Onsite at Design Miami/ Basel this week, three rising-star studios from our DM/BX shop have taken a space to showcase their talents. Each is very different, but they all share a hands-on approach and a flair for storytelling. These are definitely ones to watch.

Xtant

A few years ago, Kavita Parmar and Marcella Echavarria were drawn together over their shared love of heritage textiles and sustainable fashion. Parmar had grown up in a family with ties to traditional textile manufacturing in India and started her own design studio at age 18, before going on to forge a career in fashion. Echavarria meanwhile had built a career as a lifestyle specialist, regularly collaborating with designers and artisans around the world and connecting local knowledge with global trends. Today, the duo’s atelier Xtant is ethically producing an array of gorgeous heritage textiles handcrafted by the world’s foremost masters, while also educating the public about the artform through summits and traveling exhibitions.

Laura Sattin

Laura Sattin was born in Vicenza, near Venice, to a family in the glass business. She didn’t embrace glassmaking for herself right away though. Instead, she went off to study architecture. During a rather unexciting research project, Sattin decided to enter a competition for young glass designers—and she won! Today, she is a practicing architect based in Basel, but she continues to produce new collections in collaboration with artisans in both Italy and Switzerland. The nature-inspired colors and textures of her work evoke the centuries old Venetian glass tradition, but the forms are entirely contemporary.

Diego Faivre

While attending the Design Academy Eindhoven, French-born, Netherlands-based Diego Faivre decided that instead of smoking he would spend each 15-minute break making furniture from whatever scraps and trash he found laying around. The results weren’t so appealing at first, but soon he discovered a kind of self-hardening clay that could cover over the slap-dash structures—and his Minute Manufacturing collection was born. In a nod to the old adage, time is money, each colorful, playful piece is priced according to the time it took to make it. ◆

You can find the work of Xtant, Laura Sattin, and Diego Faivre in the DM/BX shop.