9 Standout Presentations from Design Fair Collectible New York’s Second Edition

Summer has gone and past, and September delivers the deluge of fairs and flagship events that breathe the hustle and bustle back into New York City. As the art world reflects upon The Armory and Independent, runways begin lining unassuming streets for NY Fashion Week, and the city brims with returning collectors and creatives fresh from East End idylls and coastal European escapes. Into this mix, a relative newcomer has quickly staked its ground. Arriving by way of Brussels, Belgium, Collectible has returned to NYC for its second edition, bringing with a needed jolt of contemporary design into the crowded fall calendar. The fair’s sophomore outing trades its debut digs—two floors of WSA’s original Water Street location—for a single unfinished floorplate at the hip office purveyor’s newest outpost, 180 Maiden Lane. The setting amplifies the fair’s experimental spirit, with spectacles ranging from living-room-like vignettes to dinner theater performances and a live piercing studio, all spliced across six curatorial sections with more than 120 exhibitors.

If last year was a proof of concept, this edition shows the fair flexing its muscle. The uptick in participation from both international and domestic galleries signals a growing appetite for contemporary collectible design in New York. With more players and less square footage, the presentations are forced into sharper focus—stands that feel punchier, more inventive, and sometimes delightfully over-the-top. Rather than relying on scale alone, exhibitors are experimenting with immersive build-outs and playing to the strength of friendly collaborations to push beyond the expected booth format. The shift underscores Collectible’s ability to act not just as a marketplace, but as a stage for experimentation.

That experimentation is also what makes this edition feel bigger than the sum of its parts. It’s not just about furniture, lighting, or objects on pedestals. The atmosphere, the performance, the unexpected encounters that unfold when design crosses into theater, fashion, or even body art. It’s fun, it’s ambitious, and at times, it’s a lot. But in a city already bursting at the seams with cultural noise, Collectible NYC manages to carve out a moment of real presence, demanding attention with its mix of spectacle and substance.

As is the case with every fair, there are a handful of memorable moments that tend to percolate beyond closing day. Here are the people, pieces, and presentations we think cut through the noise:

Ritual of Adornment by Llewellyn Chupin at Collectible

In Ritual of Adornment, Paris- and New York–based designer Llewellyn Chupin reimagines the possibilities of hand-patinated aluminum through a lens of softness and femininity. The collection—comprising a screen, bench, chair, and floor lamps—borrows directly from the vocabulary of fashion, incorporating jewelry-like chains, pearl drops, bows, and silk pleating. Each detail is a precisely placed intervention that transforms the material’s weight and severity into something unexpectedly delicate.

Chupin’s balancing act is exacting: remove the adornment, and the forms would tip toward austerity; include too much, and the pieces might feel kitschy. Here Chupin finds an equilibrium where ornament almost becomes essential structure. Here, aluminum, often coded as industrial and masculine, is recast as intimate and sensual. Chupin demonstrates how the smallest shifts—an arc of chain, a bow’s tension, the glimmer of a pearl—can alter perception, allowing the material to transcend its own heaviness.

Green Room No. 1 by Mzwakhe Ndlovu for WSA

With Green Room No. 1, designer and curator Mzwakhe Ndlovu extends WSA’s ongoing inquiry into community and collaboration. Named for the backstage sanctuaries where performers retreat between acts, this installation transforms the fair booth into a pseudo-domestic environment, equal parts living room and salon. Here, design objects take the place of people, standing in for their makers and entering into dialogue with one another. 

At the center sits a triangular table echoing the room’s footprint, deliberately rejecting hierarchy: no head, no privilege, just equal sides inviting gathering and exchange. Around it, candlesticks by Madeline Isakson and Ananas Ananas’ Dos Puntos dining collection spark conversations about ritual and intentionality. A new version of Ford Bostwick’s Lucy linear steel light casts a warm glow against two dynamic shelving units by Piscina, the Brooklyn-based studio led by Natalie Shook. Each object asserts itself while remaining open to interplay, reinforcing the installation’s ethos of mutual authorship.

The Cork Collection by Studio AHEAD

San Francisco–based Studio AHEAD brings a tactile futurism to Collectible with The Cork Collection, a suite of sculptural furnishings that pose a simple yet radical question: What if tomorrow’s furniture were designed with full responsibility to both humanity and nature? The response comes in the form of rounded, biomimetic silhouettes crafted from cork and stainless steel—materials chosen not just for their aesthetic resonance, but for their sustainability and symbolic charge.

Cork, renewable and richly textured, is molded into soft sculptural forms that invite touch, while stainless steel provides a sleek, reflective counterpoint, lending the collection a distinctly solarpunk sensibility. The dialogue between the two materials is deliberate: organic and industrial, ancient and futuristic. A table, bench, and stool form the core of the presentation, each an exploration of balance between weight and lightness.

Michele Mirisola, Yvonne Mak, and Anamaria Morris at Studio Solenne

After a successful debut at ICFF in May, Studio Solenne orchestrated a rich composition of works by Michele Mirisola, Yvonne Mak, and Anamaria Morris. The booth feels less like a showcase and more like a vaguely familiar living room.

Michele Mirisola’s furniture, accessories, and paintings act as conduits between New York and her spring residency in Lesa, Italy, channeling both the ornamental details of her home city and the whimsical textures of Isola Bella’s grottoes. Upon first glance, the pieces might evoke a traditional Italian coastal sensibility, but, upon closer inspection, one discovers Mirisola’s distinctly contemporary touch. Yvonne Mak offers a quieter gesture: printed textiles resembling a sun-faded curtain. The delicate illusion conjures light where none exists, making for a particularly transformative display against the raw, unfinished backdrop of 180 Maiden Lane. Anchoring the installation is Solenne’s collaboration with NuStory: a vibrant rug derived from gallery founder Lauren Williams Russett’s photographic archive of favorite floors and surfaces she has encountered during travels.

Curio by Buket Hoşcan Bazman

In Curio, Istanbul-based designer Buket Hoşcan Bazman presents a series of shelving, seating, and lighting in solid patinated brass. At its core is the patina process itself, a technique she first learned from her father and has refined into her own signature. Each surface carries the slow imprint of oxidation, layering time and transformation into the work.

Soft, unfinished brass edges and richly textured patinas define the collection, while new materials expand the vocabulary. Strands of Anatolian wool weave through the frame of a bench, adding a tactile counterpoint to metal. Organic porcelain forms serve as bulb casings for the sculptural floor lamps, their fragility offsetting the density of the brass. Together, the pieces resist stasis, evolving over time as their surfaces shift and deepen.

Introducing (I)nterval

Collectible NYC saw the launch of (I)nterval—a design collective comprising Alban Roger, Arthur Vallin, Maurizio Bianchi Mattioli, Monica Sordo, and Pietro Franceschini. Their presentation felt less like a booth and more like a cinematic living room hovering between nostalgia and futurism. A vintage television, a paused drink, and a live-feed camera gave the impression of a space just emptied. Rather than stage cohesion, the collective leaned into tension, allowing each object to stand as its own provocation.

Franceschini’s Untitled [LV] coffee table is a slab of satin stainless steel cut with primitive precision. Mattioli’s Sella Stool works in the opposite register: polished steel folded into crisp geometry, sharp yet delicately fluid. Sordo’s Peninsula Armchair carries her familiar jewelry language into furniture scale, its asymmetry evoking the collision of land and sea along Venezuela’s coast. What bound the works was not cohesion but friction: a collision of vocabularies staged to evoke tension. With its inaugural presentation, the collective makes a poignant case for the power of mood in the context of objects.

A Stylish Vignette by Emily Thurman

In the fair’s new VIGNETTE section, curated by San Francisco–based interior designer Michael Hilal, Salt Lake City–based interior designer Emily Thurman offers an assured glimpse into her young but rapidly maturing furniture practice. Her environment juxtaposes contemporary collectible design, visual art, and vintage objects with pieces from her debut furniture and lighting line, Hundō, launched during NYCxDESIGN 2025.

An 8-arm murano glass chandelier by Dana Arbib, stools and seating from Milan-based Studioutte, and Dominik Tarabanski‘s photographic series Roses for Mother set the stage, punctuated by Thurman’s own works: Toteme Standing Lamps in French oak, Stacks Smoking Table, and two organic porcelain sconces, produced by Hero Ceramics. The arrangement is framed by a warm green backdrop painted in Farrow & Ball’s “No. CB5 Cardamom,” enveloping the space in a rich, cinematic glow.

Flowers on the Table by ROOM—FILE

From the fair’s NEW GARDE Section, which spotlights galleries and collectives that have been operating for less than three years, ROOM—FILE, a curatorial effort led by up-and-comer Jirah Joshua, assembled Flowers on the Table. The presentation pulled the work of 13 young practices into a dining tableau that elevates the familiar ritual of gathering into an exaggerated display of design abundance.

Anchoring the arrangement is a solid marble stool by Etamorph Studio, carved from the rare Breccia Medicea dell’Acquasanta. Its richly veined surface inspired the booth’s sunrise palette. Around a seafoam-green table by Juntos Projects, chairs from multiple designers create a deliberate clash of personalities, transforming the dining set into a democratic stage for dialogue. Among the highlights: the Soft Steel Chair swathed in a hand-stitched, baby-pink silk slipcover by Basetale, the Georgian design duo Tinatin Dzirkvadze and Iki Antelava.

A Curated Conversation at Uppercut

Antwerp-based gallery Uppercut, founded by Scott Lippens, staged a dialogue between two distinct voices: Linde Freya Tangelder of Destroyers/Builders and the Korean designer Yoon Shun. The booth reads like a study in contrasts, held together against a playful gray rubber backdrop that heightens both the severity and delicacy of the works on view.

Tangelder presented works from her Reworked Series, including a chair and bench in brushed aluminum, white bronze, and hand-lacquered cotton. The pieces reveal her ongoing interest in “soft architecture.” The asymmetrical cotton flaps, hand-painted to evoke fragmentary floor plans, soften the cool severity of metal, while wax-cast bronze feet root the forms in a raw materiality. The dialogue between primitive and modern techniques creates works that feel both architectural and intimate.

Shun responded with lighting that pushed the limits of oak veneer. Four lamps, burned and bent into delicate curves, infused warmth into the booth’s predominantly gray palette. Alongside them, his aluminum furniture revealed a gentler, more curvilinear approach than that of Tangelder’s stark geometries.

Together, the presentation offered more than a contrast of materials. It was also a contrast in career stage: Tangelder established, Shun still on the rise. In proximity, their works sharpened one another, making a compelling case for contrast itself as a curatorial force.