15 Contemporary Design Studios You Must Know About

Art or Design? The burning question that just keeps coming up whether you are designing an office space, renovating your home, or looking for a centerpiece for a hotel lobby. As a leading online gallery featuring thousands of art and design options, we are often asked this question. And we at The Artling think why not both!

The market for contemporary design is thriving fuelled by an increasing number of notable design talents, galleries, and design events. In this article, we share 15 design studios who are blurring the line between art and design. Each of these design studios brings their unique creativity and craftsmanship to the fore resulting in a wide selection of design pieces that's perfect for home decor, corporate spaces, or hotels.

Joyce Wang Studio

Joyce Wang Studio, based in London and Hong Kong, specializes in luxury hospitality interior design with a select residential portfolio across the globe. Notable projects include the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel (Los Angeles), The Landmark Mandarin Oriental (Hong Kong), Mott 32 (Hong Kong and Vancouver) with The Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park due to reopen Q1 of 2019.

Wang runs the two boutique-sized studios concurrently. Her architectural approach to design and love of materials is rooted in her degrees in Architecture and Materials Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Later, she received her Masters at the Royal College of Art in London where interdisciplinary collaborations were to influence her work to come.

Joyce Wang Studio was most recently honored by Dezeen's top 400 Designer Hot List and were finalists for the World Interior Festival in Berlin. Wang has spoken at international design platforms such as Maison & Objet, Business Of Design Week and the World Interior Festival.

VIN & Co

VIN & Co is a Seoul-based design studio created by designer Kevin Park. He likes to design furniture with infinite imagination and recreate the Creator's designs. The Epic_Chair thought of the Bible character Daniel and his friends. Brave, wise, and faithful. Having stories in the furniture is fun. If the story is covered after creating the basics through user culture research, It has a device that can satisfy both users from the point of use. DANZI Chair, BOXTER, and wireless charging stools are the result of user culture and storytelling.

Uniqka

Uniqka is an Istanbul-based design brand that invigorates old craftsmanship traditions with new form and a subtle contemporary aesthetic.

Uniqka designs focus on craft and material. The emphasis is on the versatility and elegance of leather.

Collaborating with designers around the world, Uniqka creates handmade objects. The collection comprises of lighting pieces, side tables, tabletop objects, wall accessories, and smaller office accessories to adorn any home or workspace with organizational functionality as much as stylistic originality.

KONSTANTIN

KONSTANTIN articulates today's contemporary materials and design with an artisanal touch of ‘heritage’. Lead designer Dila Gokalp, an award-winning architect and founder of DGA - DILA GOKALP ARCHITECTS, expanded her material research under a 'couture' product collection project. Each collection is designed by a collective of professionals with passion, who have more than 20 years of experience in the field of design, manufacturing, and art. Thus, acting as a studio; KONSTANTIN curates design objects that are simple yet sophisticated while they indulge in eastern cultural heritage with a western curation.

KONSTANTIN has two curated galleries; their own design products are nested under "Collection" and a gathering of special design brands with "Selection". With KONSTANTIN Collection, the studio articulate the notion of heritage and harmonize it with magnetic feels and looks of natural stone and marble. Besides the daily-use products, KONSTANTIN has also a limited collection as 'collectibles'.

Conceptually originated in the city of Istanbul, KONSTANTIN operates in London. In our online design gallery, you will find a curated collection of furniture and accessories for a sophisticated final touch to your interiors.

Desinere

The Latin root of the word silence is desinere, meaning “stop”. The type of stopping at the roots of silence is that which enables an individual to take the sensory measure of the world. It’s ironic that in the state of being detached from our surroundings, we become more attuned and sensitive to it. Through this momentary solace, we begin to make subtle discoveries.

Based in Singapore, Desinere thus approaches design through a quiet reflection of relationships between items, people & experiences; to create authentic, honest objects that are refreshingly unexpected. They believe that design is a holistic entity that encompasses different design disciplines, and is a continuing journey of experimentation and discovery that is not simply limited by labels.

haoshi design

haoshi is a Taipei-based home and living décor design company established in 2009, named by the Chinese pronunciation "good thing".

They believe that life is full of happiness and interesting things. See every single thing from a different angle of view, and concentrate on everything from this busy world. Anything could be a good thing.

They add a kind of purity and peace into their design concept. Every exquisite design presents haoshi’s unique life philosophy. Believing the world is simple, as long as our mind is simple and always here, haoshi discovers every “good thing” in our lives, creating a new story through time.

haoshi’s collections present different ways of living, observe natural behavior and create it to a luxury home decoration. All detail on the product is full of master carver works. Let the simple and exquisite detail give you peace of mind and let good things happen!

Hyfen / HCWD Studio

Hsin-Chun Wang & Ye Liu, Founders of HCWD Studio, are based in New York City. They are one of the 50 Young Professionals of Red Dot 2016, 2016 Best Designers/Best Design Studio from International Furniture Fair Singapore and the nominees of German Design Awards 2016. Their studio practices in art, furniture, and architectural design.

Their works strike to rediscover the using experience of daily objects and redefine the relationship between human scale, space, and landscape. They work at the intersection of functionality and sensibility, dedicated to integrate elegant form with sense. They refine details and follow the nature of the material with challenging ideas to create a design with meanings and to provide a solution for improving.

SUGO

SUGO was born in 2018 with the sole mission of creating groundbreaking contemporary Biophilic furniture designs. Started by husband and wife team Kevin and Giulia we are serious lovers of nature and wanted to fuse advance sustainable technologies with nature-inspired creations. All their designs focus on working with or giving back to nature and they are all produced in limited quantity in Italy.

Kevin is the founder and director of COC design based in Hong Kong and Italy and was educated in the Architectural Association and Bartlett School of Architecture in London under the world-renown architects Peter Cook and Marcos Cruz. He was the sole recipient of Bartlett Archigram Design Award in 2001 while Giulia, who hails from the Abruzzo region of Italy has extensive directorial experience working with the Italian/China Design Education industry.

Many of Kevin’s creations have won international awards including IDA Los Angeles, A Design Award Italy, Architizer USA, China Red Star Award, Chicago Athenaeum Award, Perspective Award Hong Kong to name a few as well as been published in DesignBoom, DesignMilk, Home Journal, Design 360, IDEAT magazine, Terraform magazine, Perspective Magazine, Home Italia, Architectural Digest, Architizer and many more while Giulia has been the vital muse and idea “donator” in some of the most creative designs in the company.

Together, they want to bring the most original and environmentally conscious designs to any interior.

Saccal Design House

Saccal Design House is a family business started by two young architects with a strong vision and a commitment to excellence.

Nour Saccal is an architect who completed her graduate studies at the Barcelona Institute of Architecture with an undergraduate degree in Architecture from the American University of Beirut. Maysa Saccal is an interior architect who graduated from the Lebanese American University in Beirut.

It was established in 2014 in Beirut, Lebanon and has shown massive growth and support since then; what started with product design has quickly developed into bigger projects ranging from interior design to architecture of both residential and commercial buildings.

Tiipoi

Tiipoi is a product design studio based between Bangalore and London.

India fascinates and inspires them. The studio thinks that there is more to Indian design than just sticking an elephant on it and that Indian craft has more to offer than simply repeating the past.

India can seem a pretty chaotic place. But sitting there, quietly are some really incredible, super functional designs. The “designers” of these objects if they can be found at all, aren’t celebrated in the same way as they are in other countries. Instead, design is seen as a by-product of living. This unassuming approach, with an emphasis on a quiet functionality, is what inspires and drives Tiipoi's creative process.

Tiipoi tells positive and insightful stories of a real India, that is changing and shifting all the time. They don’t want to tell nostalgic stories of its past but instead prefer to look at what is happening right now, and highlight India’s role in contemporary design.

Xcellent Design

Xcellent Design is a design-driven brand manufacturer from Taiwan. They collect the senses of creative, innovative, aesthetics, and lifestyle to generate better products, proper service, and meaningful value about function, material, and scenario. Their humanistic-oriented thinking and style-led aesthetic experience is the core thinking for each design.

Xcellent Design pursues three design principles to
1) meet the demand of contemporary life, it must be comfortable and practical, dynamically reflect the present life and individual style.
2) offer a great experience, they integrate advanced technology, classic traditional craftsmanship, and eco-thinking of the future to create a beautiful and comfortable experience.
3) inherit their culture through their design to present oriental aesthetics, to modernize the traditional spirit and retrieve the emotional connection between people.

Beyond Object

Beyond Object is a design label creating and distributing poetic objects globally - including desktop objects, accessories, and home accessories. The vision of the brand is to probe the values beyond the physical form itself, creating logical sculptures that serve the daily needs of people. The core of their design value is about finding and expressing the quintessential quality of things from function, material or metaphor.

Hanhsi Chen is the founder and design director of design studio Poetic Lab. Based in London and Taipei, Hanhsi constantly participates in international design fairs like Salone del Mobile and Maison & Objet. In 2013 his Ripple Light and Shadow Clock was included in an exhibition called “Lightopia” curated by Vitra Design Museum, and later on, both designs became part of their permanent collection. After one year long of development and collaboration, now the Ripple Lamp is manufactured by renowned Austria brand J.& L. Lobmeyr.

He has been awarded Design Report Award in 2013 during Salone del Mobile, while Salone Satellite Award granted him the 3rd prize. ELLE decoration China chose him as the young design talent of the year in 2013, and Maison et Objet chose him as Rising Asian Talent in 2015. His works have been widely published in major media like the New York Times, The Telegraph, Wallpaper* Magazine, Monocle, ELLE decoration, The Wired, INTERNI, Dezeen, DAMn, AXIS, Abitare.

Bentu Design

Bentu is an independent Guangzhou-based design brand founded in 2011. An experimental, explorative, and cross-over team, the studio is at the intersection of product design and innovation, combining design with manufacture. A feature of their design is to make each material return to its nature by revealing its original texture. Hiding behind the form and the function is the equal care for all—all the raw materials, techniques and cultures that makeup things.

BENTU  product portfolio covers lighting, home furnishing, outdoor furniture, wall decors and so on with most of the products certified to CE, ROHS2.0, SAA, C-TICK, FCC, and IC. They have their own IPR and more than 100 patents.

Aratani Fay

Aratani・Fay is a collaborative design studio by Ayako Aratani and Evan Fay, based in Detroit, MI. Both received an MFA in 3D design at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2016 and founded the studio shortly after their graduation. Working as independent designers, the duo shares a studio and workshop, collaborating on projects and exhibiting together. Past exhibitions include a solo show at Salon Gallery in Boston, Architectural Design Digest Show in NYC, Salone Satellite in Milan, Collective Design in NYC, Interior Design Show in Toronto.

Studio Buzao

Buzao is a young brand founded in Guangzhou, China in 2017 that focuses on experimental furniture design and has now divided into collectible design and art experiments, led by Peng with fellow designers SU Zhenhan, MA Jieying, and HUANG Shiya.

Meaning ‘I don’t know’ in Chinese, Buzao reflects the studio’s interest in experimentation in unexpected materials and processes, often with unforeseeable results. The studio’s philosophy emphasizes the interplay between shapes, light and the environment, challenging the definition of product design by infusing its methods with the uncertainty of the artistic process. As part of a new vanguard of emerging Chinese designers, the studio is located in Pearl River Delta, a capital of manufacturing and fabrication. The studio’s proximity to these resources has provided high-level approaches to craftsmanship, technology, and material in each of its pieces. No two projects are ever quite the same and materials have included volcanic rock, laminated glass, marble, and electroplated stainless steel. 
 

We hope the craftmanship of these design studios inspires you to explore contemporary design works for your next home decor or architectural design project. You can easily buy the design items listed above by clicking on the product images. Should you need additional guidance or have custom requirements, you can avail of our dedicated art consultancy services or chat with our expert curators from any product page.