Nine Designers Making Furniture with Personality

There’s furniture you sit on, and then there’s furniture that stares back at you, that makes your space feel like it's part of your identity.

Lately, I’ve been focused on designers who blur the line between objects and art. Below are the names that keep popping up on my instagram feed, in niche galleries and in AD100.

I’ve listed my favorite contemporary designers right now who are all making things that just feel different and fresh.

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Minjae Kim

Minjae Kim’s pieces are bent, bulbous, and often playfully painted, feeling more like handcrafted characters than traditional furniture. Trained as an architect, he approaches form with precise and almost obsessive attention, but balances that with a sense of humor and lightness. Each piece seems animated, like it’s caught mid-motion or in the middle of telling a story. His work is both exacting and playful, blending serious craft with a sense of joy.

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Sam Klemick

Sam Klemick brings a fresh perspective to working with wood, turning a traditionally rigid material into something unexpectedly expressive. Her oversized chairs and beds have this soft, slouchy energy that make you just want to plop down on top of them. It’s furniture with posture, with mood, almost like it has a body language of its own.

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Lana Launay

Lana Launay’s work is all about capturing a sense of softness, intimacy, and nostalgia. She gravitates toward raw, natural materials, like ceramic, linen, or wood, that feel purposefully unfinished, giving her pieces a kind of lived-in vibe. The light pictured here is especially fun-you get to assemble it yourself and rearrange the shades, so it feels playful and totally your own.

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Ana Kraš

We all kind of want to be Ana Kraš, don’t we? She’s the designer/artist/photographer whose lamps and woven chairs are as nonchalantly elegant as her Instagram. Her brand, Teget, includes products ranging from homeware to fashion.

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Sophie Dries

Sophie Dries is an architect and designer whose work seamlessly bridges modern refinement with emotional depth, creating spaces and objects that resonate on a sensory level. Known for her masterful use of materials, she brings a dramatic yet delicate touch to stone, wood, and brass, imbuing them with a sense of quiet spirituality.

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Kim Mupangilaï

Kim Mupangilaï is a multidisciplinary designer who infuses her work with emotional depth and cultural resonance, bringing a distinct soul into every structure she creates. Drawing from her Belgian-Congolese heritage, she skillfully blends organic curves, bold silhouettes, and rich natural materials to produce designs that feel both grounded and elevated.

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Charlotte Kingsnorth

Charlotte Kingsnorth is a British designer known for transforming discarded or outdated furniture into eccentric, imaginative pieces that blur the line between function and art. She often upcycles old chairs and sofas, re-upholstering them with bold fabrics and reshaping their forms into swollen, bulbous silhouettes that seem to pulse with personality. Her creations evoke a sense of liveliness, as if the furniture itself has morphed into soft, surreal creatures with their own distinct character.

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Simone Bodmer Turner

Simone Bodmer Turner is a Brooklyn-based ceramicist celebrated for her sculptural vessels that channel an ancient-meets-modern. Her pieces are quiet but commanding. Working mostly in matte white clay, she plays with balance, negative space, and asymmetry, creating objects that feel both architectural and intimate.

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Cristina Moreno

Cristina Moreno, founder of Ombia Studio, is a designer based in LA who brings to life a playful, otherworldly universe where color, form and medium work together in unexpected ways. With roots from Colombia, her pieces are greatly inspired by the artisans and craftsmanship of her country.

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These designers are showing us that a object can be so much more, it can be a memory, a treasure, or even have its own personality.