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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.

Even in a sluggish auction market, the design category—in particular when boasting notable works by Tiffany Studios, Les Lalanne, and Alberto Giacometti—continues to be a bright spot at auction, with Christie’s two recent sales totaling $23.6 Million.

“You’re also appealing to such a broad range of collectors. You’re no longer just in this like, niche group of people,” Carpenters Workshop senior sales associate Betsy Beierle told ARTnews. “Even in a hesitant market, when something’s rare and when something’s scarce, that is definitely going to outweigh any kind of sluggish performing that’s going on.”

On June 12, the single-owner sale ‘American Avant-Garde: The James D. Zellerbach Residence by Frances Elkins’ totaled $8.1 million, while the auction house’s Design sale yielded $15.4 million.

The top lot for the day was the three-pane, six-foot-tall Goddard Memorial Window by Tiffany Studios with an estimate of $2 million to $3 million. After bids between a Christie’s specialist on the phones and an online bidder, the latter won with a hammer bid of $3.5 million, or $4.285 million with fees.

This was the second-highest price realized for a notable work from the artist’s studio, after the Danner Memorial Window sold for $12.5 million with fees at Sotheby’s Modern Art evening sale last November, smashing the old record of $3.4 million for a ‘Pond Lily’ lamp sold by Christie’s in 2018. The Goddard Memorial Window was sold to support the continued advancement of St. Luke’s Church’s missions and endowment.

The result for The Goddard Memorial Window also followed two recent acquisitions of monumental landscape works by Tiffany Studios at major art institutions. In 2023, the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired the three-part, 10-foot-tall, 7-foot-wide Garden Landscape. Last month, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, announced it had acquired the monumental landscape stained glass window Mountain Landscape (Root Memorial Window).

Out of 34 lots, the vast majority of total for the single-owner sale came from its top two offerings: a pair of Important and Rare ‘Oiseau’, Curved Version, circa 1937 by Alberto Giacometti, both with estimates of $2 million to $3 million. The first of the five-foot-wide plaster bird sculptures realized $2.954 million, while the other sold for $2.833 million, both amounts including fees.

The other two lots from the design sale which surpassed seven figures were works by French sculptor Claude Lalanne. The bronze and copper chandelier Unique ‘Structure végétale aux papillons, souris et oiseaux’ Chandelier, 2000 hammered at $1.5 million, or $1.865 million including fees, on a high estimate of $1.8 million.

Other examples of Structure végétale chandeliers by Claude Lalanne with similar estimates had sold for $2.4 million to $4.4 million at design sales in Paris in 2021 and 2022. While demand for works by Claude Lalanne and her husband François-Xavier Lalanne continues to grow among new collectors, Bierele said the results on June 13 reflected a shift to a “more thoughtful” art market.

“We’re seeing it at art fairs,” she said, noting her decade of experience at Pace Gallery, as well as a director at Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago and as a private consultant before joining Carpenters Workshop in 2022. “People are taking their time, and it’s refreshing. It’s a reset. That’s absolutely what’s happening.”

L’Enlèvement d’Europe, designed in 1990, depicts the Greek god of Zeus transformed into a bull with the princess Europa on his back. The first edition of 6.5 foot-tall, 6.5 foot-long bronze sculpture attracted bids from two specialists on the phones and an online bidder before it hammered at $900,000, or $1.134 million including fees, on a high estimate of $1 million.

When the same edition of L’Enlèvement d’Europe last appeared at auction at Sotheby’s New York on December 18, 2013, it sold for $485,000 with fees, on a high estimate of $350,000.

“It didn’t explode, but I think it’s still fair to say it’s a strong result,” Beierle said, noting the piece’s monumental size, and the first time the artist used the lost cast wax method on a singular sculpture. “A real Lalanne collector is going to want that piece to put a feather in their cap.”

After François-Xavier Lalanne’s Grand Rhinocéros II blasted past its high estimate of $5 million and sold for $16.4 million at Sotheby’s design sale the day before, there were bidding wars for two of the French sculptor’s smaller works at Christie’s, including one in a familiar shape.

Rhinocéros bleu, 1981 zoomed past its high estimate of $70,000 to hammer at $260,000, or $327,600 with fees. Le Métaphore (Canard-Bateau), circa 2002 did even better, surpassing its high estimate of $120,00 by more than 400% after hammering at $530,000 or $667,800 with fees.

Beierle said the results reflected the cheeky, charming, surrealist and fun themes appealing to a growing number of collectors, while being “a little bit easier to live with” compared to Grand Rhinocéros II.

“I think you can very much easily say that you have a rhino, but you can clearly pack that one up and move it to another home, rather than the desk, which obviously is going to be a quite a different lift,” she said with a laugh.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, acquired a monumental landscape stained-glass window created by Tiffany Studios, marking the first window of its kind to enter the museum’s collection.

Measuring approximately nine feet tall by seven feet wide, Mountain Landscape (Root Memorial Window) was commissioned by Woodmen of the World in 1917 as a memorial to its founder Joseph Cullen Root. The window’s design, like several from this era, is attributed to Agnes F. Northrop, who served as lead designer and worked for Tiffany Studio for half a century.

“When you see the work, that combination of the illumination from the back and the grand scale, which really immerses you [in it], you feel that nature is emanating this power,” Jen Padgett, curator of craft at Crystal Bridges, told ARTnews in an interview. “As you look up close, it’s just this amazing kaleidoscope of color and texture.”

Because of their delicate nature and site-specificity, Tiffany Studio windows are rarely owned by major museums. Among the few prominent examples, however, are Hartwell Memorial Window (1917) at the Art Institute of Chicago and two—3-part Garden landscape window for Linden Hall (1912) and Autumn Landscape (1923–24)—owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art; all three are also attributed to Northrop. (The Met’s Autumn Landscape was acquired in 1925 and never installed, while the other two were acquired by their respective institutions in the past five years.)

Another Northrop-designed Tiffany Studios window, The Danner Memorial Window (1913), came to auction last November in a modern art sale at Sotheby’s, where it sold for $12.5 million, setting a record for the studio.

The history of the Root Memorial Window is also unique. As part of its 1917 commission, it was initially conceived of a space at the headquarters of the Woodmen of the World organization in Omaha, Nebraska. Then, in 1931, it was moved to San Antonio, Texas, to anchor the ecumenical Fraser Chapel at a tuberculosis hospital that the organization was building. Its president at the time, William Frazier, was originally from Texas and “advocated for the healing qualities of being in the Texas sunshine,” according to Padgett.

“It was for people of all different faiths to have this experience of seeing this amazing scene of nature in a place of healing and spirituality. That resonates to thinking at Crystal Bridges, and how we advocate for thinking about the whole health of an individual and how art can contribute to wellness and flourishing,” she added.

After the hospital closed and its building razed, the Sunset Ridge Church of Christ acquired the Fraser Chapel in 1959 and has stewarded the Root Memorial Window ever since. During those more than five decades, “there’s been this kind of energetic thread of healing in this particular place—energetically, spiritually, that thread still carries on,” Taylor Bates, the deputy director of Sunset Ridge Collective, an affiliated organization of the church, told ARTnews. “I find it interesting that in 1931, this community of people from all over the country who came together to build this sacred space as a place of healing who thought an important aspect of our healing is art and beauty.”

The acquisition was in the works for around a year when Sunset Ridge first approached Crystal Bridges about the possibility of taking over stewardship of the window at the recommendation of Bryant J. Stanton, a stained-glass restorer based in Waco, Texas. Bates noted that Sunset Ridge had been approached over the years by private collectors interested in purchasing the Root Memorial Window, but they always declined, seeing it as a museum-quality object that one day would need to be cared for by museum professionals.

As part of a rethinking of the church’s campus and community reach in San Antonio’s Terrell Heights neighborhood, which has included creating artist studios, a nature-based pre-school, and farmer’s market, Sunset Ridge realized it was time to renovate the Fraser Chapel, including by making it ADA compliant. In order to do that, they realized that the Root Memorial Window would need to be removed before any form of construction could begin. “That’s when we started to ask the question, ‘Is it time to consider a new home for the window?’” Bates recalled, noting that Sunset Ridge also wanted to ensure “it could be seen and experienced by multitudes of more people.”

In evaluating the cost of that and the related insurance prices to maintain the window into the future, the expenses rose beyond what Sunset Ridge would be able to handle. It was around this time that Stanton reached out to Crystal Bridges to see if it might be interested in acquiring the window. After Padgett conducted a site visit to Sunset Ridge to evaluate the Tiffany window last summer, she began the formal process for its acquisition into the Crystal Bridges permanent collection, which was approved at the end of last year. (Crystal Bridges declined to disclose the financial terms of the acquisition.)

“This window leaving our chapel is really significant, and we’ve had to grieve that,” Bates said. On the day of its deinstallation, “we had a spontaneous, ritualistic way of saying goodbye to the window, inviting the congregation to stand in front of it and acknowledge everything it’s seen and witnessed over the decades of being in this particular place.”

Conserving a Window

What distinguishes Tiffany Studios work in stained glass is that the color is infused directly into multiple levels of glasses, which at times can number to four or five layers, as opposed to the more traditional European style, in which the glass is hand-painted, or stained glass windows that have just one pane of glass. Similarly, the Root Memorial Window also uses a variety of stained-glass techniques that distinguish it as a work by Tiffany Studios, including a confetti technique in which small shards of differently colored glass are sprinkled over the base layer of glass. These techniques add to the sense of the depth in the scene.

“The fact that there’s absolutely no paint on this glass—all the depth, the color, and figurative references are created only by glass—speaks to the innovation of the American Arts and Crafts movement,” stained glass conservator Ariana Makau, who is leading the window’s conservation, told ARTnews.

To further illustrate the innovation in the Root Memorial Window, Padgett pointed to the mountain peak that can be seen in the center of the composition. “The edges of the mountains are not in the front pane of the glass, they’re in a pane that’s further to the back, so when we see the ridges of the mountain, it feels like atmospheric perspective. It has this kind of hazy view into the distance.”

These approaches allow for a higher saturation of color and depth of texture and perspective—but they also complicate the work’s conservation.

After the window was deinstalled earlier this month, it was sent to Makau’s Nzilani Glass Conversation studio in Oakland, California, where it has gone through a thorough analysis, including documentation and notations about its condition and the various passages that might need restoration. That work will wrap in the coming days and then its conservation, which will likely take several months, will begin.

“One of the challenges—and one of the most amazing things—about Tiffany Windows is that they’re plated,” Makau said. “Most leaded art glass windows have one piece of glass that’s the same from the front and the back. But, with Tiffany, on the front, it seems relatively flat, and then on the back, it looks like a topographic map.”

The main focus of the conversation project is to clean layers of dirt from the glass, acquired over years of exposure to both the wind, sun, trees, and possibly smoke from candles in the chapel nearby, as well as horizontal water-mark lines that indicate a possible “water egress that came in between the plating for a little bit, and then evaporated over time because it’s so hot in Texas,” according to Makau. Additionally, any cracks will be repaired by being filled in with a museum-grade epoxy, which can be mixed with color, that that has the same refractive index as glass, or “reflects light the same way glass does,” she said.

Despite its age and exposure, the window is relatively stable and does not need to be taken apart and re-leaded to be restored to its original colorations. Because the Root Memorial Window will be displayed in a temperature-controlled gallery at Crystal Bridges and not exposed to the elements, Makau said that it will not need to add additional protective layers to the window, as it has for Tiffany Windows that have been reinstalled in homes.

“In this case, I think we’re going to reveal a lot of the vibrancy that was lost over time,” Makau said. “Every single piece was so thoughtfully chosen and placed.”

Going on View

Growing its holdings in craft is one of the museum’s top priorities when it comes to acquisitions, including objects made in stained glass. Currently, it only owns one other stained-glass work, a Wisteria table lamp (ca. 1905–06), designed by Clara Driscoll for Tiffany Studios.

Since its founding in 2011, by philanthropist and collector Alice Walton, Crystal Bridges has focused on building a museum that highlights American art in a variety of expressions, surrounded by nature via the 134-acre park it sits on. One approach is “the idea that craft is accessible, that it has a democratic quality that people can have connections to in so many different kinds of materials is definitely something that we are embracing,” Padgett said.

Oftentimes, Crystal Bridges visitors’ first encounters will art-making might be via craft, as opposed to “When people come to the museum, we want to present this really full picture of what American art looks, pulling out those stories and themes that help to move away from some of the art historical hierarchies,” she said. “Instead, it’s about how can your imagination and understanding of American history and the present be sparked by these objects.”

Crystal Bridges is also going through a major expansion that will open in 2026, which will increase its footprint by 50 percent. Of the additional, 114,000 square feet that will be added, about 25,000 square feet will be dedicated gallery space, with an additional 20,000 square feet of interstitial space in which art might be installed.

This expansion will also see the museum’s permanent collection galleries be completely reinstalled across both the original building and the new building. The acquisitions of craft—as well as Indigenous art, another current collecting priority—will be a major focus in juxtaposing work from different time periods and different mediums into various thematically focused galleries.

As part of the reinstallation of the galleries, the Root Memorial Window will go on view as a centerpiece of a gallery that will also feature landscape paintings as well as other works that relate to nature. “It’ll have this special moment of highlight, as a showstopper in the galleries,” Padgett said of the window, adding that the experience of “seeing that work can also help you see, say, Kindred Spirits by Asher B. Durand, or works by Thomas Cole in different ways.”

For its installation, the window will have its own system of artificial lighting that “replicates to the best of what we can [mimic] seeing the window in a space, like the church setting, where it’s illuminated by the natural light,” Padgett said. A possible approach might include a time element that would account for the window being lit at different times of day, as well as in different seasons, to show how the shifting light changes the illumination and coloration of the window.