The Future Perfect’s Laura Young Makes the Case for Design as the Next Collecting Frontier

The design auctions in June demonstrated the strength of a market that has continued to grow in both reach and value, particularly since the pandemic. Sotheby’s June Design Week alone generated a combined $27,568,552 across a three-day series of auctions, led by the $8.8 million Art & Design from the Collection of Barbara Gladstone sale and the $10.5 million Of Form and Color: Art and Design from the Emmanuel de Bayser Collection. Meanwhile, Phillips’ Design sale on June 12 realized $2.9 million with an 89.5 percent sell-through across its 76 lots, most of which met or exceeded their high estimates. Results at both houses reflected strong demand for French postwar design, as well as broadening interest in postwar American design, British ceramic artists such as Lucie Rie and rising contemporary designers like Vincenzo De Cotiis and multidisciplinary star Rick Owens.

Observer recently met with Laura Young, managing director of The Future Perfect, a contemporary design gallery with spaces in New York, Miami, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Founded by David Alhadeff in 2003, The Future Perfect has distinguished itself through the breadth of its vision and curatorial focus and is known for introducing highly collectible works by seminal design talents such as Lindsey Adelman, Jason Miller and Piet Hein Eek to the market.

(It’s worth noting that our meeting required a degree of complex coordination, as the design world’s calendar does not always overlap with the art world’s; the two often alternate despite similarities in their market dynamics.)

Trained as a furniture designer at RISD and a maker at heart, Young is considered a tastemaker and authority in the field, which made her the ideal person to consult about where the market for contemporary design is heading. Since joining The Future Perfect in 2014, she has helped evolve the gallery from a showroom into a cultural institution rooted in experimentation, storytelling and risk-taking.

When we visited the gallery’s New York location—a beautiful four-story townhouse in the West Village—we enjoyed a dynamic series of exhibitions The Future Perfect launched during NYCxDesign, including the debut of Studio Athena Calderone’s “Assembler I,” D’Haene Studio’s first furniture collection and “DUDD LITE,” a playfully engaging, wide-ranging show of night lights as both functional objects and artistic forms.

The Future Perfect’s space is intentionally not a showroom. It can read at varying times like a white-box gallery and a domestic interior. “We work toward creating experiences, not necessarily traditional living spaces,” Young explains. Even when a presentation becomes especially polished or formal, the house format gives the work a different charge from a traditional retail or gallery setting. Programming varies: a rotation can be as short as six weeks or last considerably longer, depending on the floor, the installation’s ambitions and the timing.

Young does not draw a hard line between art, design and craft. “Every designer I work with has the right to call themselves an artist if they want to. It is their choice,” she says, as we sit on a beautiful sofa by Christopher Delcourt facing the patio, surrounded by translucent glass wall lamps and a coffee table by D’Haene Studio. For this collection, Jane Yang-D’Haene and her late husband Francis D’Haene collaborated for the first time. Inspired by Korean jogakbo, a patchwork textile that stopped them both in their tracks, the pieces reflect a dialogue between Jane’s distinct sensibility as a ceramic artist and the surfaces of the works, while Francis shaped the details, proportions and overall forms.

Some creators who work through highly unique and labor-intensive processes, like D’Haene Studio, still call themselves designers, Young explains, while others whose practices are closer to conventional design call themselves artists. She points to a beautiful, highly articulated mirror by Chen Chen & Kai Williams hanging in the hallway, which could easily read as an art installation. “They are truly artists in what they create. Everything is unique; they hand-paint and pour the silver on the mirror. At the same time, they have made and sold many of these mirrors, and they classify themselves as designers. They studied design and believe they are designers. I say, ‘You are the most artist-like people in my entire roster, and you are calling yourselves designers.’” To Young, the lines once drawn between craft, art and design are now completely blurred, as they already were at the beginning with the early avant-garde.

In The Future Perfect’s program, that distinction matters less than the quality of the work and the clarity of the practice. The same fluidity affects pricing. Value must be built through a market, not simply imported from another category, Young argues. A painter who makes a chair cannot assume that the chair automatically follows the same pricing logic as a painting, just as a designer entering a more art-adjacent space must still establish demand, production costs and collector confidence over time. “It is about building a market, and it is about capacity. It is about understanding what the artist can make, what the work costs to produce, how the market can absorb it and how to build value over time.”

At RISD, Young studied sculpture before moving toward furniture design out of a desire to understand how things were made, not only how they could be discussed conceptually. “I had a significant interest in how things were made, so I decided to go into furniture design,” she says. After working through materials, spending time at an auction house and doing creative direction and artist-liaison work at Areaware, she found a role that combined making, storytelling, production and market-building.

When asked whether collectors need to understand how things are made in order to appreciate design, Young says it is not essential for them, but it is essential for her. Understanding process allows her to shape the story, interface with artists and help improve the work. The gallery generally supports the production of new works and collections, and Young oversees the entire cycle. “A lot of the time, it might be me simply saying, ‘I think this dimension is wrong,’ or, ‘This is not going to sell as a coffee table, so let us make it a dining table, because if it costs this much to produce, it needs to work. Then there are artists I work with very closely, and we can feed off each other.” The role Young describes is akin to that of a creative director, editor or producer. “I do not always know what the parallel is in other industries, but I often think of myself as a producer—someone supporting them in creating a hit.”

The Future Perfect works across a spectrum: some pieces can be produced repeatedly in different fabrics, sizes or finishes, while others can never be replicated. Even when a chair or credenza can technically be made without a strict edition limit, boutique manufacturing keeps the object special and naturally limits production. At the other end are works whose making process prevents repetition entirely: a hand-cut tabletop with blown-glass legs, for instance, may require many attempts before a functional version is achieved. A related object could be made again, but it will never be the same piece; it remains fundamentally unique.

When it comes to selecting designers, the process begins mostly with relationships and conversations as much as with objects. In the case of Athena Calderone’s collection, the project came through an existing personal connection with the gallery and its founder, David Alhadeff. Calderone originally designed the objects for her own home: a 14-piece collection exploring form and materiality through a contemporary lens. Each piece is defined by timeless silhouettes clearly informed by the elegance and restraint of 20th-century French design masters, paired with refined details such as high-gloss wood, lacquer, sustainable parchment and metal accents—statement pieces conceived as future classics. When Calderone offered The Future Perfect the exclusive, the team accepted because the collection fit the house and the program.

The core of The Future Perfect’s program has long been contemporary. “The Future Perfect was originally built as a place for emerging talent. That is at the root of it,” Young says. But 23 years later, that emerging talent has become some of the top names in design. “This now creates an interesting position, and helps to contextualize these practices.”

Group exhibitions also serve as scouting and market-testing opportunities. With a roster of roughly 25 artists making limited-edition and unique works, the gallery is not constantly looking to add names, but a group show can reveal how audiences respond to a maker, how the artist works within the gallery context and whether the relationship can develop.

“DUDD LITE,” organized in partnership with Philadelphia-based design collective DUDD HAUS, was an open-call exhibition featuring more than 150 works by 130 artists, including Chris Wolston, Rich Aybar, Bethan Laura Wood, Lindsey Adelman and many more, each offering a distinct interpretation of the night light. Moving fluidly across disciplines and styles—often blending sculpture, design and conceptual object-making—the presentation transforms a familiar domestic fixture into a site for experimentation where humor, nostalgia and material exploration meet. With prices ranging from roughly $10 to $8,000, the show has also drawn a younger audience back into the gallery, demonstrating how accessible objects can create a lively entry point into the program while still sitting within a serious design context.

Interior designers, architects and design professionals were, for a long time, The Future Perfect’s primary audience. More recently, however, the gallery has seen a stronger collector and private-client base, especially since participating in fairs and as its artists have gained museum visibility. Young confirms that the pandemic accelerated attention to design because people were forced to look closely at their homes. “It became less about travel and less about what everyone else had. It became deeply personal,” she says. “People stopped caring as much about what everyone else owned and started caring more about what they liked.” Even clients who first encountered the program through an interior designer now tend to return on their own to continue collecting after a home project is complete.

For The Future Perfect, that has reinforced a program rooted in taste and joy. Young says she cannot sell something she does not like, because her enthusiasm feeds the team and ultimately shapes how the work is presented to clients. “I feed them, and it becomes a circle,” she says. That also applies to the roster: the gallery wants to work with people who are collaborative, generous and enjoyable to support.

As The Future Perfect turned more deliberately toward collectors, Young educated herself by visiting homes and joining collector tours in places such as Aspen, Mexico City, Jackson Hole and New York. Yet she found a recurring contradiction: major art collections paired with generic, characterless furniture. “I would go into homes with billion-dollar or high-million-dollar art collections, and they would have Restoration Hardware sofas,” she says. “I would think, ‘How can you invest this way in paintings, but the sofa has no character and brings no joy?’” That became a conversation Young would open with collectors, creating space for their interest in collecting design. If someone was willing to invest deeply in paintings or sculpture, why should the sofa—the object actually lived with every day—be treated as an afterthought?

On collecting trends, Young points to the return of nature, animals and organic forms, which are reappearing frequently in design as powerful motifs, partly because they create an immediate emotional and material connection. “When it comes to decoration and adornment, nature and animals always come into play. Nature is a real point of connection for most artists,” she says, acknowledging how this once again reflects the needs of our current moment: the way we live with the external world and seek more authentic connections.

This also relates to the broader rise of craft. Once dismissed in some corners of the market, craft has become central to both art and design in an age of extreme digitalization because it foregrounds material, touch and process. “Craft used to be a bad word. A decade ago, craft was not necessarily a compliment, and then craft became an important part of the conversation,” Young acknowledges. The current design moment is openly decorative again. Where “decorator” once carried a dismissive tone, decoration and adornment have regained status. “I think it became about physical touch. One of the defining qualities of craft is material and touch. A woodworker uses their hands; they feel the piece and decide when it is done. A ceramicist builds. A glassblower works with heat, body and material. These are things that can be industrial and artistic at the same time.”

She points, for example, to the creations of Chris Wolston, whose work is tied to his environment in Medellín, Colombia, where plants from the surrounding landscape become the basis for wax castings and foundry-made pieces. Glass mushrooms made in Australia draw on Venetian glassblowing techniques while allowing each piece to remain unique within an otherwise repeatable production system.

Museums are also approaching design today with renewed interest and seriousness, though they differ in how they want to engage with it. Some, like the Dallas Museum of Art, are interested in commissions that respond to a specific gallery and can be used by visitors, making the object both functional and site-responsive. Others prefer to collect design as untouchable museum objects. “It varies in how institutions want to bring design in, but both validate design’s place in institutional collections,” Young argues.

Museum exhibitions have increasingly become key milestones for designers. “If a museum, or anyone, is willing to invest in someone in the way it takes to build a museum show, people look at the work differently,” Young says. Press is equally important in creating momentum around certain figures, but exhibitions provide the institutional validation that reassures collectors and helps stabilize value.

The most successful designers in the program, Young notes, are flexible, open-minded and collaborative. Because design ultimately meets a user, the artist or designer must be willing to engage not only with the gallery but also with clients, collectors and the final user of the object. “They know what they need, and you have to provide that to them; otherwise, you are failing at the core role of design.”

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