Apple backs four emerging designers with found furniture and banana-palm paper in Paris

By Tom Whitfield

Apple's Designers of Tomorrow exhibition opens today at Design Miami.Paris 2026, showing furniture and lighting by emerging designers Parafernalia, Yoonjeong Lee, Salem S Charabi and Isabel Rower.

Curator Rodman Primack selected the four, with a jury that included Design Miami president Jennifer Roberts and designer Nifemi Marcus-Bello. All four work in furniture or lighting. The show runs 21 to 25 October 2026 at L'hôtel de Maisons, 51 Rue de l'Université, Paris.

The technology company frames the exhibition around its own hardware. "Designers of Tomorrow celebrates the process – the art in the making," Apple said in a statement. "Each of the designers use Apple products in a variety of ways within their creative processes, from early ideation to creation."

The company added: "Apple has long believed that the full potential of their products is only fully realised when put in the hands of the world's most talented creatives."

That is a claim about process, not product, and the works themselves are the only evidence on offer. What they show is four designers working with salvage, plant fibre and stacked wood.

What is on show?

Egyptian-Danish designer Salem S Charabi shows a lamp made from date palm from Saqqara, limestone from the Galala Mountains and paper made from banana palms in the Nile Delta. This year's theme, Design for Presence, prompted him to ask "what is present?"

He described the piece as "a structure inspired by the date palm-cleaving methods of the qafassin, makers of boxes and trays used in the country's souks and bakeries". Its skin, he said, was "created by multiple layerings of banana stems, found in Beheira, in the Nile Delta of Egypt", with "a mass carved from limestone from the Galala Mountains, carrying the trace of its making through repetitive patterns".

Seoul-based Yoonjeong Lee began with a pencil used to nail paper to a surface, then built a table around it to complete "a three-dimensional lamp". "To make the table, I repeatedly stacked thin sheets of veneer to build a new, solid piece of wood – approximately 5,000 layers, perhaps more," she explained.

Isabel Rower upcycled furniture found "on the curb near my studio in Brooklyn", reconstituting it into a wooden armature layered with papier-mâché and a pulp composite of wood glue, sawdust and shredded waste paper. After spraying the chair black, she glued 1,500 handmade ceramic beads to its surface.

Sebastián Zorrilla and Genki Matsumura of studio Parafernalia present MonoAmbiente 1, described as a "landscape" of acid-etched stainless steel. "As it unfolds, the landscape unfolds with it: rocks become stools and a table, turning a distant scene into a place for two to converse, play, or share a drink," the designers said.

What does this change for the designers?

The exhibition gives four emerging names a slot inside a major fair, backed by one of the world's most valuable brands. Apple first launched Designers of Tomorrow at Design Miami.Paris last year, when it showed pieces including a table designed to look like butter. A second edition within a year signals the company intends the platform to recur — though Apple has not said what, if any, commercial support follows the exposure.

For now, the works, the dates and the quotes are what is verifiable. The rest is Apple's own narrative about its tools.