Monocle on Design
Your essential guide to design, covering furniture, craft, and architecture. Discover fresh stories, rising talents, and the latest from top studios.
Latest Episodes
Designing Austria
We’re focusing on the small but mighty nation of Austria and delving into the country’s craft and design clout. Josh Fehnert grills our design editor Nolan Giles on the alpine nation’s high design, we visit an exhibition on Austrian fashion in Vienna and we talk to fashion designer Lena Hoschek.
Extra: Go with the flow – riverside revival
The banks of Oslo’s Akerselva River are experiencing a wave of change. Landscape architect and planner Ola Bettum explains how to redesign a riverside.
Headline design
Oli Stratford of Disegno joins us for the design headlines. Plus, a visit to “The Porcelain Room” exhibition in Milan, and we speak with the design minds behind family-run Italian furniture business Living Divani.
Extra: Who was Corita Kent?
Director of Los Angeles’s Corita Art Center, Nellie Scott, tells us more about the ethos of artist, educator and designer Corita Kent, who worked in LA and Boston and was an influential figure in the pop art movement.
Sweden’s design future
We meet some of the brightest up-and-coming designers at the Stockholm Furniture & Light Fair. Plus: a discussion with Sweden’s first national architect, Helena Bjarnegård, and we talk to Luca Nichetto and Robert Acouri, two of the minds behind new Paris-based brand and boutique La Manufacture.
Extra: Does architecture always have to be a building?
In the 1960s and 1970s, groups of emerging designers across the globe began experimenting with architectural forms. Matthew Butcher and Luke Pearson tell us more about some of the playful projects by the avant-garde practitioners of the time.
Drawing inspiration
We speak to Foster + Partners’ art director Narinder Sagoo about the process of sketching new buildings. Plus: we visit the Danish Architecture Centre, and meet two friends channelling nostalgia into the design of Brooklyn’s Turk’s Inn restaurant.
Extra: Rules and risk
Marjorie Allen was a postwar pioneer of the Adventure Playground movement in the UK. Her story features in “Play Well”, an exhibition at London’s Wellcome Collection. We meet the exhibition’s curator, Shamita Sharmacharja, to learn more.
Meeting Francis Kéré
An in-depth discussion with Berlin-based, Burkina Faso-born architect Diébédo Francis Kéré, reflecting on how his practise Kéré Architecture creates buildings with both a sense of place and purpose. Plus, we meet design fair Maison et Objet’s designer of the year – lighting and interiors specialist Michael Anastassiades.
Extra: Bright ideas
Designer Barbara Palatin Doyle shares her inspiration behind her lamp Charta Alba, and shines a light on a new collection of table lamps from Studio Palatin.
