A Bird’s-Eye View Of Our Giants Of Design Round II

Welcome to the second half of our yearly Interior Design Giants of Design coverage, which zeroes in on two of the most profitable verticals: hospitality and healthcare. In addition to ranking the highest fee-earners in those sectors, we also publish survey results that reveal growth markets, ascendant project typologies, how much FF&E these key players are specifying, and more. Also herein is our fourth-annual Sustainability Giants portfolio, in which we list studios with the most fee income from projects with measurable sustainability goals—and gauge the industry’s appetite for pursuing various eco standards.

Back in March, we reported that sectors including cultural/sports and government were way up even though firms still anxiously awaited full recovery of corporate and hospitality. Rising Giants had, however, seen a surge in the latter market (typically their biggest money-maker), and it turns out that uptick prefigured the big news for 2026: Hospitality has finally rebounded, up 14 percent year over year and 18 percent since 2019. Cue the fireworks!

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Interested in learning more about Interior Design’s 2026 Giants of Design? Check out our reports for Top 100 Giants, Rising Giants, and Hospitality Giants.

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That’s quite a turnaround from last year, when hospitality was still down 48 percent compared to prepandemic figures. (In fact, government surpassed hospitality as the number-three vertical for the top 100 Giants in 2025.) So much for the revenge-travel spree, which never materialized; ultimately, slow and steady progress powered recovery, and Giants are now super busy designing hospitality spaces with no end in sight. Project volume has ballooned from 7,532 in 2024 to 9,182 in 2025 and is expected to surpass 10k this year. Indeed, there is so much sector business that corporate and residentially focused firms have been getting a piece of the action, tapped by clients who value the perspective they bring to the table. Designers are also specifying lots of product on behalf of those clients: FF&C equaled $17.5 billion in 2025.

Healthcare, traditionally the second- or third-largest sector for the 100 Giants and fourth most lucrative for the Risers, was flat in 2025, indicating a not-surprising rightsizing after six years of category growth. The takeaway for 2025 isn’t the tapering off, however; it’s that explosive growth that led up to it. Consider that a decade ago, Giants were averaging 3,000 healthcare projects annually. That figure has nearly doubled in the intervening period, to 6,000 this year. And FF&C value, which is up 21 percent year on year, climbed a whopping 80 percent since 2019. Credit the boom to infrastructure changes stemming from COVID, a glut of mergers and acquisitions, and the broader evolution in care delivery: shorter hospital stays and faster transfers to rehab, more procedures being performed in outpatient facilities, and a rise in community-based clinics. Of course, while those shifts add up to more work, how that work is being phased and delivered has radically changed. Designers experience significant time compression in healthcare (as in other verticals), pressured to do more work in much less time than previously allotted. Plus, the rapid evolution in technology coupled with the healthcare-project funding-approval cadence means projects start and stop, get parceled out, and drag on—thus, designers often have to redo their own work to accommodate evolving needs, new equipment, and shrinking budgets. Small miracle, perhaps, that work has remained so healthy.

And now for sustainability metrics: The data is fairly status quo, in some cases trending up a smidge. Fees generated from projects with measurable sustainability goals increased 10 percent this year, from $3.0 to 3.3 billion. . .not bad! The percentage of firms reporting their clients followed LEED or WELL principles, but ultimately didn’t pursue certification, was flat, as were certification rates in general (which remain low), though carbon tracking upticked a touch. A bright spot is that our qualitative survey results and anecdotal reporting reveal that firms increasingly consider sustainability integral to good design rather than an add-on and prioritize eco measures whether or not the client requests it.

Taken in aggregate—and in the context of our bigger-picture March issue coverage, which celebrated overarching stability despite economic uncertainty—these sector-specific spotlights provide an intriguing overview of industry headwinds. They paint an optimistic picture of resilience, diversification, pipeline health, and a dogged commitment to environmental responsibility that’s even more impressive given the myriad challenges designers continue to face, from timeline/budget crunch to supply-chain woes and clients’ hesitance to invest in sustainable certifications. What better indication of the design professional’s—and thereby the industry’s—remarkable capacity to problem solve, pivot, and persist?