Discover Design Highlights from Collectible Brussels 2026

Now in is ninth edition, the Belgian design fair Collectible is all grown up. What started as an exhibition mostly focused on recent graduates and highly experimental projects has evolved into a full-fledged fair with a compelling range of participants, from emerging designers to some highly sophisticated offerings. This year, you can find a young Latvian architects, Studio Sija, showcasing a one-of-a-kind chair in stainless steel and walnut, and a specialist in sought-after French design from the 1980s and 1990s nearby.  

The Belgian setting is no coincidence. The city is still a place where young designers and artists can thrive. Rents are not exorbitant, the cost of living isn’t unreasonable, and there are various types of government and private support. Mode and Design (MAD), for example, is a hub for creatives that opened in a 3,200-square-foot space in the city center, financed by the city of Brussels and the regional government, among other sources, which offers exhibition space, mentorship, and a coherent sense of community. An adjacent building contains ten studios offered on a two-year, cost-free basis. 

Outside the city, at Zaventem Ateliers, is a complex of 30 studios housing 32 designers run by the designer Lionel Jadot. The fruits of this artistic community are on show during Collectible at Villa Empain. The 1930s building is radical Art Deco luxury at its best—polished granite external walls, gilded window frames, a horseshoe-shaped swimming pool, and a marble interior flooded with light from a glazed roof. It was intricately restored by the Boghossian family from 2006 to 2010, and now hosts exhibitions.

It is the perfect setting for Jadot’s equally radical tribe. Candy-colored ceramic furniture and lighting come courtesy of Pierre Coddens. Roxane Lahidji fashions furniture, including small tables and stools and even a shower tray, out of compressed salt. Mathilde Wittock makes panels and surfaces from discarded tennis balls colored with plant-derived dyes. Xavier Servas’s 6.5-feet diameter pendant light shade evokes Isamu Noguchi but is actually fashioned from translucent pig intestine. Jadot’s own work includes rough-hewn tables fashioned from salvaged asphalt and a bath in an exterior made of tires.

Collectible co-founder Liv Vaisberg opened the fair on Wednesday morning in the modernist Vanderborght Building in the city center. “The collectible design sector seems to have a renewed energy and purpose,” explained Vaisberg, buoyed up by two successful editions of the fair in New York. (The 2026 edition takes place September 23-27.) “We weren’t sure if we’d chosen a good location in Manhattan,” said Vaisberg of the WSA building in the Financial District. “But people were queuing round the block from day one.”

Confidence in the fair is demonstrated equally by the participation of Pierre Frey, who provided acres of stunning fabrics for the scenography, and also by RADO, which chose it as the venue to launch the three new colors of its True Round timepiece in Europe. “The initial launch took place at Art India,” explained Adrian Bosshard, RADO’s genial CEO. “The new colors are named after three buildings by Le Corbusier—the Cité Radieuse in Marseille, the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts in Cambridge, Mass., and Chandigarh in India. We’ve worked with the Le Corbusier Foundation for seven years now.” The values of the Swiss architect—a master of material, line, and color—align well with the watchmakers, the first to produce high-tech ceramic timepieces and still leaders in material research.

As for the rest, here are some highlights:

1. Kia Utzon-Frank + Michel Mansour | Sila

Sila is another Boghossian Foundation initiative that aims to keep endangered crafts alive. Since 2021, for example, the Danish designer Kia Utzon-Frank has collaborated with the Syrian soap master Michel Mansour to create sculptural works that are almost too beautiful to use. Mansour, who is based in Koura in Lebanon, works to a 3,000-year-old recipe, and with olive oil from his family’s own trees. The results are available in the boutique at Villa Empain.

2. Axel Chay + Elisa Uberti | Galerie Liberté

Françoise Kuth established Galerie Liberté in Luxembourg in October 2024 and has had her greatest success selling to interior designers in the United States. On show in Brussels, a ying and yang pairing of Marseille-based Axel Chay—a minimalist chair and ottoman in stainless steel and black pony skin inspired by 1960s Italian design—and softly organic work by Elisa Liberti. The Liberti desk and chair, in cream stoneware and softly carved oak, are “a tribute to Artemis,” says Kuth. “The goddess of wild nature.”

3. Alessia De Pasquale | Spazio Viruly

Not for the faint-hearted, Alessia de Pasquale’s chaise longue, at Rotterdam gallery Spazio Viruly, partially resembles a large and rope-lashed body bag. Made in vegan leather in a deep aubergine and tied in violet rope, and from her Domestically Dysfunctional series, it is as much conceptual art as furniture, with shades of Japanese photographer Araki. Look out for Viruly next month in Milan, where it will present more experimental design, this time by Matthijs Koerts at Superattico.

4. 1980s French Design | Galerie Jaïs

Adrian Jaïs is one of several young Parisian gallerists to fall in love with the 1980s. “It’s what we grew up with,” he says. Jaïs’s enthusiastic collecting led him to designer Frederic de Luca, who started Paris’s first contemporary design gallery—En Attendant Les Barbares—in the early 1980s. When de Luca passed away in 2025, Jaïs acquired his inventory, and now puts on exhibitions periodically in rented spaces in Paris. On show here are prime pieces by Eric Schmitt and Garouste and Bonetti.

5. Laura Mrska

Time is not the issue for the young Croatian designer Laura Mrksa, who is based in Amsterdam. First, she sources perfect pieces of 1960s and 1970s design to upcycle, spends weeks in her studio restoring the items, and finally wraps them in a spectacular layer of net. Using standard maritime cord, which comes in a huge variety of wonderful colors, she makes the net using a method that goes back centuries. “It’s really about the invisible labor carried out by women,” says Mrksa. “There are still women all over the world repairing fishing nets in this way.” In Mrksa’s hands, however, it becomes a way to combine three Thonet S33 chairs into a sublimely beautiful bench.