sustainable-design
(16)
Bricolage wants to give togetherness a floor plan
A Santa Monica design workshop moves between apartment buildings, rain barrels, and homes for living alone together. The common question: what should we share, and what should we keep to ourselves?
Cambridge Design Partnership gets past “almost works”
A prototype can impress a room and still be impossible to manufacture. Cambridge Design Partnership has built a business in that awkward gap, fixing everything from diagnostic instruments to the feel of a kitchen knife.
Mickey Du Is Teaching the Office Coffee Machine Some Taste
A chance cup in a Hayes Valley alley gave Mickey Du a lifelong standard for coffee. Two decades later, BrewBird is his attempt to encode that feeling into a 60-second workplace ritual.
Kyle Hoff Built Floyd From One Leg - Then Designed It to Stay
An architect, a Craigslist apartment and a refusal to buy one more disposable table produced a $256,000 Kickstarter. A decade and an acquisition later, Hoff is still asking the same useful question: will this piece survive the next move?
Energy Sistem Quit the Smartphone Race - and Found Its Real Product
The Spanish electronics brand tried phones, watched the economics turn ugly, and walked back to audio. Its 30-year reinvention offers a useful playbook for any consumer company tempted to confuse a big market with a good market.
The Office Chair Became an Empire: Inside MillerKnoll’s Modern Design Machine
A century of modernism now runs through one portfolio - from Aeron chairs and Knoll classics to textiles, healthcare rooms and home stores. The bet is that the future of furniture belongs to a company that can sell an object, furnish a building and explain why the room should work that way.
The 49-Year-Old Sofa Company Betting Its Future on Furniture You Don’t Throw Away
King Living began with foam chairs strapped to a car roof. Its global pitch now rests on a harder idea: the most sustainable sofa may be the one engineered to survive your next house, your next fabric choice and your children.
The $4.5 Billion Company Hiding Under Your Palm
Logitech turned a 1981 farmhouse and a wooden mouse into the hardware layer of modern work, play and streaming - and it is quietly betting the next decade on AI, video and recycled plastic.
Arhaus
Arhaus turned direct relationships with artisans, theatrical showrooms and made-to-order upholstery into a $1.38 billion business. Forty years in, its next act is less about selling a sofa than owning more of the room around it.
Ellie Cunningham
Ellie Cunningham is the CEO of Canoa, a Brooklyn-based design-technology company building a browser canvas that unifies mood boards, scaled floor plans, real product data and FF&E schedules for interior designers. A Pratt-trained interior designer who spent years running global design operations at WeWork, she stepped up from COO to chief executive in October 2024 and is steering Canoa toward a circular, low-carbon future for commercial furniture, where good pieces get reused instead of dumped.
PASE (Peoples Associates Structural Engineers)
PASE (Peoples Associates Structural Engineers) is a San Jose-based structural and seismic engineering consultancy founded in 1990. Ranked among the largest engineering firms in Silicon Valley, PASE designs the bones of buildings that have to stay standing - hyperscale data centers for Meta and Vantage, multifamily and mixed-use communities, commercial and institutional projects, plus seismic retrofits and non-structural anchorage. With roughly 69 staff and 250+ years of combined experience across offices in California, Maryland and Croatia, the firm pairs heavy engineering rigor with a collaboration-first culture it calls 'The PASE Way.'
Symetri USA
Symetri USA - formerly Microdesk - is an Autodesk-focused technology consultancy serving the architecture, engineering, construction and operations (AECO) industry. Founded in 1994 and acquired by Sweden's Symetri (an Addnode Group company) in 2022, it helps design, construction and asset-owner teams work smarter through BIM, VDC, digital twins, enterprise asset management and its own Naviate software line. Together with its European parent, Symetri is the #1 Global Autodesk Solution Provider, serving more than 20,000 customers and 250,000 daily users with a stated mission of efficient, sustainable design.
Canoa
Canoa is a browser-based design platform that gives interior designers and architects one connected workflow to collect inspiration, build data-rich mood boards, lay out furniture to scale, pull real product data, and generate FF&E schedules. Founded in 2019 by Federico Negro out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Canoa replaces the scattered stack of Revit, AutoCAD, Excel, and PowerPoint with a single AI-assisted canvas, while pushing the furniture industry toward circular, low-carbon practices.
Heartwork
Heartwork is a New York-based commercial furniture company that designs and manufactures steel storage solutions for the modern workplace. Founded in 2012 by Karen John, the company builds modular cabinets, credenzas, desks, and cloud-connected smart lockers from heavy-duty American steel, all GREENGUARD Gold certified and made to order in the USA. Heartwork turns the overlooked, drab world of office storage into design-forward, customizable furniture that helps companies express their culture while minimizing environmental impact.
Karen John
Karen John is the founder and CEO of Heartwork, a New York furniture company she launched in 2012 to drag the workplace out of its sea of gray, black, and beige. Trained as an industrial designer in Milan and an engineer at Stanford, with an INSEAD MBA and a former VP of Merchandising stint at Design Within Reach, she rebuilt the most boring category in office design - storage and lockers - into something people actually want to look at. Heartwork builds steel furniture and smart lockers domestically, leans on color as a cultural tool, and has raised a Series A backing John's bet that beauty and durability belong in the same room.
Samara
Samara is a Redwood City-based prefab housing company building factory-made backyard homes (ADUs) for California homeowners. Spun out of Airbnb by co-founder Joe Gebbia, Samara handles the entire process from design and permitting to manufacturing and installation, with a stated goal of using accessory dwelling units to ease the West Coast housing crunch.