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Once a year the art and design crowd descends onto Miami Beach to soak up the sun, dive straight into a week of heavy hedonism, and get a taste of what’s new and covetable in the market.
As part of my scouting duties this year, I battled with the Art Basel Miami traffic jams to hop between parties, lunches, installations, and fairs to round up all the trends as selected from my iPhone camera roll. Heads up: The home space is about to get really weird—from kooky creatures to furnishing the metaverse.
Creature Comforts
All over Design Miami I discovered furnishings inspired by animals and creatures that look like they stepped out of a page of Where the Wild Things Are. I can imagine these pieces being used as a conversation piece in a chic interior, or for the adventurous, I suggest going all in on this over-the-top theme to create your own wild animal kingdom at home. I was particularly intrigued by Lebanese designer Khaled El-Mays’s fantastical New Nature bar console, which looks like a Dr. Seuss character. Chris Wolston’s woven wicker Nalgona chairs give a figurative hug as you sit in them, and Colombian studio Verdi’s La Macorina hammock is a functional piece of art that unfurls like a peacock when you lie in it.
Peachy Pinks
Some of the furnishings I saw at Design Miami had me craving sundowners at the beach, and I have to say I could probably boil it down to the peachy pink palettes spotted throughout the fair. I particularly loved Lara Bohinc’s semicircular Kipferl Marble Desk, which radiated plenty of sunset beach vibes. Tuleste Factory came with Facture Studio’s wall objects, consoles, and stools that evoked a warm Miami sunset with their signature yellow-to-pink gradient palette. Just don’t call it millennial pink.
Saturated Color Bombs
The antidote to pastels? An unapologetic use of color. Studio Proba’s playful totem sculptures, made in collaboration with Enjoy the Weather and curated by Anava Projects, brought plenty of color and joy to Design Miami and the Miami Design District. Yinka Ilori’s Blue Rider installation at Superblue Miami was the feel-good highlight of the week, turning the arts center’s alfresco café and bar into a kaleidoscopic-patterned playground bound to lift anyone’s spirits. Over at the Faena Arts District I spotted Mondrian-inspired primary colors throughout Paris-based Ivorian, Jean Servais Somian’s eye-catching furniture pieces that are made from sculpted coconut tree trunks and salvaged dug-out canoes.
Botanical-Inspired Furniture
Florals were truly abundant in Miami, but showing up in as opposed to on the furniture. Particularly in Polish-born Marcin Rusak’s Flora Cabinet, which is made from live discarded flowers set suspended in transparent amber-hued resin. New York–based design studio Pelle made its Miami debut with its fantastical Lure Eden Mirror & Light, which quite literally takes inspiration from flowers—except you’ll never have to water these.
Welcome to the Metaverse
If the hot topics in Miami this year—non-fungible tokens (NFTs), crypto, and the metaverse—are anything to go by, it’s inevitable that in a few years, we’ll all be thinking about furnishing and decorating our digital realities. So why not start browsing for some of the extraordinary furniture available on the NFT market today? Barcelona-based artist Andrés Reisinger’s The Smell of Pink was a dreamlike presentation of his Internet-famous Hortensia Chair in a space deeply inspired by the color pink. The chair, which was listed on the NFT platform Aorist, sold for a cool $100,000 before the end of the week. Perhaps now is a good time to start saving up that cryptocurrency?