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Meet the Makers: Introducing the First LDW Edit
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Six objects. Six distinctive practices. A new way to discover and collect the creative talent within the Lisbon Design Week community.

Lisbon Design Week has always been about the people behind design: the designers, artists, craftspeople and makers whose ideas and skills transform materials into objects with meaning.

This is the starting point for The LDW Edit, our new curated cultural platform. Every six weeks, a new selection will bring together collectible pieces chosen by a different voice from our community of design experts, creating an evolving portrait of contemporary design and craftsmanship in Portugal.

For our first Edit, we have returned to works discovered or presented during LDW26. The six selected pieces are remarkably different, yet the practices behind them share some of the ideas that LDW has sought to champion from the beginning: material experimentation, craftsmanship, collaboration and an openness to rethinking tradition.

Let us introduce the makers behind our first selection.

Maud Téphany & Rodolphe Renou — When two crafts meet

What happens when a ceramist and a woodworker approach a chair not simply as furniture, but as a meeting point between two materials and two highly specialised forms of making?

Lisbon-based ceramist Maud Téphany has spent more than a decade exploring ceramics as a visual language, moving between objects, sculpture and one-of-a-kind commissions. Her work is strongly pictorial, with surface, colour and glaze playing an essential role.

Woodworker Rodolphe Renou brings another sensibility. Self-taught and deeply interested in Japanese woodworking, he trained with Japanese master carpenter Takami Kawai, developing a practice centred on precision, structure and traditional joinery.

Their PINKIR_ chair II makes both identities visible.

An open structure of mutene wood supports a substantial chamotte stoneware seat whose layered glazes create shifting dusty pink and violet surfaces. Neither material is subordinate to the other. The precision of the timber and expressive unpredictability of the ceramic remain distinct while becoming one object.

The result sits somewhere between chair and sculpture and is also a celebration of what collaboration between crafts can produce.

Discover PINKIR_ chair II in The LDW Edit →

PINKIR_ chair II stoneware with chamotte, various glazes, mutene wood 58x47x72,5cm.jpg

Mariana Rola Pereira & Rival — Between cultures, traditions and times

Born in Macau and working between cultural references, Mariana Rola Pereira explores identity, heritage and the spaces that exist between apparently opposing worlds.

Textile is central to that exploration. In particular, she reinterprets the centuries-old Portuguese technique of Arraiolos embroidery, removing it from familiar forms and allowing it to acquire new meanings.

For Ou-Mun Screen, created in collaboration with woodworking studio Rival, the point of departure is an encounter between Portuguese and Chinese cultural histories.

Its name refers to Macau's original name. Its circular form recalls Chinese fans and the symbolism of imperial robes, while its surface incorporates Arraiolos embroidery. Wool, raw linen, walnut, brass and aluminium bring different traditions and material languages together.

Rival's approach to woodworking provides another layer to that conversation. Rooted in hands-on making and a desire to reconcile contemporary design with traditional craftsmanship, the studio creates the structure within which Mariana's textile practice takes on an entirely new architectural presence.

Rather than presenting heritage as something fixed, Ou-Mun asks what happens when traditions migrate, meet and are allowed to evolve.

Discover Ou-Mun Screen in The LDW Edit →

3TWINS — Reading the city through another language

Twin brothers Yuri and Anatoly Zelensky, working as 3TWINS, began with graffiti before architectural training progressively transformed the way they approached the urban environment.

Architecture remains fundamental to their practice. Surfaces, structures, shadows and the geometries of the built environment become material for large-scale abstract interventions that alter our perception of familiar spaces.

For LDW26, that dialogue with architecture took on a particularly Lisbon character.

The Memory of the Walls, Azulejo Series incorporates original early 20th-century tiles made by Fábrica Desterro Lisboa and recovered during the renovation of a Lisbon building. Rather than treating the tiles simply as fragments of heritage, 3TWINS use them as the starting point for a new visual language.

Historic azulejos, contemporary intervention, architecture and memory coexist in a single circular composition allowing something salvaged from the fabric of the city to begin another life.

Discover The Memory of the Walls in The LDW Edit →

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Frederico Oliveira Vaz — From architecture to the object

For Lisbon-based architect Frederico Oliveira Vaz, design is part of a much broader investigation into architecture and the ways we inhabit space.

After studying architecture in Lisbon and Turin and working at Aires Mateus, he founded +3a.arch in 2020. His practice has developed through an unusually broad network of collaborations, alongside research, interviews, teaching initiatives and furniture design.

His ADRO Collection brings that architectural way of thinking down to the scale of the object.

The starting point is one of Lisbon's familiar spatial typologies: the adro, traditionally the open space adjoining a church. From there, Frederico brings together two materials with very different identities: Portuguese limestone and industrially produced aluminium.

Stone provides weight, memory and a direct connection to Lisbon; precisely cut and folded aluminium introduces lightness and geometry. Together, the table, chair and support explore the tensions between old and new, artisanal and industrial, permanence and mobility.

Discover the ADRO Collection in The LDW Edit →

Ludivine Billaud — Drawing with clay

The trajectory of French artist-designer Ludivine Billaud, now based in Lisbon, has moved through textiles, graphic design, illustration, interiors, food and ceramics.

That multidisciplinary background helps explain the freedom with which she approaches clay. Rather than treating ceramics as a discipline with fixed boundaries, Ludivine uses it to draw, construct surfaces, create patterns and build three-dimensional objects.

Her "Lines with Earth" Side Table captures this approach particularly well.

Inspired by an illustration of a mushroom, raised lines divide its ceramic surface into irregular territories. Each becomes a field for Ludivine's own experimental glazes, which flow and react during firing to produce colours and textures that cannot be entirely predetermined.

It is precisely this tension between intention and unpredictability that gives the work its character. Drawing becomes volume; glaze becomes colour; a functional table becomes a small landscape.

Discover the "Lines with Earth" Side Table in The LDW Edit →

Teresa Nunes — Textiles as memory

For Lisbon textile artist Teresa Nunes, making is inseparable from memory.

Growing up surrounded by three generations of family, textiles, sewing and traditional cloth were part of everyday life. Today, embroidery, patchwork, appliqué and botanical dyeing form a vocabulary through which she explores material, storytelling and our emotional relationship with objects.

Her practice is also rooted in circularity: repairing, repurposing existing textiles and working with plant-based dyes are not secondary considerations, but part of the meaning of the work itself.

In You Can't Hold It, but You Can Touch It, created for The Beauty in Everyday Rituals at Roca Lisboa Gallery during LDW26, Teresa explores one of the most intangible materials of all: water.

Antique and contemporary cotton and linen fabrics are botanically dyed with weld and indigo to create subtle variations of aquatic green, then assembled through patchwork and hand embroidery. The textile is draped over a wooden screen created with Ricardo Leal, whose inlaid timber construction creates another form of patchwork.

The result is tactile, intimate and quietly immersive. An object about touch, memory and an everyday ritual we rarely stop to consider.

Discover You Can't Hold It, but You Can Touch It in The LDW Edit →

Beyond the object

The first LDW Edit is intentionally small. Six pieces allow us to look more closely not only at what has been made, but at who made it, how it was made and the thinking behind it.

It also extends an important part of Lisbon Design Week beyond the annual event. Many extraordinary objects appear during LDW in exhibitions, studios and special commissions. The LDW Edit gives selected works and, importantly, the creative practices behind them another moment of visibility and a way of reaching new audiences.

Every six weeks, the perspective will change. A different voice from our community of design experts will select the next Edit, bringing forward new makers, new materials and new stories.

Because collecting contemporary design can begin with an object. But very often, what we ultimately collect is a piece of someone's story, research and way of seeing the world.

Explore the first selection on The LDW Edit.