Paris Design Week: Four Collaborations Redefining Heritage, Craft, and Contemporary Design

Paris Design Week has long been a stage for experimentation, but this year a clear narrative emerged: collaboration as a tool for re-examining heritage. Across furniture, art, crystal, and stone, designers and brands used partnership not to reinvent from scratch, but to reinterpret history with a contemporary lens. From playful furniture to monumental public art, these four collaborations stood out for how they blurred the lines between past and present, object and narrative.

Monde Singulier × Necchi Architecture

Furniture with Memory — and Humor

With the Ec8 collection, Paris-based studio Necchi Architecture unveiled its first furniture line in collaboration with Monde Singulier, a platform known for championing singular, character-driven design. Rather than chasing minimalism or nostalgia outright, the collection sits deliberately in between.

Presented in a seventies-inspired “game room” setting, the pieces reinterpret familiar furniture archetypes like cabinets, chairs, tables, lamps through unexpected material contrasts. Lacquered surfaces meet brushed stainless steel; marquetry is paired with industrial finishes; soft mohair and leather soften structured forms. The result is furniture that feels slightly “out of time”: functional, domestic, yet quietly irreverent.

Necchi Architecture’s cinematic approach to interiors translates seamlessly into objects meant to be lived with. The collection prioritizes use over spectacle, but never without wit, suggesting a future where heirloom furniture doesn’t have to take itself too seriously.

Baccarat × Harry Nuriev

Luxury Crystal Meets Conceptual Transformation

At Maison Baccarat, designer Harry Nuriev (founder of Crosby Studios) approached crystal not as a symbol of untouchable luxury, but as a medium for storytelling. Rooted in his philosophy of Transformation, Nuriev’s collaboration with Baccarat reimagines iconic pieces by embedding them with traces of everyday life.

The most striking intervention was his reinterpretation of the Zénith chandelier, into which he inserted mundane objects like pens, keychains and bottle caps as if crystal craftsmanship had survived into a future where its missing fragments were replaced by artifacts of daily existence. The gesture transforms the chandelier from a decorative object into a speculative artwork about value, memory, and cultural survival.

Alongside the installation, Nuriev reworked Baccarat classics such as the Harcourt glassware and the Sirius crystal sphere, engraving them with words and symbols. The collaboration challenges the idea of luxury as permanence, suggesting instead that meaning is created through time, context, and transformation.

Marmonil × Pilar Zeta

A Monumental Portal Between Cultures

Installed at Place du Louvre, Mirror Gate II by Argentine artist Pilar Zeta is a monumental sculptural collaboration with Egyptian stone company Marmonil. Constructed from alabaster, Aswan granite, and Breccia Fawakhir, the installation draws directly from ancient Egyptian material heritage while occupying one of Paris’s most symbolically charged public spaces.

The work takes the form of a gateway - a recurring motif in Zeta’s practice - with a reflective core that invites both literal and metaphorical self-reflection. Positioned in visual dialogue with I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid, the sculpture creates a bridge between ancient craftsmanship and modern architecture, permanence and transparency.

More than an object, Mirror Gate II functions as an experience: a pause within the city that invites contemplation, cultural exchange, and awareness of time all tying in the aspects of geology, history, and personal experience.

Petite Friture × René Herbst

Reissuing Modernism for Today

In a significant shift for the brand, Petite Friture unveiled the official reissue of René Herbst’s Sandows collection, originally designed in 1927. Herbst, a founding figure of French modernism and member of the Union des Artistes Modernes, was known for his radical embrace of industrial materials and functional design.

The iconic Sandows pieces which are defined by chromed tubular steel frames and elastic rubber straps, were revolutionary in their time and remain strikingly contemporary today. Chairs, loungers, and seating systems feel lightweight, ergonomic, and almost architectural in form.

By bringing these designs back into production, Petite Friture positions heritage not as a static archive, but as a living resource. The collaboration reaffirms that modernism’s core ideas are accessibility, functionality, and clarity which all remain deeply relevant in today’s interiors.

A Shared Thread: Heritage as a Living Language

What unites these four collaborations is not aesthetics, but intention. Each partnership treats heritage as something to be questioned, reshaped, and activated, whether through playful furniture, speculative luxury, public art, or faithful reissues.

Paris Design Week 2026 made it clear: collaboration is no longer just about merging names. It’s about creating dialogue between disciplines, eras, materials, and ways of living inorder to remind us that design’s most compelling stories are often written together.