Discover Highlights From Mexico City Design Week 2026

In Mexico, craftsmanship is hardly a thing of the past. Centuries-old artisanal techniques, an abundance of natural materials, and an emergent generation of designers and architects have dutifully propelled Mexican design onto the international stage. And while Mexico City’s Art Week attracts discerning collectors from far-flung locales, Design Week Mexico turns its attention to something closer to home: the objects we live with, the spaces we inhabit, and the people who make them. 

“Mexico is an extraordinary manufacturing country,” says Rodrigo Noriega, who participated in this year’s Design House, which invites creative talents to transform disused residences into spectacular showcases of art, design, and craftsmanship. “We have access to incredible factories, but also extraordinary raw materials.” He envisions a future informed by “premium manufacturing”: moving beyond one-of-a-kind collectible pieces and toward bringing Mexican craftsmanship to a wider audience. Now in its 18th edition, Design Week Mexico is following suit by mounting exhibitions, installations, and architectural interventions across the capital while incorporating unexpected voices. Chile, for example, was named the festival’s Guest Country of Honor, and a longstanding partnership with France pairs French designers with Mexican artisans.  

Below, we round up the event’s most memorable highlights.  

Design House 

Each year, Design House invites architects and designers to transform a long-disused residence, with this edition taking over a 1970s house in Lomas de Chapultepec. “There’s a sense of synergy and community, but ultimately each designer leads their own vision,” explains Noriega. In collaboration with Casa Palacio, the designer imagined a bedroom suite for a young collector, pairing classical furnishings with contemporary pieces and works by Andrés Anza, Aldo Chaparro, and Ricardo Luévanos. “Essentially, you have to empty out what’s in your head,” says Noriega, whose intervention reflects his curiosity with the dialogue between classical and contemporary design. Elsewhere, the transformations take more playful turns: a swimming pool overhauled into a vivid red installation, a sculptural blue staircase, a distinctly Mexican living room, and a clever reimagining of the house’s underused rooftop spaces with weather-resistant materials. 

MASA: “Me Petateé” 

At MASA, the launch of Mesoamérica Moderna (Phaidon), a new book by curator Su Wu and photographer Luis Garvan, joins “Me Petateé”, an exhibition organized by New Vernacular that explores the influence of ancestral Mesoamerican techniques on contemporary design. Founded by Elise Durbecq, the Oaxaca-based initiative commissioned over 20 woven objects in collaboration with artisan communities across Oaxaca, Michoacán, Tabasco, and the State of Mexico. Traditionally, pieces such as petates (woven mats) and tenates (baskets) were everyday household essentials, used for sleeping, storing goods, and carrying food. Here, architects, designers, and researchers featured in the book reinterpreted these familiar utilitarian objects, with artisans given free rein to translate their ideas through palm and grass weaving.  

davidpompa: “Can Grey White” 

At his Roma Norte showroom, lighting designer davidpompa unveiled a new iteration of his Can collection, developed with 1050° and the master craftswomen of Amatenango del Valle, Chiapas. The show, titled “Can Grey White,” explores Barro Amatenango—a natural white clay material—through a lighter, chalky palette, allowing its texture and subtle imperfections to catch the eye. Each ceramic piece is hand-finished using locally sourced earth pigments, the movement of the artisan’s brush deliberately left visible. Suspended in delicate clusters or presented as individual pendants and wall lights, the minimalist pieces offer a contemporary expression of ancestral ceramic tradition. 

“El Oráculo de la Belleza: A Tribute to Luis Barragán” 

At Casa Rosa Polanco, a historic mansion turned contemporary art and furniture gallery, “El Oráculo de la Belleza” playfully reinterprets the legacy of Luis Barragán by uniting artists and designers working across furniture, fashion, collage, and fragrance. Among them is architect Juan Pablo Lascurain, founder of MUGAK, who devised a sculptural installation that translates the Mexican visionary’s linear geometries and vibrant colors into papier-mâché and traditional piñata-making techniques. Rectangular purple volumes and cascading red paper fringe lend an unexpected fragility to the architect’s monumental vernacular. Elsewhere, Raúl de la Cerda and Barón & Vicario explore form and proportion through furniture and objects, while Melania Chavarría, Prince Lauder, and Laguna Cyprien interpret Barragán’s world through textiles, collage, and scent.  

“El Zaguán” by Maremoto 

Ceramics become a family affair at  “El Zaguán”, an exhibition at AGO Projects by Guadalajara-based mother-daughter duo Maxine Álvarez and Natalia Ramos, who work together under the name Maremoto. Drawing on earth collected from different regions of Mexico, Álvarez creates glazes from the ashes of bougainvillea, agave bagasse, and pomegranate, while Ramos brings a sculptural sensibility. Taking the traditional cántaro (water vessel) and the humble box as their respective starting points, the artists explore ideas of shelter, intimacy, and coexistence through ceramic forms arranged like a miniature neighborhood. They gather and separate, evoking the ties between people and the spaces they inhabit. The exhibition takes its name from the zaguán, the transitional passage between street and home. 

ERAN at Consignia Vol. II 

Who says books belong on shelves? At Vol. II, a group exhibition at Consignia gallery in Anzures, Mexico City, studio ERAN, founded by Fernanda Díaz, puts them front and center. Two of the studio’s signature pieces, Mesa de Libro and Tótem de Libro, rethink the role of books in an interior, treating them as protagonists rather than accessories. The works join a wider selection of contemporary design objects exploring how materials and unconventional ideas can change the way we inhabit our spaces. With an emphasis on the relationship between function and artistic expression, the exhibition makes a case for everyday items as objects also worth looking at. 

möle studio: Mesa Tatema 

Fire becomes both a tool and a narrative in Mesa Tatema, the first collectible furniture piece by Mexico City’s möle studio, founded by Shanik Dörrbecker. The low-slung table pairs a thick slab of charred parota wood with two hand-carved volcanic stone supports. Both materials are transformed by fire—one through its origins, the other through a deliberate burning process that leaves its surface darkened, textured, and almost mineral in appearance. Rather than concealing the irregularities of the materials, Dörrbecker embraces them as part of the object’s identity. “We wanted the piece to remember its own process, not to hide the fire that made it possible,” she explains. The result is a striking exploration of Mexican materials and craftsmanship and marks the launch of the studio’s limited-production furniture collection. 

NIDAL by Pol Agustí 

At Javier Senosiain’s fantastical Parque Quetzalcóatl, AGO Projects also presented an installation by Barcelona-born, Mexico City–based designer Pol Agustí, who imagines new ways of inhabiting space. Developed during a residency at Senosiain’s Conjunto Satélite, the collection of clay, wood, and fiberglass objects draws inspiration from seeds, cocoons, insects, and subterranean organisms. Installed within the park’s Granja de Las Cabras, a dreamlike landscape of labyrinthine passages and cavernous niches, the sculptural forms perhaps appear to have grown from their surroundings.  

INÉDITO: The Future of Mexican Design 

Celebrating its 12th year, INÉDITO returns to Espacio CDMX in Chapultepec Park with 105 projects by professional designers and university students, each presented to the public for the first time. The showcase explores new approaches to manufacturing and functional objects. Among this year’s creations is a woven wicker throne by Francisco Garcés, whose intricate gradient treatment reimagines a traditional material through a contemporary lens. With Chile participating as Guest Country of Honor, the exhibition also opens a broader conversation about design across Latin America. More than a celebration of individual objects, INÉDITO offers a glimpse of an industry increasingly concerned with how things are made, who makes them, and their impact on the world. 

Difane 

Difane has quickly distinguished itself as a champion of vanguard Latin American design talents. Since Fernanda Salamanca and Andrea Gadsden founded the Mexico City gallery in 2020, they have worked closely with makers to develop exclusive pieces and custom furniture that reflects their cultural lineage. Six years later, the founders are stepping into a new role with Atara, the debut furniture collection to carry Difane’s own name. Its name derives from atar, the Spanish word for “to tie” or “to bind,” a reference that points directly to its inspiration: the classically woven chair that has furnished Latin American homes and public spaces for generations. Salamanca and Gadsden recast that familiar archetype across four chairs and two cocktail tables. Two of the chairs retain woven-cord seats, while upholstered versions pair nubby textiles with substantial timber frames. Chunky cylindrical details and visible joinery lend the pieces a hand-worked character whose sturdy proportions are tempered by softened edges.