Design Miami 2025: Make. Believe. Across from Art Basel’s Front Door

Each December, Miami Beach becomes the global meeting point for contemporary culture. While Art Basel Miami Beach anchors the week inside the Convention Center, an equally influential world unfolds just across Convention Center Drive. Under a vast tent in Pride Park, Design Miami offers its own gravitational pull—one centered on collectible design, curatorial rigor, and craftsmanship elevated to the level of art.

For its 21st edition, running December 3–7, with Preview Day on December 2, Design Miami culminates its 20th anniversary year with a thematic direction that feels perfectly attuned to the fair’s evolution. Curated by Glenn Adamson, the 2025 theme, Make. Believe., explores imagination not as escapism but as a force grounded in material knowledge, technique, and the expressive potential of craft.

The Big Picture: A Milestone Edition for Design Miami

This year’s fair brings together more than 70 exhibitors across its Gallery, Curio, and Special Project programs, including over 25 debuts. The edition also marks the inaugural Title Partnership between Design Miami and Bank of America Private Bank, underscoring the fair’s global cultural stature and its role in shaping contemporary design discourse.

At the heart of this anniversary year is Design Miami 2.0, a Special Project curated by Adamson featuring eight of today’s most compelling voices in contemporary design. The presentation has the clarity and ambition of a museum survey—bridging legacy and experimentation while signaling the directions the fair will champion in its next decade.

Make. Believe. frames collectible design as a place where imagination becomes tangible. Here, fantasy is not antithetical to function but often born from highly skilled processes: casting, carving, weaving, glassblowing, robotics, and reconstituted wood technologies. The result is a layered experience that encourages visitors to see design as both cultural heritage and speculative possibility.

Curatorial Highlights: A Global Conversation in Craft and Imagination

The Design Avant-Garde Through the Ages

Design Miami’s ability to convene the full spectrum of collectible design is especially clear this year. Mass Modern Design maps the evolution of “Art Meets Furniture,” juxtaposing twentieth-century icons with conceptual works like Studio Job’s Rock Chair. Mercado Moderno brings Brazilian modernism into contemporary dialogue, while Moderne Gallery presents rare George Nakashima works, including a pair of 1972 Conoid Benches crafted from the same walnut tree.

Debuting at the fair, Galerie Signé highlights material expression through blown glass, ceramic, wrought iron, and drawings by French duo Nemo. Superhouse takes a historical turn, presenting American Art Furniture from the 1980s in a museum-quality curation. Achille Salvagni Atelier stages a scenographic installation placing 1950s Italian masters in conversation with Salvagni’s contemporary works.

Material Possibility

Material exploration emerges as a defining thread of the edition. Galerie SCENE OUVERTE creates an immersive blown-glass environment by Simone Crestani inspired by underwater gardens, while Nouvel presents glass innovations from a five-year design residency involving Julie Richoz, Nicolas Le Moigne, Laurin Schaub, Dimitri Nassisi, and Michel Charlot.

Design Miami 2.0 extends material experimentation toward the avant-garde. Jack Craig (David Klein Gallery) transforms synthetic carpeting into sculptural forms that blur the lines between object, furniture, and fantasy. TF Design introduces the Orbit Collection in bronze, evolving sculptor Tina Frey’s hand-molded language into pieces that feel both celestial and grounded.

Spirituality and Storytelling

Several exhibitors draw from ritual, symbolism, and introspection. Ippodo Gallery highlights contemporary Japanese kogei through works that explore luminosity and spiritual reflection. Roham Shamekh presents the Roots Sofa, a meditation on collective memory and emotional connection. Charles Burnand Gallery debuts Monuments of Ether, balancing myth, material, and speculative form.

Within Design Miami 2.0, Mehdi Dakhli reinterprets the historic Sidi Bou Chair with Pink Ivory wood—once reserved for Zulu royalty—bridging heritage and modernity. Victoria Yakusha debuts The Land of Light II, adding mythical beings sculpted in ZTISTA to explore endurance, hope, and ritual in times of change.

Geology and Geography

Geologic narratives also take center stage. Mouvements Modernes places 1980s–1990s pioneers in dialogue with new talents, while KAMEH debuts KAMEH 6.0, a collection inspired by desert rose geometry, sculpted in charred wood and displayed on mirrors. Adrian Sassoon introduces new works by Kate Malone, echoing mineral formations and natural landscapes.

Recrafted Traditions

Friends Artspace presents contemporary reinterpretations of inherited craft traditions, from Japanese joinery in wood-and-paper lighting to the transformation of eighteenth-century broom-making into sculptural objects. The collection speaks to a renewed interest in the intimacy and resonance of handcraft.

Brand Activations: Immersive, Experimental, and Material-Driven

Kohler: Pearlized and the Art of Surface Alchemy

Kohler debuts Pearlized, an iridescent finish developed with artist David Franklin, where PVD technology—traditionally used on metal—is applied to ceramic. For its introduction, Harry Nuriev of Crosby Studios creates an immersive, light-shifting landscape that transforms the sink into a narrative about experimentation, surface, and reflection.

Henge: A Sanctuary for Collectors

Making its Design Miami debut, Henge unveils the Collectors Lounge by Ugo Cacciatori. Pale gold metal walls, sculptural seating, cast metal surfaces, and a monumental violet quartzite bar shape an environment where refinement and atmosphere guide the experience. The installation reinforces the brand’s presence in Miami following the 2024 opening of its Design District showroom.

ALPI x Stephen Burks Man Made: The Lost Cloth Object

In Design Miami 2.0, ALPI and Stephen Burks Man Made present The Lost Cloth Object, a reinterpretation of Kuba cloth traditions translated into ALPI’s engineered Legacy woods. The installation results from a workshop in Kinshasa with contemporary Kuba artisans, merging material innovation with cultural research.

Sten Studio: Lithic Bloom

Mexico-based Sten Studio introduces Lithic Bloom, a sculptural garden where petals and botanical forms are interpreted in stone. Creative Director Jose Schnaider describes the collection as an effort to “immortalize beauty,” transforming flora into natural symphonies through the textures and chromatic variations of minerals.

Planning Your Visit to Design Miami 2025

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Design Miami anchors Miami Art Week with a rare combination of curatorial depth, material exploration, and global perspectives. This year’s edition—shaped by Make. Believe.—promises historic masterworks, conceptual experimentation, immersive installations, and new chapters in the evolution of collectible design.

Below is everything you need to plan your visit.

DESIGN MIAMI 2025 — VISITOR INFORMATION

Dates
• Preview Day (by invitation): Tuesday, December 2
• Public Days: Wednesday, December 3 – Sunday, December 7

Hours
• December 3: 1pm–7pm
• December 4–6: 11am–7pm
• December 7: 11am–6pm

Location
• Pride Park, Convention Center Drive & 19th Street, Miami Beach

Tickets
• Passes and information: designmiami.com | @designmiami

For more Art Basel Miami Beach and Miami Art Week coverage—including guides, previews, and upcoming features—visit the Art Fairs & Festivals page on Luxury Guide USA:
https://luxuryguideusa.com/to-dos/art-fairs-festivals/

All photos courtesy of Design Miami ©