

A Design Dialogue: LVH Art speaks with Four Trailblazing Furniture Designers
This month at LVH Art, we had the pleasure of speaking with four exceptional furniture designers whose work we admire. Elliot Barnes, Ransom & Dunn, Nifemi Marcus-Bello and Studioutte each bring a unique perspective to their designs—creating pieces that are not only beautifully made but also rich with intention and artistry. We asked each designer four questions to dive deeper into their creative practices, uncover their inspirations, and explore the ever-evolving dialogue between art and design.

Elliot Barnes is a London-based British furniture designer who blurs the boundaries between industrial design and decorative art. Known for creating captivating pieces, Barnes’ work draws inspiration from the past while forging a bold, unconventional future. The term “usable sculpture” is frequently used to describe his designs and perfectly encapsulates Barnes’ approach—his ethereal pieces contrast the weight of heavy materials, blending striking visual appeal with functional form. While he’s reluctant to define a specific aesthetic—believing that a forward-thinking designer’s work should constantly evolve—his aim with each furniture piece is to uncover a mysterious element in an object that resonates with him, and hopefully with others as well.

Ransom & Dunn is a design brand specializing in lifestyle, interiors, and furniture, founded by American-born Londoners Johanna Dunn and Julia Ransom. Their work is a study in simplicity, texture, and contemporary forms, characterized by bold, modernist designs that are both tactile and refined. The Ransom & Dunn aesthetic blends elevated classics with striking statement pieces, drawing inspiration from their American roots and European sensibilities. Julia is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York and Inchbald School of Design in London. Johanna is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and received an MBA from the London Business School. Combined they have over three decades of experience in fashion, retail and finance, honed whilst living in both New York and London. This year, Ransom & Dunn will launch a full lighting collection, alongside new designs including a sofa, coffee table, slipper chair, side table, bed, and bedside table. The duo is also working on two residential projects—one in Milan and one in Miami.

Nifemi Marcus-Bello is the founder of Nmbello Studio, a commercial and artistic design studio guided by a philosophy that emphasises intuition, resourcefulness, and a deep connection to context. Marcus-Bello’s approach is defined by humility and a profound respect for materials and culture. With a strong connection to African design heritage, he engages with global narratives while honouring tradition and place. Rather than dictating outcomes, he facilitates a dynamic dialogue between material, function, and cultural significance. His work is informed by real-world interactions and human-centred insights, ensuring designs that are both authentic and impactful. His work and contributions sit in some of the most prestigious institutions, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Brooklyn Museum, New York, The Los Angeles County Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Design Museum London and more, and this year he has also been shortlisted for the Loewe Craft Prize.

Studioutte is a Milan-based multidisciplinary practice founded in 2020 by Guglielmo Giagnotti and Patrizio Gola. Giagnotti, a former architect at Vincent Van Duysen, studied at the Polytechnic of Bari. After moving to Antwerp in 2015, Giagnotti specialized in luxury interiors and small to medium-scale architecture. Gola trained in interior design at the Politecnico di Milano. In 2017, Gola joined Dimorestudio, working on large-scale hospitality, retail, and residential projects. Despite their different backgrounds, the duo shared a common vision and understanding of each other’s aesthetic, leading them to create a studio where architecture, interiors, and furniture are seamlessly integrated into a unified design language. Drawing from Italian and vernacular traditions, their approach embraces warm minimalism, merging form and function into distilled, poetic spaces. Giagnotti and Gola’s design approach is focused on purity and primal essence, with each environment shaped by an emotional connection to its elements.


What sparked your passion for design, and when did it begin?
Elliot Barnes: Whilst I’ve always been interested in what makes a place or an object stand out against others, my introduction to furniture design was through necessity; I moved into a room with no furniture and my new flatmates had tools, scrap wood and an outdoor space to make things. Whilst the resulting pieces weren’t exactly design classics, the process of watching tutorials online and getting stuck in to trying things started me obsessively researching design, drawing and attempting to produce work that I wasn’t completely despairing of.
Julia Ransom & Johanna Dunn: Our passion for design sparked well before the sensation of Pinterest when we began to travel as teenagers and young adults. Travel has an ability to broaden perspectives and inspire creativity. We both are very observant and detail oriented women who are deeply inspired by our surroundings – the art, architecture, nature, landscapes, local craft and traditions. Seeing how people live and interact with furniture, art and objects inspired us to create a brand and a design business that is an expression and reflection of our continual refining taste.
Nifemi Marcus-Bello: My passion for design started through making. I started making at a very young age and did not find path design as a profession till a later age. Making started at 14 and my interest in becoming a designer started at 20. I studied Product design at the University of Leeds for both undergrad and masters and after graduating realised I was on the right path on doing this profession for the rest of my adult life.
Guglielmo Giagnotti & Patrizio Gola: An accurate and constant observation: a sort of obsession with everything aesthetically valuable that surrounds us, architecture and design are everywhere: from a good movie to a casual object, from a pair of trousers to a window frame in the street. It’s a matter of intuitive sensibility that has always been in both of us in a spontaneous way, a sort of animistic devotion for any scale of “objects – pieces”.


In what ways has art played a role in shaping your designs or design approach, and how do you think art and design might influence each other?
Elliot Barnes: My work references design history a lot, and a large part of that will come from iconic interiors, where design and art play a similar role in being largely decorative elements in a scheme. Donald Judd’s non design works could often be shelving or lighting, and there is a great story of Peggy Guggenheim using Giacometti works as coat racks during parties. It is this sort of object that I would like to make; functional objects which have their own contextual presence, like an artwork might, and I often reference iconic artworks to convey this. Both art and design rely on a strange sort of poetry to be worthwhile in their own right. In my mind that poetry tends to arise from a combination of execution, context and beauty, each being subtly specific to each artist and each beholder. You know it when you see it, I rarely do.
Julia Ransom & Johanna Dunn: Art and design are deeply intertwined and both play a role in shaping and responding to the world around us. The use of colour, forms and textures is often a starting point to thinking about an object should look, feel or perform. Contemporary artists and designers often have shared references from historical art or design movements, and there are cultural trends and movements that inspire both practices. We personally reference the shapes of Imi Knoebel, the texture of Pierre Soulages and the palette of Rothko.
Nifemi Marcus-Bello: Even though I grew up making, I spent most of my spare time indoors drawing and painting. Infact I painted so much that my mother kept pushing me to study art. So before studying design, I studied a foundation course in Art History in the hopes of majoring in History of Art, becoming an artist or a curator. Fast forward to studying design at a technical design school (School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Leeds). I don’t think I ever got rid of my artistic precedence and do think I ever will. In my own humble opinion, good design has an element of art to it, this is what takes care of the emotional side to the experience of the product.
Guglielmo Giagnotti & Patrizio Gola: Art has a crucial part in our first approach to design and spatial composition, it sensibly influences the phase of brainstorming and concept. In many aspects some names are radically architectural: Tapiès, Oteiza, Heizer, Ungers, Vandenhove and many others.. It’s a mutual influence with different aims. Design is often softening art, diluting its freedom into function. Art sometimes radicalizes design. It demolishes, digests and splits it back with a new sense.

In your opinion, what are the factors that makes an object stand out as a well-designed piece?
Elliot Barnes: Beauty is a difficult thing to define with design as it’s meant to be practical so often the beauty aspect come through the line of thinking that solves a problem in an intelligent or resourceful way, in combination with the final ‘look’ of the piece. Execution is variable also, some of the best design works have the ‘my toddler could have made that’ factor, but that is what makes them interesting contextually and their casual or primitive production is exactly what makes them beautiful.
Julia Ransom & Johanna Dunn: The key elements we look for are in a great piece are – proportion and scale, use of materials, practicality and quality.
Nifemi Marcus-Bello: This is a tricky question as everything has and needs a bit of context to be experienced and understood. But in another humble opinion design stands out when it is considerate through its inception and completion.
Guglielmo Giagnotti & Patrizio Gola: When it is difficult to get from which period it is from. When you can still read the sense of archetype in it, when you can reed a process of refinement and deduction in it. When is timeless, when is absolute.


Is there a specific material that excites you the most to work with, and what about it resonates with you right now?
Elliot Barnes: I had the chance to work with cast glass recently, which was a revelation. It does magical things with light, almost like freezing the reflections across water in a useable surface. It is also a hugely difficult material to produce, which makes it quite rare and special to see in domestic settings. I work a lot with stainless steel as it is simultaneously quite industrial and somehow refined. With the right polish it can emulate silvered surfaces, and takes on the colour surrounding it which is an interesting tension.
Julia Ransom & Johanna Dunn: Currently we are captivated by the use of glass and exploring ways to make it feel modern.
Nifemi Marcus-Bello: I love metal and the process of sand casting because of the intimacy between the material, the human hand and the earth. Sand Casting preserves the marks of making—the textures, the flaws, the traces of touch—which makes each piece feel alive and human. It’s a reminder that creation isn’t just about precision or polish, but about presence. Right now, as the boundary between digital and physical narrows, I think these kinds of tactile, earth-rooted practices are more important than ever.
Guglielmo Giagnotti & Patrizio Gola: Since our goal is being focused on the sense of primal essence of forms, using natural material is the only way to reach a controlled expressivity. Natural materials, with their imperfections and patina change and transform with time. Sometimes we like to play with the duality of a material, for example a very plain wood that looks like paper/parchment, a very aged and oxidized copper that looks like marble and so on..






The World in Black and White: 6 Photographers Who have Mastered the Monochrome Lens
This article explores some of the most influential masters of black and white photography, artists who have redefined the medium with their unique per...

The World in Black and White: 6 Photographers Who have Mastered the Monochrome Lens
From Bauhaus to his ‘Colour Magic’: The Enduring Impact of Josef Albers

From Bauhaus to his ‘Colour Magic’: The Enduring Impact of Josef Albers
LVH Art in Conversation with Matthieu Humery, The Pioneering Curator Shaping the Future of Photography
