Discover Highlights from Design Miami’s Milestone 20th Edition

The end of the year brings a familiar cadence to the world of collectible design, with galleries and the creative cognoscenti moving from PAD London to Paris Art Week to Salon Art + Design in New York before converging in Miami. Design Miami always captures that energy and channels it into a vivid finale. This edition marks a milestone 20th anniversary, and the fair arrives with a renewed sense of ambition. Over the past year, its parent company, Basic Space, expanded its reach with events in Los Angeles and New York, launched Design Miami In Situ in Seoul, and strengthened its presence in Paris. In its home city, the presentation opens today, December 2, with a program that gathers established and emerging voices who approach material exploration with fresh conviction. 

Curatorial director Glenn Adamson guides the proceedings with the theme “Make. Believe.,” drawing from a dialogue between technical mastery and unbound imagination. The framework considers collectible design as a realm where bold ideas find vivid physical expression, a perspective that underscores the fair’s anniversary year. “It seems like a unique opportunity to reflect on the fair’s legacy while considering new paths forward,” he says. “We’re putting next generation voices alongside established and historic designers, creating a conversation about skilled craft and unfettered imagination, and the way those two things continually inform each other. Design Miami has always been a meeting point of practicality and possibility.” 

Exhibitors responded to the theme with wide-ranging interpretations that unfold within the famed tent at Pride Park, from historic masterworks to dazzling one-of-a-kind contemporary creations. Visitors encounter elaborate glass environments, sculptural investigations of geological forces, reinventions of heritage craft, and immersive collaborations from major partners such as Fendi, Range Rover, Gaggenau, Lasvit, Piaget, and others. Adamson welcomes that breadth: “We intend to create that spark of inspiration throughout the fair, to evoke the feeling that design’s future is unfolding before us.” Below, discover highlights from this year’s edition. 

Superhouse 

Starting in the 1980s, designers started treating furniture as no less salient a conduit for creative expression than art, exemplified by the rise of galleries like Néotu and Moss. This decade has long enthralled Superhouse founder Stephen Markos, who is dedicating his third Design Miami showing to works from his pivotal period. The booth features works by a dozen key figures of the era, including a branching bronze candelabra by Michele Oka Doner that emulates bramble and bark, a yellow Richard Snyder cabinet that resembles a walking layer cake, and a technicolor fiberboard screen by Dan Friedman that once furnished the New York offices of WilliWear. They all converge in a booth designed by Studio Ahead and Farrow & Ball that recalls the postmodernist tendencies of Bay Area artist Garry Knox Bennett, which received the coveted Best Curio Presentation from for its engaging scenography. “This booth revisits the freedom and fearlessness of that period, when boundaries between art, craft, and design simply didn’t matter,” says Markos, “much like we’re seeing with contemporary makers today.” 

Ateliers Courbet 

The craft-forward gallery returns with “Neo Nouveau,” a compelling group of works by global artisans whose explorations of organic matter form the main inspiration behind their vocabulary. Whether carved in wood or stone in Italy, layered and shaped by mineral pigments in France or free-formed in clay in South Africa, each piece on display reveals its material’s innate character through painstaking craftsmanship. In doing so, they distill principles of Art Nouveau—in which the boundaries between fine and decorative arts dissolved—through abstract, biomorphic forms. Don’t miss French artist Pierre Bonnefille’s dazzling credenza, made by using a centuries-old method of applying more than 30 layers of crushed minerals and carbon powders to achieve a distinctive organic texture; or Brazilian ceramist Valéria Nascimento’s hand-formed porcelain blossoms that reinvigorate Art Nouveau’s iconic floral motifs. 

Victoria Yakusha 

Continuing her hot streak after snagging the coveted Best Curio Presentation at Design Miami in 2022, the multihyphenate Ukrainian architect is choosing optimism in times of crisis and honing her design gifts toward discovering inner light. She achieves that with a powerful presentation that pairs four figures—herself, fashion designer Lilia Litkovska, quantum researcher Maksym Kovalenko, and artist Roman Minin—with mythical creatures that mirror virtues like wisdom, wonder, uniqueness, and kindness. Hand-sculpted using Yakusha’s signature sustainable material Ztista, a tactile blend of clay, flax, wood chips, and biopolymer, each design serves as a vessel for wonder and enacts her underlying philosophy of “live minimalism” where everyday objects appear simultaneously ancient and futuristic. 

The Future Perfect 

New beginnings are afoot at The Future Perfect—and not only because the influential gallery recently unveiled a new home at Villa Paula, a historic Little Haiti landmark that once housed the Cuban Consulate. At an always-impressive booth, a wealth of works will showcase burgeoning names on its roster, propelling their practices to new heights. D’Haene Studio will unveil her first-ever coffee table, a remarkable one-of-a-kind creation that layers mosaics of multicolored glazed ceramic tiles atop oak slabs. Other highlights include sculptor Ian Collings’ foray into lighting and a lamp by Autumn Casey inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s principles. 

Friedman Benda 

It’s always difficult to single out one specific work at Friedman Benda, whose stellar lineup is again capturing the diversity of superb craftsmanship within contemporary collectible design. Anchoring the reading room is Space Exchanger, a large-scale screen by Joris Laarman. Shown for the first time to the U.S. public, the striking large-scale sculpture is the result of the Dutch designer’s long-standing research in cutting-edge metal printing. The idiosyncratic Mexican architect Javier Senosiain is presenting a giant planter with integrated seating made using reinforced concrete and vibrant mosaics. Fernando Laposse will contribute “monster lamps” made with agave fibers near Misha Kahn’s lustrous glass-and-ceramic mirrors. 

Delvis (Un)Limited 

Since being founded by Stefano Del Vecchio last year, with Alcova masterminds Joseph Grima and Valentina Ciuffi overseeing set design and curation, respectively, the Milan gallery Delvis (Un)Limited has continually probed what exactly it means to live among collectible design—its first exhibition quite literally invited designers to sleep in the gallery. This open-ended inquiry unfolds anew in Miami with a materially adventurous booth that recreates the the living room setting from that inaugural show and rearranged following conversations between curators and designers. The works on view resonate with that evolving narrative, among them a vibrant pink stone bar cabinet by Objects of Common Interest that houses a uniquely engineered speaker system and a compact rubber armchair that presents the fast-rising artist Rich Aybar’s fascination with unconventional forms.  

Design Miami will be on view at Convention Center Drive & 19th Street, Miami Beach, until December 7.