Mr. Thread—The Weekly Journal on the Business of Design

🏭 INDUSTRY

Gerard ter Borch the Younger: The Suitor’s Visit

The right kind of consolidation
Eight independent luxury showrooms have just formed the Trade Showroom Collective to share experience in sales, marketing, logistics and the other things that eat up a business owner’s week. They serve different markets, and each keeps its independence. Phil Miller is the group’s spokesperson. The aim includes a stronger conversation with the manufacturers they represent. What’s strange is that not one of the names on the list is from the greats of the genre, like Jerry Pair, Sloan Miyasato or John Roselli.

I think this type of “consolidation” could be incredibly powerful. So many businesses in our industry are small and family-owned. You can feel very alone making decisions. Get a group of people together who understand the same problems, give it a leader and a purpose, and you can start helping one another in practical ways. Sharing a useful piece of software or a better way to train a salesperson could save somebody months. We’re not all competitors, remember.

The geographical distance between the members doesn’t worry me. In fact, it’s a feature, not a bug. Getting together a few times a year takes commitment, and you hear what’s happening in other parts of the country. I’ve been considered for a similar alliance myself, and I’m hoping to join it. There’s nothing I’d want more than that sense of community. I’d love Mr. Thread to help create it, too. Some of the messages I get from readers already feel like the beginning of something.

“As the independent design channel continues to grow, stronger collaboration between leading manufacturers and independent showrooms has never been more important.”
— Emilio Sadez, owner of International Design Source, quoted in Home Accents Today.

Please keep the photographer
Six weeks ago, many of you enjoyed Mr. Thread’s special edition on AI-generated interior design imagery (#00043 - The end of photo shoots?) and our interview with HookPic CEO Michael Bashour. Gasping and wheezing, Business of Home has finally followed up with its own article on the trend.

BoH’s Fred Nicolaus found that not all companies are rushing to close their studios. Rebecca Atwood uses AI for wallpaper colorways while investing more in traditional photography; Four Hands says the technology still falls short of its standards.

I use AI imagery in my business, too, but at the point where our salespeople are helping a client make a decision. But we will always still employ photographers. If anything, I’m interested in going further back toward analog photography. A photographer has to go out and find the moment, light it, work with the people in the room. I can feel that human spark in the result.

My mother recently fell in love with a picture of a hand-carved wooden table she’d found online. My wife looked at the site and thought something was off. Why were such beautiful hand carved tables so cheap? Why did all the pictures look so similar? We came away convinced we were looking at AI-generated images. It turn out we were right. Unfortunately for my mother, she had already picked a table and told her designer she wanted it. Her heart was broken by an AI dupe.

That’s where I draw the line (don’t mess with my mama). A customer needs to know whether the beautiful object in the picture exists. Show them a real product photograph and tell them when you’re showing a visualization. And for business owners, pay the photographer who can make the actual table incredible. Investing in that authenticity will always lead to better results.

“And I think when it comes to real photography, you can taste the love.”
— Kristy Greene, vice president of creative services at Four Hands, speaking to Business of Home.

Sanderson’s biggest investor wants answers
There’s trouble brewing at Sanderson. Its largest investor, LBV Asset Management, wants to remove chair Dame Dianne Thompson and appoint Stephen Brooke. The shareholder vote is scheduled for October 29. LBV’s main beef is that they’re paying executives too much, while numbers have been weak since 2022. Sanderson’s board opposes the move, pointing to improved recent results and a “Succession”-style search planned for January.

I don’t know Sanderson well enough to referee this boardroom punch-up. But if you’re increasing the boss’s pay while sales and margins are falling, you need to explain it. Everyone’s entitled to a fair wage, including big bad CEOs. Shareholders are entitled to ask what they’re getting for their money.

💰OPPORTUNITIES

Fra Carnevale: The Birth of the Virgin

Perigold wants your loyalty. What would you offer?

Perigold’s new consumer membership costs $175 a year and renews automatically. Members earn 10% back in rewards toward future purchases and get benefits including priority customer service. (By the way, the consumer program excludes Perigold Trade business accounts.)

I’m surprised it’s taken them this long. They have the range of products and the distribution to make it work. Who doesn’t love a bargain? Watching your points accumulate is the oldest psychological trick in the book. I’d expect people who already buy from Perigold regularly to take a serious look.

Still, it feels very strange seeing luxury interiors tied to a paid rewards club. I wouldn’t feel comfortable putting one of my brands into that arrangement. We’ve been thinking about a loyalty program ourselves. Maybe we offer time with artisans, access to parts of Venice you wouldn’t normally see, or the chance to design your own fabric. That’s some real value.

You have to figure out what makes your business special before you invent the loyalty card. This is interior design, not a car wash. You might organize a visit to a maker’s workshop, or a fabric company could give its special clients an early look at a collection or some time with the maker who created it.

To be honest, the priority-service part makes me uncomfortable. When a client needs help to fix a disaster, stepping in and helping them is some of the most important work we do. Would they pay for faster, more personal support? Probably. I just can’t imagine charging them for it.

Being at the airport also reminded me that priority-service could alienate everyone else. Zone one, zone two, zone three. Imagine how the person in zone nine feels, sitting there wondering whether their bag will even make it onto the plane. I’d hate a client to feel that way when they call us for help.

📊ECONOMY

Eastman Johnson: The Hatch Family

The week in numbers

⬆️ 3.7% Top-line inflation for September rose from a year ago, sadly shocking economists’ expectations. Core consumer price index (removes food and energy) also exceeded forecasts, climbing 2.6% on an annual basis. The fastest US inflation in five months rocked markets with tech stocks facing heavy losses. Egads! This is not good news.

⬆️ 1% — LVMH’s organic revenue growth in the third quarter. “Organic” strips out changes in exchange rates and the businesses included in the comparison. Fashion and leather goods fell 5% on that basis in the quarter. The group reported growth in the US, Europe and Japan, with China less buoyant. I’d be careful about treating a luxury label as a guarantee that its customers are still buying everything.

October 22 — Kering’s next revenue update. That’s next Thursday, after the market closes. We’ll get another look at how much people are spending on luxury. Until then, I wouldn’t build a sales plan around the recovery the luxury industry has been promising.

🤖 TECH

Gabriël Metsu: A Musical Party

Is your next client bringing an AI negotiator?
A special report from Mr. Weft in Los Angeles

Dwell reports that some home buyers and sellers are using AI to price homes, make offers, and interpret inspection reports. The agents interviewed say they are already dealing with AI-written offers and pushback on repair estimates. It’s no surprise to me that chatbots are giving buyers confidence. I use it to negotiate with the Land Rover dealership, the caterer for my kid’s birthday party, and sometimes even relatives planning a get-together.

My realtor in California has her own magazine. It arrives every quarter with recipes and tips, and I suspect quite a bit of it is AI-generated. Some agents are putting enormous effort into marketing themselves and becoming Instagram personalities, thanks to ChatGPT and now Meta’s new Muse agent. Now their customers have access to the same tools.

I think interior designers should expect clients to use AI to question proposals and negotiate fees, too. You might even use your own AI agent to respond. We’re heading to the moment when both sides can let their AI bots fight over the numbers, and we can all go for cocktails.

“I’ve seen AI talk about cracks in foundations that aren’t there.”
— Shantih Moriarty, a Redfin real estate agent in the Bay Area, speaking to Dwell.

🧵LOOSE THREADS

Naleye’s New York City debut: quietly layered paintings. Thanks to our brilliant reader Rachel van der Brug for sharing this amazing exhibit.
Ashtrays are back as decorative objects, even in nonsmokers’ homes. Finally, somewhere glamorous to put your keys.
London is making more room for pedestrians. More places to sit and talk sounds like a very good use of a street.
Friars are using AI to help restore the Basilica of Saint Francis. A truly inspiring use of AI to help our world recover our precious patrimony. Worth a watch!

🎲 PLAYTIME SEASON 2 WINNERS!

Congratulations to Hillary E., our PLAYTIME Season 2 grand winner! Silver medals and bragging rights go to Avner L. and Jeffrey W. Thank you to everyone who took a guess.

Over nine weeks, we asked you to price items including the following:

✅ The Dalí-inspired Xai sheep tables.
✅ Andy Warhol’s Dolly Parton.
✅ An original La Dolce Vita movie poster.
✅ Trey the Triceratops.
✅ Verner Panton’s prototype UFO lamp.
✅ Sylvia Hyman’s Remembering Dianne, the ceramic mahjong set and alligator case.

And the answer to that last one was $4,608, including the buyer’s premium.

Hillary’s prize is a featured spotlight in Mr. Thread and a mystery gift from yours truly. Congratulations!

Put those calculators down. Season 3 begins Thursday, November 5, with a brand-new game. You’ll have to wait to see what I’ve got for you.

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

🎨 THIS WEEK’S ART

Gabriël Metsu: The Visit to the Nursery

This week’s paintings let us nose around other people’s rooms. Look at the fabrics! In Metsu’s The Visit to the Nursery, the grand interior was modeled on a chamber in Amsterdam’s Town Hall. These paintings were the MTV Cribs of their time, and not a pinball machine or home theater in sight!

Enjoying Mr. Thread?
How can we make this better? We read every message and genuinely want to know what you think.

🕵🏼‍♀️MR. THREAD INSIDER #00013 - Is Architectural Digest’s “Open Door” Just a Glorified Real Estate Listing Service for Celebrities?

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our members-only section.

Just before Architectural Digest’s cameras arrived at Ashley Tisdale’s Hollywood Hills home in March of 2022, the former Disney actor had a major problem: Her bookshelves were empty. Her husband suggested they build a collection over time, but she had a deadline. “No, no, no, no. Not when AD comes!” she recalled telling him. Tisdale had a solution. She quickly purchased 400 random books—books she had never read. And she probably never did.

Her Open Door episode appeared on March 29, 2022, and by September 15, AD was reporting that Madison Beer had bought the Hollywood Hills house for $5.9 million in an off-market deal. Tisdale isn’t the only celeb to hoist their property onto the market not long after showing it off on screen. Then there was Dakota Johnson, telling us how much she loved the limes in her kitchen. She later admitted they were set dressing and that she’s mildly allergic to them. Good grief. Even the fruit was putting on a performance. (That house recently sold too, limes not included.)

In 2021, VICE’s Bobby Finger found roughly one-third of 45 Open Door episodes coincided with or preceded active property listings. Picking up from where Finger left off, Mr. Thread investigated six homes that appeared on Open Door from 2023 onward. One was put on the market just before the show went live. Another was listed about three months after the film. The other five have all changed hands since the launch date. Coincidence?

Cade Hiser, who worked on AD’s programming and production in 2020–22, gives a sense of the audience in his portfolio. He reports a 50-million-view increase for AD in 2020 and 1.8 million new subscribers, followed by another 1.1 million in 2021. His account puts Open Door at more than 90 episodes and 800 million lifetime YouTube views. That’s an extraordinary shop window for a homeowner thinking of selling. The footage can do the work of a lavishly produced property film, whether or not that was the plan. So what happened to these houses once AD cameras left?

🕵🏼‍♀️MR. THREAD INSIDER #00013 - Is AD’s “Open Door” Just a Glorified Real Estate Listing Service for Celebrities?

Mr. Thread — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 20:45:07 GMT

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our members-only section.

#00048 - What happens when robots learn to sew?

Mr. Thread — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 21:00:45 GMT

Fernand Léger: Soldiers Playing at Cards

Hello readers,

Not long ago, my CFO came to me very concerned about his job. A new AI finance tool had come along, and he assumed his days were numbered. Now, he met his wife at my company. It’s safe to say that the business is more than just a job for him. It’s his life. So instead of reassuring him, I challenged him to become the person who knew more about using AI than anyone else in the company. Make yourself indispensable, I said. That way you will never have to worry about your job.

He took me up on it. Now he produces the sort of financial reports I’d once have associated with a Fortune 500 company. And he’s the first person I go to with questions about AI. It’s been wonderful watching him grow to the point of being INDISPENSABLE.

I’ve taken the same approach with other people on my team. Rafael came in as a digital marketer, humble, hungry and ready to learn. I enrolled him in AI boot camps for “vibe marketing,” and now he builds dashboards that help us discover the latest trends in real time. This week we were looking at velvet sample queries, looking for a correlation in what people are searching for, what’s happening with our competitors, and the rest of the Internet. One can imagine how crucial this insight is to staying competitive. I’m not the only one getting serious about technology.

Arhaus has just appointed K.C. Moss as its first chief digital officer, with responsibility for e-commerce, the digital customer experience, and customer data. They don’t mention AI in the press release, but they don’t have to. I’m glad to see a furniture company investing in that expertise. Smaller businesses can start by helping the people they already employ get better at the tools. I keep telling my team to fill their skills toolbox. It is the only way to stay relevant and valuable in this wild twisting economy.

Personally, I’m overwhelmed by the choice of personal AI assistants. I’d love something that could tell me which Slack messages need an answer while I’m in the car. But choosing it, setting it up, knowing I can trust it? I haven’t got there yet. I’m known in my corner of the interior design industry as the technology guy, but even I’m hitting pause while everyone else is onboarding Meta’s Muse.

All I want from this AI revolution is more time for my people to visit a client, make a beautiful pattern, or actually touch some fabric. My plan is to use the time and money we save to hire more people for that creative work.

When I first started in this business, we were using typewriters and carbon paper. This week I watched a video of a robot being taught to thread a needle. Now I’m conflicted. Those are the skills I’ve spent my career defending, and we need to talk about what happens when machines can do them, too. It’s given me a little bit of an existential crisis, to be honest.

The Pope has something to say about this, too. Keep reading for his very welcome vote of confidence in artists, and a mahjong business opportunity I’d love one of you to grab. There’s money in getting people around a table.

See you next week!
Mr. Thread

🎲 P.S. Don’t just read—play. We’ve woven a new mystery into this issue in our PLAYTIME segment. Let’s see who has the “eye” to claim the win this time and secure a spot for our grand prize draw. Scroll to the bottom to join the fun.

🏭 INDUSTRY

Fernand Leger: Contrast of Forms

How to launch a fabric collection
I found Kindly Woven founder Laura Adams on LinkedIn, and I’ve been sharing her writing with my team. Her guide to building an interiors fabric collection starts with a hero pattern, a coordinate and a small-scale pattern or plain. She writes that each has a different job, and that by building a complete collection, you can offer a complete solution for a room.

I read every word, and I’m hoping to speak with Laura for a Mr. Thread Q&A soon. Her writing delivers super niche expert thinking related to our tiny corner of the industry. Her words are so incredibly valuable that they directly impact how I’m thinking about my own business.

Laura gives really practical advice on strategically building collections that sell. For example, you’ve got somebody excited about a beautiful curtain fabric. Have you given them anything to put on the chair beside it? If they have to go to another business to finish the room, you’ve shot yourself in the foot. You must design collections with the whole room in view. If you’re in the fabric or wallpaper business and don’t read her work already, you should.

“That group isn’t the whole line. It’s one design story inside it. The hero gives the group its pull. The coordinate carries that story somewhere new. The third fabric gives the room a quieter option or a scale that works where the larger patterns won’t.”
— Laura Adams, via KindlyWoven.com

💰OPPORTUNITIES

Fernand Leger: Propellers

The Pope blesses artists
Pope Leo XIV addressed artists and curators at the Vatican last Friday, arguing that human art has a fundamentally different character from images generated by machines. He described art’s ability to express human nature, and insisted that the Church needs artists’ work. This line stayed with me: “Algorithms lack the spark of the human.” (Fun fact: Chicago-born Leo is a lifelong fan of the Chicago White Sox.)

Whether you’re Catholic, a White Sox fan, or not, what a welcome thing to hear from someone with that platform. I spend so much time explaining why the people who make beautiful things matter. Here’s a world leader saying it with conviction.

Artists help us understand experiences we struggle to put into words. They bring their own lives to the work. We need more of that in the world, please. And more people able to earn a good living doing it. That’s the human renaissance I keep hoping for.

“Your art, when it resists homogenization, when it draws our gaze, when it compels us to pause before that which cannot be consumed, is a form of cultural and spiritual regeneration.” […] This is especially true in this age of artificial intelligence, in which we urgently need to distinguish human art from what is produced by machines. There is an ontological difference — even before an aesthetic one — between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of the human, whereas “authentic culture and art preserve this spark”
— Pope Leo XIV

Who gets to decorate a $237 million house?
This year, from January through August, 17 American homes were listed for at least $100 million, according to Redfin data cited in a New York Times report. Cha-ching! In the same period last year, there were only nine. Among the eye-popping properties is the Key Biscayne house used as Frank Lopez’s residence in “Scarface,” asking $237 million. Yes, the glass elevator is still there.

Remember, these are not sale prices. But imagine the decorating brief when somebody buys one of these mega mansions. This is the very top of the K-shaped economy: people with glass elevators at one end while ordinary people are sweating about gas prices.

I filed this under Opportunities this week, then sat there trying to work out how I’d get through the door. You’d need to hire a private investigator to even find out which designer has the job. Once in a while my company gets a massive fabric order and we never learn which house it’s going into. What I’m saying is, the contracts for decorating these mega homes are closely guarded secrets.

So I’m asking the room. If you’ve won work at this level, how did the relationship begin? A designer, an architect, a house manager, a real estate broker? You can keep the client’s name to yourself. I’d love to hear how you got the call.

📊ECONOMY

Fernand Leger: The Mechanic

The week in numbers
It’s been a softer quarter in my own business. Honestly, I don’t want to be a downer, but the macroeconomic figures as they relate to our industry are the worst I can remember since 2008. I’m not panicking, but I’m watching these numbers closely. If your day is mostly spent looking at samples rather than the stock market, here’s what’s happening in the economy, and how it affects our industry.

$117.16 — RH’s closing share price on October 6. I keep an eye on RH’s shares because the company is so tied to people’s willingness to spend on their homes. Wall Street analysts lowered their expectations for RH last month. RH says the costs of its international expansion are weighing on margins, though it expects that drag to ease next year.

5.27% — 10-year Treasury yield on October 6. That’s the annual return investors can earn by lending money to the US government for ten years. It influences mortgage rates, so when it rises, buying a home can get more expensive for your clients.

6% — September’s year-on-year fall in US luxury credit-card purchases. Reuters says that it was the third consecutive monthly decline. Even though they report the wealthiest customers are still splashing the cash, this is not a good bellwether for high-end design. The industry can’t grow by only serving the few.

$178.45 — Lowe’s intraday low on October 5. The DIY company’s shares have been feeling the pressure. Basically, homeowners have been putting off expensive renovations and home improvements for several years. That’s kept pressure on Lowe’s business.

TECH

Fernand Léger, The Mechanical Elements

The robot can thread a needle. Now what?
Someone sent me a link to a more obscure news site, NewAtlas.com, showing Suzhou embroidery master Fu Xianghong teaching a robotic hand to work with silk. I watched it separate strands, thread a needle and stitch. The robots are now performing skills that have been a human specialty for over 2,500 years. Watch it and try not to spill your drink. You can see why a textile guy might need a minute.

My first reaction was excitement, followed almost immediately by panic. It’s not going to be long before these clankers can reproduce something beautiful that’s becoming difficult or expensive to make. We could also end up with the knowledge sitting in a computer while no human can be bothered to learn how to do it with their own hands.

Imagine, for a moment, a robot that could “hand-knot” a rug indistinguishable from one knotted by a human artisan in Nepal. Same material, same technique, same construction, same beautiful result. Would you value it equally? I know how much the person behind an object matters to me. I also know that someone furnishing a home might love the chance to buy the beautiful thing at a price they can afford.

Then I found this video of Monumental Labs using robotic milling to carve stone. (They do have human stone carvers finish every one by hand.) The company says that finishing can take hours or months. Skilled people also choose the machines’ toolpaths. There’s a lot of human judgment left in that workshop. But I’m telling you, the whole robot creator thing is giving me a headache.

If robots can bring more beauty into the world, make more boring buildings look like Florence or Paris, I’m interested. But what about the craftspeople and their apprentices?

I haven’t settled this in my own head.

You gotta feel it, but be real
Neuroarchitecture studies how we experience the spaces around us. As you know, I’m a champion of this. Designer Ozge Fettahlioglu has written a very good warning about overselling the science for Australian Design Review. (Strewth, we look far and wide for design news!) In short, there’s a danger that architects and designers are making sweeping promises about what a particular curve or color will do to everybody’s brain.

I want this field to grow. Helping people live better is a fantastic opportunity for our industry, and we’ll damage it if we promise more than the research supports.

One thing Fettahlioglu recommended: Go back after the photographer has left, while the room is actually in use. Can the guests sleep? Can people hear one another when the restaurant’s full? You will see with your own eyes if the room is making a difference to people.

“But our enthusiasm has started to outrun the evidence. Somewhere along the way, an interesting finding becomes a design principle, then a universal rule, then a sentence in a client presentation beginning with ‘the brain needs…’. If we are going to call our work evidence-informed, we need to be equally interested in the limits of that evidence.”
— Ozge Fettahlioglu in Australian Design Review

Can good design save the gloomy government?
You really need to check out America.gov, developed by the National Design Studio and the General Services Administration. They’ve created AI-assisted search to help people find federal services. GSA says it draws on information from more than 29,000 government websites. You simply ask for what you need (“renew my passport!”) instead of first having to click around between various shitty federal websites. It feels amazing, but what struck me is that this is less of a website, more of a chatbot.

Which got me wondering: are we looking at the end of the website?

We’d been discussing this in my digital marketing meeting, too. If an AI assistant can find what you want and eventually buy it for you, perhaps you’ll never visit the seller’s website at all. But buying fabric? Visiting a beautiful fabric website can be part of the pleasure—the photography, the films, the whole feeling of the place. If you sell beautiful things, it’s worth asking what a customer would miss if they never came to your website—and what would make them want to come anyway. Benji Taylor wrote on Twitter recently: “A personal website should feel like you’ve briefly left the rest of the internet.” And I’m starting to think that might apply to luxury brands soon.

📈TRENDS

Fernand Léger: Mother and Child

Mahjong rooms have real $$$ and space to move
I saw this beautiful carousel of images of mahjong tables on House Beautiful’s Instagram this week. There’s a business behind the pretty pictures. In an October 2025 announcement, Oh My Mahjong reported annual revenue above $30 million. And Yelp says searches for mahjong lessons rose 819% in the year through August 2025 compared with the previous 12 months. These numbers mean one thing: it’s time to take this thing seriously.

This is a great trend and one I hope is here to stay. It encourages human connection, tradition and time away from screens. It’s artistic and unique. What is not to love about mahjong (other than learning the rules)?

Once again, I think our industry is perfectly skilled to benefit financially from this trend. For designers, I’d start with clients who already play. You could also work with instructors and clubs on tables, padded tops or handsome storage. Designers could offer a focused consultation to turn an underused room into a beautiful mahjong den. I think there’s a gap in the market for a designer who specializes in the Chinese tile game. If one of you makes millions helping people do that, please come back and tell me. I’d love to run that story.

Salone goes after the bigger brief
I was excited to read that Milan’s best fair is expanding into commercial projects with Salone Contract, planned for 2027. Monocle reports that OMA is designing a space to bring suppliers together with architects, developers, and other folks involved in large projects. Think offices and hospitals, with very different purchasing needs from a private living room.

I’ve wanted to get my business into this world for years. The difficulty has been making something beautiful that also works at the price, scale, and durability the buyer needs. Before you get excited about a huge order, find out what testing is required, what volume you can reliably produce and how the payment schedule works. I’m glad Salone is making a place for those conversations. I’d love to crack it with a fabric we’re proud of.

🧵LOOSE THREADS

I’m swooning at the release of Apparatus’s new lighting and design collection, Act V: Afsaneh.
Theaster Gates has bought Pickard China. Stay for the behind-the-scenes portraits of the makers.
Norman Foster’s former Riviera home is for sale. I could get very little work done there.
That’s cute! Louvre-Lens is exploring adorable objects, from ancient animals to kawaii.
Ross Gardiner’s eulogy for Liquid Death’s branding is delightfully savage. The canned water is having an identity crisis.
Hermès has opened its new Williamsburg store, complete with a courtyard and sweetgum tree. Brooklyn just got bougie.

🎲 PLAYTIME

Last week’s 27-foot table by Zhang Zhoujie has an asking price of $250,000. Sarah G. came closest with her guess of $230,000, earning an entry in our October 15 grand-prize drawing. Congratulations, Sarah!

A mahjong set you really shouldn’t play with

At first glance, it’s a mahjong set on an alligator case. Look again. Sylvia Hyman’s Remembering Dianne is actually a trompe-l’œil sculpture made from stoneware and porcelain. The tiles, the case—the whole damn thing is ceramic!

What is the asking price? The person who guesses closest to its final price wins!

Reply to this email or click the button below to submit your guess.

Share Mr. Thread—The Weekly Journal on the Business of Design

Honor system, please—no using Google to look up the answer! (If you do cheat, we still get the engagement, but you’ll have to live with yourself!)

The Stakes
Whoever gets the closest guess each week wins an entry into our grand prize drawing! We’ll be holding the final drawing on October 15th—the more weeks you win, the higher your chances! Our winning threader gets:

A featured spotlight for you/your firm in an upcoming issue of Mr. Thread.
Another special mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle.

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

🎨 THIS WEEK’S ART

I never heard of …

Enjoying Mr. Thread?
How can we make this better? We read every message and genuinely want to know what you think.

Q&A

SITDOWN WITH MR. THREAD

Elaine Barsoom on AI, taste and the work you hate
Elaine Barsoom is a partner at AIVC, venture partner at Silicon Foundry and a former technology innovation leader at Nike, with earlier roles at American Express and Airbnb. She now helps businesses put AI to work. We asked her about the role of AI in the interior design industry, the jobs nobody wants to do, and why she still needs someone with a good eye.

Q: I understand you’re moving into a new office. Did you use AI during the design process?
A: We used ChatGPT and Gemini for imaging. We had to redo the whole space. I should have done the before and after to show you. It was really helpful to source products too. Our interior designer was great.

Q: Was your designer already on board with AI?
A: Yes, she was.

Insider #00012 - Elaine Barsoom

Mr. Thread — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 21:00:45 GMT

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our members-only section.

Insider #00011 - One of 2027’s Colors of the Year looks like “car undercoat”

Mr. Thread — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 21:31:02 GMT

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our members-only section.

Every year, paint companies look into their magic crystal balls and, by the power of self-fulfilling prophecy, try to tell the future. They choose a color, give it a silly name, and tell us this is The Color of the Year. Sometimes they’re right. Sometimes everyone ends up painting their walls the c…

#00047 - How design can end the loneliness era

Mr. Thread — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 21:29:33 GMT

Jan Steen: The Merry Family

“I’m new to Substack but this is the only one I’ve read that is informative and hilarious. I can see why Business of Home would not want to be driving traffic here.”

— H.S., New Subscriber

Hello readers…

It’s October, and I’m already looking at Christmas ornaments. My textile company has been working on beautiful handmade decorations, including heirloom ornaments for the tree that fold away like a ninja until next year. It makes my heart sing, and if the forecast I mention below is correct, America is in for a $275 billion online holiday spending season.

The best thing is, since we don’t have public shareholders or any private equity bros to answer to, we’re taking our time with a new line of products, letting the team learn, and seeing what customers actually want to buy. There’s something wonderful about watching makers try something new. And there’s no better season to find out whether people love your idea.

That’s the cheery mood I’m bringing into this week. So I was surprised to read Derek Thompson’s excellent piece on the decline of having people over. My house is going the other way. My wife and I love cooking massive meals and opening our home. There’s no better way to show love and be loved. I’d like for design to help more people have that pleasure.

It’s also why I can’t stop thinking about a story I read about a group of friends in Oakland, California, who built a compound together. They live in separate homes on the same plot, share dinners, and the children all run around between the buildings. To me, it sounds like a dream come true.

My mother and her nine siblings each had an apartment in the same building in Egypt. When we visited in the summer, we’d run up and down between everybody’s apartments. Someone was always having tea, or my aunt was making kefta (a seasoned minced meat dish), or butchering a live chicken. There was always somewhere to go. A compound like this is just one way to cure the loneliness epidemic, I think.

I enjoy a version of this in Venice. I can be there alone over a weekend, walk down the street, and find a friend who wants an espresso or a beer. I’ve been telling my wife for years that I’d love a family compound, with enough space for everyone to have their own life and a short walk between the houses. Maybe I’ve always wanted to live in a sitcom, where Kramer stops by at any moment unannounced.

Imagine getting that brief as a designer. A small backyard home for elderly parents, somewhere the cousins can stay at Thanksgiving, a table that multiple families can break bread around. You’d have some fantastic problems to solve. If this really is the direction living arrangements are going, our industry could do so much good with it.

Keep reading for my solution to the ongoing destruction of heritage sites, and more good news about Christmas, especially if you’re in the furniture biz. Then, in Mr. Thread Insider, two color experts cut through the BS and tell us what they really think of the five popular picks for 2027. There’s “butter yellow turning saffron” and a blue-gray that reminded one expert of a car undercoat. This should be fun.

See you next week!
Mr. Thread

💰OPPORTUNITIES

Norman Rockwell: Freedom From Want

Your next design brief could be a whole compound
Here’s that story I was talking about. In Oakland, a group of friends has spent years living across seven homes at a compound called Radish. They share meals and childcare, and have a regular “baby happy hour.” Now the property is on the market for $3.95 million, the New York Times reports. Some residents are moving into new compounds nearby. Co-founder Phil Levin has also started Live Near Friends, a business helping other people put this sort of arrangement together.

I’d absolutely love it, providing that there are options for separation and space, and assuming nobody’s dog is pooping all over your yard. When I moved to North Carolina, I realized how much I missed having people close by. Working from home was wonderfully convenient. I could do everything on my own schedule and be there entirely for my growing family.

But there was a very deep hole where that everyday community had been. The serendipity of the water cooler, blowing off steam over a drink after work, and of course, seeing the style and personality our colleagues brought through the door every day. It is good to know I am not alone in yearning to be surrounded by people again.

For designers and architects, the opportunity is immense and gratifying. Think about the brief. You need places to gather and doors people can close. Kitchens for a crowd, somewhere to sit when a neighbor stops by, and a way for an older parent to feel part of the household without having to live in the middle of it. Architects and interior designers have plenty to contribute. Of course, there’s the less photogenic work of deciding who buys the groceries and takes out the trash. Radish’s co-founder Kristen Berman calls that the “coordination tax.” Fair enough.

I’d happily talk bins if there’s someone down the path who’s always got people over for Sunday evening gravy. Rooting hard for this trend to continue.

“What we basically learned over the course of Radish is like, there’s a pretty universal desire to live this way.”
— Phil Levin, Radish co-founder, via the New York Times

Furniture companies make Santa’s nice list.
An Adobe forecast expects Americans to spend $275.1 billion online this holiday season. Phew! I was thrilled to see furniture among the stronger categories, with sales expected to grow 7.3%. What great news for furniture companies, who have had a disastrous year.

But anyone in the interior design industry can cash in at Christmas and during the sales periods. A designer could offer past clients a living-room consultation around Black Friday. You might get a new project, or a referral to a daughter who’s getting married. A maker might try a small giftable object. You don’t have to invent an entirely new business before Thanksgiving. In fact, please don’t.

🏭 INDUSTRY

John Singleton Copley: The Copley Family

Make the AI giants pay for our heritage
According to a World Monuments Fund study in Wallpaper*, 86% of sites nominated for its next World Monuments Watch are suffering from a lack of funding and resources. That’s not shocking news. These beautiful heritage sites cost money to keep up. Somebody has to repair the roof, and the people who know how to do it properly need to earn a living. We can’t lose these places because nobody profits from paying the bill.

Why are these sites falling into disrepair while the SI industry builds data centers?

By the way, if you haven’t heard, it’s “SI” now. Super Intelligence. Trump signed an order this week directing federal agencies to use that name instead of AI. He also met with technology bosses and announced a voluntary agreement on overseeing their technology, which he called “morally binding.” That’s a doozy, Mr. President. (It sounds to me like the foxes guarding the chicken coop.)

I think the biggest SI companies should be required by law to pay a small share of their revenue into preserving cultural heritage. The government should make it part of the cost of doing business. They’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars building data centers so we can use LLMs to answer our emails, and I’d like some of that cash spent on keeping beautiful buildings going. I’d also base the contribution on revenue, not profit, so these companies can’t try and use Hollywood accounting to pretend they make no money.

I discovered that there’s already a useful example in India. Its corporate social responsibility law requires qualifying companies to spend at least 2% of their average net profits over the preceding three financial years on approved causes. Heritage restoration and the promotion of traditional arts and handicrafts are explicitly eligible. For these tech behemoths, contributing to society should be a legal obligation.

Does anyone have any ideas about how our industry can turn these words into real action? We would welcome your thoughts in the comments section.

A craftsperson should be able to pay the rent
Homo Faber’s Venice exhibition closed this week, but I hope the ambition behind it lasts a lot longer. In Surface’s interview with Alberto Cavalli, the Michelangelo Foundation’s executive director talks about helping talented craftspeople build businesses. The work can be difficult. Earning a living from it shouldn’t be made any harder than it already is.

That’s right in line with Mr. Thread’s mission statement. I know how hard it is to make a career out of being an artist or a craftsperson. You need someone who’ll talk honestly about the business as well as admire the work.

Cavalli wants people to see a future in their skills and stick with them. I love that. Imagine being brilliant at something and abandoning it because you can’t see how to pay the rent.

I want us to be the force that helps these brilliant creative souls not end up as the proverbial “starving artists.” In the coming robotic age, human-made arts will be the most valuable thing in the world. Let’s make sure that makers are paid the money they deserve.

“That there is a bright future for craft. That it is possible to earn a living from human skill. That there is an audience and a market for craft in today’s world and they do not have to abandon their passion out of fear or disillusionment.”
— Alberto Cavalli, executive director, Michelangelo Foundation, via Surface

📊ECONOMY

Max Beckmann: Family Picture

Lower asking prices, expensive mortgages
The Mortgage Bankers Association’s average 30-year fixed mortgage rate reached 7.3% in the week ending September 25, Realtor.com reports. Purchase applications fell 4% from the previous week. Separately, Realtor.com’s September report found that roughly one in five listings had a price cut. Basically, sellers are trying to get people through the door. I know people who are renovating a kitchen to improve their chances of selling.

If your pipeline depends on clients buying houses, you can see the problem. Instead, I’d talk to the clients who are locked into their homes. Maybe there’s a kitchen they’ve been putting off or a room they’ve stopped using. We can give people a reason to love where they live.

“Mortgage rates jumped to their highest level in almost three years, pushing borrowers to the sidelines.”
— Joel Kan, MBA vice president and deputy chief economist, via Realtor.com

Consumers are worried. They’re still looking at furniture.
The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index fell to 81.9 in September. (This monthly survey shows how real people feel about the economy and whether they plan to spend money.) Respondents were worried about prices and jobs. But in the board’s six-month average of buying plans, furniture remained one of the leading durable-goods purchases people were considering over the next six months. More good news for the furniture companies.

Those of us running a business need to pay attention. A client can still want to renovate a room, even if they have to look at the budget a little closer. Explain what they’re getting and be prepared to work with them on the cost. If consumers are in a buyer’s market for properties, they may feel the same way about buying a sofa. I’d make it very easy for somebody to ask a question before they buy. Answering the phone remains a fairly impressive sales tactic.

“Consumer appraisals of current business conditions became negative for the first time since September 2024.”
— Dana Peterson, chief economist, The Conference Board, via CNBC

📈TRENDS

Frédéric Bazille: Réunion de famille

NY NOW makes room for the handmade
NY NOW is bringing back its Handmade division for its winter edition. The show will have three sections: Gift & Lifestyle, Home, and Handmade. A jury will reviewing applicants for the Handmade section until October 15. I keep telling you, hand-made, artisanal crafts are BACK. How wonderful.

I talk all the time about protecting craft, but the real challenge is to get craftspeople paid fairly. A trade show can help, provided the right buyers turn up and the maker can afford to be there. If you’re exhibiting, treat it as a business decision. Have a plan for whom you want to meet and how you’ll follow up. Compliments are lovely, but they don’t pay the bills.

“We want to create a platform where the quality of the work, the story behind it, and the people making it are truly valued.”
— Dorothy Belshaw, CEO, NY NOW, via Home Accents Today

🧵LOOSE THREADS

Es Devlin’s rotating library opens tomorrow at London’s Design Museum with over 2,000 books. There goes my afternoon.
A very funny piece from McMansion Hell that asks “what is going on with ceiling fans” (stay for the “Fandelier”).
Check out the Skywalker Grill at the Lucas Museum in Los Angeles.

🎲 PLAYTIME

The UFO has landed
Last week’s Verner Panton prototype UFO lamp sold for $61,920, including buyer’s premium. Avner L. came closest with $45,000 and took this week’s entry in the October 15 grand-prize drawing. Congratulations, Avner!

How much is this 27-foot table for your family compound?

This week’s object is Object #MT-V1, a 2019 mirror-polished stainless-steel table by Zhang Zhoujie. It stretches more than 27 feet from end to end, which should make seating plans interesting when you buy that massive compound for your family and friends.

Your clues:

✅ Made from 304 mirror-polished stainless steel.
✅ It is actually ten independent tables. Each can seat one to four people, or join the others for a larger crowd.
✅ This is an edition of six: five pieces and one artist’s proof.

What is the asking price? The person who guesses closest to its final price wins!

Reply to this email or click the button below to submit your guess.

Share Mr. Thread—The Weekly Journal on the Business of Design

Honor system, please—no using Google to look up the answer! (If you do cheat, we still get the engagement, but you’ll have to live with yourself!)

A featured spotlight for you/your firm in an upcoming issue of Mr. Thread.
Another special mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle.

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

🎨 THIS WEEK’S ART

In keeping with this week’s theme of community and compounds, I’ve selected a bunch of paintings that show families coexisting throughout history. Look at them all. Not a cell phone in sight!

Enjoying Mr. Thread?
How can we make this better? We read every message and genuinely want to know what you think.

🕵🏼‍♀️ MR. THREAD INSIDER #00011 - One of 2027’s Colors of the Year looks like “car undercoat”

Our experts’ unvarnished verdict on next year’s biggest shades

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our members-only section.

I never advocate following trends blindly. I’ve been in this industry long enough to know that good taste doesn’t arrive in a press release. But color forecasts can be a tea-leaf reading of where people’s tastes, anxieties, and money are going. If you run a creative business, you should know what’s coming—even if you use that info to sprint in the opposite direction.

In this week’s Insider, we reveal five leading paint and color brands’ official 2027 shades and ask two color experts what they really think…

BREAKING: Receiver appointed for doomed D&D building annex

Sat, 26 Sep 2026 15:35:43 GMT

Image: Google maps / Mr. Thread

According to a September 24 tenant notice reviewed by Mr. Thread, a court-appointed receiver has been authorized to collect rents and take over management of the Decoration & Design Building annex at 222 East 59th Street in Manhattan. Public listings identify showrooms in the annex including Kettal, Christopher Peacock, Mc…

#00046 - The show house math nobody tells you

Mr. Thread — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 21:52:12 GMT

Pietro Longhi: Il Ridotto

WICKED WHISPERS

Which iconic New York design address is having a very bad month?

A whisper making the rounds among the city’s real-estate crowd says the building may now be under “special management,” with the Starwood hotel group poised to take over. Rents that once flirted with $90 a square foot are reportedly being negotiated in the $60s. According to the same rumor, the longtime operator is still managing the property—but perhaps not for long. We hear a change could come within weeks.

Hello readers…

I’m back, I’m jet-lagged, and I’m feeling cranky. It’s been a great couple of weeks in Europe and now I’m ready to get back to other business. Good timing, because I just saw a Business of Home story titled “Why the design industry needs anonymous critics.”

I started reading what I thought was a beautiful love letter to Mr. Thread, the industry’s fastest-growing newsletter, written by yours truly, an opinionated, anonymous industry veteran.

The piece rattled on about the value of insiders saying what the polite design world won’t. It says anonymous writers can be useful because they don’t have to worry about offending clients, vendors or peers, or getting cut from a party list. All true. But instead of Mr. Thread, it mentions “The Grumpy Decorator,” a Substack that’s been going for…checks notes…only three weeks. It has published three posts to about a dozen followers.

I mean, come on.

No disrespect (because we feature an excellent Grumpy Decorator piece in this very newsletter) but Grumps will probably have given up publishing by Thanksgiving. Mr. Thread is a word-of-mouth sensation that has been growing for almost a year, and is read and respected by thousands of leaders of this industry. The email address of the CEO of a publicly traded company landed on our subscriber list last week, which blew our minds (guess who?). All told, we have published close to 200,000 words of deeply researched, sometimes cynical, but always passionate content.

I’m actually flattered that Business of Home considers us such a threat that they ignore Mr. T, and instead choose to cover “non-stories.” But I didn’t start this journal to compete with BoH. Frankly, who in their right mind would want to run that business model in this dawning age of the independent publisher? Instead, we’ve been effusive about their team, and probably send them more traffic than the dozens of daily emails they bombard you with.

But I get it. They’re going through their own version of enshittification having been acquired this year by another media powerhouse, Ziff Davis. Go figure… they’re slowly starting to lose their soul.

Alas, we have much bigger things to worry about here. I tell every entrepreneur I mentor: be the best you can be, focus on putting out the best you can put out, and the competition will stand no chance. That said, a little fire in the belly from “the competition” certainly helps push us on to greatness.

This week we have a massive issue with tons of opportunities to help grow your business. So keep reading to find out why show houses are a waste of money, why hotels are brilliant lead generation, and what artwork Johnny Depp is exhibiting this week.

This one’s another banger.

See you next week!
Mr. Thread

🎲 P.S. Don’t just read—play. Scroll down to meet last week’s winner and guess the price of this week’s flying saucer

💰OPPORTUNITIES

Edouard Manet: Masked Ball at the Opera

Could a show house ruin your business?
The Kips Bay Decorator Show House has opened in Greenwich Village with 22 designers. Kips Bay is the godfather of show houses. Everybody wants in. It’s like winning an Academy Award, except the award comes with an invoice that’ll give you a stomach ulcer.

I’ve been involved with these things for decades. If a great designer calls one of my companies and asks for fabric, I nearly always say yes. Twenty years ago, the late, great Thomas Britt wanted roughly 150 yards of a red-and-gold fabric for a Kips Bay entrance. We gave it to him. The return was the relationship. I helped a great designer make a great room, and I’ve watched relationships like that turn into real business.

It’s a harder game for the designer. Kips Bay gives you the room, sure. Brands may give you free products. But nobody gives you the upholsterer, electrician, trucks, flowers, or insurance. Designers tell me they often spend at least $50,000 out of pocket, sometimes with four or five days to install it.

The math is super scary.

Say you spend $50,000 on a show house. If your 25% to 30% markup, plus the design fees, leaves you keeping about a quarter of every dollar billed, you need $200,000 in new work just to get your money back.

Then pay the studio and the staff, and count the weeks everybody spent making the room happen. If you’re really keeping 15 cents on the dollar, break-even jumps to about $333,000.

Holy shit. You’d better know exactly what you want that room to do.

So before you commit to a show house, you must ask yourself what do I want my business to get out of this? Defining the objective clearly is the key to success.

An established designer’s objective may be to flex their creative muscles, raise their profile, and make a room everybody talks about. Fine. They can afford it.

But a young designer who needs work has an entirely different objective. They must put their ego aside and make a room a potential client can imagine living in. If it’s an art piece to impress designers, expect a lot of applause, but no clients. You might as well light $50,000 in cash on fire.

“[A]n invitation to design a room here is a defining moment in an interior designer’s career.”
— Andrew Torrey, via Galerie Magazine

When your best client says no photographs
House Beautiful reports that a $40,000 kitchen project collapsed after a designer told the client to allow photography or pay a $300 exclusion fee. The client walked. This has kicked off a massive argument about privacy and portfolios.

This is one of the biggest problems interior designers bring to me. You finally get the really, really, really amazing project from a wealthy client. It may be the best work you have ever done. Then the client says: “This is my home. I don’t want it on your website. I don’t want it on your Instagram.”

I can’t tell you how many designers have cried to me about this. Literal tears. How do you get more work when you can’t show the best work you’ve ever done?

My advice is: Deal with it before the marble arrives. Put photography in the first contract. Decide early which rooms are fair game, whether the owner stays anonymous, and who approves the pictures. Some clients may allow a private portfolio shown only in person.

What about renderings? Could you recreate the room and change enough that the house can’t be identified? Maybe. Ask first and label it. The same goes for iPhone pictures. Would the client like you showing snaps of their private home?

These projects are your most important assets and the key to growing your business. You must give them the attention they require.

“There’s a very real opportunity cost when a project can’t be documented.”
— Ali Burgoon Nolan, via House Beautiful

Your next showroom might have 40 rooms and a pool
I spent four days in Crete with a visionary hotel owner. The trip was incredible, and it will produce our most important order of the year (I told you I’m a workaholic, I’m always closing, even when I’m in paradise). It also made something very obvious to me: luxury hotels are a very, very hot place for design brands to be.

Modern Retail reports that brands are already moving into hospitality. At a Lela Rose pop-up in the Montage Big Sky, 82% of customers were new to the brand. Public Goods told the publication that hospitality makes up roughly 75% of its B2B operation.

Getting your product into the right hotel is a brilliant lead-generation play. Guests live with it, touch it and ask what it is. You need them to remember it when they get home.

I do have one warning. In Venice I saw staff uniforms made from a famous company’s heavy jacquard. The workers looked fantastic. It was also 95 degrees and the poor people were suffering like crazy. The hotel may be a showroom, but the concierge is still a person.

“The hotels almost became our content studio.”
— Lizz Niemeyer, Quilt, via Modern Retail

🏭 INDUSTRY

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo: The Minuet

Schumacher buys an archive I can’t pronounce
F. Schumacher & Co. has acquired most of the archive of Vanoutryve, a French-Belgian mill founded in 1860. Van Uchrey? Van-ou-tryve? However you say it, Schumacher now has its hands on more than 75,000 samples and 1,500 swatch books.

It turns out that Frederic Schumacher worked as a Vanoutryve agent before founding his own company in New York. I can see the good in this. Schumacher bought Tillett too. I know the owners; that company was close to going extinct. Schumacher saved it. So good on them.

But the real fear with consolidation is this: will enshittification eventually rear its ugly head? You have to remember these aren’t philanthropic organizations. They are massive businesses with revenue expectations and profit-and-loss statements.

Can they keep the beauty and the oddness of all these little companies alive or sacrifice themselves on the altar of shareholder value? I am certainly hoping for the former, but we’ll see.

“The collection ranges from classic Persian motifs and traditional European florals to early-20th-century French designs.”
— Home Accents Today

Lindsey Adelman refuses the usual ending
Lindsey Adelman has spent 20 years building a lighting studio so successful its glass globes are some of the most copied interior design products after the Eames lounge chair. Her anniversary profile in the Times says the studio is still completely hers. She has no shareholders and says she won’t sell the business carrying her name. Go, girl!

This is the antithesis of consolidation. She moved production to North Carolina and reduced her staff from 35 to 20, so independence hasn’t made every decision painless. But it has let her invest in workshops for employees and celebrate 20 years by deciding to work less. Magnificent.

What do they say? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I tell my own team to relax when it happens. I know it’s infuriating, but nobody copies the thing that nobody wants.

“The way I wanted to celebrate 20 years was to chill out for a minute and work less.”
— Lindsey Adelman, via the New York Times

The Pacific Design Center is becoming an office building
The Red Building at West Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center (PDC) has signed nearly 96,000 square feet of leases across seven deals, according to Commercial Observer. Hourglass Cosmetics is going in. Pattern Beauty. Princess Polly, whatever the hell that is. AllSaints is staying put. These are offices and headquarters, not new showrooms.

The dream was always that the PDC would be a massive design center. A good landlord could fill all three buildings and make it a design landmark for the world, never mind Los Angeles.

But this isn’t a good landlord; it’s Charles Cohen, who continues to lord over the collapse of the D&D. Maybe Charles could learn a thing or two from Jim Druckman, who keeps the New York Design Center alive as an industry and a community, without selling out to Polly Pocket or whoever they are.

“We’re not just a real estate project… We’re an industry with a soul.”
— Jim Druckman, via Business of Home

The Peloton of rugs is coming after your market share
Nothing quite zaps your inspiration like an Ernesta showroom. The custom-rug company was founded by three Peloton alumni and has just opened its 12th location, in Santa Monica. It raised $20 million in Series B funding earlier this year and wants 30 locations by the end of 2027.

The showrooms themselves are a real snoozefest. I don’t understand the sterile, soulless vibe they have created. This isn’t an Apple Store. Maybe that’s beside the point. They do understand consumer behavior. They make rugs to your exact size and show you a 3-D rendering.

If you’re in the carpet business, pay attention. These guys are going to eat your lunch. Of course, a bunch of tech bros building a heavily funded consumer brand made me think of Allbirds. The public company sold the shoe business and pivoted, for reasons I may never understand, into AI-computer infrastructure. So don’t be surprised if your favorite rug company turns into an AI company next month.

📊ECONOMY

James Ensor: The Intrigue

Holy shit, what is happening to the 10-year bond?
The bond market is putting the housing market in a chokehold. Wednesday was a bloodbath for bonds. Investors sold after another round of inflation worries, pushing the 10-year Treasury yield (the number mortgage rates tend to follow) to 5.10%, its highest since 2007, Wolf Street reported.

By last week, the average 30-year fixed mortgage had already climbed to 7.12%, its highest in more than two years, according to Mortgage Bankers Association data reported by Reuters. Anyone waiting for cheaper money is shit out of luck.

Mortgage rates are horrible. Builders feel it, buyers feel it, and eventually our industry feels it because, as I seem to say every week, people who don’t buy houses don’t furnish them. I’m not calling it a collapse quite yet, but I’m going to keep my beady eye on permits and completions, and what I see going down inside my own businesses. That will tell you more than some “expert” yelling on CNBC.

The U.S. Census Bureau just reported that August housing starts ran at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.275 million, down 2.6% from July. Permits fell 2.7%, and completions fell 11.9%. Single-family starts went the other way, up 7.6%, although the bureau says the margin of error around that monthly number is wide.

“Privately-owned housing starts in August were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,275,000.”
— The U.S. Census Bureau

MillerKnoll got a refund, not a cure
MillerKnoll, the massive global furniture and design company, saw first-quarter sales fall 3.4% to $923.4 million. Orders rose 3.2%, which sounds better, until you dig deeper: North American contract sales fell 5.3%, international contract orders rose 17.3%, and global retail orders rose 4.3%.

My delicate boardroom assessment was that they’re getting their asses kicked. That’s a little unfair to the good parts of the quarter, but I tend to keep a close watch on the North American business I watch.

Tariff refunds also made the margin look healthier. Management admits the refunds added 110 basis points to operating margin. I wouldn’t say no to that refund, but I wouldn’t mistake it for sales.

“Orders of $913.9 million, up 3.2% as reported and up 3.5% organically.”
— MillerKnoll, Inc. Reports First Quarter Fiscal 2027 Results

I hate to say it, but RH chose the right street
RH has opened its first standalone RH Estates gallery in Greenwich, a 20,000-square-foot, two-story bet on traditional design. It sits near two existing RH properties and includes Cucina Angelina, the company’s first Italian restaurant in North America. Their hope is that you enjoy their spaghetti bolognese so much that you accidentally drop $20k on a cloud sofa on the way out.

Greenwich is the perfect market. People forget about Fairfield County because New York City sits next door, but this place is full of old country houses, old wealth, banking money, stock money and some of the most beautiful estates in America. It’s the Beverly Hills of the East Coast. RH now owns what feels like an entire corner of it.

Will the design community embrace Estates? I don’t know. I think the customers absolutely will. Using restaurants for lead generation is a smart play, and for once I salute you, Gary Friedman.

📈TRENDS

Charles Hermans: The Masked Ball

The luxury of getting lost
Everyone is talking about AI shopping, AI shopping, AI shopping. Make sure the machines can find your product. Make sure it shows up on ChatGPT.

Then go to the Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen (aka the Paris Flea Market). Monocle reports that five million people visit its seven hectares every year. Furniture, clothes, silver, paintings. And the place is completely AI-proof.

That creates romance. As the Monocle writer says, you go looking for a table and leave with 16 silver dachshund knife rests that make absolutely no sense in your apartment. An algorithm didn’t tell you to find them. You found them, and now you will bore everybody at dinner with the story.

Jim Druckman says designers come to 200 Lex not simply because they have to source something, but because they want to shop and participate—part of his strategy to make the New York Design Center a destination rather than just a building full of showrooms, he told Business of Home.

People want to get out from behind screens. Put them in front of a salesperson. Let them touch the product and discover something away from the computer. I am completely sold on that.

“The world’s largest flea market is a maze of human history that answers to no algorithm.”
— Susanna Schrobsdorff in Monocle

Everybody is a shelter magazine now
A recently launched Substack called Homebody has published a list of 10 favorite interior-design publications. I had never heard of half of them. House & Garden, fine. World of Interiors, of course. Then a Swedish property agency, and an Australian site, and Never Too Small. Jeez, how many publications are there?

Some of the work is beautiful. I clicked through one site, Scura, and thought, what the fuck is going on here? The website is deliberately a mess. Thumbnails of the stories dance around and try to avoid your click. It’s different for the sake of being different. Yet… beautiful. And the quality of the photography and the writing is next level. Who even owns it? A company named “Flawk,” whose website is equally ambiguous.

The obvious opportunity is for designers to publish for themselves. Jake Arnold has launched a Substack, Jake’s Take, with projects, sourcing discoveries and material from his library. A famous designer showing people how to choose green paint can reach an enormous audience. Mr. Thread talks to a smaller group of business readers. We’re all happy on Substack, which says it has more than 5 million paid subscriptions. Enshittification is surely next.

Would I tell a designer with something useful to say to start a Substack? Yes. Do I open all the Substacks in my own inbox? Absolutely not.

🧵LOOSE THREADS

Johnny Depp is now a sculptor. His first piece is a two-meter white-bronze half-man, half-rabbit carrying a “sword of truth,” cast in Milan and shown in Istanbul.
LVMH is opening 71 workshops, hotels and boutiques across 13 countries for three days in October. I talked about this last week. Everyone wants to see how the sausage is made.
A Florida family has become famous for fifteen minutes after alleging in a lawsuit that it spent more than $6.7 million on 200 fake Warhols. Allegedly, some cost just $30 to make.

🎲 PLAYTIME

Trey cost how much?
Last week Mr. Needle asked you to price Trey, the largely complete, 66-million-year-old Triceratops that spent nearly three decades at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center before appearing at Joopiter.

It sold for about $5,500,000.

Hillary Ellner came closest with a guess of $8.2 million and takes this week’s entry toward the October 15 grand-prize drawing. Congrats, Hillary!

What did the UFO lamp sell for?

This week’s object is a 1975 prototype “UFO” lamp by Verner Panton. It is plastic, steel, and aluminum, hangs nearly five feet, and was manufactured by J. Lüber AG in Basel.

Here are some clues:

✅ Panton gave us the first single-form plastic cantilever chair.
✅ This lamp is a prototype, not a later retail example.
✅ Its presale estimate was $4,500 to $5,500.

What was the final sale price, including buyer’s premium? The person who guesses closest to its final price wins!

Reply to this email or click the button below to submit your guess.

Honor system, please—no using Google to look up the answer! (If you do cheat, we still get the engagement, but you’ll have to live with yourself!)

A featured spotlight for you/your firm in an upcoming issue of Mr. Thread.
Another special mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle.

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

🎨 THIS WEEK’S ART

This week’s art is inspired by “masks.” We led with a traditional tabloid “blind item,” and the theme of the intro was anonymity. Longhi, Manet, Tiepolo, Ensor, and Hermans all painted masked revelers, so imagine this week that our whole industry is one glorious masked ball.

Enjoying Mr. Thread?
How can we make this better? We read every message and genuinely want to know what you think.

INTERIOR LIVES #00002 - Jeffry Weisman

Jeffry Weisman is a San Francisco interior designer whose work combines glamour, theatricality, and meticulous restraint. He began his career designing corporate interiors before establishing a product-design consultancy with Charles Pfister. In 2000, he joined forces with artist Andrew Fisher to create Fisher Weisman, a design practice known for highly individual homes and handcrafted furniture, lighting, and accessories. Here, Weisman reflects on chairs, loss, textiles, difficult clients and why a smaller office became his better version of success.

I was 16 when I started in interior design. I was hanging out with a girlfriend in high school whose mother was a decorator in Los Angeles. Her mother asked if I could carry a chair into the house. She looked at me with a cigarette in her hand and said, “I like the way you carry that chair. Do you want a job?”

I started out as her gopher. In a short time I was promoted to shopping and selecting fabrics and doing more than that. I knew rapidly that it was something I loved, and that I could imagine it being a real career for me.

Insider #00010 - Homo Faber: the full report

Mr. Thread — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 21:30:17 GMT

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our members-only section.

I went to Venice for Homo Faber. I saw the Biennale, a few factories, a few churches and ate an irresponsible amount of food. You can see a lot in a showroom, but you never get to see real artisans making things that take thousands of hours. That’s why Homo Faber is such a mind-blowing experience. …

#00045 - Live from Homo Faber

Mr. Thread — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 21:30:16 GMT

Photo by Mickey Riad: “A Luminous Ark,” by Chinese paper-lantern artist Wen Qiuwen

Hello readers…

Maybe it’s the Negroni talking, but sunsets in Venice just hit differently. Everything’s alive here. The sky outside my hotel window has been doing ridiculous things every night, the streets are full, and everybody is on the way to their next Aperol Spritz. I’m here for Homo Faber, of course, one of my favorite weeks of the year.

I spent this week being a cultural ambassador, visiting factories, wandering around churches, and looking at work so good it made me question my very existence. I also ate my entire body weight in spaghetti alle vongole. The place next to our factory makes the most incredible dish with clams and maybe three or four ingredients. It’s simple and incredible.

I’ve told you before that Homo Faber is quickly becoming one of the must-see events on the design calendar. I was still not ready for this edition. It’s just such a mind-blowing experience — the way it’s curated, the way you walk around the island to see it, the way you travel from room to room. Even the staff are dressed in hand-dyed uniforms.

WWD just published a report on why our industry should take Homo Faber seriously. Sure, it’s getting much bigger, but it’s also putting furniture, marble, glass, metal, and textile makers in the same rooms as the people that matter. If you make incredible wallpaper or any other beautiful work by hand, this would be a great show to consider. Our readers should be paying attention.

The mission here is the same as Mr. Thread’s: to get people excited about craft again and give artists a venue where they can put their best foot forward. Every object here has a QR code, then visitors vote, and somebody wins. For too long, everyone has been too nice to each other about art. A little competition brings out the best in people, I say.

This week’s Insider is my full Homo Faber report. I’ll show you the best rooms, the objects that stopped me in my tracks, and the pasta I spilled on my shirt. I went to every exhibition we could get into, took the iPhone snaps, and came home with enough ideas to keep our showroom busy for a year. Be warned, this kind of show takes you outside your comfort zone. If you run a design business and believe that craft is one of the last great luxuries, you’ll see why you need to be there next year.

Also, keep reading to find out about a new American school teaching the classical building trades, the latest on tariff refunds, and why a former prison is currently Japan’s hottest new hotel. Then meet me in Venice below.

See you next week!
Mr. Thread

🎲 P.S. Don’t just read—play. Scroll down to find out who guessed right on last week’s item, and enter this week’s challenge.

🏭 INDUSTRY

Photo by Mickey Riad

Congrats to the Godfather
Jim Druckman is getting the 2026 Design Leadership Award at the Design Summit in Los Angeles this November. Jim has run the New York Design Center since 1995, and under his watch 200 Lex became a trade-only home for nearly 100 luxury showrooms.

Jim has spent decades making the design business feel like a community. He gets designers and makers talking, and keeps 200 Lex a center of the design world. You can still go there, lounge in the chair, and run into an old friend.

He is a treasure for our industry and he means the world to me. For close to 2 decades he has been trying to get me to move my fabric company out of the doldrums of the D&D to his sunny and warm confines. I never took him up on his offer, but honestly, it feels like a decision I wish I could revisit.

I love this award. Enjoy your night in LA, Jim.

Charleston keeps the skills alive
Not far from where I live, the American College of the Building Arts in Charleston teaches carpentry, blacksmithing, plasterwork, and stone carving. Students work on real buildings while earning an applied-science degree with liberal-arts coursework. Sounds like a creative nirvana to me.

Everyone seems to be complaining that they can’t find skilled labour. Then they act surprised when the kids say they can’t find a way into a trade. Somebody has to shape the stone and lay the plaster; we can’t all be out there choosing paint colors and cushions. I’d hire the young person who spent a few years learning a trade over someone with a beautiful mood board any day of the week.

“Aut disce aut discede”
— the student body’s unofficial motto at American College of the Building Arts in Charleston. [“Either learn or leave.”]

Tariff refunds are not free money
This tariff-refund story in Business of Home gets it spot on: customers shouldn’t expect tariff refunds to come back to them. The businesses absorbed losses, watched demand get ruined, paid more to move things, and now new tariffs are landing on top of the old ones. We were getting crushed then, and we still are.

At my business we’ve only had a handful of people ask us for a refund. You’ve got to be pretty audacious to reach out and ask, I think. Nice try. But the refunds don’t line up with what smaller companies actually paid out. The big boys can turn it into a lovely quarter. Companies in the middle are still getting kicked in the ass.

Look at RH’s numbers. Its latest reported adjusted EBITDA included $55.1 million from tariff refunds. That is real money when you’re a giant company. For a smaller textile business, the refund cash just vanishes into the overhead.

“Everything we’ve received back has gone into reducing the ongoing increase in overhead costs. Shipping and fuel surcharges are through the roof these days.”
— John Greenawalt, Stout Textiles, via Business of Home

RH discovers traditional
RH beat forecasts this quarter, and as reported this week its new traditional Estates line is bringing in a new customer. That shows the power of traditional and classical, and how much it’s back. RH is changing the first floors of its galleries to show traditional furniture. They realized they had nothing for the biggest segment of interior-design clients.

My definition of modern? It never goes out of style. The Glass House is modern. RH is contemporary, and contemporary can go out of style in a snap. Have they gone too contemporary? Yeah. Estates seems like a smart play, and I think they’ll do well for a while. But they’re over-leveraged in other places, so I’m not buying a party hat just yet.

They’re trying to scale taste and luxury, which is a hard thing to do without making it a little hokey. Still, as much as I like to poke fun at Gary Friedman, I certainly wouldn’t bet against them.

“Perhaps RH had been ‘too modern’ for the past eight years.”
— Gary Friedman, chairman and CEO of RH, via Business of Home

💰OPPORTUNITIES

Photo by Mickey Riad

The warehouse becomes the gallery
R & Company has opened its Brooklyn Navy Yard warehouse to the public by appointment. I bumped into Zesty Meyers, the visionary behind R & Company, at Homo Faber and heard about the new 16,000-square-foot space. It’s experiential, it’s a warehouse, and it’s much more interesting than your average showroom.

Clients want to see the back of the house, the samples, the tools, the worktables. I say let them. We spend too much time trying to look perfect, and then everyone wonders why the room has no energy. Show your mess.

I’ve never met someone as passionate and knowledgeable about design and craft. Honestly, if we could elect a mayor of the design industry, he would get my vote!

“It feels so refreshing to be able to pull things out and just play.”
— Zesty Meyers, co-founder, R & Company, via ELLE Decor

📊ECONOMY

Photo by Mickey Riad

Five-percent money is back
The 10-year Treasury yield reached 5.04%, its highest level since 2007. If these numbers mean nothing to you, mortgage rates are still in the toilet. People aren’t moving house, and people who aren’t moving house aren’t taking on the big renovation and furnishing projects that follow.

Wayfair has had good reports and it’s still under pressure. Hermès is getting crushed. There’s a really bullish, bad vibe everywhere. I’m not hitting the panic button yet. The client already in the house still has a kitchen, a bedroom and a sitting room that need a change. Go find them.

📈TRENDS

Photo by Mickey Riad

The latest wealth flex is a tree

SPECIAL REPORT FROM MR. WEFT, WEST COAST EDITOR

I was walking my kid to a park in Bel Air, in Los Angeles, not long ago when I noticed a huge crane lifting a full-sized palm tree into what must have been a $40 million home. It was pretty close to the famous Spelling mansion, if you know the area. Anyway, I asked one of the crane operators what each tree cost. He said $180,000. I nearly fell over.

The New York Times has been onto this too. The super-rich are craning mature palms, banyans, baobabs, and whatever else they need to make their new-build feel as if it has been sitting there for 40 years. Because who has time to let trees grow?

Welcome to the K-shaped economy. The other flex in this neighborhood, apparently, is burying your power lines at the cost of half a million dollars or more. I mention it only so you can feel poor in a completely new way.

To be honest, I felt a pang of jealousy for the crane operator. This business didn’t exist five years ago, and now he’s spending his days lifting $180,000 palm trees, and eating the incredible tacos from the food truck that services the manual laborers of Bel Air (and occasionally, hungry dads on their way back from the playground).

🧵LOOSE THREADS

• Washington’s proposed 250-foot “Arc de Trump” has preliminary site and building-plan approval.
• Japan’s former Nara Prison is now a 48-suite hotel, with each suite made from nine to eleven original cells.
• A giant Poké Ball-shaped hotel is coming to Hokkaido. Gotta catch ‘em all.
• Faye Toogood has named her crumpled-paper lanterns. Johnny. That’s British slang for a condom, she says.
• Tom Dixon is showing new lights, tables and textiles at Coal Drops Yard for London Design Festival.
• Studio Waldemeyer just put rechargeable Lumeable candles in a church. Even the Lord likes sustainability.
• Raw Edges has added LightMass table lamps made from a single material. Less waste, more floating sculpture.

🎲 PLAYTIME

How much for Trey the Triceratops?
Last week’s item was an original movie poster for the classic Italian movie “La Dolce Vita” (1960). It sold at Sotheby’s last week for $17,125. Freddy V. came in with $16,500 and took the crown. Congrats, Freddy!

This week we’ve got Trey, a largely complete 66-million-year-old Triceratops skeleton. I mean, why not?

Here are some clues:

✅ Excavated in Wyoming in 1993, then restored and mounted in Germany
✅ Spent three decades on public display at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center
✅ The first fossil offered by Joopiter, the auction platform founded by Pharrell Williams

What was the final HAMMER price? The person who guesses closest to its final price wins!

Reply to this email or click the button below to submit your guess.

Honor system, please—no using Google to look up the answer! (If you do cheat, we still get the engagement, but you’ll have to live with yourself!)

The Stakes
Whoever gets the closest guess each week wins an entry into our grand prize drawing! We’ll be holding the final drawing on October 15th—the more weeks you win, the higher your chances! Our winning threader gets:

A featured spotlight for you/your firm in an upcoming issue of Mr. Thread.
Another special mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle.

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

🎨 THIS WEEK’S ART

Photo by Mickey Riad: Spectators enjoy “A Great Turning,” a kinetic mirror sculpture conceived by Es Devlin with a soundscape by her band Polyphonia.

Enjoying Mr. Thread?
How can we make this better? We read every message and genuinely want to know what you think.

🕵🏼‍♀️ MR. THREAD INSIDER #00010

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our members-only section.

Photo by Mickey Riad

Mr. Thread goes to Homo Faber
I went to Venice for Homo Faber. I saw the Biennale, a few factories, a few churches and ate an irresponsible amount of food. You can see a lot in a showroom, but you never get to see real artisans making things that take thousands of hours. That’s why Homo Faber is such a mind-blowing experience. I went to every exhibition I could get into, asked too many questions, took all the iPhone photographs and ate all the spaghetti. Let me take you on the tour.

Interior Lives #00001 - Avner Lapovsky

Mr. Thread — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 21:57:11 GMT

Avner Lapovsky

Avner Lapovsky is a veteran of San Francisco’s design-showroom world and a longtime design community advocate. His career has included Kneedler-Fauchère, Randolph & Hein, and Sloan Miyasato, where he became co-principal and president—spending decades connecting designers with exceptional materials, furnishings, and independent makers. For…

#00044 - The rise of the tastemaker

Mr. Thread — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 21:18:01 GMT

Canaletto: The Bacino di San Marco on Ascension Day

Hello readers…

Did you know that cigarettes don’t count in Venice? Standing in the courtyard with employees, or out on the street with a spritz, these cigarettes are totally allowed. I don’t make the rules.

My brother is always making me take these post-dinner walks, and he finds the most dreamy corners. On our first night, jet-lagged and still floating around after working all day, he announced that there was a floating cinema around the back of Giudecca. We turned a corner and there it was: a screen on the water, rowboats ferrying people over, and master chefs cooking the most incredible food served on paper plates to round out the scene. Magical does not even begin to describe it.

Venice is unbelievable at this time of year. All the glitterati descend for the film festival, the city is alive, the weather is cooling, and this week I’m going to Homo Faber, Es Devlin’s magnificent celebration of the human hand. I’m super excited. We’ll report back next week.

That brings me to last week’s AI-rendering issue. It was one of our most successful issues ever: lots of opens, clicks and messages. I had a feeling the topic would resonate.

Then I saw the results of our poll. Only a third of you said you’d use an AI-rendered room to market your brand. More than half would keep it inside R&D and testing. Another 13% chose “over my dead body.” I’m surprised by it, but I don’t believe it.

For 30 years, I’ve watched people mock our industry for being behind the times. We’re always the last to adopt technology. We’re the little brother to fashion, years behind on websites, e-commerce, CRM, and back-end systems. We’re a cottage industry made up of tiny companies that couldn’t invest like the giant luxury houses. I think the design industry is like the Orthodox Church, protecting the past, conserving our heritage, keeping things the same.

AI has made these tools available to everyone, even a small company like mine. The question isn’t whether we could, but whether we should use AI. A professional designer can use it to work faster and provide a better service to their clients. But AI alone does not have the taste, training, or cultural memory of its own, or, more importantly, the humanity needed. The opportunity here is with the experts and tastemakers who know what to ask for and can spot the difference between slop and style.

Keep reading to find out which design firm is selling trend reports for just $18, the return of the dining room, and why Wayfair thinks the market for beautiful interiors is enormous.

See you next week!
Mr. Thread

🎲 P.S. Don’t just read—play. Scroll down to find out who guessed right on last week’s item, and enter this week’s challenge.

🏭 INDUSTRY

Canaletto: A View of the Rialto Bridge

Good taste gets an entry-level price
The sisters behind a design agency named Goesling Group have turned their boutique forecasting work into a subscription. Business of Home reported a launch price of $22 a month; the live “Deep Cuts” page now shows $18. Subscribers get monthly reports on color, materials, and finishes. It’s not really clear to me how this four-person team spots and analyzes trends, and I’m not critiquing their business, but this did connect to a wider trend I’m seeing in the marketplace.

Los Angeles designer Talia Laconi is doing a cheaper package too. Room Service costs $2,500 for one room, delivered in two weeks or less. The client gets a concept, two layouts, elevations, a shopping list and 30 days of access, then handles the buying. No meetings. In the automotive industry this is called “the Cayenne effect”: Porsche uses the Cayenne to bring in buyers who’d never have considered a 911.

I think there’s a massive latent demand for interior design. When Uber got its crazy valuation, it wasn’t based on the size of the taxi market, but a bet on revolutionizing the entire transportation industry. Designers like Laconi and the Goesling Group are aiming these products at customers who would ordinarily not pay for interior design or trend forecasting, not those who want it cheaper. These smaller services also give a new client access to an expert. The smart ones will turn a $2,500 room into a much bigger relationship.

“A ‘trend’ is more than a TikTok dance; it could be a 10-year movement that is going to impact your customer base, and even if you ignore it, it’s still going to happen.”
— Becca Goesling, director of design, Goesling Group, via Business of Home

The new tastemakers
Nikita Bier is a former product lead at Elon Musk’s X. He spent the weekend feeding simple photos from his home into AI. He uploaded various land and soil surveys, a Zillow listing, and satellite photos into AI and came out with what he called construction‑ready renovation concepts. Menswear critic Derek Guy quoted the post to make an uncomfortable argument: he thinks Bier’s right, but that it’s also bad news for taste.

His example is bespoke tailoring — once custom suits got cheap and easy to order, fewer people trained as tailors, competition thinned out, and even the top end of the trade got worse. His conclusion is that most people have no eye for design and are better off led by an expert who does.

Houzz’s new numbers back him up: 97% of us believe AI will reshape this industry within five years, but 80% of renovating homeowners still hire a pro, and the single biggest reason the rest skip AI tools entirely is that they’d rather have one (38%, true in every generation). The machine can render the room in a few seconds. It just doesn’t know if you deserve a nicer one.

“They would benefit from constraint — an educated group of people, in this case tailors, who gently guide them towards better choices.”
— Derek Guy, via X

Don’t knock the knockoffs
Danish furniture company OMHU has answered the knockoff market with a knockoff of its own. It released 50 bright-orange “Tedy” sofas at $799.99, made with the same materials as the original Teddy, which starts at $1,995. In other words, they sold out. This is a tale as old as time. Tom Dixon tried a similar move with his lights after watching cheaper copies of his Beat range go viral. If you can’t beat them, join them.

I understand the raging internal debate: do we knock ourselves off before someone else does? One of my companies makes fabrics by hand in a 100-year-old factory using original techniques. A digital version might look good in a photograph, but it wouldn’t carry the hand, the texture or the way it looks under different light. That’s not to say people won’t try. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, creating your own dupes is flattering yourself. But it just might save your business… as some people like to say: “Better to knock yourself off before someone else does.”

“With this campaign, we’re saying that being copied is iconic. If you’re a viral product or if you’re popular, then you’re getting copied.”
— Christine Smith, creative director, OMHU, via Business of Home

📈TRENDS

Canaletto: A Regatta on the Grand Canal

Bad architecture is worse than smoking
Designer Thomas Heatherwick told Monocle that banal buildings are the ultra-processed food of the design industry. His nonprofit, Humanise, is collecting evidence on how buildings affect the health of the people inside them and the poor souls who have to walk past their grim façades every day.

I gave Monocle a hard time last week, but I absolutely love this article. If bad architecture is bad for your health, our industry shouldn’t sell a beautiful home as a decorative indulgence. We sell a long and happy life. Light, proportion, color, craft and materials affect how your clients feel every day. That is an enormous promise. Yet more evidence that cigarettes in Europe are actually good for your health if you enjoy them surrounded by iconic architecture.

“We’re in an industry where, if the public doesn’t like what we do, we say that they’re stupid.”
— Thomas Heatherwick, designer and founder of Humanise, via Monocle

Neo Nouveau is coming for the beige box
Writer Laura Scalco has put a name to the decorative mood she sees forming across fashion, graphics, tattoos, and architecture: “Neo Nouveau.” Think whiplash curves, botanical motifs, elongated forms and delicate ornament, remade in chrome, resin, acrylic and metal mesh.

As you can probably guess, I’m pretty bullish on this. You can see classicism in its DNA, and classic is back everywhere I look. Fashion gets there first, then the ideas slowly trickle into interiors.

Art Nouveau rose when people were uneasy about industrial production. Scalco sees the same reaction to AI slop. This is fantastic news for designers and artisans. Let the machines produce the smooth, sensible milquetoast shit. Bring back the sexy curve, the embroidery and the unnecessary little flourish.

“Ornament is, and I suspect will increasingly become, a differentiator: the more bespoke, crafty and dainty the detail, the more it signals singularity, originality and a move away from the mass-produced.”
— Laura Scalco, The Taste Archive

The scent of Venice
Sanchita, who writes The Other HAFH, a weekly newsletter on hospitality design, argues that scent architecture starts long before a hotel chooses a branded candle. Timber, textiles, detergent, kitchens, pools, plants, humidity, and ventilation have already created an olfactory interior by the time the perfumer arrives.

My brother is an expert on this topic. He’s developing a scent for our company’s showrooms. It’s inspired by Venice and the jasmine and roses in our factory garden. The canals give you… other notes. That’s a little bit of an issue.

Anyway, a good interior should reach every sense, and smell is the one that conjures memory. It’s like a signature. You’ll know it when you step inside Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. The hotel has its own signature scent that is unforgettable and incredibly Californian.

“A hotel’s scent is already forming before a perfumer steps in.”
— Sanchita, The Other HAFH

Walls that demand to be touched
Selected Wallpapers just called tactile wall coverings a “defining force” in luxury interiors. I’m talking woven raffia, raised textile surfaces, and wood veneers that create a calm and serene environment that is good for the soul. After another day spent tapping away at glass screens and keyboards, it turns out people want a wall that makes them feel something when they run a finger across it.

One of my companies has just released a wallpaper collection full of leather, marble, stucco and wood-like textures (everything made by hand, of course), and it feels good to be ahead of the trend. That is one of the nice benefits of running Mr. Thread: we read about something six months ago, put it into the business, and then watch the rest of the world arrive. I hope you’re doing the same.

“Designers increasingly talk about how a room feels and sounds, not only how it looks.”
— Selected Wallpapers, via Dezeen

💰OPPORTUNITIES

Canaletto: A View of Santa Maria Salute and the Entrance to the Grand Canal from the Piazzetta.

The dining room returns
House Beautiful asked designers why clients want formal dining rooms again. I remember the 1990s and early 2000s when every house had a dining room. Now the call is more urgent: People need a place where dinner doesn’t compete with the washing-up, the Knicks, or TikTok.

Clever designers are adding hidden bars and little seating areas, and some rooms double as foyers or reception halls. That gives you permission to use the wallcovering, lighting, and materials that might be too dramatic elsewhere. Go nuts. Sell the dining room as the center of the family home, and, most importantly, ban phones.

“A dedicated dining room invites people to sit down, slow down, and enjoy a meal in a more intentional way.”
— Christopher Boutlier, designer, via House Beautiful

📊ECONOMY

Canaletto: The Grand Canal from San Vio, Venice

Wayfair is feeling optimistic
Wayfair just told the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference that the home market across its core countries is worth roughly $400 billion to $500 billion. The company made $12.5 billion last year, so I listened to the recording so you don’t have to. Executives kept banging on about Perigold and how they believe online discovery and physical stores can open luxury brands to customers who, ordinarily, would never set foot in a design center.

I’m excited, but I’m not necessarily sure this is true. Many of the things we sell are complicated and can’t be reduced to a thumbnail and a buy-now button. But Wayfair’s confidence proves there’s tons of demand for the beautiful stuff we make. They’re using technology, logistics and shops to open the door a little wider. We should be paying attention to who walks through it.

“We do not believe that individual consumer is likely to defer to an agent to make all the decisions on their behalf about how they are going to outfit their home.”

— Niraj Shah, Co-Founder, CEO and Co-Chairman, Wayfair

LVMH is not enjoying the view
The view from Venice is less cheerful at the giant end of luxury. I just walked past one of LVMH’s biggest stores here and it was absolutely empty. I’m talking tumbleweed-and-a-distant-church-bell empty. One shop is only an anecdote and not a data point (maybe there was a fire drill?), so I checked the numbers: HSBC has downgraded the group after weak fashion and leather-goods trading, and the shares are down about 35% this year. Scarcity works until customers realize scarcity is just a bullshit marketing strategy and there are more LVMH bags on the street these days than Nike sneakers. There’s a really deep lesson in here. It will be amazing to watch if LVMH can turn this around… it feels way too early for me to bet against them.

🧵LOOSE THREADS

Canaletto: The Square of St Mark’s, Venice

London Design Festival opens September 12 with craft and AI sharing the bill.
Homo Faber has filled Venice with all-white Summa poufs. I’ll inspect them personally. Tough job.
Canada’s new tariffs reach 50% on large American furniture. Ouch.
Stainless steel is back in expensive interiors. I absolutely hate it. Begone.
Brompton Design District calls its London program Perfectly Imperfect. At last, a trend name I can live with.
Past Made Present puts student material experiments into 400-year-old Ham House.
On Thursday, the British Museum opened its blockbuster Bayeux Tapestry exhibition.

🎲 PLAYTIME

Last week’s item was the Apollo 15 Hasselblad Lunar Data Camera. It sold at auction for a hammer price of $760,000. The winner was Jeffry W. with $775,000. Congrats!

This week’s item is an original movie poster for the classic Italian movie “La Dolce Vita.” (1960).

Here are some clues:

✅ Italian Style B Quattro Fogli, signed by artist Sandro Simeoni
✅ Linen-backed, unframed: 79 x 55 in. (201 x 140 cm)
✅ Sold at auction last week by Sotheby’s

What was the final HAMMER price? The person who guesses closest to its final price wins!

Reply to this email or click the button below to submit your guess.

Honor system, please—no using Google to look up the answer! (If you do cheat, we still get the engagement, but you’ll have to live with yourself!)

A featured spotlight for you/your firm in an upcoming issue of Mr. Thread.
Another special mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle.

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

🎨 THIS WEEK’S ART

Canaletto: Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo

This week’s art has been chosen by my British West Coast editor. Naturally it’s Canaletto, the master painter of Venice. Over to Mr. Weft:

My grandfather was not an art forger, but he did make a living copying masterpieces. One of my earliest memories is taking one of his paintings with him to Sotheby’s in London to get it appraised. We walked in, and the lady behind the counter was on the telephone. She didn’t even look up or finish her call. She just looked at the painting and said to my grandfather, “The colors are wrong. I can see you’ve painted this from a book, and the calibration is off.” I learned an important lesson that afternoon that is even more urgent today: Even in this age of AI and digital reproductions, the experts, the tastemakers, can always tell a copy from the real thing.

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Avner Lapovsky

INTERIOR LIVES
Avner Lapovsky is a veteran of San Francisco’s design-showroom world and a longtime design community advocate. His career has included Kneedler-Fauchère, Randolph & Hein, and Sloan Miyasato, where he became co-principal and president—spending decades connecting designers with exceptional materials, furnishings, and independent makers. For more than 18 years, he has also supported vulnerable young people through At The Crossroads.

My chosen profession was show business. But it was difficult making a living in entertainment, so someone sent me to a job interview in a showroom. I somehow thought a showroom must have something to do with show business. In the end, it did.

Every morning, when I opened the showroom doors, I felt I was raising the curtain on the business. The lights went on, the air conditioning came on, the flowers arrived on Monday, and the displays became settings: living rooms, bedrooms, maids’ rooms, kids’ rooms.

A showroom is a kind of theater. The salespeople are the actors, the clients are part of the theater, and the staff is backstage operations. You are creating a world and inviting people to believe it can exist in their clients’ homes.

#00043 - The end of photo shoots?

Mr. Thread — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 21:36:38 GMT

René Magritte: The False Mirror

Hello readers…

Is it just me or is everything quiet? A little too quiet? I like to spend these rare moments of serenity in research and development. Like many people in our industry, I’ve been tooling around with AI rendering products. They say the photo shoot is over. Now we can just wave our hands and the perfect catalog images appear, as if they were shot by Douglas Friedman for Architectural Digest. I wanted to find out how much of this is true, so we gave four rendering tools the same job and asked Brenda Nusenovich, a brilliant NYC-based creative director, to tell us which ones are worth the money.

Personally, I’m thrilled about this new technology. A small company like mine can see a custom fabric on a wall or a sofa before anyone has spent three months making samples. We can put a colorway in front of a client, get a reaction, and make a decision in minutes. Big companies have done that with serious R&D budgets for years. Now the rest of us can get in the game.

Of course, there’s a catch. There’s always a catch. Now anybody can take a fabric, render it beautifully, collect orders and then fail to deliver what the picture promised. That person is an idiot. Remember, a photograph can flatter a product too. People were having this type of existential feeling when Photoshop came along. And product photographers have been doing this kind of witchcraft long before anyone called it “retouching.” You know the ice cubes in the Coke in McDonald’s adverts? They’re made of solid crystal.

We spoke to Michael Bashour from HookPic, one of the leading companies creating AI rendering solutions. With this type of product you can create any rendering you can imagine to show off your furniture. You want a dog to sit on the sofa? Bulldog? Chihuahua? Doberman? The choices are now infinite, and if you’d asked me five years ago, I’d have said this would be heaven. Now it sounds like hell. AI isn’t making R&D and marketing easier; it’s making people like Brenda more important than ever. She’s the one in control of the robots, and it’s down to her impeccable taste to make sure they don’t destroy your brand’s legacy. The human eye just got a whole lot more power.

Meanwhile, the rest of the industry feels as sluggish as I do. AD says rooms are getting weird. Monocle and Business of Home are hoping that interior design can make us feel well again. Housing remains endlessly stuck.

See you next week!

Mr. Thread

🎲 P.S. Don’t just read—play. Try our new guessing game in our PLAYTIME segment. Shout out to Freddy V., who gave the closest guess on last week’s item; Freddy guessed $850,000. Test your market eye this week—scroll to the bottom to join the game.

🏭INDUSTRY

René Magritte: La Naissance des Fleurs

Thibaut and the right way to consolidate
I just learned from BOH that Thibaut has acquired Pindler, the old-school California textile business founded in 1947. Terms were not disclosed. This is Thibaut’s third acquisition in four years, after it snapped up Coraggio and Rosemary Hallgarten. I really like this move and think Thibaut will do a great job continuing the Pindler legacy.

It seems like acquisitions are happening all over the place. Many of them are home runs where the acquiring brands truly understand the soul of the company they are buying. Some of my recent favorite pairings are Holland & Sherry acquiring Elizabeth Eakins, Schumacher buying Tillett Textiles, Kravet buying Brunschwig & Fils, and Fabricut buying Clarence House.

“Pindler has been built over 80 years on the foundations of extraordinary product and a relentless dedication to clients.”
— Rick Kilmer, CEO, Thibaut, via Business of Home

I think we are going to see this trend accelerate significantly. It’s the natural result of the K-shaped economy, applied at the macro level to the design industry. I’m praying for more of the right kind of acquisitions like those mentioned above. This is a good form of consolidation, where the acquisition feels less like a hostile takeover and more like a COLLABORATION with a natural respect for each other’s brands.

Sure, there are bad examples of consolidation. I won’t always trash Private Equity, but too much of it points to a scarier, murkier future for our industry. Same with publicly traded monstrosities like RH gobbling up heritage brand names.

The lesson for anyone trying to make money in this industry: build your company with an eye toward selling it someday. That means getting the fundamentals right: a repeatable model, assured growth, great operations, and a strong culture. Do that and you’ll have plenty of suitors, whether you’re a design firm or a wallpaper brand.

The best part is that setting up your company for acquisition doesn’t mean you have to sell. Running it that way gives you a fantastic business with real enterprise value as a byproduct.

📈TRENDS

René Magritte: The Philosopher’s Lamp

Design is trending weirder
Architectural Digest says good taste is getting weirder. After years of the same low sofa, warm lighting, and algorithm-approved beigeness, people are bringing odd chairs, personal objects, and things with actual memories back into their homes. Thank God.

I’m here for five-legged Rococo chairs and a full-size polar bear in the living room. Bring it. Let’s have some fun. Put the strange object back in the middle of the room and let it cause a little trouble. Design should be about pure personal expression.

I think this is yet another human rebellion against artificial intelligence. AI-designed rooms skew normal and safe, because those programs, by their very nature, create a medium of what has come before. Anecdotally, I’m seeing a lot of hand-drawn art and risograph printing everywhere in marketing. This is great news for designers. Clients need bizarre and different design decisions, otherwise they’re just buying a wavy mirror and calling it a personality.

“The design that was dated the fastest is probably what was the safest at the moment.”
— Frances Merrill, Reath Design, via Architectural Digest

Neuro-architecture
What is Monocle? Can someone tell me? I pay for it, I love it, and it feels beautiful in my hands. But the writing has a lot of fancy words and no calories—to borrow a phrase from my British editor, Mr. Weft. I tried to enjoy its piece on neuro-architecture this week because it’s a topic that greatly interests me. Business of Home also did a very good job with its guide to wellness at home. Both pieces get at the same thing: a room should make you feel better when you walk into it—and there is now hard scientific evidence to support that. Today you should not be selling interior design services to your clients, but rather you should be selling them extra years of healthy life. It’s not an exaggeration for you to say that.

“The smallest things increase someone’s mental health and physical wellness.”
— Mike Quinn, principal, The Golden Design Group, via Business of Home

I’ll tell you why my office is the room in my house that makes me feel fantastic: On the wall I have the front pages commemorating the Knicks’ championship, Tiger’s Masters victory, and the Yankees’ 27th World Series. My wife put them up. I walk in and I feel great. That may be the least scientific definition of wellness ever written, but it is real.

The opportunity before us is clear. We as an industry literally sell products and services that make people live longer, healthier, happier lives. If you can communicate this to clients and deliver on the promise, there will be no limit to your success. What an exciting time to be alive!

📊ECONOMY

René Magritte: The Fair Captive

The home freeze continues
Mortgage rates remain above 6.6% and, no surprise, pending home sales fell again in July. The 10-year Treasury yield rose over the latest trading sessions, which is exactly the thing you do not want to see if you’re hoping people will start moving house again.

I’m sitting on a 2.75% 30-year fixed mortgage. I paid down points for it. There’s no world where I sell my house and buy another with a 7% mortgage. Friends of mine have had more kids, now their houses are too small, they need a yard, but they’re forced to stay put. Meanwhile, boomers are selling at outrageous prices, driving up supply. The younger generation cannot get into those houses at a price that makes sense. It feels eerily like a bubble ready to burst.

We also learned that boomers are complaining about paying property taxes. According to Reddit, boomers say that having paid off their homes and raised their children, they should not have to pay rising property taxes that are pricing them out on fixed incomes. Will no one think of the boomers!

RH catches a cold
RH stock tumbled 3.3% on September 1 to $144.48, nearly 7% in two weeks, and it’s drifting back toward its 52-week low ahead of Q2 earnings. Oof! People are asking whether opening those fancy overseas galleries was a good idea.

The affluent client is still spending. They just need a good reason. A beautiful piece with provenance and a proper story is easier to sell than another standardized luxury catalog item with a big retail markup. A fancy catalog can only do so much. (I want to know how many trees are sacrificed by RH for its catalog every year. Mine sails straight into the trash).

Q&A

SITDOWN WITH MR. THREAD
Michael Bashour is the co-founder and CEO of HookPic, a company building AI-powered product visualization that is becoming popular among owners of furniture and home brands including Moore and Giles, He came to the business from the technology side, after founding and selling a fintech startup, and now works with his co-founder Chase Kerlin to turn accurate product information into sales-ready visual content.

What does HookPic do?
We turn product truth into sales-ready visual content, using AI. AI is the production engine, but the catalog always remains the source of truth. What we deliver is a controlled catalog-to-visual system.

For an interior-design company, a textile company, or a furniture manufacturer, our goal is to help them sell more products. That might mean complete catalog photography, social-media posts, or personalized last-mile imagery: here’s your product, and here’s the specific version someone is looking at, in a scene that looks like their home. We’re finding more and more ways to be helpful to these groups.

What’s your background, and how did HookPic begin?
I approach this purely from the tech side. About two years ago, I started learning about image-generation models. Before that, I’d done a few startups, including one in fintech that I was fortunate enough to start, run, sell, and exit. Then I began looking for the next thing and discovered this image-generation technology. I thought it was fascinating.

I tested early models—DALL·E and Midjourney—and learned about LoRAs, low-rank adapters that modify some of those early models. I thought there was an incredible opportunity, so I started building a proof of concept.

Through a friend of a friend, I met my co-founder, Chase Kerlin, who lives in Austin and owns a company. He had a photo shoot fail just before a product launch, so he had no photography. We applied the prototype to his specific need. The results were stunning: beautiful lifestyle photography that was also incredibly accurate. That accuracy was what was most compelling.

We learned that we enjoyed working together and thought there might be a bigger product there. That’s how we started building HookPic. We began talking to furniture companies, people started signing up, and then textile companies told us they didn’t just need beautiful photography—they needed accuracy. That’s been our north star the whole time.

AI is cool, but it hallucinates. It gets a lot of things wrong. We’re trying to build the exoskeleton around these AI models that produces truly accurate visuals as well as beautiful ones.

What technology does it use?
We use a lot, and we’re intentionally model-agnostic. In the year and a half we’ve been going, we’ve used OpenAI, Gemini, and a number of models from Black Forest Labs. We use Blender for some of our 3D work, plus homegrown tools that help with prompt engineering.

Our goal is to be decoupled from any one model and give customers the advantage of whatever is leading at that time.

Why wouldn’t a brand simply use Gemini, Midjourney, or Firefly itself?
Generative results can look plausible at first glance but still be commercially wrong. You can get a different profile, different sheen, motif drift, color drift. Scale drift is huge among AI models: you tell it a pattern has an eight-inch repeat and it gives you a 16-inch repeat. That really matters for textiles.

That accuracy issue becomes even more important at scale. HookPic can ingest a PBR map, original digital art plus photography, or basic scans. The better the input, the more we can do. Rather than simply telling a model to put a pattern on a chair or drapery, we’re building literal shaders from the data a customer gives us, and 3D models that can scale up and become the source for image generation. That preserves sheen, reflectiveness, scale, and color—the things that matter when you’re selling an actual product, not just making a cool picture.

What does HookPic replace from the old photography process?
Photography is still critical, especially for data ingestion. I don’t think that will go away anytime soon. We still need people with an expert eye, the hardware and technology that make that initial data ingestion possible, and the same artistic eye for photography. The best imagery from HookPic is generated by people with a photography background. We see that all the time.

Where HookPic gets interesting for brands is the accuracy-at-scale piece. They don’t have to ship materials to a studio, arrange them, hire the people, set the lighting, edit the images afterwards, and do it ad infinitum for every combination.

We’re working on solutions for hex-code transfers for furniture with two-tone options. If a piece comes in 30 materials and can be two-tone, there may be 900 possible combinations. With HookPic, that becomes commercially viable from a production standpoint. Before, you couldn’t bring most of that to market, and most of it probably would never get manufactured.

You mentioned “last-mile” visualization. What does that look like?
It’s an incredibly exciting part of the purchasing process where we can be extremely powerful. It’s highly personalized. Someone can say: these are the three or 10 fabrics I’m interested in, these are the scenes I’m most likely to use them in, and this is the style of my home.

It also provides a little leeway. Even with all the work we do to lock in accuracy—and I stand by that—there can still be some wiggle room. With a one-on-one client, there’s more room for error than when you put something on your website and say, “This is the product.”

For companies that are skeptical of AI—and even as a purveyor of this technology, I share that skepticism at times—you can bring it into the final part of the conversation: “Let us visualize this uniquely for you. Understand this is an AI rendering, but this is a stack of imagery we’ve made just for you.” That’s a compelling sales technique compared with handing someone 10 squares of material swatches.

How are creative directors responding?
In the beginning, we had more pushback from people who were skeptical, almost offended. There may have been some defensiveness, which I find completely relatable and understandable.

But people who engage with this technology find that the time between having an idea and seeing it realized is so shortened that they get really excited. There’s also a high level of control when it comes to editing an image: “I want to move this bowl from here to there.” That’s actually pretty doable.

Who is moving the bowl? Is this software as a service?
[Brands] do it themselves. We’re a product company. We offer services with onboarding and configuring large amounts of textiles, which can be a bold process, and we do a lot to simplify it. We’ll often lend a helping hand in pursuit of accuracy. But people log in and have their catalog, materials, and images.

Our approach to AI imagery is like a barbell. In the middle is AI image generation. On the left is the catalog of product truth: the SKUs, materials, variants, perhaps pricing. On the right are the visualization surfaces: raw image output, Shopify visualizers, digital lookbooks, and other surfaces we’re exploring. The connective tissue is image generation. Our goal is to provide a complete ecosystem that takes a brand from product truth to commercially viable, useful visuals.

That middle part—the image-generation connective tissue—may commoditize very rapidly. If it does, I still think we’re in a fabulous position. AI makes it possible to create a lot of imagery, and if you have a lot of imagery, you need a way to organize it logically, collaborate around it, and publish it. HookPic doesn’t just create imagery. We provide tooling and support around the specific act of creating it.

What’s your view on disclosing that an image is AI-generated?
It’s highly context-dependent, but I’m generally in favor of disclosure. It shouldn’t be hidden or treated as something to be ashamed of. It’s an emerging technology. It shouldn’t be used to deceive or oversell anything.

The raw purpose of a visual is to communicate an idea, whether that’s a product, real estate, or something else. I don’t necessarily think disclosure needs to be mandated, but I like that there are invisible watermarks. Some customers literally write on their visualizer, “Hey, by the way, this is AI-generated,” and I don’t think it affects their sales at all.

Will photo shoots still exist in five years?
There will still be photo shoots. They’ll probably have a different meaning and significance. You’ll always need the raw input, and the photo shoot as an artistic act won’t go away. Will it be needed in the same commercial volume? No.

What’s the one item in your home that you couldn’t live without?
I have a print of Thomas Eakins’s “The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake” that my dad gave me. It’s just a print, but it’s very special to me because of the stories he told me about it when I was a kid. The original is an old hand-painted oil-on-canvas painting at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and it holds so much meaning for me.

My father died about two and a half years ago. I’d be devastated to lose it. It would be the first thing I’d rescue in an emergency.

It shows two rowers. My dad used to say, “That’s you in the front, that’s me in the back.” Now I say the same thing to my son. It still means the world to me.

Find out more at HookPic.com

*This interview has been lightly condensed for readability.

🧵LOOSE THREADS

René Magritte: The Fair Captive

George Lucas’s Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens in Los Angeles on September 22. It looks like a spaceship. Natch.
In Los Angeles, Save Iconic Architecture is helping people rebuild after the fires and avoid turning their homes into quick, cheap, soulless boxes. Keep fighting the good fight.
Norway’s Whale Museum opens next year with a roof that rises from the water like a whale’s tail.
Puig CEO José Manuel Albesa has a brass box from the 1970s, a
Japanese screen bought for $20, and a serious sleep kit. I loved this FT piece and saw it all over Twitter/X this weekend.
A Venetian textile company is partnering with an addiction-recovery community on a handmade wallpaper collection.

🎲 PLAYTIME

In our last issue, we challenged you to put a price tag on Andy Warhol’s vibrant 1985 "Dolly Parton" canvas. Turns out everyone's financial optimism was running high, as every single guess overshot the mark. Even so, massive congratulations to Freddy V. for taking the crown as our closest contender with a bid of $850,000, earning a well-deserved win against the actual $604,000 hammer price!

This week’s item is the Apollo 15 Hasselblad Lunar Data Camera.

Here are some clues:

✅ Used by Astronaut Jim Irwin during the historic 1971 Apollo 15 mission.
✅ One of the exceedingly rare cameras brought back to Earth from the lunar surface.
✅ Sold at auction in 2014 following a furious bidding war. Japanese retail titan Terukazu Fujisawa secured the winning bid.

What was the final HAMMER price? The person who guesses closest to its final price wins!

Reply to this email or click the button below to submit your guess.

Honor system, please—no using Google to look up the answer! (If you do cheat, we still get the engagement, but you’ll have to live with yourself!)

A featured spotlight for you/your firm in an upcoming issue of Mr. Thread.
Another special mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle.

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

🎨 THIS WEEK’S ART

René Magritte: The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe)

I found René Magritte’s art perfect for the renderings topic. His most famous work, “The Treachery of Images,” is a painting of a pipe with the caption “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe)—it’s literally about the gap between representation and reality. Maybe it’s too perfect for a renderings conversation?

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Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our members-only section.

THE MR. THREAD RENDERING CHALLENGE
We gave the latest AI tools the same fabric sample and a prompt to render it in the same scene. Pretty pictures are easy. The question is whether a textile company, furniture maker, or designer can show an actual product without embarrassing themselves.

Insider #00008 - The Mr. Thread rendering challenge

Mr. Thread — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 21:30:31 GMT

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our members-only section.

Why we are doing this
The opportunity is massive. Until now, a serious photo shoot meant a studio, products being shipped back and forth, stylists, photographers, lighting, flowers, and a lot of patience. I have seen flower budgets on photo shoots that cost as much as a Tesla Model 3.

With AI, a crea…

#00042 - The back to school issue

Mr. Thread — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 22:11:29 GMT

Andreas Achenbach: On the Coast of Capri

I’ve just driven from Charlotte to Auburn to drop my son off at university, then Auburn to Miami, then Miami back to Charlotte. The Tesla drove 98% of it. Look Ma, no hands. What an experience.

When I got home to North Carolina, I discovered Walmart drone delivery is now a thing in my area. Flying robots are airlifting my neighbors’ shopping into their backyards. I got out of my self-driving car and, for a moment, found myself having an existential moment. The robots are taking over. What will become of our beautiful businesses?

Then I remembered what time of year it is. Factories are reopening in Italy. The kids are back in high school. Everybody who wasn’t already working is getting back to work. It feels more like a fresh start than January 1st. I’ve actually thought about changing our fiscal year to begin September 1st, but that’s a story for another day.

Anyway, welcome to the Back to School issue. Monocle just ran an inspiring feature about a Catalonian kindergarten redesigned to aid learning, and it really gets to the heart of why design matters. A well-designed school can change how children learn, concentrate, and feel energized during the day. That’s a pretty good reminder for all of us that great design has value. It makes people’s lives better.

There’s good news elsewhere, too. Williams-Sonoma is reporting very strong numbers, and the size of the market opportunity is incredible. Cary Kravet, President and CEO of Kravet, sent a reply to last week’s article and we’re running it without changing a comma. We also look at the homes of Dolly Parton, from a one-bedroom mountain cabin to a private 63-acre retreat. What a woman, and what a life.

Behind the paywall, we took Architectural Digest’s long, hard-to-read piece on designer pay and made it accessible. Think of us as Architectural Digest-Digest. These numbers aren’t going to give you the warm and fuzzies, but you don’t subscribe to Mr. Thread for sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns. You want the truth.

And it’s almost time to start talking about color. With the 2027 collections now in production, the work on 2028 begins. We’re here to be your guide, starting next week, with a look at the trending colors everyone will be talking about.

School’s back. The factories are back. Collection launches are right around the corner. Let’s go.

See you next week!
Mr. Thread

🎲 P.S. Don’t just read—play. Try our new guessing game in our PLAYTIME segment. Congratulations to Martin R., who came closest without going over. Last week’s object was asking $175,000; Martin guessed $100,000. Let’s see who has the “eye” to claim the win this time and secure a spot for our grand prize draw. Scroll to the bottom to join the fun.

🏭INDUSTRY

Andreas Achenbach: It Clears Up, Coast of Sicily

A letter from Kravet
Last week I wrote about Kravet’s Pottery Barn collaboration. Cary Kravet sent a personal reply. Mr. Thread has opened up a conversation with one of the great men of our industry, and that is exactly what I want this newsletter to do. And it goes to show you the type of powerful readers on our mailing list.

Dear [Mr. Thread],

As always, it was a pleasure to catch up with you earlier this week. I love what you have created with Mr. Thread, but I do want to highlight some corrections to a segment that you published last week about my company going ‘whale hunting’.

First, I would like to start with our company’s vision statement- basically what is truly our whale. It is, “To be the design trade’s most trusted partner- carrying forward our legacy of beauty, craftsmanship and service while empowering the next generation of designers to create extraordinary spaces.”

Second, our relationship with Pottery Barn is as a licensor. My daughter, Sara, along with our licensing product development team, works closely with their talented and exceptionally professional team. Together, they curate the 35,000 items in our US archive to find designs to develop with our team. These products are completely exclusive to Pottery Barn. Every SKU we design in collaboration with Pottery Barn is unique to that partnership, with zero overlap with any SKU in our Kravet brand. The products and designs can ONLY be viewed or purchased through Pottery Barn, reserving the products we solely develop and produce on our own exclusively for designers.

“Our entire licensing strategy is predicated on supporting the trade and building recognition for our brands.”
— Cary Kravet

Third, our entire licensing strategy is predicated on supporting the trade and building recognition for our brands. In fact, it seeks to introduce an entirely new audience to the world of design. Our hope is that when they are ready to hire a designer, they already have our name in mind.

Finally, this is not a new strategy for us. It has nothing to do with my family inviting an outside investor into our company, as it well preceded that event. It has entirely to do with supporting our aforementioned vision.

Mr. Thread, thank you for the opportunity to speak to your audience.

Best wishes,
Cary

This is great. I’ve had my say; Cary has had his. Readers, what do you think?

Dolly Parton’s very Dolly homes
As you know, Dolly Parton died on Tuesday at 80. Realtor.com has gone through the homes she left behind, and the contrast is wild. She grew up as one of 12 children in a one-bedroom cabin in the Smoky Mountains with no electricity or running water. She ended up on a private 63-acre estate outside Nashville. She wrote a few hits in between. (I can’t get enough of this Islands in the Stream duet with Kenny Rogers).

“Dolly was a farmer, just like her daddy; he farmed the soil, she farmed songs and happiness.”
— Bryan Seaver, Dolly Parton’s nephew

In between, Dolly accumulated a secret Idyllwild cabin with a guitar-shaped toilet seat, a Solvang compound with a windmill and Dolly’s original wig room. Quite frankly, I don’t want to hear another word about restrained good taste. She lived a life as bright as rhinestones and left me wanting a wig room.

Dolly was so damned unapologetic and brave, and made a killing doing it. A valuable lesson for all of us in the creative industry.

📊ECONOMY

Andreas Achenbach: Landscape with a River

Williams-Sonoma hands us its AI playbook
Quarterly earnings are always a great opportunity to understand things about our industry and the world as a whole. I geek out on these things, which is one of the reasons I started Mr. Thread. Williams-Sonoma always puts out an illuminating report (check it out here). WS is reporting very strong numbers that should make everyone pay attention: second-quarter comparable sales rose 6.2%, net revenue reached $1.96 billion and operating margin hit 17.3%.

“We gained market share, continued to outperform the industry, and raised our annual outlook on both the top and bottom lines.”
— Laura Alber, Williams-Sonoma

I mean, look how much bigger they are than RH. The investor deck puts Williams-Sonoma at $7.8 billion in 2025 revenue beside a $290 billion US home category. At face value, that is roughly 3%—and it shows just how fragmented the market is. This is a consolidator’s wet dream scenario…until they realize there’s a good reason why this fragmentation exists (see Journal #00041).

Next, WS provided a whole page on exactly how they’re using AI: digital design, customer service, product discovery and content. There’s their playbook. These companies are growing, so you’d better be using this stuff too. Open the deck and steal the lesson.

A huge market and tiny shares.

📈TRENDS

Andreas Achenbach: Ship in Stormy Seas

The GLP-1 home
When I saw the headline, I thought: come on, what a reach. What clickbait garbage. Then I started reading it. Well, wait a minute. Maybe Architectural Digest really is onto something here.

AD reports that one in eight American adults is currently using a GLP-1. In case you’re not paying attention, a GLP-1 is an injectable drug that staves off your appetite and makes you lose a lot of weight, super-fast. Designers are already being asked for smaller kitchens and pantries, bathroom fridges and hidden syringe storage. New fridges designed with syringe storage! Home design is changing because people are taking these medicines. Crazy.

“I think we’re going to be moving away from the big, big kitchens. The kitchen may transition to a secondary space rather than the social hub or heart of the home.”
— Elizabeth Valkovics, interior designer

Now, I’m not an expert in any way on these medicines, and this is all anecdotal. As AD points out, COVID changed the home office: open floor plans followed people’s desire for more connection in a digital age. So yes, a drug taken by millions of people could start changing the way homes are designed.

And although this all sounds quite dystopian, it represents an opportunity for our industry as we are uniquely qualified to provide clients with wellness benefits in their most intimate home lives. With great design we can help people live longer, healthier lives. You would think we would be rewarded handsomely for our services, but as you’ll read further below, we are not. But the more of us that speak up and prove our value, the more we can unlock this massive opportunity to grow.

A ticket to ride
Writing guru David Perell posted a very good piece on Twitter/X about tickets. The Guggenheim is one of the most iconic buildings in New York, and its ticket looks like the most economical thing somebody could make. How depressing! It’s also another clear example of ENSHITIFICATION. It’s time to bring back the golden era of ticket design!

A museum ticket, an old Japanese train ticket, a circus ticket — you used to put these things in a drawer and collect them. They were part of the day. Now we’ve stripped the little bit of beauty out of everything and then wonder why the world feels so flat. No one can collect a QR code, or reminisce over a digital ticket in your phone’s Apple Wallet.

There’s a huge opportunity here to bring back good design. We can lead the way by showing the business value of creating emotional experiences, even right down to the ticket. FIFA—by no means a bastion of beauty—sold souvenir tickets to fans who attended World Cup matches, who wanted more than a QR code.

The masses are starting to wake up and ask for better design. Let’s be there to serve them.

A reader letter about Holly Hunt
Last week, I wrote about MillerKnoll and Holly Hunt, and worried that consolidation could be taking down another iconic trade brand. Reader H.E. wrote in:

“Regarding your snippet about MillerKnoll and the Holly Hunt problem... overall, your point is correct but the part about HH underperforming is a bit of MK quarterly earnings called ‘mis-direction.’

It is political from what I know, but what any smart analyst knows is that a division that is basically $100M-$300M revenue cannot affect a company that is $3.B. No matter how much their margin has fallen. They are being conveniently scapegoated IMO. Not saying their business wasn’t down, or that their margins weren’t lower than expected. I am just saying that a business that is approximately 5% of their overall business (if that) is not bringing down the ship.

MK doesn’t really chase [the trade] audience from what I see — they are focused more on the well-off retail customer, and contract business of course. They don’t really understand the High Point/D&D customer. They moved Maharam’s showroom out of the D&D, in fact. It was placed there strategically years ago.”

“When HH was under Knoll, they had the leadership that understood HH’s magic and what it could mean for the overall Knoll brand. At this point, I am not sure there is anyone there recognizing the importance of the HH ‘uber wealthy audience.’”

H.E. says Holly Hunt is a wonderful furniture and textiles business that could be much higher with the correct caretakers. I agree. These brands are more than just another line item on the org chart.

🧵LOOSE THREADS

Andreas Achenbach: Surf on a Rocky Coast

Hermès’s London windows featured carrots dangling from a chandelier. Your furniture can provide calories now. Amazing.
Manhattan is building a 335-foot jail in Chinatown for 1,040 people. A literal jailscraper. Lovely.
1stDibs found some really incredible pictures of dogs. Go brighten up your day.
New-home sales ran at 607,000 in July, with 9.6 months of supply. Welcome to the eternal housing slump.

🎲 PLAYTIME

This week’s item is Andy Warhol’s “Dolly Parton”.

Here are some clues:

✅ It’s a synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas (1985)
✅ It measures 42 by 42 in.

What is the asking price? The person who guesses closest to its listed price wins!

Reply to this email or click the button below to submit your guess.

Honor system, please—no using Google to look up the answer! (If you do cheat, we still get the engagement, but you’ll have to live with yourself!)

A featured spotlight for you/your firm in an upcoming issue of Mr. Thread.
Another special mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle.

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

🕵🏼‍♀️ MR. THREAD INSIDER #00007

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our members-only section.

WHAT INTERIOR DESIGNERS REALLY EARN
Architectural Digest published this enormous guide to interior-design jobs and pay. We did the digesting for them, rebuilt the graphics, and it’s still depressing as hell. Listen, I told you this was the dystopia edition! Read on to find out more…

Insider #00007 - What do designers really earn?

Mr. Thread — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 22:08:29 GMT

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our members-only section.

#00041 - A sunny place for shady people

Mr. Thread — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 19:33:54 GMT

Winslow Homer: On the Beach

Hello readers…

I’m in Miami. Sunny skies with a chance of shady dealings.

I just went to the supermarket with my wife. A bottle of hot sauce, some cheap bottles of Sauvignon Blanc, various sundries, and batteries at the local Publix just set me back $140. Sadly, none of this is surprising anymore.

We then had lunch at a nice Medi…

#00040 - Who stole all the color?

Mr. Thread — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 21:31:07 GMT

Arthur Dove: The Sun

🌻 Help us get better…

Mr. Thread exists to help our creative industry build stronger businesses, and part of that job is deciding what deserves more of our time. So, I want to ask you directly:

Please click one. We want to know what will actually be valuable for you.

On to this week’s issue…

Hello readers…

Everyone in Spain went outside yesterday to stare at the eclipse. Totality lasted barely a minute, and it was a good reminder to stop working and look up once in a while.

Instead, I’ve had my head buried in a book. I finally finished From Bauhaus to Our House, Tom Wolfe’s mad little 1981 attack on modern architecture. It’s been on my list forever. Wolfe is all over the place. He’s crazy. I love his writing style. I’m a hippie at heart, so The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is next.

Wolfe wrote about hippies, space, architecture, New York society—he bounced everywhere. Mr. Weft tells me Wolfe once wrote a long, letter-like memo to his Esquire editor about an article he couldn’t start. They published the note, and that became his style. I thought, Okay, good. I’m allowed to be all over the place too.

Wolfe’s argument, in the simplest terms, is that socialism turned decoration, craftsmanship, and individual taste into dirty words. In the moral fight to make good design available to everyone—which, in spirit, is beautiful; who doesn’t want everyone treated fairly?—we ripped some of the soul out of art. We ripped out the color too.

Color used to be a serious luxury. To make Tyrian purple, you had to extract pigment from sea snails’ mucus glands—roughly 10,000 of them could yield just one gram. It was a color reserved for the rich. The people in the poorhouse wore beige.

It became offensive in elite architectural and academic circles to use color and ornamentation. And since these societies almost single-handedly enforced the direction of modern style, we ended up with a world of concrete and glass boxes, with clean modern interiors. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions… this is a great, if not catastrophic, example of that in action.

The Atlantic just published a sobering piece arguing that the color recession may be permanent. We keep hearing maximalism is back, and the fall reports you’ll read about further down are full of wine red, smoky purple, and layered green. But the paint companies still sell endless shades of Swiss Coffee and “greige.” I hope this isn’t a little blip before everyone gets brainwashed back into brown.

Read on for some billion-dollar market research from Arhaus, Usher’s cringe-tastic AD home tour, and a 3D printer making buildings out of mud. Our Insider interview is with the business coach who saved my ass when COVID sent my company remote. She’s back with us again giving some fresh takes on how creative companies can survive and adapt in the new AI world.

See you next week!
Mr. Thread

P.S. Don’t just read—play. We’ve put our first Guess the Price mystery near the bottom. Honor system only… no Googling the sheep, okay?

📊ECONOMY

Charles E. Burchfield: Sun and Rocks

Free billion-dollar market research
Arhaus absolutely kicked ass in the second quarter. Net revenue hit a record $385 million, up 7.4%, and comparable written sales rose 12.5%. The top line for me is that about 90% of its 2025 sales came from clients who live within 50 miles of a showroom. If you are a furniture or interiors company thinking about your brick-and-mortar strategy, this should answer your questions.

Also, orders supported by an Arhaus interior designer carry an average value more than four times that of a standard order. Our industry continues to be the MVP of big-box retail furniture stores. Shocker!

Arhaus Q2 2026 investor presentation

But wait. The report reveals that Arhaus recovered $37.8 million in previously paid tariffs, and $23.8 million lowered its second-quarter cost of goods sold. We’re all paying more for furniture, and they got a very nice lift to the bottom line. D’oh! To its credit, Arhaus says it will reinvest some of the recovery in growth and use another portion against higher fuel and shipping costs.

The 1stDibs results went the other way aesthetically. Its press release looks like a high-school project, which is crazy for a design business. The actual business is doing fine: revenue rose 5% to $23.3 million and gross merchandise value climbed 7%, even as active buyers fell 10%. The business is the business is the business. 1stDibs is 1stDibs. They’re not really growing that much.

These reports are free, but no one in the business really reads them. Arhaus paid serious money for the market research sitting inside that investor deck: a $27 billion US interior-design services market, a trade channel, a showroom strategy, a supply-chain map. Guys, you can get free billion-dollar market research if you just take the time to read these things. I don’t know why I geek out on this stuff. I get my business education from it.

Arhaus Q2 2026 investor presentation

Check this out from the Arhaus document. I’ll say it again: Their customers who work with designers spend more than four times as much. That is a public company telling Wall Street, in plain English, that people need interior designers.

“GMV of $96.0 million came in above the high end of guidance, up 7%, our strongest growth rate since late 2024.”
— David Rosenblatt, CEO of 1stDibs

Falling into a K-hole
I don’t want to jinx it, but things are looking up. Inflation eased slightly in July and mortgage applications rose after a brief dip in rates. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared the K-shaped economy over and said lower earners were beginning to catch up. But the housing market didn’t get the memo. In the first five months of 2026, sales below $200,000 fell 14.4%, while sales between $1 million and $2 million slipped just 0.6%.

Realtor.com: May 2026 year-to-date home-sales trends

Look at the chart. Doesn’t it look exactly like a K? The expensive homes are up there and the cheaper ones are down there. We just saw it in Arhaus too, in real economic data. For now, if your clients sit on the upper arm, they’re still spending.

“Housing doesn’t support that story right now. The entry-level tier isn’t stabilizing.”
— Hannah Jones, senior economist at Realtor.com

💰OPPORTUNITIES

Andy Warhol: Sunset

The paintings in the trash room
Bloomberg writes that nearly $1 trillion of art is expected to pass between generations over the next decade. The next generation won’t want all of it, museums don’t have room for it, and auction houses will only fight over the very best pieces. That leaves a great quantity of paintings and sculptures looking for a home, a buyer or, in the worst cases, a thrift store.

When I was younger, my father called me in his eloquent but thick Egyptian accent: “Come, come to the office.” He was moving his law firm out of the MetLife building, right above Grand Central, and told me to look through some old company files before they were shredded. I opened a small room absolutely rammed with boxes. It was a shit-ton of crap. Ninety-eight percent old financial and legal documents.

Then I found a weirdly shaped box in the corner. It looked like a frame was inside. I pulled it out, looked at the signature, and realized it was an original painting by the founder of one of my companies. I kept going. There were 12 of them, absolute treasures. They now hang over my mother’s sofa.

The bigger opportunity is the money moving with the art. My generation is reaching the point where we’ve had good careers, the kids are leaving, and we’re ready to invest in the forever home. We’re finally going to buy the great fabrics. That wealth is landing in the hands of people like me, ready to spend it on interiors.

I will keep yelling it from the mountaintops… there is no better time than now to be building in our industry!

“The next gen don’t want it. They want something different.”
— Philip Hoffman, chairman and founder of the Fine Art Group, via Bloomberg

Washington is hot, hot, hot, hot
Washington, D.C.’s luxury market is setting records. Inventory is down and prices are soaring. A Georgetown house just sold for a city-record $28 million, and agents say cabinet officials, tech leaders, and AI executives are competing for trophy properties. Many want the house turnkey and fully furnished. They don’t want to lift a finger.

We’re feeling it too. It’s a great market for us—great clients—but it’s so sketchy. Why is it hot? Washington is booming. Maybe these folks got rich off insider trading (have you seen Pelosi’s stock tracker?) Or AI. Or Trump Media’s new paid Truth API feed that I just read about.

The direct feed is called Truth API, and reportedly costs as much as $100,000 a month. It doesn’t give traders a post before Trump publishes it, but it can deliver his market-moving announcements milliseconds before ordinary users see them. If this isn’t the most brazen form of corruption I’ve ever seen in my life. Because if Trump posts tonight, “I have a deal with Iran,” the markets are going to move tomorrow, right? Oil is going to move. Not to mention the prediction markets.

In completely unrelated news: Click the button below to subscribe to Mr. Thread Insider.

Can you imagine selling faster access to the news you’re giving out as president? I’m not bashing only Trump. I wouldn’t put this kind of caper past other presidents, only you’d never hear about it. Anyway, I don’t know whether any of that has anything to do with a $28 million house in Georgetown. But when this much money is appearing this close to power, I think I’m allowed to ask: why are you guys all so rich around there?

Look, the design opportunity is real, whatever you think of the politics. These buyers need designers. They’re purchasing speed and taste, and they want to bring their toothbrush—not their contractor.

“We’re in an AI race. These people are driving the market.”
— Daniel Heider, executive vice president at TTR Sotheby’s International Realty, via The Wall Street Journal

📈TRENDS

Odilon Redon: The Black Sun

Human-made is the future
Fast Company argues that “human-made” is becoming the next big flex for luxury buyers, something I’ve been trumpeting since Journal #00001. As AI cheapens creative work, visible human curation becomes scarce. Organic food, craft beer, and handmade furniture are already showing us that customers will pay a premium for a story they can believe.

We’re on the right path. A large language model could scrape Mr. Thread and rebuild a perfectly serviceable version in five minutes that sends you links to interior design news. But it can’t give you commentary from 30 years of industry experience and it probably wouldn’t make fun of Gary Friedman every other week. That’s why readers constantly tell me Mr. Thread is a better read than the tired old trades.

What does this mean for us? Keep leaning into handmade, human storytelling, and authenticity. The demand for it will keep exploding in direct opposition to AI.

“The more AI-assisted creation becomes the default, the more conspicuous—and commercially powerful—unadulterated human involvement becomes.”
— Ben Sherwood, via Fast Company

The robot becomes an artisan
Architects are now 3D-printing buildings from local soil, lime, and agricultural waste. TECLA used 350 layers of raw earth to build two interlocking domes in Massa Lombarda, Italy. Near Barcelona, IAAC students and researchers created a separate project, Teixit, printing local soil into expressive walls. The nozzle leaves a delightfully natural texture directly in the structure. Check it out.

This is 3D printing as artisanal work. It takes mud out of the ground, and a robot turns it into a building. And it’s beautiful. We spend a lot of time worrying that machines will erase the human hand. This one is making art out of dirt, using AI and modern technology. I love that contradiction!

“This digital approach transforms robotic execution into an expressive medium guided by human minds.”
— Moises Carrasco, via ArchDaily

I need a third place
This one really resonated with me. Working from home can be very lonely. I’m desperate for a third place—a coffee shop where you can gather your thoughts, a library where I bump into people who like to read instead of scrolling, a shared workspace that gets me away from computers and social media to meet other like-minded entrepreneurs. Imagine a theater with a members’ club where you meet your buddies for a bourbon and then watch a movie. Who better than designers to create these places in our lives? We’ve lost a lot of them. Well, I have some good news… it seems they’re coming back.

Designers are rebuilding the space between home and work. This week, Hospitality Design’s report finds cafés with play areas built into the architecture, cinemas with real bars (not the depressing one at your local AMC), and mixed-use buildings combining coworking, wellness, food, and cultural programming. Come for coffee and stay for a workshop!

Howard Schultz, Starbucks’ former CEO, understood this years ago: Home, office, and then the other place. That was the insight. But the third place doesn’t have to be one coffee chain with the same chairs everywhere. It can be a cinema, a bathhouse, a hotel lobby, a library, a kids’ café, one of those Korean spas where they scrub salt into your whole body and make you feel like a fish. Just some place with enough of a heartbeat that you don’t feel lonely. That’s a real design problem, and a very good business opportunity.

Summer reading tip: Read the origin story of Starbucks and Howard Schultz in this excellent biography.

“We wanted to allow for people to be with a group or equally be alone but close to others and still feel welcome.”
— Rachel Coll, cofounder of TiggColl, via Hospitality Design

Autumn’s quiet color rebellion
Veranda just put out its fall color forecast and it says designers are about to move on from years of caramel, burnt orange, and chocolate brown. They’re pointing to green-tinged neutrals, smoky purples, and softened marigolds. None of it is loud. Every shade has been dirtied up a little, which apparently is the only way we can cope with color now.

“Color never moves in a straight line—it’s always an evolution rather than a revolution.”
— Ruth Mottershead, creative director, Little Greene

This is good news for designers whose clients say they want color, then select Swiss Coffee. You can give them a wine red that reads almost brown, or a purple with enough gray to not offend. Personally, I still want the proper stuff—strong color, a little danger, a room that doesn’t look staged for resale. But if softened marigold is the gateway drug, I’ll take it. Let’s get the people hooked.

🏭 INDUSTRY

Max Ernst: Clouds, Sun and Sea

The human touch is the watermark
The EU’s new AI transparency rules took effect this month. The rules say providers must make “synthetic” output detectable, while deepfakes and certain text must be labeled “made by AI.” Standard editing and some B2B uses may be exempt, but fines can reach €15 million ($17.3 million) or 3% of worldwide turnover. Ha-ha-ha!

My textile company will now have to put a disclaimer on our website when we show a beautiful AI rendering of our fabric on a sofa. Seriously? I understand protecting people from deep-faked videos of politicians and celebrities, but this feels like an overreach.

The bureaucrats don’t understand the line between bad actors and good actors, so everybody gets lumped in. And where does it end? Do I have to confess every time a retoucher corrects the lighting, expands an edge, or upscales a photograph—all of that is AI. And anyway, what about McDonald’s? Their photo of a Big Mac looks nothing like the burger they serve you, and I don’t recall ever seeing a disclaimer under the golden arches.

“Published text that has undergone human review or editorial control does not need to be labelled.”
— European Commission, Article 50 guidance

Lonni Paul on winning work when the phone stops ringing
Business of Home asked five designers how they find projects when business slows. Lonni Paul gave the best advice: stay visible. She uses quiet periods to reconnect with past clients, architects, builders and trades, while improving her portfolio, updating her website, and pitching. You may not win a project tomorrow, but the right client might remember you.

Getting new business as an interior designer is nerve-racking. It’s feast or famine out there. You can spend months chasing leads and making calls and hear nothing back. Then the projects come. In this K-shaped economy, fewer designers are getting access to the clients with the big money. You have to fight harder to reach them. Lonni is right on this one. Just keep showing up, keep your relationships warm and make sure your best work is impossible to ignore.

“Rather than focusing on selling, I focus on consistently showing the quality of our work and the experience we provide.”
— Lonni Paul, Lonni Paul Design, via Business of Home

🧵LOOSE THREADS

Félix Vallotton: Sunset, Orange Sky

COOKFOX has opened the Bruce Springsteen Center near the places that shaped his music. The Boss says the building feels like him.
ArchDaily rounded up some joyful ice-cream shops. Apparently the universal design language of dessert is color and childish fun. Correct.
Check out this design magic. Broadway’s “The Lost Boys” set becomes nearly 20 locations without a video backdrop. My wife and daughter tell me the house is the star.
In the surprise hit movie “Backrooms”, fluorescent big-box emptiness supplies the horror while old furniture supplies the soul. Frightening commentary on what happens when design is intentionally ripped out of architecture.
Summer Thornton turned a bland Cabo retreat into a kaleidoscope of Mexican craft. Twelve thousand color samples later. She went wild. I couldn’t help but dream of living in her brilliant design work.
Usher’s Architectural Digest house tour has the house “performing” by day and “confessing” at night. Somebody get that poor sofa a therapist.
I really want to eat at Graciela. It was designed by the super-smart team over at Home Studios from NY. Rustic interiors serving old-school Argentine steaks. Sounds like my happy place.
Here are some groovy eclipse glasses.

🎲 PLAYTIME

Guess the price: Salvador Dalí’-inspired sheep

A rare set of four Salvador Dalí-inspired limited-edition Xai sheep tables

Check out our new weekly guessing game made just for our community of design fanatics. Let’s see how good you are at guessing prices of the objects we sell in our zany world.

Each week, we’ll share an image and clues about an item for sale. The person who guesses closest to its listed price wins!

Here are some clues:

✅ Set of 4 side tables
✅ Manufactured by BD Barcelona and Deyrolle
✅ Designed by Oscar Tusquets, inspired by Salvador Dalí
✅ Made from animal skin, metal and wood
✅ Approximate measurements: 34.3” W × 10.2” D × 28” H (head) and 23.2” H (back)

Playtime Instructions:

Guess the asking price (in U.S. dollars) for this rare set of four limited-edition Xai sheep tables.
Click the button below to submit your guess.