Above, from left: Arielle Assouline-Lichten, Lisa Hunt, Farrah Sit, Natalie Weinberger, Kiva Motnyk.
It has been proven true time and time again—in every artistic field, no matter the endeavor, we are living in an age of collaboration. Every few weeks, it seems, creative minds are brought in to infuse a big brand with fresh, sought-after vitality; it should go without saying that the world of interior design is no exception to this rule. Often these recruited designers are household names in their own right—John Derian for Target is just one recent example among many others—but what if we were to consider a different type of partnership? One that relies upon under-the-radar yet equally dialed-in, detail-oriented artists, creators whose work may require a deeper level of intimacy. With this question as our guiding light, we mined our networks to bring together five designers who are ripe for the next career-making major brand collaboration.
Each of the five women featured here—all product designers based in the New York City area—are linked by a reverence for their chosen materials and an understanding of how functional forms can be catalysts for a rich, full life. What’s more, with their keen business minds, they possess just the right mix of creative and pragmatic skills to push their craft forward into wider visibility. Read on to learn about the people we want to see in everyone’s homes right now.
Farrah Sit
Sit’s Scorpio lamp.
A brush with her own mortality made Farrah Sit see what really mattered: balance, harmony, and our ecosystem. These are the tenets by which she conducts her work and life. After cutting her teeth at Calvin Klein, where she was a home decor designer for four years, Sit launched her own ethically minded home accessories brand, Light and Ladder, in 2011. By 2015 she was presenting her first furniture collection at the design co-op Colony; she has kept pace with a Crate & Barrel collaboration and collections for TRNK and Love House. “I want to inspire a more conscious way of interacting with objects, people, and the Earth,” she says.
Kiva Motnyk
Motnyk’s Ren quilt.
After 14 formative years working with fabric—first with artist Susan Cianciolo and fashion designer Calvin Klein, then for nearly a decade with Isaac Mizrahi—Kiva Motnyk founded Thompson Street Studio in 2014 to create a textile language all her own. The Rhode Island School of Design graduate’s work is inherently collaborative, with textile scraps sourced from other artists and dealers, some dating back 150 years. In 2015 she incorporated prints by Zoe Latta of fashion label Eckhaus Latta into her work; in 2017 she made room dividers with furniture makers Waka Waka. What’s next? “I would love to work with Hermès,” Motnyk muses.
Natalie Weinberger
Weinberger’s Optic Twist Lamp.
For Natalie Weinberger, the path to ceramics was a winding one. Following an initial dalliance with glassblowing in high school and at the University of Wisconsin, she went on to study historic preservation at the University of Pennsylvania, thinking it could marry her love of craft, cities, and the built environment. But she missed clay, and in 2014 she opened her eponymous ceramics studio, making vessels, dinnerware, and now lighting and furniture; she works both independently and with a tight-knit crew of collaborators—designers Vonnegut/Kraft, glassblower Kenny Pieper (on this lamp)—and recently debuted a collection for CB2.
Lisa Hunt
Asha Tiles by Lisa Hunt.
Lisa Hunt leads with optimism. Her career as an artist began in earnest in 2016, and in the seven years since then her multimedia collages, prints, and paintings have become synonymous with future-forward, West African–inflected abstraction. Her work ranges vastly in scale, from inches-wide tiles produced with Ann Sacks to feet-long murals for the Brooklyn Tower (the tallest building in the New York City borough). And over the past two years, she has made it all happen while battling cancer. “Developing my practice has been such a personal journey,” Hunt says. “And I am just starting to scratch the surface.”
Arielle Assouline-Lichten
Assouline-Lichten’s Oni cocktail table.
A collection can start anywhere for Arielle Assouline-Lichten, even on a neighborhood stroll. It was during one such walk that she discovered the marble yard that has since birthed the tables, lamps, and chairs for which her studio, Slash Objects, is now known. After studying at New York University and Harvard, Assouline-Lichten really caught the function-over-form bug during an internship with architect Bjarke Ingels, followed by
time working with the late interior designer Jim Walrod. “I’m of the Dieter Rams school,” she says. “Less is always more.” With projects for Nike and Cartier under her belt, less indeed looks like a whole lot more.
Styled by Jocelyn Cabral
This story originally appeared in the November 2023 issue of ELLE DECOR. SUBSCRIBE