Some of the most impactful work of late, like Milan Design Week or NYCxDESIGN, have come from emerging and independent designers. Four in particular stand out from the crowd as they’ve already developed their own distinct practice, drawn from their unique studies and skills: robotic and material fabrication, music, architecture, and art. These designers’ practices, informed perhaps by non-traditional realms, have with them unique results. Each has evolved a vision of craft and aesthetics that has been missing within the industry. Some have already been exhibited at international fairs, but AN Interior predicts they’ll quickly rise through the ranks—or, at least, they should. Here are the four burgeoning designers not to miss.
Kiki Goti
New York–based Greek designer Kiki Goti is perhaps best known for her steel-based lighting that blends the feminine and masculine. Beyond the Celestial Table Lamp and Buttoned Up collection, Goti is first and foremost an educator. She teaches at Pratt Institute and Parsons New School, focusing on cutting-edge technologies and robotic fabrication. She’s also the cofounder of the nearly year-old architecture and interiors firm, The House Special Studio. Already Goti and her cofounder and partner have been commissioned to renovate an apartment in Paris and, most recently, a wine bar and restaurant in Brooklyn, Entre Nous. Throughout all scales and typologies—furniture, accessories, interiors, and education—Goti’s attention to material innovation, femininity, and beauty have made her a rising star in the design world.
Zack Nestel-Patt
Zack Nestel-Patt is the founder of Los Angeles–based furniture studio Ah Um Design Studio. The name riffs on Charles Mingus’s album Mingus Ah Um, which is a nod to the designer’s career as a jazz and classical bassist and indie rock musician in the band No Swoon. After years of touring, Nestel-Patt moved to California and took up woodworking with a fellow musician-turned-furniture-maker. The passion project soon became the basis for Ah Um and the idiosyncratic, playful, and yet warm design language it models. Despite founding the studio in 2024, the musician, designer, and builder already debuted work during NYCxDESIGN, a testament to the power and resonance of Nestel-Patt’s aesthetic, which highlights the human hand behind furniture making.
Zeynep Arolat
An architect, designer, and painter, Zeynep Arolat finds communion within her many interlocking disciplines. As the founder of ZAROLAT, a contemporary art and collectible design gallery in Brooklyn, Arolat cultivates a community of fellow interdisciplinary practices: international artists, designers, and makers. This year, the studio made its debut at Milan Design Week, presenting new work at Alcova for the group exhibition OMNIA, which Arolat curated. She debuted the geometric, oak-and-copper Simple Chair, as well as the Mirror Series, which exposes its hardware to elevate the art of engineering. Her collectible design, her architecture practice, and other work balance function and timeless aesthetics. The result is considered and cross-disciplinary.
Pilar de Ariño
Born and based in Mexico City, Pilar de Ariño is an artist and designer who blurs the boundaries between the two disciplines. Sometimes this comes in the form of oil paintings depicting the facades of apartments or partly demolished buildings in Egypt that speak to a new urban landscape, as in her Artefactos series. Other times this ethos manifests itself in the form of furniture, like a stool made of acuchillada volcanic stone that connects feminine forms with the land and creation/destruction. Currently, the designer-meets-artist is working on a sculptural coffee table as an extension of her shape studies within her Visiones sin Motivo series.