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Amid a sluggish art market and concerns about new tariffs, the design category keeps growing. Earlier this month, as much of the art world was in Basel, the major auction houses each held design sales that outperformed expectations.
Sotheby’s design sales in New York totaled $37.5 million, and Christie’s totaled $23.6 million; Phillips, which staged just one sale in this category this time, brought in $4 million. By comparison, last year, Sotheby’s reported $19.5 million in design sales, Christie’s reported $15.5 million, and Phillips reported $5.1 million across two sales with significantly more lots. Across all three houses, that’s a 62.3 percent year-on-year increase.
Experts told ARTnews there are multiple factors behind the category’s continued momentum for established names and a broad range of artists.
Lewis Wexler, who previously served as Christie’s assistant vice president of 20th-century decorative arts, told ARTnews there has been a “paradigm shift,” with collectors purchasing design in the same way they approach fine art.
“There’s always a demand for lighting, benches, sofas, and things along those lines,” said Wexler, who currently runs an eponymous gallery in New York and Philadelphia. “I think there has been a realization that you can obtain the same quality and caliber in the design world that you can find in the paintings hanging on your walls.”
That awareness has increased due to larger budgets for interior design, notable gallery exhibitions and institutional acquisitions, greater auction data about the investment value of collectible pieces, and the re-evaluation of artists such as Sonia Delaunay and Toshiko Takaezu, both of whom were the subject of major shows in New York last year.
Claire Warner, cofounder of Chicago’s Volume Gallery, which focuses on material-driven art practices and design, told ARTnews that the ongoing “technological revolution” has pushed collectors toward items that are “handmade” and “well-crafted.”
“People’s understanding of this work is becoming much more fluid and not as siloed,” said Warner, who previously worked as a design specialist at the Wright auction house in Chicago.
Betsy Beierle, a senior sales associate at the design gallery Carpenters Workshop, told ARTnews that collectible design has a “cross-market fluidity” that draws buyers from multiple sectors.
“It appeals to art collectors, institutions, people working in design, architecture, fashion, and industrial design,” Beierle said.
Global interest in the category, especially from younger buyers, has also helped many design items exceed high estimates at auction.
At Sotheby’s design sale on June 11, 76 percent of the lots sold above their high estimates. Christie’s and Phillips also noted that a significant number of lots in their sales surpassed high estimates, including the three-pane, six-foot-tall Goddard Memorial Window by Tiffany Studios, which sold for $4.29 million on a $2 million–$3 million estimate. That is the second-highest price at auction for a window from the artist’s studio. Those results are especially notable given the few house and third-party guarantees offered at the sales.
The houses also saw an expanded audience this month, with Sotheby’s and Phillips reporting that more than 20 percent of buyers at their major design sales were new to the houses. Sotheby’s reported a 64 percent increase in bidders compared to last year, and a 76 percent increase in buyers. Phillips noted that millennial and Gen Z collectors made up 20 percent of bidders at its design sales this year.
“At least half the people I sold [Les Lalanne works] to last year are younger than me, which is extremely encouraging,” 56-year-old art dealer Ben Brown told ARTnews, noting his London gallery’s representation of Les Lalanne since 2007 and the ‘Planète Lalanne’ exhibition in Venice, Italy last year featuring more than 150 works. Brown added that he is frustrated that Lalanne works have been categorized as design.
The success of design objects at auction has been apparent even outside of dedicated sales, underscoring their crossover appeal. In May, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Double-Pedestal Lamp from the Susan Lawrence Dana House sold for $7.5 million at Sotheby’s modern evening sale, far exceeding its $3 million–$5 million estimate. But the spike in design interest has been most apparent in the market for works by François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne, as ARTnews reported in April. Four of the top 10 auction sales for works by François-Xavier took place last year, and at Sotheby’s design sale on June 11, Grand Rhinocéros II sold for $16.4 million—his second-highest price at auction.
Meanwhile, the result at Christie’s for the Tiffany Studios window was boosted by recent acquisitions of other large Tiffany windows by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Dealers told ARTnews that institutions have increasingly acquired design works by both established and emerging artists. For example, Carpenters’s Beierle placed Spanish artist Nacho Carbonell’s One-Seater Concrete Tree (2022) with the Cincinnati Art Museum for its outdoor sculpture garden in 2023, and Marcin Rusak’s Van Florum 23 (Hybridae Florales) at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta last year.
According to Volume’s Warner, when the gallery has worked with institutions like the Art Institute of Chicago and LACMA in recent years, curators from multiple departments—including contemporary art, design, American art, fiber art and architecture—have collaborated to acquire design works, with the idea that they may be used across different exhibitions.
The strength of the design category was also reflected in works priced under $500,000, many of which exceeded their estimates and helped set new artist records at auction this year.
American artist and furniture designer Judy McKie is one who has seen that kind of market bump. At Phillips’ design sale in New York on June 10, the top lot was her Fish Bench, which sold for $406,400 with fees, on an estimate of $150,000 to $250,000—setting a new auction record. By comparison, another edition of the same patinated bronze sculpture sold for $327,600 on a high estimate of $100,000 at Rago Auctions in 2023. Other editions of the bench are in the collection of the Longhouse Reserve, at Eastport Park in Boston, and in a public park in Walnut Creek, California.
Despite institutional acquisitions at places like the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, McKie’s prices at auction and in private sales remain relatively accessible.
“Even with the tariffs, the prices are still more easily digested than Les Lalanne,” said Wexler, who has represented McKie for years. “In fact, I literally just sold a monkey chair this week for $110,000.”
Other auction records in design have been set this year for Louis Cane, Maria Pergay, and Jean Puiforcat.
Expectations of even more growth in the future
Multiple dealers told ARTnews they expect prices in the design category to continue rising as buyers get priced out of works by top names; as design furniture, ceramics, and textiles continue their shift from craft to fine art; and as expectations for masterpieces recalibrate.
Aside from the Lalanne effect, Wexler said the prices for McKie’s bronzes are also likely to rise due to limited inventory. “I think that’s also increasing the desire for collectors to purchase the work,” he said.
Brown similarly believes auction estimates for Les Lalanne works remain too low, particularly when comparing limited-edition masterpieces like Grand Rhinocéros II to other works like the Mouton wool and concrete sheep sculptures.
“You can’t have a situation where a masterpiece is worth 10 times a perfectly nice medium-plus object by an artist,” Brown said, noting the sheep were in editions of 250 compared to the Grand Rhinocéros II, which exists in an edition of 8. “When you’ve got a discrepancy of 10 between a good and a great work, there’s something wrong.”
Brown said he expects more people to understand the appeal of Les Lalanne through his gallery’s upcoming exhibition on the French couple, René Magritte, and Surrealism, opening this fall in New York.
“When you’ve got Lalanne standing next to Magritte and standing up for themselves and looking strong, I don’t think anybody’s doubting that Magritte is a great artist,” Brown said.
