The Dwell 24: Meet This Year’s Best Emerging Designers

Omi Collective

For Olorunfemi Adewuyi, furniture can blur the lines between architecture and interior design. While he has both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture from Covenant University in Nigeria, he’s not fussy about titles: "People say, You’re an architect, but you’re working as a designer. I’m like, It’s one and the same!" Taking its name from the Yoruba word for water, Adewuyi’s Omi Collective project is fluid in scope; "Furniture has always been a natural extension of my practice. It’s something you can use to quickly test your ideas." Now, he makes pared-down pieces like the OS2 stool, which separates into smaller, individual seats. Its form draws from tropical modernism. You might see traces of Ashanti stools or Malian ladders in Adewuyi’s staple-shaped creations; some have even compared them to Japanese torii gates. To this, Adewuyi shrugs: "There’s no monopoly on form." —Nathan Ma

"People say, You’re an architect, but you’re working as a designer. I’m like, It’s one and the same!"

—Olorunfemi Adewuyi, Omi Collective

Rafael Triboli

Former art director Rafael Triboli began assisting carpenters in 2016. "It was a great discovery in my life," the self-taught designer says. He found inspiration in Donald Judd’s plywood works and similarly decided to explore the intersection of art theory and furniture design. Triboli’s visual language—hardwood carved with decorative inlays filled with carnauba wax and bronze—came through trial and error. "Wood is kind of a live material, so I have these mixed feelings of respecting it and, at the same time, not respecting it too much," he says. For a floor lamp, numerous wax-filled squares run down narrow mahogany beams. Triboli painted (and stripped) the wood until the color was how he envisioned it. "I had started to lose hope," he says of the process, "so it’s great to see that the finished piece is how it’s supposed to be." —Jinnie Lee

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