Introducing the 2023 AD100 – today’s top talents in interior decoration, architecture, and landscape design. When we’re looking for incredible interiors that are liveable yet stunning, these are the names we always come back to. Stay tuned and discover the European interior designers of 2023’s AD100!
Beata Heuman
The bubbly Beata Heuman, a native Swede who studied under British style guru Nicky Haslam, asserts that “the best design combines form, function, and personality.” She describes her mischievous, family-friendly aesthetic as combining “a Scandinavian attention to detail with the desire to create something original and characterful.” In the fresh-faced rooms that Heuman conjures from Nantucket, Massachusetts, to Hamburg, Germany, to the United Kingdom, bespoke furnishings (imagine a bed perched atop white-wood lion’s paws) meet fabrics and wallpaper of decidedly mirthful mien (a dining room appears to be entirely encased in penciled doodles).
Bjarke Ingels Group
A spiraling, partially underground museum dedicated to watchmaker Audemars Piguet. A city of the future created to test autonomous automobiles. A former ferry converted into a floating house with a unique design. A Malaysian archipelago with a focus on sustainability. A partnership with NASA to construct 3D-printed homes on the moon. Founded by Danish design icon Bjarke Ingels, this multinational company produces the type of modern icons that broaden the concept of what the built environment might look like—and how it can better our lives and the world—or worlds—we inhabit.
Francis Sultana
In 2019, Francis Sultana honored his late mother Marie-François with a special line of furniture as he marked the tenth anniversary of the design company bearing his name. According to Sultana, “My mother was, if you will, my first client; she enabled me to try out looks on her house.” As you turn the pages of the book, two themes will immediately become apparent: first, the strong Mediterranean-meets-classicism influence of Sultana’s native Malta; and second, a fondness for the fine arts, which accounts for his clientele of art collectors from all over the world.
Laplace
Luis Laplace, an Argentine native, earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in architecture and urbanism from the Universidad de Belgrano in 1995. Later, he gained experience working with Annabelle Selldorf in New York before relocating to Paris, where he cofounded a business with his French colleague Christophe Comoy. Laplace is particularly drawn to art; he once told AD that “Art, art, and art!” best represented his sense of design; as a result, he creates interiors that are both creative and ideal settings for art collections.
Martin Brudnizki
“Context, culture, and the client—the end result needs to be a response to how they wish to live,” is Martin Brudnizki’s straightforward creative tenet. For the stylish interior architect and designer from Stockholm, it’s a good thing that his followers, including ultra-covert financiers and industry titans like Soho House, Rosewood Hotels & Resorts, and The Birley Group, value high style that’s been significantly boosted by irreverent maximalism. His stunning 2018 renovation of Annabel’s, the infamously seedy London exclusive club, has more trelliswork than the Château de Versailles, a disco with golden columns shaped like palm palms, a mirror ladies’ lounge with a ceiling covered in pink artificial peonies, and more trelliswork overall.
Pierre Yovanovitch
Pierre Yovanovitch founded his own studio in Paris in 2001 after switching careers from apparel design for Pierre Cardin to interior design. Since entering the interior design field, Yovanovitch has developed a particular love for going back in time and giving old buildings a contemporary makeover. The AD100 designer says, “I frequently work on 17th- and 18th-century residences, but I believe they must live in our day.”
Studio KO
The architects at Studio KO first became friends while they were undergrads at Paris’ École des Beaux-Arts more than 20 years ago. After falling in love, Olivier Marty and Karl Fournier founded their business, which is now well known for its handcrafted, rustic minimalism. Fournier has stated that the human touch should be highlighted rather than erased. Imperfections are inevitable in the process. The design team has worked on projects all over the world, including the Musée Yves Saint Laurent in Marrakech, the Balmain boutiques in New York and Los Angeles, and André Balazs’s Chiltern Firehouse hotel in London.
Veere Grenney
Veere Grenney’s interiors are characterized by three essential characteristics: harmony, clarity, and balance. “Pared-down classicism, like that practiced in the early-19th century by the architect Sir John Soane, continually serves as inspiration,” says Grenney, who, before founding his London-based business two decades ago, was a director at the prestigious British decorating firm Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler. The designer combines modernism and classicism, the modest and the spectacular, but notably beauty and comfort, for his residential buildings around the world, from Mustique to Morocco to London.
© Architectural Digest
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AD100: Discover The European Interior Designers of 2023 (Part I)
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