Design Miami Turns 20: Explore Show Highlights

Design Miami celebrates its 20th anniversary in its home city from December 2-7, 2025, with an offering of over 80 exhibitors. In the last two decades, the fair has become something of a career-maker for emerging designers and an industry force. Besides expansions in Paris and soon Dubai and Aspen, the fair claims a substantial spot on creatives’ calendars, but Miami is where it all began.

“It is important that the fair plays a role in many designers’ careers by giving them a certain credibility before they spread out,” says Grela Orihuela, senior vice president of fairs at Design Miami. Harry Nuriev, founder of Crosby Studios, for example, had a significant breakthrough at the fair’s 2019 edition and this year, he collaborates with Kohler as part of the brand’s annual partnership with an established designer. Similarly, artist and designer Katie Stout, who unveiled her “Bedroom Curio” exhibition at Design Miami in 2015, is back this year with a self-operating merry-go-round that is both psychedelic and whimsical, not to forget sustainable, with ceramic figures rotating on an endless spin.

Orihuela also points out the fair’s role in invigorating creatives across disciplines, adding that besides collectors, Design Miami attracts many interior designers and architects in search of new directions. “People come to us to get inspiration and to learn,” she says. Explore show highlights below.

Must-See Highlights From Design Miami 2025

Achille Salvagni Atelier

The fairs are often ideal platforms for galleries to soft launch their presence in a new market. Londoner enterprise Achille Salvagni Atelier coincides its first Design Miami participation with its expansion to West Palm Beach following its New York City space. The large booth pairs classics with contemporary and puts brand founder Achille Salvagni’s own creations with those by Gio Ponti and Piero Fornasetti as well as Renzo Zavanella from 1950s. A dramatic lacquered birchwood cocktail table from midcentury, for example, is in dialogue with Roman-born Salvagni’s rounded and inviting furniture pieces that reflect today’s organic forms and textural touches. A sculptural trumeau with a trompe-l’oeil screen-print surface by Ponti and Fornasetti is a standout.

Tuleste Factory

Whimsy is an indispensable part of a Design Miami experience, especially given the fair’s commitment to showcase emerging designers and the host city’s energy. Tuleste Factory’s booth is among the presentations where whimsy takes many forms and colors in the hands of a range of artists and designers, such as Marina Abramović, Lyora Pissarro, Karen Atta, Miranda Makaroff, Kim Mesches, and Merve Kahraman. Bert Furnari’s oozing mirrors and malleable coffee tables transform aluminum into almost moving kinetic objects through the self-taught maker’s experimental command on metal. Facture Studio’s benches, mirrors, and ottomans convey a similar feeling of ripple effect on resin with patterns that recalls waves across the furniture items.

Superhouse

The New York’s beloved gallery Superhouse returns to the fair after a hiatus with a win for the Best of Show in the Curio section. The gallery founder Stephen Markos dedicates his booth entirely to historical work of American design. Twelve names, including Gloria Kisch, Michele Oka Doner, Dan Friedman, Wendy Maruyama, and Forrest Myers, are showcased in a setting helmed in collaboration with Studio AHEAD and wall paint by Farrow & Ball. Doner’s candle holder in cast bronze from 1990 radiates a dramatic bacchanal force while Myers’s purple-hued sharply geometric anodized aluminum chair from 1980 carries the era’s unabashed color choices and bold experimentalism to the present.

R & Company

R &. Company, the Tribeca powerhouse gallery, also partners with yet another major wallpaper company to raise the dramatic effect of their booth in the visually competing setting of a fair. Calico dresses the backdrop of artist and designer Francesca DiMatteo’s floral objects with a new wallpaper also designed by herself, Titled Lattice, the wall covering across a small nook within the booth release a floral burst of colors and patterns that are both delicate and determined, not unlike DiMatteo’s mirror and chairs that blend theatricality with use and daydreaming alike.

Cristina Grajales 

As Orihuela reminds, the 20th edition is partially a retrospective look at the fair’s history which is perhaps most vivid in Hechizoo Textiles’s reuniting with Cristina Grajales two decades later in Miami. The Bogotá-based weaving studio’s takeover which is titled Woven Territory is both effortless and nuanced with furniture and decorative pieces each reminding the indelible value of the handmade. Made with natural fibers as well as wood and metal, seater, hangings, and rugs inhabit the booth in natural tones, composing an overall oomph effect while each demanding a closer look into their DNA.

Design Miami 2.0

The fair’s curatorial director Glenn Adamson occupies a section with a group exhibition that celebrates the present in an effort to celebrate the fair’s past and hint at its future. Adamson invited eight designers and studios to contemplate the fair’s overall theme of Make.Believe, including Tina Frey Designs, Steven Young Lee, Victoria Yakusha, and Mehdi Dakhli. Among the hefty statements is Antwerp-based Ukrainian designer Yakusha who has opens her Design District storefront this week with her Land of Light series which are larger-than-life sculptures. Made in Yakusha’s signature material ztista, which combines paper, clay, and hay, the mythic figures with punctured textures invite touch both as a healing ritual and appreciation of the particular material.

Moderne Gallery

The Philadelphia gallery demonstrates the impact of a singular material and focus on a time period with a booth dedicated to Japanese mastery and its connection to Midcentury wood. Stemming from the Japanese term for high skill craftsmanship—shokunin, the works by a medley of designers include a 1972-dated George Nakashima bench titled Concoid which has brought the gallery’s this year’s Best of Show award in the Historic section. Miriam Carpenter, Mira Nakashima, and Ashley Joseph Martin are other names to be included in the gallery’s theatrical composition.

Casa Malaparte x Gagosian

An amusing encounter at this year’s fair is blue chip art gallery Gagosian’s collaboration with Casa Malaparte in Capri. The architectural marvel house which was established by Curzio Malaparte’s descendant Tommaso Rositani Suckert in in 2019 is celebrated with a nuanced installation which includes a large photograph from the cliffside house’s scenic window. This domestic reference supports the new release of Malaparte’s iconic sofa which was later reinterpreted by Jean-Luc Godard in a now-classic cobalt blue color for the seminal, 1963-dated film Le Mépris (Contempt).