The Chicest Designers in New York All Seemed to Agree on These 4 Trends at NYCxDESIGN 2026
Shapeshifting furniture, art-kid ceramics, and emotionally in-tune lighting point toward a future where the home finally feels like it gets you back
Since its inception in 2012, NYCxDESIGN has evolved into a borough-hopping extravaganza of trade shows, summits, panels, cocktail parties, open studios, award ceremonies, and exhibitions that make the supposed ‘week’ feel closer to a month.
As a massively centralized cultural event in what is arguably the most culturally overstimulating city on the planet, there’s perhaps nowhere I look more closely for what’s next than right outside my apartment door.
From the WSA Building downtown to the gigantic six-block juggernaut that is the Javits Center, this year’s half-month blur of tote bags digging into shoulders, frantic cross-borough commutes, and heel-blistering power walks past Pleats Please-clad people felt more justified than usual. Mostly because these interior design trends actually looked new.
Not ‘new’ in the AI-smooth sense where everything is really an anemic sequel of something else, but a potential renaissance of capital ‘D’ Design, packed with soon-to-be-everywhere oddities that might actually make your life easier, prettier, or at the very least, more interesting.
1. Avant-Garde Antiques
Before landing at STUDIOTWENTYSEVEN in New York City, Francesco Balzano’s Tessuto chair debuted at Rome’s Villa Medici, whose theatrical architecture and botanical gardens inspired its jacquard toile and sculptural forms – part of a broader Design Week return to historical grandeur seen everywhere from Sarah Sherman Samuel’s marble Pop Pop tables to Puiforcat’s opulent tableware revivals.
New pieces with a clear reverence for antiquity, rendered with varying degrees of subversion, emerged as one of the fair’s more interesting status symbols in an era where everyone has already caught onto vintage.
Seated inside one of the ten iconic Jetsons-esque EPISODE chairs at APPARATUS’s immersive PEEPSHOW exhibition, created in partnership with heritage silversmithing house Puiforcat, I found myself repeatedly pressing tiny buttons for fleeting flashes of bijoux antique tableware reimagined in jewelry-grade materials. A lion-head soup tureen from 1772. An Anne d’Autriche tumbler from 1945. Sterling silver, gold gilt, black onyx, and craftsmanship reportedly clocking upwards of 1,200 hours for certain pieces.
Further downtown at STUDIOTWENTYSEVEN – the sprawling Neo-Renaissance Tribeca gallery that remains inspiring whether Design Week is happening or not – Francesco Balzano’s TESSUTO became a kind of ping-pong dialogue between French and Italian, old and new.
Francesco, a French-born designer with an Italian father, developed the collection after a month-long residency at Rome’s historic Villa Medici, where the stately architecture proved just as influential as the idyllic gardens overlooking the city below. That story carried throughout the furniture-focused solo debut – including a daybed, stool, sideboard, pedestal, and table wrapped in a custom jacquard landscape that, historically, might have taken the form of a Toile de Jouy. And, in a way, it did.
The fabric itself felt French in spirit, given its close-up renderings of trees and foliage woven in dusty greens, faded pinks, and warm yellows mirroring the villa’s sunbaked walls – but, completing the conversation, was produced by Italian (ding, ding, ding) textile house Rubelli. From afar, the pattern dissolved into abstraction; only while approaching did branches, leaves, and fragments of landscape crystallize into view.
A similar appetite for old surfaced across town at Colony, where Sarah Sherman Samuel’s first-ever solo debut, Weight & Wonder, included sleek-lined Pop Pop tables in deliciously veiny two-toned marble that recalled the status shorthand of ancient Greece, softened by the cleaner silhouettes of today. Legacy, permanence, and prestige echoed just the same.
A little much? Maybe so. But then again, when everyone suddenly has an honorary B.A. in secondhand sourcing courtesy of Facebook Marketplace, even extraordinary vintage references begin losing some of their exclusivity. The answer, then, appears to be a return to good old-fashioned opulence, newly difficult to replicate.
2. Barley-There Lighting
Don’t panic – these dripping, drooping, swooping fixtures aren’t actually in as much danger as they appear. But really, what better way to inject a little tension into a room than lighting that looks one wrong move away from disaster?
Lighting suspended from wires wispily approaching the point of disappearance turned out to be one of the defining overhead anomalies of the week – and a rather GLP-1-ish departure from the inflated orb lighting that has dominated just about every IG-first restaurant interior since Covid.
Ironically, the look isn’t new. In fact, this season signaled the return of an older industrial lighting language, underscored by the 20th-anniversary celebration of Marc Sadler’s iconic Twiggy floor lamp for Foscarini, commemorated during Design Week with its own jazz-filled cocktail party. Two decades later, Twiggy’s signature off-balance silhouette proved to be exactly the urtext that it is.
Mostly, that lanky experimentation moved upward toward the ceiling. At ICFF, Studio Anna Dawson translated childhood memories of ribbon dancing with her grandmother into cascading chandeliers of kiln-formed glass, while Anony Studio’s dizzying high-wire installation stretched delicate glowing orbs to such unnerving extremes, I can only compare it to watching Cirque.
Meanwhile, Cuff Studio’s Petal Promenade collection slightly quelled my cortisol with a beautifully 'Brut' approach to barely-there lighting, debuting a raw solid-brass pendant with asymmetrical matte mouth-blown glass panels that felt both soft and severe all at once. It's a fixture I could absolutely imagine hanging slightly off-center beside an armchair or hovering low over a side table, delicately destabilizing a room.
Perhaps the most prominent example, though, came from Canadian lighting brand Matthew McCormick Studio, whose New York debut, Ova in Colour for Afternoon Light, transformed a former corporate office overlooking the East River into an ethereal dreamscape through a towering two-story installation of 41 softly glowing pendants. Suspended overhead like celestial organisms, the layered pâte de verre glass forms felt alive – or, as the house described them, ‘womb-like.’
East, west, floor-to-ceiling, these ultra-thin appendages pushed the orb agenda to increasingly celestial and appropriately perilous extremes. Best experienced up close and off-screen, this waif-look-lighting feels like it may finally have a fighting chance of escaping influencer interiors and migrating into actual homes for good this time.
3. Flexible Furniture
In 2027, furniture increasingly meets us where we’re at. A pet bed might hide beneath a glossy Manhattan-worthy tabletop, a stool may rotate into a side table and back again, and a sinuously layered desktop offering the illusion of minimalism could very well be the category’s chicest sleight of hand.
You could call it flexible furniture, or perhaps furniture with a hidden agenda, but pieces transcending their original prototype with outsized elegance were everywhere this May.
Fourth-generation heir Leleu, Alexia LeLeu, now at the helm of The Met-acclaimed Maison, revisited her great-grandfather and grandfather’s work through a more functional lens with the sinuous Lila Desk at Invisible Collection – scaling up what was once a 1940s coffee table silhouette and adding a second tabletop inspired by her lovingly disorganized grandfather, who appreciated having somewhere to discreetly stash clutter beneath the surface. Executive-office grandeur above, controlled chaos below: finally, a desk that lets maximalists cosplay as minimalists when necessary.
Elsewhere, just-launched studio DuroDeco married into modularity with an adaptable family of tables, while Cuff Studio added an impossibly black piano-lacquer shine to a cleverly nested pet-bed-occasional-table hybrid. Also at Invisible Collection, a Bamboo Coffee Table by Droulers Architecture paired plush, spare-seat-worthy Dedar upholstery with a solid metal tray surface that eliminated the usual low-table anxieties around drinks, feet, and displaced coffee-table books. Each intuitive enough, in my opinion, to become a fairly immediate living room trend.
While it’s difficult to imagine an oversized butterfly-shaped oak console table becoming a literal breakout hit, a piece by Acht Studio also demonstrated just how far flexible furniture can fly, concealing four-stem wine-glass flaps beneath whimsical wooden wings. Suddenly, the ‘just-for-show’ console table became a pretty plausible accessory for anyone serious about hosting.
Theater aside, my mind kept returning to the striking simplicity of newcomer MOOOMO. Founded by Sophy Shi in 2024, these playful stools transform into tables with a two-second twist and can take on entirely original personalities through the swap of a washable cover. More than a clever trick, the system challenges the longstanding stagnancy of furniture itself. Why shouldn’t pieces evolve over time the way clothing, taste, or even people do?
Across the category, furniture felt less fixed and more collaborative – inviting us to 'play sorcerer' and meet our needs in real time rather than living around them.
4. Funky Ceramics
Words like ‘funky’ and ‘quirky’ no longer carry the pejorative edge they once did. At ICFF, the art-kid-ceramic look was everywhere – well on its way to becoming the new abnormal.
We’re getting really weird on the throwing wheel.
I first noticed this in Leanne Ford’s two-tone splatter-paint tabletop collection for il Buco Vita, which kicked off the festivities with a kind of rock-and-roll irreverence applied to Portuguese stoneware. As the week unfolded, however, I realized that was actually one of the more tame examples.
At ICFF, Studio J.E.D. founder Jen Dwyer brought softness and asymmetry to wheel-thrown vitrified stoneware through a series of bulbous lamp bases finished in glossy neutral glazes with occasional jolts of cobalt blue and 22k gold luster accents. (Unsurprisingly, her work is already stocked inside heaven on earth: the home section at Bergdorf Goodman)
Nearby, Brooklyn ceramicist Jesse Hamerman of Beginner Ceramics embraced exaggerated Deco curves and negative space across mirrors, lighting, and vessels, while Karen Gayle Tinney lent classical ceramic shapes a sense of movement with braided and woven fibers.
Then there were some pieces that barely resembled ceramics at all, like Canadian designer Simon Johns’ FF Grid Shelving Unit: a slender aluminum-like grid structure roughened with lichen-esque layers of stoneware in silvers, greens, and dusty pinks that appeared as if they were excavated from some enchanted parallel universe.
Speaking of, the signature slab and coiling techniques of Cambodian ceramicist Sivim Ly could certainly live there too, adding a sense of surrealism (even to a cement-floored Javits Center booth) with octopus-based lamps, scalloped side tables, and an almost ancient, magical aura.
Established designers are feeding their share of flames here, but more than any other category this season, ceramics felt propelled forward by emerging talent. A few years ago, this level of art-kid-quirky still felt niche. Now, the sheer volume of fresh energy suggests the weird ceramic renaissance may not be a fleeting trend, but the new visual language of the medium entirely.
It’s a bad day to be a boring table.
Further down south, the Kips Bay Decorator Show House this year proved too 'Palm Beach' for a single property, splitting its fringed, cocktail-soaked coastal fantasia across two separate houses instead.
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