Moooi’s Playful Luxury

More than two decades ago, Marcel Wanders and Casper Vissers founded Dutch furnishings and lighting brand Moooi. But according to Arjen Stege, Moooi’s head of marketing, the company’s design philosophy hasn’t changed much in the ensuing years. “We still don’t tell designers what they must make, we make their design dreams come true,” he says. He cites the Hortensia Armchair by Andres Reisinger (2021), which originally only existed as an NFT, and the Heracleum suspension light by Bertjan Pot (2010) as examples. “They were thought of as impossible designs at the time,” he continues,  [But] we made them happen.”

The same unbridled creativity informed Moooi’s introductions at this year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF). In its Welcome Lounge, which included a concierge desk for NYCxDesign events, the company displayed its voluminous Big George upholstered seating; flexible florescent Tubelight fixture; and Green House wallcovering collection, a set of five floral abstract prints available in silk, wood veneer, bouclé fabric, and jacquard textures.

The Welcome Lounge echoed Moooi’s “creative luxury” ethos. “We are serious about design, but playful in our approach,” says Stege of the multisensory space, which was front and center on the show floor. “We work [to] create the unexpected and elicit the extra ‘o’.”

As well as championing design talent, the brand has been a staunch ICFF advocate, hosting the Fair’s opening party (which, this year, was part of the ICFF Night Out x Interni) for the past two years. Stege says the relationship has flourished because Moooi and ICFF share the same values. “ICFF supports designers, new and old, just as Moooi do,” he explains. “And, like us, the Fair aims to bring innovative and original designs to the market that elevate people’s spaces and lives.”