hearing, smell, taste, sight, touch) + Rene Descartes Theory of Vision + Smart Phone AI + Illustory Truth Graph) and Outputs (Habits) A while back, I captured this provocation on LinkedIn by Darren Hood, which got me thinking. What does it take to "Let Designers think"? Thinking is the value we bring. Let's discuss more ways to carve out "thinking" time.
Picture a building so raw and honest that it looks like it grew straight from the ground. That's exactly what Fernando Menis pulled off with the Holy Redeemer Church and Community Centre of Las Chumberas in Tenerife, and the architecture world just named it the 2025 World Building of the Year at the World Architecture Festival. Located on the outskirts of La Laguna, Spain, this isn't your typical church.
