Studio Hagen Hall's First Furniture Piece Leads Dezeen's October Roundup

London architect Louis Hagen Hall has designed his first-ever piece of furniture, a sculptural coffee table that tops Dezeen's monthly roundup of furniture and homeware spotted by the magazine's Jane Englefield over October.

The SHH-001 table arrives as two cherry veneer legs and a weighty recyclable brown smoked glass top. No mechanical fixings hold it together. Hagen Hall, who runs London-based Studio Hagen Hall, originally designed the asymmetric piece for Pine Heath, a modernist Hampstead renovation completed in May 2025, where a corner sofa left a negative space that demanded a bespoke table. The design philosophy of American modernist architect John Lautner informed the made-to-order piece.

What does October's selection tell us about collectible design?

The six chosen works lean heavily toward the sculptural and the one-off — objects closer to gallery pieces than to catalogue stock.

Exo 01 vase by Flora Lechner. The Austrian, Netherlands-based designer first drew the attention of London's Max Radford Gallery with aluminium chandeliers that resemble ornate robots. She has now translated that style into a vase built from aluminium clips joined by stainless steel bolts. Stems slot into the clips, which rest on a water-fillable base.

"Exo 01 approaches the vase more as a support structure than as a container," Lechner explained. "Inspired by braces used to hold and align parts of the body, the work applies this principle to flowers."

Low-relief tables by Anne Holtrop. The Dutch architect and designer, known for rough-hewn pieces that conjure volcanic craters and mountainous landscapes, is showing cast glass tables from his Low-relief collection at his inaugural exhibition with Carpenter's Workshop Gallery in London. Their unrefined legs draw on stone reliefs Holtrop visited in Aswan, Egypt.

Pleats Cabinet No 1 by Didi Ng Wing Yin. The Helsinki designer, who works with locally sourced Finnish timber, debuted his first cabinet last week at Spazio Nobile Gallery in Paris. The piece mixes fir and pine, finished with tung oil, and carries a pleated door made through Ng's combined splitting, brushing and carving technique.

"I wanted to explore the dynamic contrast between form and texture," Ng told Dezeen. "The chunky pedestal base is built from straightforward architectural beams that retain their natural knots and raw characteristics, providing a heavy, structural anchor for the light, organic silhouette of the pleated cabinet door."

PAD London anchors the month

Two of the six selections came from PAD London, the annual collectible design fair held in Mayfair's Berkeley Square.

Mexico-based Manu Bañó showed a duo of patinated brass chairs formed from stacked, sculptural metal slabs, a continuation of his existing brass and stainless steel furniture. The chairs appeared as part of the Objects with Narratives exhibition.

South Korean designer Seungjin Yang, who has spent years making balloon-shaped furniture from colourful epoxy resin, presented a sofa, two armchairs and two stools. His method is slow: he coats real balloons in resin and painstakingly builds their strength. Each piece is complete after around two weeks of delicate testing. The delicate appearance deceives — the finished pieces are solid enough to be sat on.

What the list changes for buyers is a matter of access, not taste: several pieces — Hagen Hall's table is made to order, Ng's cabinet debuted days ago at a Paris gallery — remain small-batch, gallery-channel work. That is the quiet caveat under every promise of collectible design's widening audience. November's roundup will show whether the pattern holds.