Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.

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.

A report published in Air Mail features allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior, questionable accounting, and more at Carpenters Workshop Gallery.

The weekly newsletter’s report, published on Friday, draws on “more than a dozen interviews” with former employees of the prestigious design firm cofounded by Julien Lombrail and Loïc Le Gaillard 18 years ago.

ARTnews’s attempts to reach Lombrail and Le Gaillard by phone were not successful. When ARTnews reached out to the gallery’s global marketing director Mary Agnew for an official comment, she wrote in an email, “We are of course deeply troubled by the content of the article. Right now, we are prioritising the welfare of our staff and artists and taking the time to consider our response with our internal teams.”

ARTnews sent further questions to Agnew by email in regards to the allegations about Carpenters Workshop Gallery, but did not receive a response by press time.

Carpenters Workshop Gallery works with high-profile artists and estates, including Charlotte Perriand, Jean Prouvé, the Dutch Atelier Van Lieshout, the Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid, and the American sculptor Wendell Castle, as well as fashion designers such as Rick Owens, Karl Lagerfeld, and Virgil Abloh.

The gallery reportedly has 120 employees across its four locations, in Paris, London, New York and London. Ladbroke Hall—a 43,000-square-foot, $37.5 million glitzy club and gallery space—was unveiled last April in the London neighborhood of North Kensington.

In 2022, the Art Newspaper called the enterprise the first design “mega-gallery”; the gallery was the subject of a New York Times profile published last month. It has attracted high-profile collectors such as actor Brad Pitt, designer Tom Ford, singer John Legend, model and television personality Chrissy Teigen, Russian businessman Roman Abramovich, and art collector Dasha Zhukova.

Carpenters Workshop Gallery has also exhibited at several fairs, including Design Miami, Design Basel, the Armory Show, and TEFAF.

Workers interviewed by Air Mail claimed that artists received less than the standard 50 percent commission for selling works on consignment, and alleged that the gallery failed to reimburse expenses for the production and shipment of works. The report also featured claims the gallery had manipulated sales invoices sent to artists.

One section of the Air Mail report focused specifically on the gallery’s 83,000-square-foot production facility located in the suburban French town of Mitry-Mory, 15 miles from the center of Paris. The facility, Roissy, was profiled by Vanity Fair in 2023. Allegedly poor conditions may have contributed to the death of one of the workers, Zbigniew Sokol, a Polish bricklayer who reportedly collapsed while working at Roissy and was later found unconscious in 2015.

The Air Mail report also featured allegations of sexual misconduct by Le Gaillard. Workers interviewed by the newsletter claimed that he was involved with a gallery director, that he selected female interns based on physical appearances, and that he led affairs with staff members, including “an intern in her early 20s,” per the report.

San Francisco’s grandest new art space is not a gleaming minimalist dwelling or futurist abode but a historic Catholic church that has been restored to an immaculate state after being abandoned for nearly 30 years. Or maybe not completely abandoned. “It was filled with pigeons and a homeless encampment and just neglect,” said Ken Fulk, the designer who purchased the building three years ago and remade it in such fantastical fashion. “It was raining inside.”

Now a long way from the earthquake damage it suffered in 1989, the church has been resurrected (Fulk’s word—“a good religious term,” he said) as the Saint Joseph’s Arts Society, an exhibition space and arts club with otherworldly furniture, a bar, and even a velvet-covered rope that visitors can pull to sound the bell up in a tower peering out over all the land.

Also inside, in time for the FOG Design+Art and Untitled art fairs in town this week, is an exhibition presented by the New York gallery Venus Over Manhattan in a small room with a storied past. “I wasn’t sure what a rectory was, but it turns out this is where something holy went on before the services,” Venus Over Manhattan’s founder, Adam Lindemann, said. “I thought if we have four walls—especially during FOG—we could do something interesting.”

The result is a spirited show drawing from a mixed congregation: the mid-century designers Charlotte Perriand and Pierre Guariche, the painters Alberto Burri and Maryan, and the sculptors Alexander Calder and Ken Price. “I tried to bring a a contemplative mid-century idea of minimalist thinking to the serene aspect of the church,” Lindemann said of a show that started with Perriand, who designed furniture for Le Corbusier and went on to a career as one of the most revered designers of the 20th century. A lamp in the show lived in her own apartment, and other of her pieces—tables and a desk with chairs, all in sumptuously amorphous wood—take up position around the room.

“I thought they would go well with these monochromatic Burris,” Lindemann said of two black, brooding paintings hung nearby. “They’re interesting to me because they’re from when Burri left Italy and moved to L.A. I think they have a West Coast feel.”

The show, on view through March 8, joins an array of other presentations in the church. A giant photograph by Catherine Wagner—some 30 feet tall and 50 feet wide—from a series of works devoted to Rome was commissioned specially for the space and hangs behind the altar. Upstairs is a new location for the design-minded Carpenters Workshop Gallery (also of New York and London), which has a show on view featuring works by the Milan-based architect and designer Vincenzo De Cotiis. “The drive is to try to demonstrate that these are way more than functional objects,” Carpenters Workshop director Loic Le Gaillard said of the programming he plans to present in San Francisco. “All these objects have their own narrative and emotion and reasons why they’ve been made. They’re as relevant as art.”

Also dispersed throughout the voluminous 22,000-square-foot environs are offerings by the Dutch duo Jaap Sinke and Ferry van Tongeren, whose work includes photographs and “fine taxidermy.” Animal heads hang all around, and a group of horse faces lies on a table burned black in tribute, an onlooker said, to the fire that destroyed Brazil’s National Museum in ‎Rio de Janeiro last year.

Of the newly launched arts space and its many parts, Fulk said the endeavor will take on 400 households as members under subscription—“much like you would subscribe to the opera or the symphony or any traditional arts organization.” The nonprofit 501 (c)(3) Saint Joseph’s Arts Foundation will present arts programming, education, and residencies. “And then there’s the Society, which helps keeps the lights on,” Fulk said.

Of the Saint Joseph’s Arts Society as a whole, he said, “Hopefully, collectively, it will be a gift to the city of San Francisco.”

Carpenters Workshop Gallery, which produces and exhibits functional sculptures, will open a San Francisco outpost on October 1. The gallery is taking up residence in a 9,000-square-foot space on the mezzanine of the Saint Joseph’s Arts Society, a new arts space founded by designer Ken Fulk and housed in the former Saint Joseph’s Church, which was built in 1913 and recently underwent a three-year renovation.

The Saint Joseph’s Arts Society will host rotating exhibitions and special events—some programming will be open only to the organization’s “subscribers” and their guests—and it will house a selection of retail shops. Carpenters Workshop, which will be open to the public, is the sole gallery to be located permanently in the building.

In an email, Loïc Le Gaillard, a cofounder of Carpenters Workshop Gallery, told ARTnews that the “unconventional architecture” and open-air mezzanine present many possibilities for using the new space. “For our West Coast debut, we were looking for an unusual space, off the beaten path in an architecturally interesting space, as we do for our other galleries,” he said. “The interaction with the Saint Joseph’s Arts Society should also create an interesting cross-pollination between the city’s creative community.”

The San Francisco enterprise’s inaugural exhibition will survey work by various artists on the gallery’s roster. Highlights include Maarten Baas’s interactive Self Portrait Clock, a Fragile Future chandelier by Studio Drift, and a sculptural bronze chair by Wendell Castle. Pieces by Nacho Carbonell, Johanna Grawunder, and others will also be on view.

Carpenters Workshop Gallery first opened in 2006 in London, where it has two spaces—a gallery open to the public and a by-appointment-only venue. The gallery also has locations in Paris and New York, and a production facility and private sales space in Roissy, France.

“The fact that San Francisco is supported by an active and engaged collector base made the city a clear choice,” Le Gaillard said. “We also feel that—more than other cities in the U.S.—the taste of the new generations in San Francisco is evolving quickly towards a more contemporary approach where craft and technology exist side by side, which is exactly what we do.”