A Look Inside Unique Design X Mexico City 2026

It is no longer an industry insight that art and design collecting go hand-in-hand. A fan of Ansel Kiefer—for example—will likely seek out a Nacho Carbonell lighting fixture or a follower of Cecily Brown’s paintings is well likely an owner of India Mahdavi furniture. Besides fairs that offer material from all sectors under a single roof, such as TEFAF or Salon Art + Design, art fairs are ideal opportunities for their design-focused counterparts to land on a town, such as Design Miami which takes place during Art Basel in Miami and Paris.

Unique Design X’s positioning in Mexico City similarly coincides with the city’s established art fair ZONA MACO, which both ran through February 8, 2026. In its third year, the design fair, which takes place at Expo Reforma, not only exemplifies Mexico’s unparalleled legacy and current impact in design and craft, but also connects the local scene and the market with a global network of design authority. This unifying role that the fair adopts is not surprising given Unique Design X’s other previous iterations in Paris, Miami, Savannah, and Shanghai since its launch during 2019’s Shanghai Art Week.

Parallel to Unique Design X’s run, Mexico City brims with studios and design galleries presenting projects that create a vortex of creativity across town. “Mexico City is a place that continues to invite and transform our understanding of the multitude of approaches to functional art and collectible design,” tells Interior Design the fair founder Morgan Morris Sans. “It is an international ecosystem of inspiring exchange that informs how we position ourselves, our participants and our curation.”

Discover Highlights From Unique Design X Mexico City 2026

Carpenter’s Workshop Gallery

Perhaps the most globally present gallery in this year’s edition, Carpenter’s Workshop Gallery exhibits in the FORMA section with a presentation dedicated to French artist and designer Léa Mestres’s lighting fixture, titled Jessy. Joyful and somewhat reminiscent of Mexican design’s bold flirt with colors, the floor sculpture has a fuchsia tone and a bumpy surface, with a duo of shades balancing luminescence and play. Reaching 63 inches in height, the cement form challenges notions of neutrality and adaptability in form and appearance with the Parisian designer’s uncompromising visual vocabulary. The presentation also joins the fair’s celebration of 200 years of Franco-Mexican cultural exchange which will be the theme of a special evening titled “French Mex Touch” on Saturday.

Roham Shamekh

“We invite viewers to experience the works that highlight this renowned moment of multicultural collaboration,” says Morris Sans, citing Roham Shamekh’s participation as an example. Based in Dubai, the Iranian American artist and designer has been a sought-after name in international fairs, including the most recent Design Miami and Basic.Space in New York. A duo of ceramic and epoxy resin side tables embody a sense of eeriness and welcome at the same time, grasping a moment of oozing and solidification in the designer’s sculptural approach to use. Equally akin to chopped wood and a chemical explosion, the pieces convey a moody aura complete with Shamekh’s large couch which he created in the same aesthetic as well as an abstract painting.

Fredrik Nielsen

Swedish glass artist Fredrik Nielsen makes his Unique Design X debut, contributing to Morris Sans’s statement on this year’s noticeably global program. Inspired by pop culture and graffiti, the blown glass pieces, including a tilted candleholder with a melting effect, demystifies the tradition’s supposed attributions of perfection and seriousness. A graduate of the Pilchuch Glass School in Washington, Nielsen was a recent resident at the Corning Museum of Glass as well as a finalist for Loewe Foundation craft prize.

Gaia Matisse

An advisor and curator—as well as the great-great-granddaughter Henri Matisse—Gaia Matisse presents a booth with selection of furniture and objects. In line with this year’s celebration of Franco-Mexican heritage, French painter and sculptor Ugo Schildge’s lush paintings of flora and fauna provide a textural backdrop on the walls while a totemic sculpture by Mexico City and Los Angeles-based Sten Studio in the form of various marble pieces stacks on top of each other heighten Matisse’s overall earthy visual palette. Sten Studio also presents a display of their totemic sculptures in collaboration with British perfumer Penhaligon’s, titled Whispers of Halfeti.

Nativa Living

Another local tastemaker brand Nativa Living presents a vignette of rich materiality and comfort in furniture. Wood, marble, and volcanic rock are common materials the Mexico City-born enterprise exhibits, and here, their palette also includes wicker and copper. The Aura armchair is a medley of hammered copper and woven wicker, in which the former hard material offers the seating element to the latter’s generous expansion as a backrest with a bulbous form. Playful and inventive, the furniture piece, which was made in Michoacán, offers a surprising alchemy of seemingly disconnected materials. 

Antologia & Katja Loher

Collaboration, unsurprisingly, yields bold experimentation—for proof, take a look at an installation helmed by Guatemalan design studio Antologia and Swiss artist Katja Loher. Trippy in its creation of an outer space environment, the display indeed focuses on the hexagon form as a symbol of perfection and purpose. A suite of star-shaped light fixtures beam across the installation while planet-like lamps hover above a set of hexagon-shaped ottomans in a thick yellow color. The intergalactic installation is an example of Morris Sans’s definition of her fair as a “bridge between culture, ideas and ways of being by presenting objects as an experiential moment to transform our relationship to our daily lives and all emotive aspects that exists within them.”

Sofia Hagen

Among the presentations that meander the realm of technology, Sofia Hagen offers a visually tranquil but technically complex installation of a seater. Supplemented with a sonic component, the London-based designer’s HEMPLA – Meditation Pit Stop comes out of a collaboration with Studio Marmi and The Sound Nutritionist. The 3D-printed meditation set features a handmade hemp and wool rug and seats made out of sugar. The lighting component operates based on the sitter’s circadian rhythm while a soundscape adds yet another sensory element.