Design in Focus: Our Favourite Highlights from Collectible New York 2025
PEOPLE • Places
Each year, Collectible New York unites leading voices in contemporary collectible design, offering an international stage for bold ideas, rare discoveries, and groundbreaking craft. At the 2025 edition, Designeers had the honour of co-hosting a VIP tour for our community, guiding members through the fair’s most compelling presentations and sharing insights into the innovation shaping today’s design scene.
From boundary-pushing material experiments to reimagined design classics, Collectible New York 2025 delivered countless moments of inspiration. Among them, a handful of works stood out for their originality, vision, and resonance with the conversations driving design forward. Here, we share our favourite picks and highlights from Collectible New York 2025.
Pepe Valenti
Toro Manifesto
1. Pepe Valenti
Pepe Valenti’s El Mar wall pieces shimmer like frozen waves, their rippled steel surfaces catching and bending light with every shift in perspective. The works animate the wall, oscillating between fluid movement and sculptural permanence. Shown together, they evoke tidal fragments or lunar phases, balancing abstraction with subtle references to nature. It is this dialogue between poetry and precision, material experimentation and refined craftsmanship, that makes Valenti’s practice so compelling within today’s landscape of contemporary collectible design.
Ehecatl’s wall-mounted floral pieces glowed like luminous organisms, radiating a presence that felt both organic and otherworldly. Their sculptural forms recall the rhythms of natural growth while echoing the ritual ornamentation of Mesoamerican cosmology. More than decoration, these works act as symbolic presences within a space, transforming the wall into a living surface and affirming Ehecatl’s ability to merge cultural memory with the language of contemporary collectible design.
Kamilla Csegzi
Novocastrian
Kamilla Csegzi unveiled Counterformations, a series that transforms bubble wrap into sculptural memory. Cast in mycelium, the works preserve the ghostly geometry of a material designed to protect and then disappear, turning absence into textured form. Referencing the idea of counterform in typography, Csegzi gives presence to what is usually discarded. Poetic yet quietly radical, her practice reimagines the overlooked infrastructures of everyday life as contemplative objects within the realm of contemporary collectible design.
4. NOVOCASTRIAN
Novocastrian introduced the Otterburn Chess Table, a striking piece named after the historic Northumberland village that witnessed the battle of 1388. The design channels this layered history into a work that feels both grounded and resolute. Defined by measured geometry and a refined material palette, the Otterburn Chess Table is more than a playing surface; it is a monument in miniature. As an object of contemporary collectible design, it holds the weight of place and time while remaining effortlessly modern, a testament to Novocastrian’s dedication to craftsmanship and cultural resonance.
Rosie Li
Elena Mahno
Rosie Li Studio unveiled Jewel Block, a lighting collection five years in the making and a bold evolution of the atelier’s practice. Drawing inspiration from early 20th-century architectural glass tiles and vintage train signal lights, the series reimagines ribbed Fresnel lenses as a modular system of cubic, crystalline forms. The design language also nods to the geometry of pre-Columbian temples, balancing the modern with the archaic, and the intuitive with the engineered. The result is a body of contemporary collectible lighting design that feels both futuristic and timeless, underscoring Rosie Li Studio’s reputation for innovation and sculptural vision.
6. elena mahno
Elena Mahno presented In Flux: Changing/Rearranging (2024), a body of clay works where form, memory and mutation appear almost inseparable. Drawing on her background in visual arts and science, Mahno’s pieces hover between abstraction and suggestion, echoes of feminine silhouettes, pinafores as symbols of work, even cellular forms from her studies, all blended into shapes that resist literal reading. Each sculpture gives weight to transition, the unlived life paths and transformations that linger in the margins of experience. Her work at Collectible New York felt intimate yet expansive, minimal in surface yet rich in emotion and conceptual depth.
Buket Hoşcan Bazman
Art and Loom
At Collectible New York 2025, Buket Hoşcan Bazman presented the No.2 Bench from her Curio Collection — a work that masterfully balances the raw and the refined, the structural and the soulful. Crafted in patinated solid brass with a seat woven from Anatolian wool, it functions as both sculptural object and place of rest. Limited to just ten pieces plus two artist’s proofs, each bench is signed and numbered, embodying meticulous craftsmanship and thoughtful restraint. In its muted palette of metal and textile, the No.2 Bench feels deeply anchored in heritage yet unmistakably contemporary.
8. art and loom
At Collectible New York 2025, Art+Loom made a striking debut with the Kolaz Collection, introducing a bold new chapter in woven texture and sculptural floor design. These works push the boundaries of the rug as an object, transforming it from a background element into a tactile statement piece. Exploring shape, colour, and layered materiality, each rug feels both composed and alive — as though the weave itself shifts with light and shadow across its surface. For a first showing, Art+Loom achieved an elegant balance of craftsmanship and expressive gesture, redefining rugs within the language of contemporary collectible design.
Kawabi
Edoardo Cozzani
9. KAWABI
At Collectible New York 2025, Kawabi partnered with Of The Cloth for Confluence, an exhibition exploring collaboration as both resistance and renewal. Kawabi’s sculptural paper lighting was shown alongside textiles and ceramics from Of The Cloth’s archive, weaving a story of inheritance and individuality. Pieces such as Relic I, crafted through the traditional chōchin lantern-making technique, drew on the history of the folding fan to reveal how objects travel and accrue meaning across cultures. Using wood and paper, everyday materials became luminous hybrids of furniture, lighting, and sculpture. Framed as a sanctuary, Confluence redefined domestic rituals as acts of memory, belonging, and cultural survival within the realm of contemporary collectible design.
10. Edoardo Cozzani
Edoardo Cozzani is a Brooklyn-based multimedia artist whose work explores the evolving relationship between nature, time, and human presence. Moving fluidly between experimental photography, sculpture, land art, and site-specific installations, Cozzani draws on influences from philosophy to physics to reimagine matter in transformation. His practice often involves repurposing waste into poetic works of art, creating new connections between the cycles of nature and human experience. Recent series such as Vessels and Pupae (presented at Alcova Milano with Zarolat) exemplify his inquiry into material metamorphosis and the cyclicality of landscapes.
