Furniture design sits at a unique intersection: it has to function, it has to last, and it has to say something. The pieces recognised at the Design MasterPrize (DMP) 2025 edition do all three. Drawn from studios across Europe, the Americas, and Asia, this selection covers outdoor living, home interiors, and the office, and taken together, they offer a clear picture of where furniture design is heading.
What Makes Furniture Design Worth Recognising?
The short answer: intention. Every piece below has a clear concept at its core, whether that is a material reference, a cultural memory, or a structural idea carried through to the last detail. The DMP jury recognised work that earns its form rather than arriving at it by default.
Outdoor Furniture Design
Monterey, Landscape Forms - Best of Best, Outdoor Seating
Designer: Landscape Forms
Location: Kalamazoo, United States
DMP Category: Outdoor Furniture
Outdoor furniture too often treats durability and comfort as competing values. Monterey resolves that tension. Designed by Landscape Forms, the collection uses welded and powder-coated metal rod frames to cradle upholstered seats and backs, bringing a quality of cushion detailing usually reserved for interior pieces to the demands of an outdoor site furnishing. The result is seating that reads as refined rather than utilitarian, at home in a hotel terrace or a civic plaza alike.
Cora, Landscape Forms - Best of Best, Outdoor Tables
Designer: Landscape Forms
Location: Kalamazoo, United States
DMP Category: Outdoor Furniture: Tables
Where Monterey focuses on comfort, Cora focuses on form. The collection of low outdoor tables draws its shapes from natural compositions, stacked river rocks, layered leaves, a canopy seen from above, and translates them into laser-cut steel tops with bent steel understructure. The tables are designed to nest, stack, and layer in ways that change the character of a space depending on how they are arranged. Construction is deliberately simple: efficient use of materials during manufacturing was a design condition, not an afterthought.
Orbit, Robin Delaere for Pebl - Winner, Home Furniture: Garden and Pool
Designer: Robin Delaere, Arne Malfait
Location: Kortrijk, Belgium
DMP Category: Home Furniture: Garden and Pool
Orbit addresses a genuine gap in outdoor furniture design: a sofa that works differently across different moments in the same weekend. The piece converts between three configurations, a formal sofa, a lounge, and a daybed, without hardware or effort. Designed by Robin Delaere for the client Pebl, it is the kind of solution that looks simple from the outside and represents real problem-solving underneath.
Home Furniture Design
PABLO NOW Chrysler Chair - Winner, Home Furniture
Designer: Yaoxiang Fen, Pablo Now
Location: Foshan, China
DMP Category: Home Furniture
Few buildings have defined a city’s silhouette as the Chrysler Building defined New York’s, and fewer designers have drawn from architecture so directly in furniture. Yaoxiang Feng’s Chrysler Chair for PABLO NOW takes the Art Deco spire as its formal reference, combining a retro aesthetic with contemporary production techniques. The result is a chair that carries a clear cultural argument: that the furniture design vocabulary of early twentieth-century America still has things to say.
Palafita Buffet, Felipe Zorzeto Winner, Home Furniture
Designer: Felipe Zorzeto
Location: Brasília, Brazil
DMP Category: Home Furniture
Brazilian vernacular architecture has long used wooden stakes to raise structures above floodplains. The Palafita buffet takes that structural logic and applies it to storage furniture. Solid wood elements create a rhythmic vertical pattern that simultaneously elevates and divides the door modules. The piece is symmetrical and adapts to placement against a wall or as a freestanding island. It is an example of furniture design that earns its concept through every material and proportional decision, not just its reference point.
TRAU Armchair, HO studio for BOONG - Winner, Home Furniture
Designer: HO studio
Location: Hanoi, Vietnam
DMP Category: Home Furniture: Hobby and Leisure
TRAU was designed specifically for art gallery spaces, intended to sit beside paintings and installation work without competing with them, and yet to become a sculptural presence in its own right when placed with intention. The layers and curves in its form trace back to a specific lacquer painting by artist Thanh Chuong, making this a piece of furniture design with a precise cultural origin rather than a general aesthetic aspiration. Designed by HO studio for BOONG, it reflects a growing strand of furniture design in Southeast Asia that grounds itself in local material and artistic traditions.
Ribbon Desk, VerveMulti Studio - Winner, Office Furniture: Desk
Designer: Scot DiStefano, fabricated by Luke Jenkins / In Bloom Studio
Location: Dania Beach, United States
DMP Category: Office Furniture: Desk
The brief was a single, fully interconnected office unit. The response was a desk that flows continuously through the room, uniting workspace, vinyl display, seating, and shelving into one sculptural form in laminated cherry veneer. Concealed supports and sectional construction allow the piece to read as seamless, as if the material itself decided to move through the room rather than being placed in it. Ribbon Desk represents a direction in furniture design where the office is treated as seriously as any other domestic interior.
What These Furniture Design Projects Have in Common
Different countries, different materials, different briefs. But across all seven, a few things hold:
The concept is specific. Not “inspired by nature” in a vague sense, but stacked river rocks, floodplain architecture, a lacquer painting by a named artist. Specificity is what separates furniture design that lasts from furniture design that trends.
The material follows the idea. Laser-cut steel because it allows organic forms with minimal waste. Cherry veneer because warmth and structural integrity were both required. Powder-coated rod frames because outdoor upholstery quality demands a frame that can carry it.
The function earns the form. None of these pieces prioritises appearance over use. The convertible Orbit sofa, the adaptable Palafita buffet, the all-in-one Ribbon Desk: each starts from a real problem and arrives at a formal solution.
Enter Your Furniture Design in DMP 2026
The Design MasterPrize is open for entries across Product Design, Graphic and Communication Design, and related disciplines. If you are working on furniture design, residential, commercial, or outdoor, the 2026 edition is open now.
