Mr. Thread

#00034 - A fortune in the desert

Mr. Thread — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 20:26:00 GMT

Jean-Léon Gérôme: View of Medinet El-Fayoum

~ In Memoriam ~
Dave Dawson

Dave Dawson was a legend of this industry. In just over twenty-five years he built Urban Electric into an American icon—a company that stands for everything we believe in at Mr. Thread: authenticity, craftsmanship, and serious business sense. He also founded Makers Alliance, a brilliant coalition of American companies devoted to preserving the best of made-in-America manufacturing. He was a friend to the design community, loved and respected by everyone who met him. He was lost far too young, but he leaves behind a legacy that will not be forgotten.

“Dave Dawson started The Makers Alliance, through which we met. Every Maker admired Dave and secretly or openly, we all wanted to be just like him. He wasn’t just a leader—he was our hero, and we loved him. As a Texan, I’ve always thought that when Willie Nelson dies, I’d be at a loss to remember how to tie my shoes. With this news, today, it’s a lot like that, thinking about our lives without Dave in them.”

—Kyle Bunting

Hello readers,

We have a scorcher on our hands. Here in North Carolina, it’s 100 degrees but it feels like 117, and I’m loving every minute of it. I’m Egyptian; the desert heat is in my blood, and I’ll take a sticky, blazing afternoon over the constant blast of American air conditioning any day.

My staff in Venice can’t say the same. They’re melting because no one can retrofit air conditioning into ancient palazzos (nor should they). Here’s the thing about Venice in a heat wave: it’s a city of canals, so no matter how rich you are, there’s no cool car to duck into on your way to the next destination. Heat in Venice is a great equalizer.

But in our industry, we follow the heat, and there’s nowhere hotter than the desert right now. Believe me: I’ve been working with an engineering firm sourcing for a private residence in the Far East: 300,000+ square feet, 30 bedrooms, garden galleries, grand halls, barber shops, the works. A modern Versailles set in an arid, sun-scorched landscape.

The interior budget on a single room easily runs in the millions; the chandeliers cost about what a Tesla self-driving car does; the furniture, wallpaper, and fabric alone will land easily over $50 million.

What’s interesting to me is that the buyers in these nouveau riche regions value one thing above all: the brand label. Not the colors, not the 100-year history, not the artisan who hand painted the fabrics, just a famous name they can point to.

My companies have produced work that has hung in the Hermitage, the Met, the US Senate, and the royal palace in Amsterdam, and for this client that list is the entire pitch.

Meanwhile, back home in America—the biggest luxury market on earth—the exact opposite is happening. The American buyer is done with logos. They want meaning, specialness, and a story that means something to them. This week our guest essayist says so in the tale of a broken pair of sunglasses, and a brand-new McKinsey and Business of Fashion study says so in hard numbers. We’ve read all the data, so you don’t have to.

So read on to find out why one industry insider thinks RH is going bankrupt, why craftsmanship stopped closing sales, and how many phalluses you can find in Madonna’s house.

Fair warning: this one’s a monster. If your inbox clips it, read it online—and yes, we’re weighing a move to Substack for the summer, so stay tuned.

See you next week.

Mr. Thread

P.S. Don’t just read—play. We’ve woven a new mystery into this issue in our PLAYTIME segment. 7 Correct Guesses Last Week. Let’s see who has the “eye” to claim the win this time and secure a spot for our grand prize draw. Scroll to the bottom to join the fun.

Get the free weekly journal

Industry

Jean-Léon Gérôme: On the Desert

RH and the battle of the beige
RH is the most argued-about name in our business, so let’s start where the fight is loudest. Gary Friedman has launched RH Estates, 165 collections reproducing legends like Michael Taylor, Dennis & Leen, and Dmitriy & Co., wrapped in a 300-page sourcebook and new standalone galleries in Greenwich and West Hollywood. Friedman calls it “removing the barriers that have segregated taste from scale.” Look, it’s a smart move—Taylor’s curves are iconic, and RH has the chops to deliver it. But check out the lookbooks. These rooms are sterile, beige-on-beige, and styled like a showroom for the same reason realtors paint interiors white to ensure a quick sale. What’s missing is the soul. You can copy the exact curve of a Michael Taylor chair and still lose the man entirely. To me, this reads less like a tribute than a name being cashed in.

They also just introduced “a new covenant with the Trade.” After spending a decade declaring our industry the enemy and vowing to take it down, he now sees the light and desperately wants designers back. He’s finally offering financial incentives for designers to shop at RH, among other benefits (though let’s be honest, it’s really about the money). These are moves that are obvious pivots away from strategies that didn’t work. Will designers now take the bait and welcome RH back into their budgets? That remains to be seen.

These launches landed the same week as a bruising quarter for the company: revenue slipped 1.7% to $800 million, hit by roughly $45 million in backorder and special-order problems, and RH posted a $1.97 per-share adjusted loss—though, defiant as ever, Friedman raised full-year guidance. No wonder RH is a lightning rod. A New Jersey shop owner, Elke Ridge, who posts sharp, funny business breakdowns under her Instagram handle, Whimsicality, racks up thousands of comments every time she talks about the stock—proof that nobody in this industry can look away from RH, least of all the people who swear they’re over it.

“It is stagnant. It is big, oversized, beige, beige, beige furniture. And the only people buying it, to be honest, are 40-, 50-, 60-year-old single men. There, I said it, and I'm not sorry about it.”

— Whimsicality, via Instagram

Cohen strikes back
Two weeks ago Charles Cohen pulled a $187 million rabbit out of a hat and paid off Fortress Investment Group. Now, barely dry, he’s suing them for $204 million. Cohen claims Fortress botched the foreclosure auction of four of his properties, scooping them up for $150 million—$85 million below the lender’s own internal valuation—in a process that, his suit argues, should have used different brokers, different marketing, and different timing. Fortress denies all of it.

Translation: the man who just wrote a nine-figure check to end this war has decided the war was worth reigniting. I’ll keep my commentary measured, because I still lease space in his building and he’s not a man who lets things go. But this one is turning into a soap opera with no happy ending for the world’s most iconic fabric brands.

“The out-of-court auction of the properties was not conducted in a commercially reasonable manner and should have involved different marketing strategies, different brokers, and different time frames.”

— From Charles Cohen’s lawsuit against Fortress, via The Real Deal

Guest Essay

Meena Dimian: @meenaconsulting

Made in The Shade 🕶️
By Meena Dimian: @meenaconsulting

It’s Saturday night in Hollywood. I’m at the bar at the Musso & Frank Grill on my third gimlet, settling up to stumble into the disgusting dive next door to watch the fourth quarter that I’ve been waiting for the last four decades. The Knicks are down by a few, but seem pretty confident even though it’s an away game. Approaching the massive open-air taqueria I’m passed by a gauntlet of giant fishbowl margaritas that could double as kiddie pools. I’m overdressed. The floor is sticky, the patrons are missing essential body parts (teeth, namely), and everyone’s eyes are glued on the possibility of the first NBA championship for New York since 1973. I tuck my glasses in my breast pocket, I sit at the bar, order a Glenfiddich on the rocks (playing it safe), and wait for the clock to wind down.

The final shot didn’t end the game—the game was essentially over two plays earlier when a few forced errors put San Antonio down by four with seconds left. It was time. Wemby, the seven-and-a-half-foot-tall French alien freak, pops up a hopeless three-pointer that doesn’t even come close. The mark of the defeated. Now, keep in mind, I’m in LA. Half the bar is full of Texans, half the bar are New Yorkers (or at least people who pretend to be from New York—New Jersey, Connecticut people, etc), but even the people who were rooting for The Spurs were wowed by the moment. People were jumping, screaming; one fellow even let a tear out, it was a surreal experience. Arms in the air, we were leaping and hugging uncontrollably, at moments almost violently, it was a long-awaited release.

Driving down Highland Avenue back to my home, I hear people honking, I see people dancing in Knicks jerseys on the corner of Melrose, I’m taking it in as the booze starts to wear off. Back home, I take my jacket off and notice my David Kind frames that I’ve been wearing since 2009 have split in half right down the nose bridge. The one break point that is irreparable, oh, and the other half is totally gone. I guess the joy of the Knicks’ victory was too much for the Japanese acetate to sustain. It’s weird to lose accessories that become part of your identity. I saw the world in those glasses, London, Paris, Venice—all through those lenses. I’m also a believer in destiny, so I felt it might be time for a change, in line with or even against my own will.

Shopping for sunglasses is hell. If you actually care about the way you look and only plan to buy a few pairs in your lifetime, it is almost an impossible feat. The size, the color, the lenses—quality, material, branding, it’s literally endless. There are probably a thousand brands just in America, let alone the tens of thousands in Europe. Let’s not even get into the Japanese, who have mastered the art of making things so beautiful that choosing anything becomes impossible. This is a particularly harrowing dilemma because I have chosen to live my life in two of the most sun-intense spots on the global map. Between South Florida and Los Angeles, my retinas are deep-fried on a daily basis, and these are both driving regions, so visibility is paramount when your car hood is on the brink of melting.

So I visit local boutiques, find some interesting new brands, some iconic ones, all very stylish but slightly off the mark. Too big, too light, too 1970s pornstar. Nothing feels right, and my ocular capacities are dwindling by the day under the golden California sun. I try my luck on Facebook Marketplace, and stumble upon a newly listed pair from Jacques Marie Mage. Highly respected brand, top quality, handmade product. Revered and recommended by a few of my clients and art-world friends—I even had the luck of meeting Jerome Mage himself last year at an event and we chatted about the eyewear industry, and about a mutual friend who used to be one of my dearest clients. He is legit, the product is legit, I’ve got nothing bad to say. The only apprehension is that in the world of eyewear, there has never been a bigger “IT” brand. Basically, Jerome cornered a luxury market by making something so top-tier that if you wore any other brand, you were just announcing to the world that you were poor. Nevertheless, the frames were the right size, right color, and the girl selling them was willing to meet halfway at the most modern hipster coffee bar in Hollywood you could imagine.

I showed up early, I sat with my $6 Americano waiting for her arrival (that’s 80% hot water, by the way). Perched on my aluminum cube, I start scanning the crowd. The Hollywood artist is truly its own breed. Luxury for the unemployed and the unemployable. Guys in weathered leather jackets, girls in athleisure and sweatshirts, pant-less. Again, I’m overdressed. Something did jump out at me, though. Everywhere I seemed to look, I see the gold-fill temples, indicative of the Jacques Marie Mage brand, plastered on the side of most of the patrons’ heads. Young girls, guys too old to be wearing wallet chains, and by God, I even think one of the baristas was wearing a pair as their vision frames. When I first discovered the JMM Instagram account in around 2011 they had 14,000 followers on Instagram. Everyone loved their content, but no one could afford (or justify the expense) to actually purchase a pair for themselves. Fast forward 10 years and one of the extras you glanced at a decade ago on “Desperate Housewives” is sporting a pair of Jaggers at the very reasonable sum of $1,185. I sip on my undeniably delicious coffee, and still can’t help but grimace.

What happens when luxury gets caught up in mass-adoption? If everyone you encounter has access to the same product, is it special? Is it worth it? Most importantly, is it even interesting anymore? Are we shifting into an era where the small-time, under-the-radar brand becomes the most desirable? Is a windfall of praise and positive PR actually damaging otherwise credible brands by rendering them overexposed? It seems after the boomers bought literally everything ever made and filled their second garages to the rafters with Costco junk, the next generation is indeed buying less, and focusing on quality over consumption (which is great news) but abandoning all sense of personal discernment. If the influencers wear it, that’s all the validation they need. Cost, supply chain delays, even poor aesthetics as they relate to them personally, will not hinder them from lining up and shelling out thousands for the validation of everyone around them knowing what they paid for their shades. Simply because everyone in the room just bought the same pair last month.

She showed up, patiently watched me stare into my phone screen, audibly talking myself out of them. I didn’t buy the frames. Not because I don’t like the brand, or didn’t think they looked good…I do, and they did. I didn’t buy them because I felt like they have been bought to death. JMM didn’t need me as a customer. They don’t need anyone. Jerome Mage has built an empire on a product that everyone truly wants, and seemingly has. In the culture shift we’re going through, people are craving human connection, a reason to chat about something, share perspectives, tell stories. In my experience, there is no better impetus to that conversation than “Hey, where’d you get that?” Every new discovery is an opportunity to share. Share your experience, your style, your choices…to inspire each other. Mass adoption is the death of all that, and I can’t be part of it.

It’s time to return to the magic of discovery. Walking down an old alleyway in Florence, or by a tiny workshop on the Lower East Side and finding someone who is actually making something. Something unique, made in small batches with care, and maybe even an imperfection, so it’s truly yours. Here’s hoping I find that before the Knicks win their next championship. Until then, I’ll be here, driving down Venice Blvd., squinting.

Opportunities

Jean-Léon Gérôme: Rider and his Steed in the Desert

A eulogy for the influencer
Drew Michael Scott has built a real business out of YouTube—1.78 million subscribers on his Lone Fox channel, another 1.5 million on Instagram, a brick-and-mortar shop, and a refreshing habit of editing every video himself.

On the Business of Home podcast, he drops genuinely useful advice, including one that really speaks to me at the moment: long-form beats short-form for building trust (you’re with someone 10 to 20 minutes, not 20 seconds). TikTok will bury you on a whim—he has 1.5 million followers there and a post can die at 1,400 views. It’s smart stuff and it speaks to why I’m not bullish on the influencer era. It gets harder every month—the platforms hold all the cards, and I suspect only LinkedIn survives the decade (no, I’m not kidding). The real opportunity is finding a way to build something so good people come find you.

Economy

Jean-Léon Gérôme: Prayer in the Desert

1st Dibs keeps missing
A fresh analysis has slapped 1stDibs with a sell rating. The numbers don’t lie. Gross merchandise value has fallen from a $459 million peak in 2021 to around $360 million in 2025, first-quarter GMV dropped another 5%, and revenue is still below where it was at IPO. Management has prettied up its margins (the company finally turned cash-flow positive) but only by slashing marketing, which is like dieting by skipping the gym. The world’s greatest collection of antiques sits on a platform that can’t grow. It’s a caution for anyone who thinks a beautiful catalog can market itself.

A billion reasons to follow up on your tariff refund
Buried in the tariff mess is real money. US Customs just expanded its refund process so more furniture importers can claw back duties paid under the IEEPA tariffs the courts struck down—part of what could total up to $175 billion in refunds across the economy. Over in the sportswear world, Nike just said it expects $986 million back, and its latest quarter’s margins were, in one analyst’s words, “highly flattered” by the recovery. If a sneaker giant is banking nearly a billion, it’s worth an afternoon with your customs broker to see what’s owed to you.

A record night for the rich
They say if you want to know what the very top of the market is doing, watch the gavel. A Sotheby’s evening sale in London raised £393.4 million (about $521 million), the house’s biggest-ever night of modern and contemporary art in the city. Joe Lewis—the billionaire former owner of London’s Tottenham Hotspur Football Club—sold twenty-four works for £296.3 million (roughly $392 million). This was a record for any single-owner London sale. All this in a market gutted by Brexit, where UK auction sales had fallen 47% since 2015. Tottenham fans, including Mr. Thread’s West Coast Editor, Mr. Weft, note that the Lewis family has already pumped £100 million into the club this summer—and hope some of it finds a new striker.

“This was a perfect example of what London can do. This was the best sale we’ve had here in years. It showed that if you offer great quality material people will go the extra mile.”

— Thaddaeus Ropac, art dealer, via The New York Times

Loose Threads

Trump’s “Patriot Passport” hides the Declaration of Independence behind his own scowling face.
Tour Madonna’s home: the decor is gloriously unhinged, and there are perhaps a larger ‘collection of cocks’ than you would expect.
World of Interiors goes inside Frida Kahlo’s (Madonna’s favorite artist) cobalt-blue Casa Azul—luscious proof a home can be an artist’s greatest work.
Rick Owens and Adidas made inflatable tracksuits with built-in fans—heat-wave couture so absurd my Venice team wants a set.

Playtime

Shout out to Hillary E., Tullia P., Martin R., Ginger S., Freddy V., Avner L., and Rico V., who identified last week’s mystery word correctly: SCALLOP! Keep it up, threaders!

Smart enough to guess this week’s mystery word, threaders? It’s playtime!

The Clue: Dior’s iconic mens’ fragrance of the late 1980s.

Piece together the mystery word based on the clue provided above.
Click HERE to submit your answer.
Type your answer in the subject field and hit send!

The Stakes: Every correct guess earns you points that accumulate for our upcoming raffle. The more you play, the higher your chances of winning. We’ll be holding the grand draw on July 29th! Our lucky winner gets:

A featured spotlight for you/your firm in an upcoming issue of Mr. Thread.
Another special mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle.

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

This week’s art

Jean-Léon Gérôme: Self Portrait

I stumbled onto Jean-Léon Gérôme while searching for art capturing the heat of desert life. And if you know anything about me by now, you know I love the heat. So it doesn’t take much for me to picture myself inside these scenes. Desert life has always held some pull on me, and Gérôme’s paintings put me right there.

Fun fact: his most famous work, “Pollice Verso,” a painting of Roman spectators giving a gladiator the thumbs-down, is the painting that convinced Ridley Scott to direct Gladiator. Scott saw a reproduction and said it captured the glory and wickedness of Rome in a single image.

Glad I found him. Hope you enjoyed his work as much as I did.

Jean-Léon Gérôme: Pollice Verso

Mr. Thread Insider

Everything you need to know about luxury
Business of Fashion and McKinsey just surveyed more than 2,000 luxury clients across the US and China. We read the 65 pages so you don’t have to. Here are the five things you need to know…

Mr. Thread Insider begins here — one premium story a week, for readers who want to go beyond the headlines.

Craftsmanship is no longer the differentiator. It’s all about feeling now. Craft now ranks 9th of 10 desirability drivers in the US and dead last in China. Emotional connection ranks first in both. “We’ve been doing this for 125 years” is not a pitch anymore; it’s all about making the buyer feel like they relate to the product.
Scarcity is losing its spell. Only about a third of US clients and a quarter of Chinese ones say waitlists or limited runs push them to pay full price. People have wised up to that manufactured urgency—the Birkin two-year wait, the long list for a Ferrari, the “only three left in your cart” hocus pocus.
The showroom is king. In China the physical store is the number-one source of inspiration, which is why Louis Vuitton built a boat-shaped Shanghai flagship with a trunk museum and third-floor café. In the US it’s the opposite problem—pushy associates and long queues are pushing clients to resale markets and online. In an AI world where nothing feels real, the room you can walk into and touch is a bigger asset than it has been in years. I’m opening two more showrooms next year for exactly this reason.
Small can beat legacy—but read the map. In the US, 68% of clients say a challenger brand best represents who they are, versus the legacy houses. In China, legacy still rules, with 69% saying they’re drawn to big historic names. I saw it first hand this week with my potential Middle Eastern customers: they wanted to see the label.
If AI can’t find you, you’re toast. You and I knew this back in January. Roughly half of luxury clients now use AI to explore brands and compare products before they ever speak to a human. L’Oréal is already restructuring its content so the machines recommend it correctly. Most design businesses haven’t thought about this at all—our friend Chad Smith at Tradespoke is one of the few building for it.

The Mr. Thread verdict
The thing that stuck out to me while reading this is that luxury clients are more skeptical, more selective, and far less impressed by heritage and craft alone. What they’re buying is meaning. And meaning is exactly what a craft-driven, story-rich business is built to sell—if you tell the story right. The founder of one of my brands lost his father at three and found that making beautiful things was the thing that pulled him out of his own suffering. That beats a designer label any day in my book.

“It sometimes feels like sales associates assume you will buy as soon as you walk in. They’ve lost the art of the soft sell, and that pressure puts me off.”

— A high-spending US client, interviewed in the State of Fashion: Face to Face With Luxury Clients report, via Business of Fashion & McKinsey

#00033 - The one that got away

Mr. Thread — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:27:00 GMT

Paul Signac : The Port of Saint-Tropez

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Hello readers…

By the time you read this I’ll be on a boat off Greenport, at the far tip of Long Island, with a rod in one hand and a beer in the other. I'm going out with my son and an old friend I haven’t seen in years—a guy we call the Greek, a generational fisherman from Alexandria. We’ll be reeling in striped bass and bluefish, hopefully. These little guys put up a good fight: the line screaming off the reel, the rod bent double, that half-second where you wonder if it’s going to snap back and take your eye out. I admit it, I’m a city guy, and any real fisherman reading this would call me something unprintable and he’d be right. But I don’t care. I’m going to spend some quality time with my son and the Greek. And the only reason I can vanish into the middle of nowhere during a workday is that after 30 years in this business, I’ve mastered the art of results over schedule. Nobody pays me to sit at a desk; they pay me to deliver. Between AI, my cellphone, and the tech I’ve wired into the way I work, I don’t miss a beat out there—I might not catch any striped bass, but I’ll still see an important email if it lands.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the ones that got away this week. The industry’s biggest fish, Charles Cohen, just wriggled off the hook with a $187 million payment the day before his deadline. And everywhere else I look, the people at the very top of the market are spending like whales—$50,000 outdoor sofas, $200,000 vacations aboard a luxury sailing yacht, Bay Area mansions for AI millionaires. Luxury home prices up there have jumped 13.4% since ChatGPT launched. This is the K-shaped economy we keep talking about, and for our industry the top half of that K is where the opportunity is.

Summer is my favorite time of year. Sure, business slows down and I finally get to touch some grass. But the real reason I love it is that the slowdown is when I get to advance the opportunities I’ve been sitting on, dream up new ones, and do the creative work of growing my businesses—the stuff that’s almost impossible to reach when you’re running at full tilt. It’s why I’m finally moving one of my brands over to long-form video, the slow, patient work I never make time for otherwise. So here’s hoping Mr. Thread sparks the summer opportunity that becomes your next big catch.

See you next week.

Mr. Thread

P.S. Don’t just read—play. We’ve woven a new mystery into this issue in our PLAYTIME segment. 8 Correct Guesses Last Week. Let’s see who has the “eye” to claim the win this time and secure a spot for our grand prize draw. Scroll to the bottom to join the fun.

Get the free weekly journal

Trends

Claude Monet: The Nets

That indoor-outdoor living
AD PRO’s new Outdoor Design Forecast says clients increasingly want backyards that read like five-star resorts. They’re demanding bed swings, outdoor kitchens built under the close guidance of a chef, gardens wired for morning meditation and midday Zoom calls.

Furniture Today is seeing the same trends, with the segment outperforming a soft market because people are now treating the patio like another room. The numbers at the top are wild: a friend of mine who runs sales for one outdoor maker tells me a single outdoor lounge chair runs at least $30,000 and his average order is half a million. Here’s why those orders get so mammoth—you don’t buy one lounge, you buy them in sets of six, eight, or twelve, and that’s before the umbrellas, side tables, and chairs. Fewer orders, but each one is enormous. That’s the dream.

However, the real opening is in the middle where the same jumbo order dynamics still exist. It’s nearly impossible to find outdoor furniture and fabrics that are actually beautiful, durable, and affordable—the kind that survives 15 years without fading, deteriorating, rusting, or going moldy. Build that, and you own the part of this outdoor furniture boom very few are serving.

“The outdoor room isn’t just a trend anymore. Consumers increasingly view these spaces as true extensions of the home, and they’re furnishing them with the same attention they give indoor rooms.”

— Matt Pisani, vice president of sales, Telescope Casual, via Furniture Today

Sail away on a Gatsby dream boat
Art Deco is having a major comeback, and it’s the trend du jour. As I mentioned earlier, the French hospitality giant Accor just launched the world’s biggest sailing yacht, the Corinthian. It’s a 721.8-foot triumph that set sail in May as the first of two Orient Express vessels. The interior is a love letter to 1920s seafaring heritage (just don’t mention the Titanic): rosewood, marble, vintage lights pulled from the original train, and a hidden speakeasy tucked between a barbershop and a treatment room. Architect Maxime d’Angeac designed it with 54 cabins and five Michelin-level restaurants. A seven-night sailing runs about 36,400 euros (around $41,000) per suite; the two-bedroom, 2,422-square-foot Agatha Christie suite goes for roughly 196,000 euros (about $220,000) for the week, all-inclusive. Wow. The same Art Deco wave is washing up on the shores of interior design: at one of my brands we’ve got a couple of patterns landing in January.

I have just one warning: If it’s done wrong, Art Deco can quickly turn a living room into a casino. It’s much harder to pull off tastefully than Midcentury.

Industry

William Merritt Chase: Still Life: Fish

Charles Cohen wriggles off the Fortress hook
Charles Cohen pulled a $187 million rabbit out of a hat. One day before his June 19 deadline, the billionaire landlord paid off the personal guarantee he owed Fortress Investment Group, hauling his property empire—the Pacific Design Center and our own Decoration & Design Building among them—back from receivership.

His general counsel called the payment “consistent with Mr. Cohen’s integrity.” Anytime a man needs his lawyer to vouch for his honor, it feels like when someone has to say “trust me, trust me.” The rub for those of us still in Cohen’s buildings: bankruptcy at least forced some disclosure, like the D&D limping along at 63% occupancy, down from 83% in 2020. Now that Cohen’s settled, the shutters come back down, and we are left with a deteriorating building with no clear direction.

I was in the building this week, and things just keep getting worse. A good friend owns a showroom on the fourth floor. The floor is over 90% empty, everything boarded up except for a new concept called the D&D Collective. Apparently it is a liquidation/flea market concept for small vendors and/or showrooms that want to liquidate excess inventory. Poorly conceived, horribly lit, terribly designed, uninspiring. It just looks like desperation and makes the once proud “D&D Brand” even more of a joke than it once was.

The worst part is, now that it’s settled, you’d think we’d finally have more certainty. But alas, things feel more uncertain than ever. The iconic David Sutherland already gave up and bolted for 200 Lexington. The rest of us stay put, in the dark, because our clients still want us here. And we’ll always choose to be where our clients want us. That’s just good business sense.

I’m probably risking my lease saying any of this, but that’s what you subscribe for: the unvarnished truth.

Economy

Winslow Homer: Casting in the Falls

Inside the AI property gold rush
Every tech cycle mints a new class of millionaires in the Bay Area, and the AI boom is no exception: luxury home prices there are up 13.4% since ChatGPT launched, per Redfin. Some of that is already washing into design.

A great designer I know, Jay Jeffers—a Mr. Thread reader and one of the nicest guys in the business—tells Business of Home his phone hasn’t stopped ringing: “back to multiple offers and going for way over asking,” three or four fresh inquiries a month. But the smart money up there is spending with one eye on the exit. These are people who watch booms turn to busts for a living. One designer’s client, an AI CEO, remodeled his Menlo Park house but won’t finish every room until he sees where the technology lands. That should tell you everything you need to know about confidence levels in Silicon Valley.

Washington builds something
Congress did the unthinkable and actually agreed on something. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act cleared the House 358-32 this week, after an 85-5 Senate vote, and now heads to Big Don’s desk—it’s the biggest housing package Congress has passed in decades. More than 50 provisions aim to juice supply: streamlined environmental reviews, factory-built “manufactured housing,” zoning “pattern books” to beat local governments and their NIMBY instincts, and money to rebuild aging homes. There’s even a cap on how many single-family homes institutional investors can hoard. This is great news, because corporate landlords don’t hire designers; owner-occupiers do. I’ll allow myself some cautious optimism here because anything that cuts red tape on new construction while breathing life back into old houses is good for an industry that exists to fill homes with beautiful things. The experts warn the payoff is years out, but it’s finally pointed in the right direction.

"This is a very rare occurrence to have successive bipartisan votes across both chambers on versions of this bill, and it finally seems to be reaching the finish line. This bill is the most serious that Congress has gotten about housing reforms in a generation."

— Francis Torres, housing and infrastructure director, Bipartisan Policy Center, via TIME

Loose Threads

David Hockney has died at 88. The British artist was the art world’s loudest champion for color and joy.
A Marrakesh garden center woven from palm and reed is proof that the humblest materials, in the right hands, can show up anything you can special-order.
Katie Ridder and Peter Pennoyer, the rare design power couple, have made the case that a happy marriage and great taste can live in harmony.
Live embroidery was the “popular party trick” at Cannes Lions this year, per Emily Sundberg on Substack. She spotted monogrammed socks at Hearst House, custom scarves, and a sandal-maker hammering leather for guests. I called it months ago: the analog flex is real.

Playtime

Congratulations to Chad S., Jake W., Richard B., Hillary E., Avner L., Lori L., Rico V., and Tullia P., who uncovered last week’s mystery word: ALGORITHM! Nice game, threaders!

Now let’s see who can crack this week’s mystery word. It’s playtime!

The Clue: This popular tile style is inspired by the sea.

Piece together the mystery word based on the clue provided above.
Click HERE to submit your answer.
Type your answer in the subject field and hit send!

A featured spotlight for you/your firm in an upcoming issue of Mr. Thread.
Another special mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle.

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

This week’s art

Paul Signac: The Port of Saint-Tropez

Well, this was an easy week. And it’s an art subject I really love. Paintings of scenes of life on the sea (with a little fun sprinkled in for our friend Chuck Cohen). These paintings mesmerize me and literally transport me to another time. I hope you enjoy some of my favorites shown here.

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How can we make this better? Reply to this email and tell us. We read every message and genuinely want to know what you think.

#00032 - The AI edition

Mr. Thread — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 18:47:00 GMT

Mark Rothko: Blue, Orange, Red

June 18th, 2026 - Go Knicks 🏆

Hello readers…

Three years ago I ran a contest at my company with a cash prize: drop our fabrics into Midjourney and show me the most creative interior you could dream up using our fabrics. These were the clumsy early days—you had to write prompts through Discord, and I made little screen-share videos teaching people how. I run a 100-year-old fabric company that existed before the telephone, so I was surprised when all most of my staff jumped in with both feet, from the CFO to the fabric painters. It was a revelation, and I’ve been encouraging my team to keep learning AI ever since. But not to replace our humanity, only to elevate it.

I'll be honest. If AI vanished from my personal life, I'd survive—search would get harder, I'd have to change my own thermostat and write my own greeting cards. But if it vanished from my business, I'd feel crippled. People keep warning me the bill is coming, that they're selling us cheap tokens to get us hooked. It's working. I've slowed hiring because my existing team is simply more capable. We are more productive than ever, and the real win is, it is has made our work more fun. The mundane is now handled by AI, which lets us focus on the things that inspire us and bring out our real talents.

For all the doom surrounding AI, I am on the opposite side of the spectrum. Used for good, I am convinced it will lead us to the next great human Renaissance.

So here are the top seven ways I use AI to grow my business, make my job more enjoyable, and increase my productivity 100x:

My brainstorming co-pilot. Being a CEO is a lonely job. AI is the companion I think out loud with—then it does the heavy lifting, vetting luxury packaging vendors, building customer personas, and even helping me hunt down the art and artists for this newsletter.
My infinitely powerful data analyst. Before I fly out to meet my California sales reps, I ask what's moving—colors, order sizes, zip codes outperforming the rest. It surfaces trends I used to hunt by hand, half of which I'd never have spotted. (I still verify the numbers myself until NetSuite catches up.)
My HR department. A full training module used to mean hiring an agency like McKinsey, a copywriter, and a graphic designer—an expensive, three-month job. Review meetings, employee handbooks, job descriptions… all that used to take forever. My CFO now drafts them in-house in a fraction of the time. We add our context and edit, but the heavy lift is gone.
My in-house headhunter. The prospecting that once had me researching candidate after candidate until my eyes bled is far tighter now. I tell it exactly what I want, and it delivers—which is a big reason I've been able to slow hiring without slowing down the business.
My super project manager. We still run on Slack, email, and Loop. But AI now reads across all of it and surfaces what needs a nudge, e.g. “Your marketing director hasn't delivered the documents—check in with her.” It's like having a full-blown project manager at my side, so I'm not chasing people around.
My resident graphic designer. Our price list once lived in messy, slow Excel for years. Now it's a beautiful, searchable, sortable site the whole sales team can access online. Same story for client and partner presentations—polished in minutes, not days.
My market researcher. Trend analysis that took a digital marketer several days now runs in seconds—simple enough that my 14-year-old could pull it. Add A/B testing and distribution across every channel, and the marketing grind is mostly handled.

Which brings me to something we just built: a trends dashboard for our world. Feed it a keyword—“velvet,” “alpaca”—and it goes hunting across Google Trends, YouTube, Reddit, and Pinterest, then back into your own site to show you the opportunity. Think Bloomberg terminal, for interiors. There's a poll at the bottom of today's issue. If enough of you say yes, we'll build it out for you.

The rest of this week is all about AI—and the people figuring it out fastest.

See you next week.

Mr. Thread

P.S. Don’t just read—play. We’ve woven a new mystery word into this issue in our PLAYTIME segment. Let’s see who has the “eye” to claim the win this time and secure a spot for our grand prize draw. Scroll to the bottom to join the fun.

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Sit down with Mr. Thread

Guy Ailion

Guy Ailion
Guy Ailion spent two decades as a London architect before noticing that interior designers — the most visually exacting professionals alive — were choosing their materials not because they were the best option, but because the samples were already on their desk. He left his partnership, co-founded MattoBoard, and built a platform that gives designers access to thousands of digital materials without anyone couriering a swatch. Home Depot Ventures and Masco backed it. Last year, Ailion also published MattoBoard's inaugural State of AI & Business of Interiors report — a survey of 250-plus designers across six continents — which found that 81 percent of designers now use AI regularly, and most of them are anxious about it. The top concern: that AI will make everything look the same.

Q/A

Things move fast in AI. What have you noticed since the report came out?
We're still in a liquid stage where no fundamental changes in workflow have solidified — but that doesn't mean we're not in a transition. In our industry, mistakes get more costly the further down the workflow you go. If you specify the wrong material for a hotel foyer, that's an expensive error. So the further you go into the process, the less AI has permeated, because the stakes are high and trust hasn't been established yet. But at the early stages — visualization, inspiration, experimentation — AI is extremely well adopted.

The bigger shift I'm seeing is this: traditionally, designers had to do all the drafting work upfront just to produce a visualization that would get a client to sign off. That's enormously labor-intensive. What's happening now is that the cost of visualization is being driven down to basically zero. So designers can show clients a rendered idea at the very beginning, before any drafting happens, get their feedback, and only then commit the labor. You do a lot less repetition. You're not remodeling everything from scratch every time a client changes their mind.

Do clients now expect to see AI renders upfront?
I wouldn't phrase it that way. Clients have always wanted to see visualizations — that's why Pinterest became so popular, because it gave designers a digital shortcut to show clients a direction. Clients respond to pictures, not words. That desire has always been there. What AI changes is that the designer no longer has to delay that moment. Previously you'd show a client a Pinterest image and say, “Just imagine this in your room.” Now you can actually show them their room, in that style, right at the start, before you've done any drafting at all.

The sourcing gap was one of the most striking findings in the report — 93% of designers are spending up to 20 hours a week on material sourcing, but only 35% trust AI to help. Is that the problem MattoBoard is built to solve?
Exactly. MattoBoard is a virtual sampling and visual curation platform. We have a digital library of materials and products for interior projects. A designer can bring their own visualization, or something they found, or generate one directly on MattoBoard — and we break that image down into the materials and products that create that look, matched to their specific brief. Is it a wet room? Residential? Based in New York? Do they need expensive materials, or would engineered flooring work? We can parse all of that. And we don't just match the aesthetic — we map the product data too. Slip resistance, fire ratings, regional availability. We find materials that are beautiful and specifiable.

“The studio of the future is part human, part machine — and the human is the conductor.”

There are probably infinite options for engineered hardwood flooring. How does the AI decide?
We have around 50,000 materials and another 50,000 furniture pieces in the database. But we always give designers options — designers love options, that's not going away. If someone writes “mid-century modern kitchen,” we understand they're probably not looking for light oak, maybe something with more of a matte finish. If they've specified a tighter budget, we might suggest engineered board or tile instead of natural wood. We read the brief and provide a curated range of the best visual fits.

Can designers get a full rendering inside MattoBoard?
Yes. They can type in a brief and we'll build an image of that design with materials applied. Or they can bring their own image, and we'll break it down and offer alternative materials matched by color and texture. And with our editing tool, they can swap materials in and out of an image directly.

Why did you become such an early adopter when so much of the industry is anxious?
I ran an award-winning practice in London doing ultra-high-net-worth and celebrity homes. And the decision bottleneck on every single project was always the same two things: the paradox of choice — too many options for both the designer and the client — and the time it took to produce visualizations that could bring clients to a decision. Everything was some form of visual presentation: material boards, mood boards, renderings.

When I started seeing that AI could reason across complicated data — and technical specs for the materials industry are just mountains of PDFs — and also produce visualizations, I thought: there's an overlap here. For the first time, you could search for materials and see them rendered simultaneously. We've never been able to do that. Previously you'd search across dozens of websites, order samples, file them, compile everything in a presentation, design somewhere else. This idea of looking for products and seeing them appear in front of you in context — that's the fastest way for a designer to think creatively. When experimentation becomes cheap, creativity becomes freer. Instead of it taking hours to try five different materials, you can try twenty, quickly.

Why do you think so many designers are still anxious about adopting AI?
I think designers are more scared of losing the steering wheel than they are of AI itself. When they see AI produce something beautiful, they feel slightly disenfranchised. But what I keep coming back to is this: the job shifts from producing content to selecting the right content. And honestly, selection has always been the job. People don't hire designers for their technical ability alone — they hire them for their editorial eye. Knowing what pairs with what. Knowing where to take a risk. AI is going to amplify that skill, not replace it. We are curators, connectors, placemakers. Once designers realize that, they can see AI as a tool to help them select more, faster, better.

The other part is trust. AI makes errors. And the further you go into the workflow, the higher the stakes, and the more trust you need. Nobody has proven themselves as the right tool for those later stages yet.

“We are curators, connectors, placemakers. Once designers realize that, they can see AI as a tool to help them select more, faster, better.”

Is the fear of everything looking the same warranted?
Yes — and it's structural. These models are probabilistic machines. They absorb as much input as possible and calculate the most probable successful outcome. And that will always be the mean of the bell curve. If you use default AI, you get the average. Your outputs soften toward the mean. You become very average.

Now, that's not entirely bad. Most clients actually like the average — the average can be beautiful. But designers and artists live at the edges. Innovation happens at the edges. And the edge is always evolving: someone pushes into new territory, it gets popular, it moves toward the mean, and the next innovators are already somewhere else.

The challenge is that AI, as it's currently deployed, makes the mean very easy to reach. It's up to the designer to push against that. At MattoBoard, we've actually built our generative model to resist the default — to push toward edge-case, unexpected combinations, happy accidents. We think about that a lot.

Where will we be in five years?
The stages of architecture and design don't disappear — the deliverables will always be contractually required. But the labor between those stages evaporates. We've already seen rendering go from weeks to seconds and essentially free. What I think becomes the irreducible human moment in the workflow is the decision itself.

We will always be the custodians of decision-making. And that comes back to the same idea: selection is our ultimate skill. The studio of the future is part human, part machine — and the human is the conductor. The decision-making bottleneck. I use that word as a term of endearment. It's where our value lives.

LEARN MORE: Visit MattoBoard, and Guy Ailion’s architecture firm, KSR Architects. Guy also writes about small ideas with huge impact on design and psychology at smallhuge.com.

📊 AI AND INTERIOR DESIGN BY THE NUMBERS

81% use AI regularly. Most of them are anxious about it.

93% of designers spend up to 20 hours a week sourcing materials — yet only 35% trust AI to help.

85% use ChatGPT. A text chatbot is the dominant tool in one of the world's most visual professions.

57% fear AI will make every interior look the same.

82% believe AI literacy will be essential within two years.

Source: MattoBoard Interior Design Report

Musings from Mr. Weft

Mr. Weft is Mr. Thread’s West Coast Editor and Correspondent, based in Los Angeles.

AI-powered lighting websites are a turn-off
I’ve been renovating my kitchen in California, which meant I needed lights—two pendants for an island, a chandelier, and a pair of sconces. Not in a position to hire a designer, I did what most people do: I went online.

What I found there was something new. Websites with slightly Scandinavian-sounding names—Vakkerlight, Ozark, that sort of thing—selling beautiful fixtures at prices that weren’t cheap but weren’t suspicious. The photography was immaculate, the copy restrained and confident. I placed my orders.

Six weeks later, the boxes arrived…on a boat from China.

The electrical fittings were 3D-printed from cheap plastic. What the site called “natural wood” was pressed metal with a wood-grain sticker on top. One pendant hadn’t come at all. The chandelier ($400) looked like something from a dollar store. The return policy was theoretical—complaints were met with silence, or offers of partial refunds. Shipping everything back to China would cost more than the lights.

American Express sorted it out. They’ve seen this before.

Vakkerlight, it turned out, was a drop-shipping operation that took my order, forwarded it to a factory at maybe $20 a unit, and kept the difference. It was an entirely AI-powered enterprise, probably run out of someone’s basement. You see, a convincing e-commerce site once required a developer, a designer, a copywriter, and several weeks. Now anyone can do it with a free account and a few hours. The barrier is gone, and the money is good enough that it doesn’t matter if half your customers dispute the charge.

I’ve worked in e-commerce for a decade, and I’m not easily fooled. I’m also not the only one fighting back. On a podcast called How I AI, two women are building AI shopping assistants—not tools that find you the best product, but tools that investigate the seller. They read the thousand reviews you’d never have time for, check whether a company has a physical address, and spot a drop-shipper before a dollar changes hands.

So the drop-shippers outsource their web design to AI. Shoppers, it turns out, are outsourcing their shopping to the same robots. Soon the marketplace will just be robots talking to robots, and we humans can just sit it out.

In the end I drove to a local showroom, where I could hold each fixture in my hands. The salesman worked out the price with an old-fashioned calculator and a handshake. The new lights arrived last week. They look wonderful. Sometimes the old ways are best.

🏀 Beauty for the win
Mr. Thread is the work of a four-person team driven by a single mission: help a creative industry do better business, make more beauty, and leave the world a little better for it. That’s it.

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AI Loose Threads

“AI money” and the K-shaped housing market
Real estate agents have a new phrase for the luxury boom: “AI money.” Axios reports luxury home prices hit a $1.39 million median, up 3.6%, while non-luxury managed just 1.4%. In the Bay Area, luxury homes are up 13.4% since ChatGPT launched; affordable homes are down 3.8%. My takeaway: follow the AI money. It’s about to start renovating houses.

Label the machine
Dezeen says design fairs need an AI disclosure policy now, and it’s right. Milan was the watershed. AI-assisted presentations slipped onto the floor with no label. If the Louvre can disclose its AR and Augusta National can ban cellphones, Salone can manage a tag that reads “made with a machine.” This is about honesty, not hostility to AI. Honesty protects the designers doing the real work. Disclosure is coming. The industry should write the rule before a regulator writes it for them.

The search bar grows opinions
At its I/O conference, Google rolled out what it calls the biggest search overhaul in 25 years: conversational AI Overviews and a universal shopping cart that hunts for deals across merchants. Amazon’s “Alexa for Shopping” is now the default for US users. Most people start a product hunt on Google or Amazon, and those searches now surface whatever the model ranks first. Everything below it vanishes. My takeaway: if your product line isn’t optimized for generative search, you’re toast.

Playtime

And the crowd goes wild! A massive round of applause for Chad S., Caroline P., Parker W., Martin R., Hillary E., Freddy V., Justine B., Anne-Marie F., Lori L., and Tullia P. who just walked away with the title for cracking last week’s mystery word: VOCATION. Your energy is absolutely unmatched, threaders!

But don’t get too comfortable—our next big challenge is live! Can you spot the hidden mystery word and claim the glory this time? Let’s play!"

The Clue: The hidden recipe of code that translates a designer’s text prompt into a photorealistic rendering.

Piece together the mystery word based on the clue provided above.
Click HERE to submit your answer.
Type your answer in the subject field and hit send!

A featured spotlight for you/your firm in an upcoming issue of Mr. Thread.
Another special mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle.

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

Enjoying Mr. Thread?
How can we make this better? Reply to this email and tell us. We read every message and genuinely want to know what you think.

#00031 - No diploma required

Mr. Thread — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 22:10:00 GMT

Jan Steen: A Village School

🌻 Spread the word, make more beauty
Face it. Making beautiful things is one of the hardest ways to make money — and the creative industry, for all its ingenuity, runs some of the most complicated businesses on earth.

Mr. Thread is the work of a four-person team driven by a single mission: help a creative industry do better business, make more beauty, and leave the world a little better for it. That’s it.

If you know a colleague or designer who’d benefit from our weekly journal, we’d love it if you shared the link below.

Thank you so much for being a loyal reader!

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Hello readers…

My youngest son graduated from eighth grade this week. He wore a snazzy suit and tried not to smile too hard crossing the stage. I sat there wondering what comes next for him, and for the next generation of our industry.

The truth about me and school: I failed out of college in spectacular fashion (with a 1.07 GPA to be exact). I grew up the son of Egyptian immigrant parents who had incredible courage coming here. But that same ambition meant my Dad was barely around. By the time I got to college and experienced pure, unadulterated freedom, I totally fell off the rails. I’m lucky I survived it. I’m grateful design saved my life.

But it wasn’t just partying. What I discovered, after I fought my way back in and finally earned my degree, was that I actually love learning. Just not like that—not sitting in a classroom being talked at. My curiosity for learning comes from books, mentors, bootcamps, and most importantly trying and failing. I could have saved my parents a lot of money and heartache if we had only known back then.

So I’ve told my kids: I won’t be disappointed if you skip college. While college certainly can be a fun experience and ‘rite of passage,’ and necessary for doctors and lawyers, if you are in the world of design, I believe that apprenticeship, learning a trade, or a year of travel—almost anything—beats $85,000 a year for an education. It has never been easier to be an autodidact. The entire universe for learning is at our fingertips like no other time in history.

It’s especially true for interior design. You’re working in four dimensions of light and proportion, a craft learned on the front lines at showrooms and studios, pulling samples, watching a master manage a client. Other than the theoretical, it is nearly impossible to learn it in a lecture hall. At my company we hire for cultural fit and often choose candidates with zero experience, then teach them our way. Our CFO started as a bookkeeper, our head of sales as an intern. It is the long path, but the returns it yields are never-ending.

The good news: the next generation is having a moment. Home Accents Today opened nominations for its 40 Under 40 (closes July 1), and Frederic just published a gorgeous piece on the American College of the Building Arts in Charleston, where students master blacksmithing, stone carving, and timber framing. “Ancient truths are coming alive again in the hands of a new generation,” says Savannah-based architect Christian Sottile. Now you’re speaking my language!

Speaking of longevity and craft, on Wednesday, Pope Leo XIV blessed the final tower of the Sagrada Família—144 years after construction began. Gaudí knew he’d never see it finished and designed it anyway. So nominate a young designer for an award, hire somebody green, and take the long path: the most beautiful things are started by people who won’t be around to see the results. And who also most likely don’t have diplomas.

Keep reading to find out why clients are demanding dinosaur fossils, and why Pyongyang might just be the next interior design hotspot.

See you next week.

Mr. Thread

P.S. Don’t just read—play. We’ve woven a new mystery word into this issue in our PLAYTIME segment. Scroll to the bottom to join the fun!

Get the free weekly journal

Industry

Albert Anker: At the Crèche

The A stands for Arbitrary
ELLE Decor published its 2026 A-List this week—the industry’s second-biggest beauty pageant after the AD100—welcoming five debuts: Michael Bargo, Lily Dierkes, Casa Muñoz, Leonora Hamill, and Studio Zewde plus an inaugural “A-List Legends” tier. No doubt, these are great designers worthy of recognition, but I’m questioning the criteria, because there aren’t any—no objective measure, just hokey words about defining the best of the best.

This feels like another marketing exercise—one designed to juice Instagram feeds rather than elevate craft. There are a thousand designers just as brilliant who will never break through because they don’t have a publicist, can’t manage a social feed, or never built a fancy website.

That said, the list does matter commercially: an A-list name bills $750 to $1,000-plus an hour against $150 to $250 for a very good local designer, and most A-listers won’t touch a project under a half-million-dollar purchasing budget.

Flipping through, I noticed something else: almost all of the designers are on the older side (like me). Now, I understand that it takes years to master this craft, and years more to earn the gravitas to take $3 million from a billionaire and go shopping for fabrics. But it’s exactly why the 40 Under 40 above deserves your nominations.

We need to recruit, foster, and grow a new generation of design talent or else we are cooked and will suffer through a world of RH-designed madness.

“We make the list and check it twice (or 50 times).”

— Elisa Lipsky-Karasz, head of editorial content, ELLE Decor

Taylor-made for RH
RH Estates has debuted, and its first act resurrects Michael Taylor—the legendary West Coast designer who invented the “California look,” and one of the masters our industry lost to the AIDS epidemic.

RH bought the rights and is reissuing his influential work: the overscaled Jennifer seating, Klismos chairs, the Ibero trestle table, and the Diamond pedestal. Strategically, this is smart: Gary Friedman is buying legacies—licensing names and designs that carry decades of meaning. I went looking for the actual collection to judge it for myself and came up empty; it hasn’t even hit the website yet. Still, reviving a lost master beats another celebrity-endorsed furniture drop, and keeping Taylor’s name alive is good for all of us.

Will it be enough to change RH’s fortunes? Probably not.

💡 Tell us what you think
Gary Friedman is buying up legacy design names. Genius growth strategy… or will RH damage an iconic brand that matters?

Click here to send me your take on this—we’ll publish the best responses in the next issue.

The armpit of Midtown East
I’ve spent plenty of time in the A&D Building, and I’ll be honest: it sits at the mouth of the 59th Street Bridge, the big commercial truck route out of the city. It’s loud, aggressive, and has zero charm. I call that stretch the armpit of Midtown East. Now the building is in limbo. Vornado put the East 58th Street design center up for sale last August with a $250 million ask, pitching it as “an ideal candidate for a residential conversion.” Ten months later there is no sale—but Vornado has quietly stopped renewing long-term leases, and Karen Williams of St. Charles New York lost the showroom she kept for decades.

The model, though, I am very bullish on. Putting many brands under one roof creates a community for designers, and the serendipity of running into people creates opportunities you never knew existed, something that could never happen on Zoom.

Maybe losing a tired building is the shake-up we need to reimagine a town square for our beloved industry. Schumacher clearly believes physical showrooms work: in August it will open a 1,800-square-foot, trade-only studio in Richmond, Virginia, with almost 10,000 samples on hand. “Richmond holds a meaningful place in our expansion story,” says Schumacher North America President Emily Romero. Design destinations in tier-two markets are alive and well.

“Showrooms are always going to be important, but they’re definitely going to be redefined. I think we’re suffering from a fatigue problem. There are too many choices, too many options, too many colors, and when you bring them into these large-scale showrooms, it’s just another overwhelming experience.”

— Karen Williams, owner, St. Charles New York, via Business of Home

Opportunities

Adriaen van Ostade: The School Master

Supreme growth
The Wall Street Journal says the world’s most surprising economic success story is… North Korea. GDP grew 3.7% in 2024, the fastest in eight years. Arms sales to Russia have netted more than $10 billion. Pyongyang built 10,000 new homes last year (that’s more than Los Angeles or Chicago) and the capital now has fancy car dealerships, pet stores, an Uber-style taxi app, and brick-oven pizza you pay for with a QR code.

Before anyone gets misty: outside the showpiece capital, nearly half of the country’s 26 million people are malnourished. From an outsider’s perspective, this looks like a regime enriching itself.

But this is our OPPORTUNITIES section, so here is my tongue-in-cheek pick of the week: somebody is going to specify fabrics and furniture for all the new wealth being generated there. If a massive order from Pyongyang ever landed at my company, why wouldn’t we take it?

Google “North Korean interior designers” and see what comes back. Slim pickings out there. But if you can somehow penetrate the market, there is probably a fortune to be made.

Economy

Rembrandt: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp

A bloody scene
I keep a watchlist of the stocks around our industry, and this week it is a sea of red.

Arhaus: down 40% YTD
1stDibs: down 32% YTD
Wayfair: down 26% YTD
RH: down 17% YTD

…and Gary is still bragging about beating the market, which tells you everything about the market. MillerKnoll is off 10%, and that’s the commercial side, supposedly the steadier business. Even Home Depot is getting crushed, down 9%.

There’s a lot of blood being spilled out there, and hopefully some bottoming-out happening underneath it. At my brands we’re treating this as the quiet quarter and hustling hard to meet our numbers. That’s the whole playbook: run a great business, watch your costs, and serve the customers who are still spending—because as you’ll see below, they’re out there.

Go where the money lives
I read two housing reports worth your attention this week. Existing home sales surged 3.2% in May to a 4.17 million annual pace, the fastest since December, with the median price hitting $429,300—an all-time high for any May. First-time buyers took a 35% share, their biggest since 2020. More homes changing hands means more rooms getting redone, and that’s the pipeline that pays all of us.

Meanwhile, Realtor.com ranked America’s most expensive luxury markets, and the list reads like a sales map for our industry: Bridgeport–Stamford–Danbury tops it, with luxury listings starting at $4.2 million, followed by Los Angeles, Maui, Naples, Santa Rosa, San Jose, and Oxnard–Thousand Oaks. Hawaii aside, that matches almost exactly where my brands’ fabrics sell. These metros hold a deep concentration of very talented designers, and great ones are rising in Naples and San Jose right now. These are markets not to be slept on. One sobering footnote: this is a K-shaped economy. Bridgeport sits a few exits from Port Chester. Same corner of the map, two different worlds—and only one of them is renovating.

The art world’s reckoning
Pace Gallery—one of the four mega galleries, alongside Gagosian, Zwirner, and Hauser & Wirth—is cutting 50 artists and 50 staff, shrinking its roster about 30% to 85 names and its headcount 20% to 200. That is the strongest signal yet that the art market’s contraction has reached the penthouse. The very top still performs: Pace took on the Brancusi estate the same day a Brancusi bronze sold for $107.6 million at Christie’s. It’s the middle getting hollowed out, like a microcosm of the American economy.

What I respect is that CEO Marc Glimcher isn’t spinning it—he admits the whole system got too big and too corporate, while paying roughly $9 million a year in rent on an eight-story Chelsea flagship. Galleries chasing scale forgot that art only works as magic, and magic doesn’t franchise. If your clients collect, expect the smart galleries to get smaller and more personal. That’s where luxury always returns.

Retail spending is up (except in furniture)
Retail is holding up better than the current mood suggests. The CNBC/NRF Retail Monitor (built on actual anonymized card-purchase data) shows core retail sales rose for the eighth straight month in May, up 6.98% year over year. Electronics rose 11.59%, clothing rose 10.25%. Even groceries rose 6%.

Then there’s us: furniture and home furnishings stores slipped 0.09% month over month, up just 3.35% on the year. Consumers are spending—they’re prioritizing essentials, and a new sofa is the easiest purchase on earth to defer. Put this next to the K-shaped luxury data above and the 2026 playbook writes itself: the middle is frozen, the top is liquid. Serve the clients who are still renovating, and hold on until rates give everyone else a reason to move.

Loose Threads

Billionaires are buying dinosaur fossils instead of art now—after last week’s $250,000 aquariums, a 66-million-year-old skeleton in the great room almost seems reasonable.
Prada is designing the next-generation cooling garment for NASA’s moonwalking astronauts. That’s one giant leap for fashion.
The production designer behind Backrooms explains how he built the scariest empty hallways in cinema. My kids went nuts for this movie, and I still don’t understand how anyone can undergo two hours of self-imposed angst.
The fantastic Ghislaine Viñas designed a penthouse at 150 Nassau Street that just hit the market—keep scrolling until you see the massive indoor slide.

Playtime

A round of applause to Chad S., Hillary E., Martin R., Beth G., Jake W., and Matt Q. for identifying our mystery word last week: SWALI. Love the incredible energy you’re all bringing to the community, threaders!

This week's puzzle is officially live, threaders, and it's a clever one. Let’s see who spots the hidden mystery word first. It’s playtime!

The Clue: A lifelong purpose your soul summons you to pursue.

Piece together the mystery word based on the clue provided above.
Click HERE to submit your answer.
Type your answer in the subject field and hit send!

A featured spotlight for you/your firm in an upcoming issue of Mr. Thread.
Another special mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle.

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

This Week’s Art

Winslow Homer: The Country School

I had a tough time finding art this week that involved education. Alas, I persevered and was lucky to discover the work of Winslow Homer. Did you know that before reshaping American realism, a self-taught Winslow Homer endured a grueling, two-year commercial lithography apprenticeship he called a “treadmill”—a brutal grind that drove him to abandon conventional education altogether and forge his own independent path to mastery. Sure sounds familiar!

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#00030 - The algorithm vs. the old world

Mr. Thread — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 22:45:00 GMT

Henri Rousseau: Surprised!

Mr. Thread is the work of a four-person team driven by a single mission: help a creative industry do better business, make more beauty, and leave the world a little better for it. That’s it.

If you know a colleague or designer who’d benefit from our weekly journal, we’d love it if you shared the link below.

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I was in Los Angeles recently and called a Waymo for the first time. My driverless taxi was ten minutes late. It pulled up on the wrong side of a narrow two-way street. I jogged down the sidewalk to catch it, just as it made a U-turn toward me. That’s when a grocery delivery robot rolled through the intersection. The two machines froze. They gyrated back and forth. Neither could decide who had the right of way. Traffic backed up. Horns blasted. Someone overrode the system from a headquarters somewhere. It summed up where we are: bubble about to burst, or the chaotic start of a new industrial revolution? No one is sure.

We ran a quote a few issues ago, attributed to philosopher Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” It came back to me listening to Mo Gawdat on The Diary of a CEO. Gawdat ran Google X and has been warning about AI since 2021. He called himself optimistic about the future, but added: “I’m not optimistic about the next year.” Those who make it to 2038, he said, will enjoy what comes next. Anthropic and OpenAI are both heading toward IPOs that analysts are calling historic. Neither is public yet, but in San Francisco the money is already being spent: a townhouse just listed at $3 million, the seller accepting stock in either company as payment.

It’s easy to look at Silicon Valley and assume our world is insulated. We make things that are physical and real. But the wave is hitting us too. Humanoid robots running fabric mills around the clock may still be years away; the back-end disruption is already here. When a single back-office employee armed with AI can do the work of ten, corporate structures change overnight. Look at design: a principal designer with the right tools may no longer need junior designers, renderers, or project managers. I’m speaking from the front lines: Our own hiring for back-office and marketing roles has slowed dramatically. Our enterprise software now handles automated commands and serves real-time data, and we recently brought on a digital marketer who uses AI so avidly they easily produce the output of three people. This is sobering. Colleagues and friends we love will lose their livelihoods. Economically, if 10 to 20 percent of the workforce faces sudden unemployment, consumer spending collapses — and the broader economy goes with it.

So what do we do? What we have always done: run great businesses and make exceptional, human, soulful products. That is our defense. The demand side will work itself out. In fact, I suspect people will grow to resent AI so intensely — its synthetic, frictionless sameness — that they will come flooding back to us, wanting the handmade more than ever.

Which brings us directly to the world of interiors, where the old world is refusing to die. The rest of this newsletter concerns the crafts of the past. An atelier in Mumbai has a waiting list of women who want to learn embroidery by hand. The Times has profiled the last remaining long-straw thatchers in all of England. Their cottages sell for £1.75 million ($2.35m). Here in the US, Mahjong rooms are up 20 times year-over-year. As we wait to see how this shakes out, one thing is clear: the more automated the world becomes, the more valuable the handmade. See you next week.

Mr. Thread

P.S. Don’t just read—play. We’ve woven a new mystery word into this issue in our PLAYTIME segment. Scroll to the bottom to join the fun!

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Industry

Henri Rousseau: The Equatorial Jungle

Anti-algo rooms are the new luxury
The 2026 London WOW!house opened this week at the Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, comprising 22 rooms and 22 designers, open through July 2. The big story here is anti-algorithm design.

Tiffany Duggan of Studio Duggan built a speakeasy salon. The bar disappears behind a wallcovering. You’d walk past it without knowing it was there. No screens. Just people talking in a room nobody can find. Sara Cosgrove’s Morning Room, built with Phillip Jeffries, is designed for magazine reading and long conversations. “I’ve had so much sensory overload in the last few years,” she said. “I just wanted to create a space that I would feel completely calm and relaxed in.” She got there with woven wallcoverings, bespoke upholstery, and a sculptural stone fireplace. She calls it an “anti-algorithm space.”

Your clients are overstimulated and most of them can’t name it. They spend their days switching between a small screen for work, a tiny screen for life, and a big screen at night. Now they want a room where you walk in and feel calm.

Position your marketing to solve this emotional problem for customers and watch the money start rolling in. The best part is… what better way to make money than by helping people be healthier? And they say our industry is frivolous. 🤷🏽‍♂️

The Mumbai masters
This article in the Wall Street Journal Magazine was enough to calm my jittery heart this week. Karishma Swali runs an atelier of 2,400 artisans whose hand embroidery appears in collections for Christian Dior, Prada, Gucci, and Schiaparelli. For the Dior Fall 2023 show in India, Chanakya produced a monumental toran composed of 1,008 individual pieces, each made by a different master. Swali also built the Chanakya School of Craft from nothing. She went door-to-door in underserved neighborhoods until 22 women showed up. The school now has a waiting list, and it is 100% free.

At one of my brands, we’re building something we call the Five-Star Maestro program: an artisan rating ladder where reaching the top in any one specialty earns you the title of maestro. Some of our processes take a decade to learn. You don’t pick them up in a weekend workshop. We start the pipeline early or we don’t have an art form.The logic is the same as Chanakya’s: make craft careers aspirational, or watch the craft die. Artisanal craft is the best marketing story out there in this new, synthetic world. “The physical act of making and working by hand is maybe the single strongest human act,” Swali told WSJ Magazine. “Thankfully, AI cannot replace that.” Preach.

“Unless every single person wins, it’s not a win.”

— Vinod Shah, founder, Chanakya International, via WSJ Magazine

The last straw
Talking of historical craftspeople: Only 800 thatchers are still working in Britain, according to this beautiful New York Times story. And only 20 to 30 practice long-straw thatching, the technique that gave English villages their silhouette before cheaper water reed from Eastern Europe and China replaced it. The economics are stark: water reed lasts 70 years against long straw’s 40, and costs $8 a bundle against long straw’s $20. Rethatching an average cottage runs $40,000 to $50,000.

Master thatcher Stephen Letch, 66, is the most vocal holdout. The craft carries its own vocabulary: yealms, broaches, spars. Just like with the Mumbai embroiderers, when the last practitioners go, the craft will go with them. My first thought reading this was fire. At my brands, fire resistance is the first conversation I have before anything goes on a building. Long straw catches faster than water reed and is notoriously hard to insure. Sienna Miller’s thatched Buckinghamshire cottage is listed at $2.2 million. I don’t know what she’s paying for coverage.

My second thought is my gosh, how beautiful a thatched roof looks. And how crucial it survives for the sake of the community inhabiting those villages. It would be a tragedy to have this art form lost. We must fight to preserve it.

“There’s 20 or 30 long-straw thatchers left in all of England. We’re the last and we know we’re the last — and we know that once we’re gone, those skills will be lost.”

— Stephen Letch, master thatcher, via the New York Times

Economy

Henri Rousseau: Exotic Landscape

AI is buying San Francisco
A townhouse in San Francisco’s Duboce Triangle is listed at $3 million, and remarkably, the seller says they’ll accept OpenAI or Anthropic stock as payment! Neither company is publicly traded yet, though Anthropic filed for its IPO on June 1. This whole deal is a symptom of a crazy real estate market in San Francisco, where the median sale price hit $1.7 million in April, up 10% year-over-year, the highest in the country.

I’ve watched this movie before. In 2015, a buyer offered Ryan Serhant's client 50,000 Bitcoin for a $13.95 million Manhattan apartment. The seller turned it down because it was also a million below ask. Guess how much those 50,000 Bitcoin are worth today? I’ll tell you at the end.* Pre-IPO AI stock is 2025’s Bitcoin offer. It feels like imaginary money until it doesn’t.

The point is, the San Francisco market is running hot — more than most American cities can claim right now.

Berkshire bets big on housing
Greg Abel, who became Berkshire Hathaway’s CEO when Warren Buffett stepped back in January, has made his first major acquisition: Taylor Morrison Home Corp., for $6.8 billion, all-cash. The Scottsdale-based builder focuses on higher-end homes and build-to-rent communities. Abel paid a 24% premium over Friday’s close and TM stock jumped 22% on the announcement. Let me catch you up: The US housing shortage stands at 4+ million units and more than 75% of young renters still expect to own a home. But single-family starts fell 9% in April and a third of builders cut prices last month. Abel sees an opportunity.

Berkshire already owns Clayton Homes, Shaw Industries, Benjamin Moore, Nebraska Furniture Mart, and HomeServices of America. This deal makes TM a top-five US homebuilder. Abel said: “This investment is grounded in a long-term belief in the strength of America’s housing market and its underlying fundamentals, which we see as enduring over time.”

That is the most sophisticated capital allocator in American history betting on housing after four consecutive difficult years. This is a very, very good sign.

The tariff refunds are here
We got part of our tariff refund last week. Fourteen percent of what was owed, with more tranches coming, slowly. We filed in March. I called my accountant before I told anyone else. If you haven’t checked your portal, go now. One catch: the White House is appealing the order compelling refunds. Get what’s yours while the portal’s open.

Mixed news otherwise. Steel, aluminum, and copper tariffs drop June 8 and hold through 2027. The new front is more serious: the White House is proposing 10 to 12.5% tariffs on 60 trading partners under Section 301, legally sturdier than the IEEPA path SCOTUS struck down. Cotton for garments is on the list. Comments due July 6. Hearings July 7.

Trump’s new maneuver to get his tariffs back is the new front to watch.

"Trade partners will be understandably upset by this determination. You’ve opened a door now for a whole lot of new tariff and non-tariff adjustments."

— Deborah Elms, Hinrich Foundation, via Business of Fashion

Trends

Henri Rousseau: The Dream

Mahjong mania
I went to a mahjong lesson on Monday, dragged there by my wife. I may have had three beers and an edible beforehand, which did not help my retention. I must admit I enjoyed the ceremony. The game is beautiful, the art on the pieces is unique, and it has a beautiful slow-down-and-socialize vibe to it—with zero screens.

But it’s not really for me, even though our teacher mentioned that regular mahjong players report lower rates of dementia and anxiety. The next morning, I opened the Houzz 2026 Emerging Summer Trends Report, and saw that Mahjong rooms are up nearly 20x year-over-year. This is part of a larger movement: Bibliothèque searches up 191%. Card rooms up 129%. Speakeasies up 75%. Clients want spaces to play old-fashioned games. If you’re not offering them, you’re a few tiles short of a set.

Sleeping with the fishes
Eric Moskow, a healthcare entrepreneur in Delray Beach, just spent $250,000 on a 2,200-gallon custom aquarium in his $17.9 million home. Monthly maintenance is a staggering $3,000. An aquarium from Infinity Aquarium Design in Los Angeles starts at $75,000 and reaches $1 million. Their best line from this Wall Street Journal article: “Art budgets have now become aquarium budgets.”

Jeff Franklin, the creator of Full House, has five tanks in his Beverly Hills mansion, including a 5,000-gallon separator between his dining room and family room that occasionally houses blacktip sharks. The house is listed at $49.95 million. His fish alone are worth $80,000. “I sleep with the fishes,“ he told the Journal.

But seriously, a 2015 University of Plymouth study found that watching an aquarium for 30 minutes elevated pain threshold, with readings still elevated 10 minutes after viewing ended. Studies in dementia units found fish tanks increased body weight and nutritional intake. 43% of saltwater-fish owners opted for custom tanks in 2025, up 19% from 2023.

I wasn’t really a fish guy until my son convinced me to buy a clownfish. He named him Bubbles. Bubbles has a personality. He knows my son from me. He comes straight to the boy and hides from me briefly before deciding I’m safe. Little does he know, I’m the reason this little bastard is staying alive.

Fish tanks are a legitimate designer revenue stream nobody in our industry talks about. Living art, a body of science behind it, and a commission on every install. Get ahead of this. You’d be a fool not to take the bait.

Obama library
The Obama Presidential Center opens in Chicago on June 19. I am not an architectural critic. I want to be clear about that. I am a man who sells fabric and occasionally has strong feelings about buildings. But when I watched this one go up, I didn’t get it. Just four granite towers, heavy and intense.

Then I went back and looked at what came before it. The Hoover Library looks like a country club. The FDR one looks like a Nantucket home — I’d live there. JFK got it right: modern, timeless, feels like its moment. Nixon’s is Spanish Tuscan and beautiful. I would also live there. The Ford Library looks like the DMV in a backwater town in Mississippi. Gerald Ford misread the brief and actually built a library. The Reagan one is fine and Clinton's looks like Tesla's factory. You should totally check them out in the above link.

Against that field, I still don’t get it.

Loose Threads

Henri Rousseau: The Sleeping Gypsy

Andi Owen is stepping down as CEO of MillerKnoll at the end of June after a disastrous eight year reign.
Saudi Arabia has halted The Line until after 2030, capping planned population at 100,000—down from nine million. This was supposed to revolutionize civilization, now it’s just a dusty township in the middle of nowhere.
Walmart head honcho Alice Walton just built a $150 million expansion to her $800 million museum in a ravine in Bentonville, Arkansas. She brought art to the last place you would think to find it. Billionaire vanity project or is it altruistic philanthropy? Who cares… art is good for the soul no matter who is bringing it.
AD100 designer Sheila Bridges designed a 14-piece outdoor tabletop collection for Walmart for America’s 250th. Everything under $20. Never thought I would see Sheila Bridges and Walmart in the same sentence, but here we are.
Cool feature on Obama’s new desk… it is a work of art.
Kelly Wearstler just dropped 65 fabrics and wallcoverings with Lee Jofa — approximately her fifth collaboration in two months, and her licensing lawyer is the most underrated person in American design.
The hottest Instagram spot in NYC is this Knicks flavored subway entrance. (How could I not mention the Knicks today?)

*If the seller had accepted, those 50,000 Bitcoin would be worth $3.18 billion today — enough to land him on the Forbes 400.

Playtime

Huge shoutout to Caroline P., Hillary E., Parker W., Martin R., Tullia P., Chad S., Dianne M., Ted L., and Scott G. for totally crushing last week’s puzzle and sniffing out the mystery word, CRANBROOK. Thanks for keeping the energy high and the competition fierce in our community. Awesome work!

Dropping an interesting one for you this week, threaders. Let’s see who uncovers the hidden mystery word. It’s playtime!

The Clue: The powerhouse embroidery Queen from Mumbai

Piece together the mystery word based on the clue provided above.
Click HERE to submit your answer.
Type your answer in the subject field and hit send!

A featured spotlight for you/your firm in an upcoming issue of Mr. Thread.
Another special mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle.

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

This Week’s Art

Henri Rousseau: Myself, Portrait-Landscape

Henri Rousseau’s work seemed perfect for this week’s issue about the tension and friction caused by AI in our lives and businesses. His work blends together reality with fantasy and oftentimes leaves you scratching your head wondering what the painting was all about. Seems pretty apt for our times.

#00029 - One small step for design

Mr. Thread — Thu, 28 May 2026 22:17:00 GMT

Leonora Carrington: Sueño

Mr. Thread is the work of a four-person team driven by a single mission: help a creative industry do better business, make more beauty, and leave the world a little better for it. That’s it.

If you know a colleague or designer who'd benefit from our weekly journal, we'd love it if you shared the link below.

Thank you so much for being a loyal reader!

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May 28th, 2026 (Happy bday sis ❤️)

Hello readers,

This is the busiest time in the wonderful world of interior design. March through June—this is when years are made. Clients want homes delivered before summer; sales teams are burning the phones; designers feel like they’re cramming for finals. This week my team closed an order from a designer in the Northwest (no one had heard of him), for tens of thousands of dollars of luxury fabric. But get this: he’s using it as lining for draperies. It’s not even the main fabric! That really is putting caviar on the cornflakes.

There’s something happening out there. Orders like this don’t appear in isolation. The top of the market is still splashing the cash, even though world events are making them a little nervous. The evidence for this “K-shaped economy” is everywhere, and we’ve been reporting it for weeks. Any design business not pivoting toward the wealthiest of clients right now isn’t paying attention. There’s a fortune out there to be made if you know where to look.

Also in this edition, two interesting trends: the Midwest is coming back, and women are buying luxury real estate on their own terms. You’ll also discover how one iconic car brand I love torched its own reputation in the name of “innovation”.…mamma mia, che cazzo!

This week Mr. Thread is going to turn up the heat and get a little bit feisty. Consider this your fair warning.

See you next week.

Mr. Thread

P.S. Don’t just read—play. We’ve woven a new mystery into this issue in our PLAYTIME segment. Congratulations to Chad S., Martin R., Dianne M., Parker W., Tullia P., Hillary E., and Emily S. for guessing the word of the week from our last issue! Let’s see who has the “eye” to claim the win this time and secure a spot for our grand prize draw. Scroll to the bottom to join the fun.

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Opportunities

Leonora Carrington: El retorno de la osa mayor

Space race
Two years ago, my brother had a genius idea: write a letter to Elon Musk. The pitch was simple. When the first home gets built on Mars, it needs to feel fundamentally human. And if you’re going to live that far from everything that made us, surrounded by nothing that remembers us, then the objects around you become a lifeline to humanity. Handmade fabric carries centuries of human culture. Bring it to Mars and you’re carrying civilization forward. We’re still waiting on the reply (Elon has been a little busy recently).

NASA has released a plan for permanent moon habitation by 2032, including living quarters, research labs, and work areas designed for extended human stays. The architecture firm Foster + Partners is already developing structural concepts. Imagine hundreds of people, working and living in space, within six years!

But the point stands: someone is going to furnish these spaces. After reading about it on Mr. Thread, one subscriber recently found a government fabric contract: hundreds of thousands of yards of fabric, annually, for multiple years, for a government run hospital. He submitted his bid, and we are rooting hard for him to win!

Government money is real money that’s up for grabs. Space is the next new market. I am not joking about any of this! It’s one small step for the design industry…

Sky high shipping fees are nibbling on profits
I sure hope you’re auditing your shipping fees, because you could be losing a ton if you are not.

Just last week UPS implemented surge emergency fees on goods shipped from India, China, and Hong Kong to the United States, plus a $0.32-per-pound fee on goods shipped internationally from the US. The Postal Service implemented an 8% fuel surcharge in late April, in effect until at least January 2027. Middle East oil prices are behind all of it. Carriers are operating on 15% margins—if fuel costs keep rising, those margins get eaten fast.

We just audited our shipping charges and repriced our schedule. Once the tariff picture settled, we had our team pull the numbers. The analysis was sobering—shipping costs are dramatically higher than they were, and not all of it was being passed through. If you haven’t done this in the last six months, go to your accountant this week. The designers and brands who are ahead of this are building it into project estimates right now. The ones who aren’t will absorb the difference—or have a very awkward conversation with a client mid-project.

“It’s no longer the kind of thing where you can set it and forget it, and just do one deal with my one carrier. It’s really forcing merchants of all types and sizes to think strategically about how they optimize this.”

— Josh Steinitz, chief strategy officer, Auctane, via Modern Retail

Trends

Leonora Carrington: The Hour of the Angelus

Can’t live with them…
This is interesting. Single women now account for 21% of all homebuyers in the United States, compared to just 9% for single men. More than 20 million single women own homes nationwide, against roughly 14 million single men. At the luxury end, Coldwell Banker reports that women with net worths exceeding $5 million now own 15% of luxury homes nationally—and the number is rising. Sales directors at branded residences in Brooklyn, Miami, and Nashville all report the same dynamic: women are the decision-makers, often arriving alone, doing the most rigorous due diligence of any buyer in the room.

This surprises no one who works in our industry. At my companies, 80% of our end-user clients—the people who ultimately live with our fabrics—are women. What Robb Report is documenting is the shift: women are now making these purchases without a co-buyer, as principals and investors, on their own terms. They are extraordinarily analytical. For anyone selling high-end design services, it is important to know who you’re talking to—and how.

“We’re definitely seeing a shift from where women used to influence decisions to now being the decision-maker. In some cases, they are the breadwinner in the couple, and we’re seeing them solely making the decision.”

— Alexandra Newman, sales director, One Williamsburg Wharf, via Robb Report

Enshittification, LBI edition
The New York Times has documented the slow erasure of Long Beach Island’s architectural identity this week. LBI is one of only three places on the entire East Coast with a genuine tradition of modern architecture—alongside Cape Cod and the Hamptons. That tradition is being dismantled by a wave of Hamptons-style shingle mansions replacing one-of-a-kind modernist homes. Average sale prices on the island hit nearly $2.5 million last year, up more than 250% since 2014. Developers are building “maxed out” spec houses with elevators, pools, and gambrel roofs. Unique homes are coming down for 7,000-square-foot compounds.

I find this genuinely depressing. The houses being lost are the ones that stop you on the sidewalk—that make you wonder about the person who dreamed them up, that add something to the street instead of just occupying it. They are irreplaceable, and we don't treat them that way. The tragedy is not only aesthetic. Architecture creates community identity, draws the buyers who care about the place, and holds value. The race to sameness is always the race to the bottom—and helping reverse that is what Mr. Thread is for.

If you’ve been to LBI and stood in front of one of those extraordinary modernist houses—clean lines, glass, completely at odds with everything around it but also perfectly fit in—you understand what is being lost. Daniella Kerner of the LBI Foundation put it plainly:

“Architecture adds so much value to a community. It’s not about how many TVs or bathrooms you can stuff into one house.”

— Daniella Kerner, executive director, LBI Foundation, via the New York Times

Design makes you live longer
Visionnaire announced a partnership this week with The Longevity Suite—a network of biohacking and anti-aging clinics—and studio Luca Dini Design & Architecture to develop what they call “longevity-ready” residences. According to Wallpaper*, their first projects include a 1,500 sq m private villa in Cairo and a 1,200 sq m property in Porto Cervo, Sardinia, with a residential tower in Warsaw in the pipeline. Each unit gets a dedicated Visionnaire collection plus an in-building clinic, air purification, micro-filtered water, and lighting calibrated to circadian rhythms. The tower’s façade: vertical glass panels with integrated solar cells, designed to filter light the way a leaf does.

This is where the top of the market is going. Wealthy clients already pay for the best fabric, the best stone, the best appliances. The next item on that list is a home that actively extends their life. Biohacking clinics inside residential buildings change what a design brief looks like. If your clients are in this income bracket, learn the vocabulary now: circadian lighting, acoustic zoning, air quality specifications. This is a product category you need to know.

“Today, developers and clients seek spaces that regenerate, support long-term health, enhance life-expectancy and deliver meaningful living experiences.”

— Leopoldo Cavalli, co-founder and CEO, Visionnaire, via Wallpaper

Industry

Leonora Carrington: Tuesday

Frederic’s Devil Wears Prada moment
I was at the Barnes & Noble bookstore in town with my kids a couple of days ago (it’s become a lazy day ritual in my house) and I spotted Frederic magazine on the shelf, right there between Architectural Digest and House Beautiful. Schumacher’s in-house publication is now on newsstands nationwide. It started as a cool editorial project inside one of the industry’s great fabric houses. Now it’s a real magazine: national distribution, $30 annual subscriptions, paying advertisers, 11,000 trees planted from subscriber revenue alone. The magazine is edited by Dara Caponigro, who came from Veranda. Issue 20 is out now.

Here’s the part that makes my head spin: competitors are buying ads in it. They’re paying Schumacher to spread their name. Somehow Schumacher has turned a marketing cost into a revenue stream while collecting brand equity on top.

I’ve been watching Timur Yumusaklar steer this company for a while now, and the moves are always calculated and coherent. There’s a sense that they genuinely care about the industry—not just their slice of it—and they’re never standing still. What another company might treat as a vanity project, Schumacher turns into a platform. That’s what good leadership looks like.

So boutique publishing is having a moment, and for all brand owners out there, the question is: when are you launching your magazine?

The list industrial complex
Two new self-fellating lists were announced this week. Home Accents Today unveiled the Home Furnishings 500, an annual list of “500 of the most influential people in the home furnishings industry,” debuting September 7. (Should Mr. Thread be waiting for the mailman?) Simultaneously, LUXE Interiors + Design announced the LUXE Product Awards, celebrating “the outstanding products shaping residential interior design today.”

Here is the award you receive: you are on a list. Just your name, formatted nicely, alongside 499 other names. If you’re lucky, maybe you also get a shitty glass plaque from the tchotchke bin.

Our industry has a terminal case of mutual backslapping, and nobody will say what’s actually bad. I’m an avid sports radio listener, so I know honest criticism can oftentimes be more useful than celebration—and a lot more fun. The trolling instinct is alive at Mr. Thread. Our industry Top 10 shit list is in development. Who do you think should be on the list?

Mother Nature on the board
The Financial Times published a deep look this week at House of Hackney, the British interiors brand founded by Frieda Gormley and Javvy M Royle. Their decision to appoint “Mother Nature and Future Generations” as a board director has become a Harvard Business School case study. They bought back their private equity stake through B Corp bank Triodos and a crowdfunding campaign. Revenue is up 9% since 2023, despite exiting entire product categories and fighting cost pressures from tariffs and a weakening dollar.

I’ll be honest, when I first read the Mother Nature thing, I thought, ‘What kind of bullshit PR stunt is this?’ And then I gave it five seconds and realized I was just jealous. I didn't think of it first.

It’s so on-brand—botanicals, natural materials, a Cornish castle headquarters, a four-day workweek, and now a board seat for the planet. It’s so oddly consistent it becomes credible. I bring people to House of Hackney’s website constantly when I’m making the case for what a fabric company can become.

Economy

Leonora Carrington: Cannibal Feast

Bad design can destroy shareholder value
Ferrari unveiled the Luce this week—its first fully electric vehicle: five seats, 1,035 horsepower, starting price $640,000. The car was designed by LoveFrom, the studio founded by Jony Ive and Marc Newson. Social media called it a Polestar. A bar of soap. A microwave. Ferrari by Playmobil. Even Luca di Montezemolo, the famous former Ferrari Chairman, said the design risked “destroying a legend.” Ferrari’s stock fell nearly 8% in a single session, the steepest single-day drop since October, wiping a fortune from Ferrari’s €53 billion market cap.

My Italian CFO shot me a text as soon as he saw the car. He rarely texts me—we zoom, we Slack, but the man does not text. I had three messages from him before breakfast. “They called the iPhone designers to do that!” he wrote. This man speaks for the Italians, and the Italians know their design shit.

Ferrari’s value is emotion, scarcity, the specific sound of a combustion engine at redline. Strip those out and replace them with a glass house from an Apple Store, and it’s over. Bad design has always been expensive, and now we see it can also destroy $4 billion in a single afternoon.

“We are lost in translation with Ferrari’s new strategy.”

— Pierre-Olivier Essig, head of research, AIR Capital, via Bloomberg

The Midwest is back
The Wall Street Journal reports that for the first time in years, America’s Midwest gained slightly more people from the rest of the country than it lost—about 16,000 net, reversing losses that topped 175,000 as recently as 2022. Housing affordability is the driver. The median home price in Akron is $226,000. In Cleveland: $237,400. The national median is $419,300. Young professionals who left for Miami and Atlanta are coming back, priced out of the Sunbelt.

Pay attention to this. We opened in a large showroom in Chicago earlier this year for precisely this reason—the Midwest is a massive territory that has been getting crushed for over a decade.

In its heyday, this is where the real money lived: 40,000-square-foot Wisconsin estates for tire magnates and manufacturing barons, not 5,000-square-foot Manhattan apartments. Some of my biggest clients in history came from Wisconsin. The Midwest has always been sophisticated in the old-world sense. I’m excited for this and hope it’s real. A Midwest revival would be good for everyone in our industry.

“When you live in a place that’s been losing population since the 1960s, to say out loud that we believe this place can stabilize and grow…it landed on some ears as ridiculous. And to now be at a place where we’re leveling off and starting to tick up a little bit, it gives me goosebumps.”

— Kyle Kutuchief, program director, Knight Foundation, via the Wall Street Journal

The five-year sentence
Consumer confidence hit 93.1 this month; two-thirds of Americans are cutting back. The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is at 6.65%, up 30 basis points in five weeks, and refinancing applications are down 18%. Home Depot: 0.6% same-store sales growth, down 12% year-to-date. Customers “focused on need-based over discretionary projects,” they say. The five-year rate forecast (from Deloitte, Goldman Sachs, CBO) puts best-case rates at 5% by 2030. No forecast has them returning to 3%.

The reality is that people with 3% mortgages do not move into 6.5% ones. That lock-in holds for years. The renovation client is already in the house, has been living with the same interiors since 2021, and is bored. That is the client worth pursuing. Home Depot's professional segment outpaced DIY in Q1. So the good news is, the pros are still working. The bad news is, there are certainly some troubling signs out there and I hope the bill does not come due soon.

“Consumer confidence edged downward in May as the inflationary impacts of the war in the Middle East intensified.”

— Dana Peterson, chief economist, Conference Board, via Bloomberg

Loose Threads

Leonora Carrington: Les Distractions de Dagobert

One color, one story, every day—check out the internet’s most quietly obsessive project. I absolutely LOVE THIS!
Gucci straps itself to a Formula One car at Monaco, betting speed can fix a sales slump.
Interested in the brilliant surrealist whose art haunts this issue? Her work just went under the hammer at Sotheby’s.
Washington approves a triumphal arch for the current president, because why not.
Studio McGee’s new Kohler fixture line is called "Claude"—a name that may not age well.

Playtime

Salute to Chad S., Martin R., Dianne M., Parker W., Tullia P., Hillary E., and Emily S. for their brilliant deduction of our last mystery word, GONDOLA. Thank you for keeping our subscriber community sharp and competitive. Splendid job!

We are raising the bar with this week's challenge. Sharpen your focus and step up to the plate, threaders. It’s playtime!

The Clue: Which town is home to the academy that shaped almost every great American furniture designer of the 20th century?

Piece together the mystery word based on the clue provided above.
Click HERE to submit your answer.
Type your answer in the subject field and hit send!

The Stakes
Every correct guess earns you points that accumulate for our upcoming raffle. The more you play, the higher your chances of winning. We’ll be holding the grand draw on July 29th! Our lucky winner gets:

A featured spotlight for you/your firm in an upcoming issue of Mr. Thread.
Another special mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle.

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

This Week’s Art

Leonora Carrington: Who Art Thou White Face?

I had never heard of Leonora Carrington before I read this week’s loose thread. Her colors and strokes made me curious. Although I am not usually one who likes this fantastical genre, I just thought her work felt very appropriate for this week’s headlines. It added a very different feel to the journal. Let me know what you think!

#00028 - The toll on everyone else

Mr. Thread — Thu, 21 May 2026 21:30:00 GMT

Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo: The Fourth Estate

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Hello readers,

I found myself stuck in traffic on Tuesday afternoon, bumper to bumper on 485. Part of the reason I moved here from NYC was to reclaim hours of wasted time sitting in traffic jams, but in this instance I had no choice.

Here in Charlotte, they recently introduced toll lanes on the loop around the city. Pay $15, skip the traffic, shave 20 minutes off your morning while, more importantly, preserving your sanity. I use them when I can. But sitting there last Tuesday, watching the toll lane move while mine didn’t, I realized this is what the economy has quietly become: the same road, the same destination—but if you’ve got the money, you don’t have to wait with everybody else. How and when will that phenomenon hit our industry?

That thought was still rattling around when I read a New York Times piece on Air France’s La Première this week. A round-trip costs $16,000. A Mercedes limo collects you from your hotel and delivers you to an exclusive terminal entrance. Your passport is processed “offstage” while you wait in comfort. A curtain separates you from the other 300 passengers “as impenetrable as a velvet rope at a nightclub.”

None of this is marketed as exclusion. It’s sold as convenience, speed, and seamlessness. But the effect is identical to paid toll lanes—the haves in America are whizzing past the have-nots. Spirit Airlines went bankrupt while American, Delta, and United are in a business-class race to win premium flyers. The Four Seasons Maui now offers a “hotel within a hotel” so guests paying $2,600 a night don’t cross paths with guests paying $1,615. Comfort is part of it. But the real product is not having anyone else around. A depressing thought—and probably a direct result of the social media device that has become a permanent extension of our hands.

The K-shaped economy runs through every story in this issue—Toll Brothers selling homes at a $1 million average to cash buyers who don’t notice interest rates, furniture getting bludgeoned for the sixth straight month while the luxury move-up market holds.

There is something troubling about a world where the ultimate luxury product is simply not having to share a room with anyone outside your tax bracket. This divide cannot keep widening. History is not kind to societies that confuse abundance with entitlement.

Our industry exists to make spaces that bring people together—that communicate beauty, that remind us what we share rather than what separates us. The bar for effortlessness has moved, and the friction economy isn’t an abstract macro trend. It’s changing air travel, real estate, and the rooms our clients hire us to design. Our best clients have already solved friction everywhere else in their lives. The question is, how can you offer the La Première service they’re becoming accustomed to?

See you next week.

Mr. Thread

P.S. Don’t just read—play. We launched our new quiz last week, we kept it easy and a lot of you got the answer right. It’s gonna be harder today, so make sure you scroll to the bottom to enter the prize draw.

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Trends

Honoré Daumier: The 3rd Class Carriage

Do furniture and fabric “brands” matter?
A new Provoke Insights survey of 1,500 Americans found that furniture ranked among the lowest of 13 categories for brand loyalty—well below apparel, alcohol, electronics, and beauty. It makes perfect sense that people have brand loyalty toward apparel and liquor (I only drink Tito’s, never Belvedere (unless Tito’s is out)).

But just one-third of consumers said brand name mattered when shopping for furniture. Nearly half said they’d buy an unbranded version if the price were lower. When brand does matter, it’s almost entirely about quality at 47%—not identity, not aesthetics, not reputation.

The numbers don’t really surprise me. Some of the biggest fabric companies in this industry—businesses doing serious volume—you’ve never heard of their names. They don’t win on branding, but because they have the best sales team, the best selection, and they nail the trends.

What furniture brands actually sell is quality. I know if I order from certain houses, the shipment arrives on time and the product holds up. That’s it. That’s the whole value of the brand. It doesn’t carry identity or aspiration the way a pair of sneakers does. Which means the moment an unbranded version looks identical and costs a third of the price, most buyers take it without a second thought. Why would anyone pay 50% more?

That’s why the numbers in this survey connect directly to a story we’re working on. More on that very soon.

Is Art Deco the new midcentury?
When “Mad Men” premiered in 2007, it did something no trade publication ever managed: it made an entire design style cool again. Over its seven-season run, Herman Miller reported a 60% increase in North American business. Then midcentury became a default—which is the beginning of the end for any aesthetic. Business of Home ran a sharp piece this week on what comes next. The answer, apparently, is art deco. Pinterest and 1stDibs both reported surges in deco searches last year, and a cache of 1930s furnishings from the de Gunzburg collection fetched a record $96 million at Sotheby’s.

The truth is, art deco is genuinely hard to pull off. Midcentury traveled because it’s so forgiving—clean lines, nothing that fights the room. Deco is the opposite. Get the proportion wrong and you’ve built a casino, not a living room.

At my brands, when we build new collections, a portion goes toward trend-responsive work. The search data and the auction records are speaking very clearly about where clients are heading, and ignoring them would be a mistake. The rest of the collection we hand to the creative team and stay out of the way. That split—Art x Commerce—is what keeps us responsive without becoming a trend factory. The designers who thrive in a deco moment will be the ones who know exactly how much is enough.

Industry

Robert Koehler: The Strike

What next for the D&D Building?
The D&D Building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side is still in default on its $150M loan—and we follow this story closely, not only because it’s one of the most important design centers in our industry, but because my company is one of the original six tenants of the building since it opened as a design center in the 1960s.

Owner Charles Cohen missed the maturity date on May 6, and his debt is now in “special servicing” (which means he’s in deep shit.) Occupancy sits at 63%, down from 95% in 2015. Annual revenue has fallen to $36.7M from $48.4M. Cohen says he’s working with the lender. He also owes Fortress Investment Group $135M from a separate default, with a deadline of yesterday, May 20. (No news on if he made it).

For over six years, half of my floor has sat empty. The building’s value to a tenant like me is the marketplace economy: designers moving between showrooms, foot traffic generating leads. When your neighbor’s space is dark, none of that works. You pay a premium for an address that should be generating traffic, and instead you’re subsidizing a vacancy you had no say in.

New ownership that runs this place like a business is what the D&D needs. Until then, for those of us inside, it’s the most expensive waiting room in New York.

“It’s business as usual. This is a maturity default. We are actively working with the lender. We are currently in the market to refinance the loan shortly.”

— David López, General Counsel, Cohen Brothers Realty Corp., via Bisnow

Trends

Ilya Repin: Barge Haulers on the Volga

Homo Faber, the artisan’s marketplace
Homo Faber—the biennial celebration of extraordinary handcraft held on the impossibly beautiful Venetian island of San Giorgio Maggiore—has launched a marketplace of 5,000 artisan workshops. Glass blowers, embroiderers, furniture makers, weavers—all now available to you and me. Take Laura Baverstock, a British grand embroiderer whose needlework appeared in “Murder on the Orient Express.” A year ago, finding her required knowing someone who knew someone. Now she’s three clicks away.

Homo Faber is one of my favorite shows of the year. Venice in early summer, that island, that level of craft—you must go at least once. My business is built around handmade work and preserving the arts, and Homo Faber is as close to the real thing as our industry ever gets. Which is also why I’ve been obsessed with it since the beginning. The show is run by the independent Michelangelo Foundation, but it has always been closely aligned with Richemont, the Swiss luxury holding company. Something about it never quite added up as just another trade event. Someone was building something.

And now, a marketplace of 5,000 artisan workshops. Think Artemest, backed by serious capital and curatorial muscle, pointing toward the Alibaba of handmade luxury. Whoever controls the platform controls access to both the maker and the buyer, and collects the toll from both sides. Wow.

The great luxury conglomerates have done more to keep these crafts alive than most governments ever will. They understand what makes handwork extraordinary. But they have capitalistic roots and they have to keep growing—and that combination has a poor track record with fragile creative ecosystems. Look at what streaming did to independent musicians. This could be extraordinary, or it could become Spotify for artisans. I’ll be watching it very closely.

Economy

Luke Fildes: Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward

Toll Brothers is making bank
We use Toll Brothers as a bellwether economic indicator for our industry. The home builders sit in that mid-to-high market—building that first real home, the family graduation, the “move-up” buyer—which makes their numbers a useful read on where the industry is heading. They beat second-quarter guidance this week with $2.5 billion in revenue and homes delivered at an average price of $1.009 million. Net signed agreements were up 7% year over year. The luxury move-up segment now accounts for 62% of home sales revenue, up from 59% in Q1. The company raised full-year guidance.

Interestingly, 23% of buyers paid all cash. These are not people tracking mortgage rates. The K-shaped economy shows up here exactly as it does everywhere else in this issue. Is Toll Brothers outperforming because the luxury segment is holding, or because they’re simply a very well-run business? My instinct is both—and that’s the more useful lesson.

In my own businesses, we’re doing fine despite the macro headwinds, not because conditions are good, but because we’ve tightened strategy and improved the sales and marketing teams. Toll Brothers is doing the same thing at scale. You can’t control the market but you can control how you run.

The irony: if you’ve ever been inside a Toll Brothers home and opened a door or leaned on a kitchen island, you know the product feels hollow. The finishes fall apart on closer inspection. On the outside it looks fine—which, come to think of it, makes it a pretty good metaphor for the American economy right now.

“We are, quite simply, a more efficient and less cyclical home builder. Even in a difficult market, our business continues to perform well.”

— Doug Yearley, executive chairman, Toll Brothers, via MarketBeat

Furniture bloodbath continues
One thing is clear in this economy: folks are not buying furniture. For the sixth consecutive month, furniture and home furnishings retail posted a decline. April sales came in at $11.08 billion—down 3.6% from April 2025 and down 2% from March. Through the first four months of the year, the category sits at $42.32 billion, off 3% from the same period last year. Gas stations, electronics, and sporting-goods stores all posted gains. Furniture did not.

Though America is not officially in a recession, it sure is starting to feel like one, according to many Americans. Those of us who were around in 2008 remember the lag, how it took about eight months to a year before the nightmare hit us. The furniture industry sits at the end of the project pipeline, so the pain from a market slowdown arrives long after the rest of the economy feels it. The pipeline may be drying up even as current orders still roll in. Watch Q3 and Q4.

This is one we hope to be dead wrong about. A recession on top of the housing crisis is not a good recipe for our industry. It only drives me to go out and work even harder to be sure we can snatch up the inevitable opportunities that arise during a crisis like this.

Dear Mr.Thread

George Bellows: Cliff Dwellers

I love getting mail and I reply to every one—and the mail has been good lately. Three recent letters worth sharing:

Special K.
F.V. runs a small furniture design and fabrication business focused on traditional craft. He wrote in about our K-shaped economy coverage: "Those low-end brands trying to move up tend to have more resources and, I fear, may confuse clients or crowd out true high-end shops from telling their stories—since they are usually busy doing their authentic work. But I tend to worry. We just have to be more creative." That last line stuck with me.

The AI revolt
M.C. is not in the industry—she makes custom-tailored clothing—but she connected our Foshan piece to Beth Macy’s book Factory Man, which tracks almost exactly the same story from the American side. Then she went further: “AI [is] creating a similar aesthetic revolt to the late nineteenth century’s mass industrialization. I’m rereading William Morris. It’s little wonder to me that the grandmillennial style is coming back, as are so many no-tech/lo-tech hobbies and the demand for new antiques.”

The Knick of time
S.H. wrote in after our Knicks mention in a previous newsletter. He was at Game 7 of the 1970 championship. His ticket, in the Orange Seats, cost $15. “I will never forget the moment when Willis came onto the floor. He took two practice shots, made both, and then made the first two Knicks baskets. The rest is history.” Fifty-three years of heartbreak and counting, S.H. Let’s hope this is the year.

Loose Threads

Selldorf Architects has won the competition to redesign the Louvre's entrances. Not a bad gig.
Banksy’s ‘Girl With Balloon’ sold for $18 million at Tiffany’s last week—the first major auction since his identity was revealed.

Playtime

Hats off to Parker W., Hillary E., Martin R., Amy G., Scott G., Emily S., and Tullia for correctly guessing the mystery word (LOUVRE) in our last edition. Bravo!

Ready for this week’s challenge? It’s playtime!

The Clue: The fastest way to get to Homo Faber.

Piece together the mystery word based on the clue provided above.
Click HERE to submit your answer.
Type your answer in the subject field and hit send!

A featured spotlight for you/your firm in an upcoming issue of Mr. Thread.
Another special mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle.

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

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#00027 - The little guy is winning

Mr. Thread — Thu, 14 May 2026 21:55:00 GMT

Johann Jakob Hartmann: The Four Elements: Fire

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Hello readers,

I’m back at my desk in North Carolina after a week in Venice, swapping espresso for bourbon. I blame jet lag. The post-travel fog is real. But so is a stat I stumbled on this week that cut right through the haze: in 2023, half of Gen Z said their dream career was to be an influencer. They just ran the survey again. The number is now 5%. Thank God, it seems nature is healing.

I’m considering killing Instagram advertising for one of my companies. The platform has just become an endless scroll of ads, AI-generated slop, and algorithmically juiced product placements. It seems Zuckerberg’s Meta is becoming the modern-day equivalent of Philip Morris. Terrible for you and your business, but everyone’s doing it and we can’t quit. But the tide is turning…

Deep, authentic newsletters, YouTube, non-algorithmically driven content (i.e., art)—that’s where people are going to learn and engage. And a fascinating essay by an economist at Stanford (thanks for the tip, Jacob!) makes the case for why that shift matters: in a world flooded with slop, the scarce thing—the valuable thing—will be the human touch: the handmade, the provenance, the person behind the product. Before industrialization, you knew your blacksmith by name. Capitalism made the maker invisible, and, ironically, it might be AI that brings back the maker.

That’s what makes this issue so rich. An old friend, Esha Ahmed, has built a textile showroom with soul and zero algorithms. Chinese factories are pivoting from Walmart knockoffs to custom design. Houzz tried to be everything and wound up being nothing. The thread connecting all of it is authenticity—the real thing, made by real people, for people who give a damn.

Maybe it’s the bourbon speaking. Or, maybe it’s because the Knicks are in the Eastern Conference Finals. Two years running. Over 50 years of heartbreak, and maybe—maybe—this is our year. I’m trying not to jinx it.

See you next week.

Mr. Thread

P.S. Don’t just read—play. We launched our new quiz last week, we kept it easy and you all got the answer right. It’s gonna be harder today, make sure you scroll to the bottom to win a prize.

Get the free weekly journal

Industry

Gerrit Lundens: Two Blacksmiths at Work in a Forge

The Death Star goes dark
Shop Houzz, the home-products marketplace tied to the Houzz ecosystem, is shutting down effective May 22. Vendors were given barely two weeks’ notice: no new orders after May 7, all shipments finalized by May 15, data archived and inaccessible after the 22nd. Goodnight and good riddance.

I’ve always described Houzz as the Death Star in the industry. The origin story was actually brilliant—an Israeli couple asked people to share pictures of their homes, and suddenly you could browse 100 living rooms without flipping through a decade of shelter magazines. But then they turned those eyeballs into a listing service, then a marketplace, then project-management software. They were a search engine, a hiring platform, a retailer, and a SaaS company—all at once. Most importantly, the marketplace was soulless. A mountain of made-in-China product with zero differentiation, competing with Wayfair on scale but without any soul. Selling cheap furniture to consumers in the mid-west while courting high-end designers for portfolio listings on the same platform—pick a lane.

Between the tariffs, the furniture bloodbath we reported on a few weeks ago, and the brutal macros grinding down the entire industry, something had to give. The horse finally got taken behind the barn.

“All orders placed on or before May 7 must be fulfilled and marked as shipped by Friday, May 15. Any orders not shipped by May 15 will be automatically canceled and fully refunded to the customer.”

— Shop Houzz vendor notice, via Home Accents Today

Viva Makrosha
Not long ago, Esha Ahmed was running her textile business, Makrosha, out of the trunk of her Volvo and her apartment in Queens. Now she has a fantasy-filled atelier above Union Square that feels like stepping into a 19th-century wunderkammer—lilac limewashed walls, antique Murano chandeliers, a towering 1890s cabinet, and fabrics with names like Whirly Girly and Goosey Gold displayed on gold metal rods. The brand name comes from the Bangla word for spider, and Ahmed weaves history into every bolt—from 17th-century French silk to Art Nouveau to flowers scattered across a Yorkshire moor. I know Esha, and I was thrilled to see this profile in Wallpaper*.

Last week we talked about Ernesta, the rug startup run by the Peloton guy, and its sterile showroom—swatches on rails, zero soul. Look at the difference here. Esha did this with color, with authenticity, with flea-market finds and a ferocious point of view—and it probably cost a fraction of that clinical setup.

Esha’s showroom makes you want to hunt through a cabinet of curiosities for the perfect fabric. Ernesta’s makes you feel like you’re standing in line for Apple’s Genius Bar. This is the kind of founder story our industry needs more of: someone who learned the supply chain, understood the craft, and built something unmistakably hers. Bravo.

“I had never seen my fabrics all hung up together because I never had space to show the full collection. It made me a little emotional!”

— Esha Ahmed, founder, Makrosha, via Wallpaper*

Designers are hiring AI consultants now
A growing cottage industry of AI consultants is targeting interior design firms, and Business of Home reports that the demand is real. Jessica Nelson of AI for Interiors runs monthslong onboarding audits for firms, training teams on everything from email drafting to agentic sourcing tools. Meanwhile, Jenna Gaidusek coaches designers through quarterly certificate programs and an upcoming AI Social Club app. Expect to spend a few thousand a month for intensive coaching.

Nicole Lashae Hall of Thrive in Design puts it bluntly: most firms are still using AI tools like a search engine when they could be automating the entire admin stack. The irony is that AI can teach you how to use AI—but designers want a human to sit down and say, “Here’s how I’d use this, and here’s what it looks like for you.”

But what is the business objective here? Before hiring an AI consultant, before touching a single tool, answer that question. Do you want more profit? Stronger marketing? Faster proposals? AI without a defined goal is an expensive distraction—a shiny tool with no job to do. I’ve been using a stack of AI tools to revolutionize the back-end of my businesses. If anyone’s interested in learning how, just reply to this email.

“Most brands are thinking of Claude in the same way that they have been using ChatGPT, in order to ask questions or refine things. But designers have a huge opportunity to automate a lot of the admin—research, sourcing, organizing, invoicing—all of those teeny, tiny tasks you’re so used to doing manually.”

— Nicole Lashae Hall, founder, Thrive in Design, via Business of Home

Sound familiar? China’s furniture capital is going upmarket.
Foshan, China—the factory town that once powered the global furniture industry—is fighting to survive. The Wall Street Journal reports that the city’s economy grew just 0.2% last year as manufacturing contracted. China’s furniture exports fell 6.8% in 2025, with shipments to the US plunging 18%. Walmart shifted orders to Southeast Asia. The Julei bed-frame factory, a 26-year operation with 100+ workers, lost its entire US business after steel and aluminum tariffs hit 50%.

But here’s what I find interesting. The factories that are surviving are moving upmarket. Foshan’s luxury furniture expo, called the Louvre, was bustling with international buyers on a recent weekday. The budget mall next door was a ghost town. Last week we reported on Ashley Furniture making its “luxe” play, and now Chinese manufacturers are doing the same thing from the other end of the supply chain. The K-shape recovery is real—and it is global. The low end is cratering but the high end is holding. Ciaoweather, an outdoor-furniture maker, built a studio above its factory floor to shoot original-design products for social media. The future, for Foshan at least, is branding, design, and direct-to-consumer—not container loads of commodity products for Wayfair.

“Who knows what the future holds? Perhaps we really won’t be working in factories anymore. Instead, we’ll be focusing more on branding and design.”

— Joe Tang, sales director, Ciaoweather, via The Wall Street Journal

“Much like the factories in Hickory, N.C., did in the aftermath of the China Shock, manufacturers in Foshan are now trying to move upmarket, focusing on higher-end furniture and custom designs.”

— The Wall Street Journal

Trends

Franciszek Ksawery Lampi: In a Forging Shop

Midimalism or Grandmillennial?
Forbes reports—because apparently Forbes is a design authority now—that the hot trend for Summer 2026 is “midimalism.” Take a moment with that word. Midimalism. A Yelp survey found wallpaper requests up 450% and custom upholstery up 70%. This trend is pattern, print, and color, but nothing too scary. Heather Mastrangeli of Innovatus Design calls it the sweet spot between minimalism and maximalism. I'd call it half-assing it. Never split the difference when it comes to design.

My office is purple and gold on one wall, blue rugs, a blue velvet daybed with pillows made from vintage T-shirts—all inspired by a Monet I saw at the Philadelphia Art Museum. I could have played it safe. White walls, blue cabinets. But that feeling I get every time I walk in—the green of the golf course coming through the windows, mixing with the blues and the purples—would be gone. Commit to the vision or don’t bother. I’m serious.

The grandmillennial aesthetic gets this right. House Beautiful, which coined the term, just published a deep dive into why it won’t quit. Heritage furniture restoration is up 2,697% on Yelp. Framed mirror installation up 733%. Millennials are styling inherited pieces alongside flea-market finds. It’s rooted in something real. A home that feels like Grandma's triggers safety, warmth, comfort—what Dr. Easton Gaines of MindCare Psychology calls “a genuine hunger for rituals that anchor us.” Unlike midimalism, the grandmillennial movement actually commits. Let's hope it keeps going, and that we never hear the word "midimalism" again.

“In times of uncertainty or rapid change, people gravitate toward familiar, comforting symbols, whether it’s the warmth of a crocheted blanket, the smell of baked bread, or the slow ritual of a Sunday meal.”

— Dr. Alfonso Ferguson, in House Beautiful

Economy

Godfrey Sykes: Interior of an Ironwork

Housing paints a grim picture
Zillow just downgraded its national home-price forecast to flat—down from last month's 0.5% gain projection. But the national number is the least important part. Of 894 markets tracked, 309 will see price declines. Houma, Louisiana leads at −7%. Austin has shed 24% from its 2022 peak and now carries 128% more sellers than buyers—the widest gap Redfin has recorded since it began tracking in 2013. Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather says that prices are falling in places “where sellers outnumber buyers.”

I've been staring at these numbers and I can't make sense of them. In parts of New York, homes are still selling in bidding wars with offers $100k over asking price. This economy is baffling. I think we're all just speculating. More supply should mean lower prices. But inflation won't budge, mortgage rates remain stubbornly high, and affordability stays crushed. My verdict on economists who claim to understand it: they're as speculative as philosophers.

Housing-related stocks are also in depression. Whirlpool is down 81% over five years, North American EBIT cratering 96% to $6 million. Lennar, the home building giant, has fallen from $185 to $85. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 is at fresh highs. The stock market keeps everyone's 401(k) comfortable while the actual housing market sits in a deep freeze. Something has to give. I don't know what the catastrophe looks like when it does—but it won't be pretty.

The checks are in the mail. Seriously.
After the Supreme Court struck down the Trump administration’s global tariffs in February, skeptics assumed refunds would never materialize. Business of Home reports that the opposite is happening: US Customs and Border Protection began issuing ACH payments on May 4, and roughly $166 billion in tariff collections are subject to potential refunds. UPS CEO Carol Tomé says the company collected about $5 billion from customers and will remit it right back.

The catch: you only qualify if you were the importer of record. If you used a broker or third party—which most smaller firms do—you are not eligible for a direct refund from CBP. The first phase covers only shipments liquidated within the past 80 days, a microscopic slice of what’s owed. Large shippers like FedEx, DHL, and Costco are moving fast. For small businesses importing an occasional container, the paperwork alone eats billable hours. But the law is clear: if you paid those tariffs directly, you are owed a refund. Don’t sit this one out.

“Even if it’s a small dollar amount, you should definitely be thinking through how you can get in line. Whether you’re a designer or you’re selling textiles or bringing in some things, go ahead and have those conversations. Do not just say, ‘I’m not a FedEx; I’m not a Costco.’ The law is clear.”

— Josh Rutstein, partner, Zandi Rutstein, via Business of Home

Loose Threads

Phillips just held the highest-grossing watch auction in history—including the sale of one Patek Philippe world timer at $10.2 million.
Ralph Lauren is the first designer ever asked to curate a complete stamp issuance for the US Postal Service. Available next month.
On the 100th anniversary of Gaudí’s death, Casa Batlló opens a private apartment on its third floor, available for dinners and overnight stays.
The American Home Furnishings Hall of Fame names its 2026 class—five inductees including the founders of such esteemed brands as… Wayfair. The same Wayfair currently hemorrhaging money selling disposable furniture that falls apart in two years. Hall of Fame. Give me a break.

Playtime

Season 2 of Playtime kicked off with a bang! We were hit with a wave of entries for our launch word: MR. THREAD!

Congratulations to all participants who got the right answer! Let’s see if you will be able to guess the word of the week this time. It’s playtime!

The Clue: Is it China's luxury expo market, or a museum?

Piece together the mystery word based on the clue provided above.
Click HERE to submit your answer.
Type your answer in the subject field and hit send!

A featured spotlight for you/your firm in an upcoming issue of Mr. Thread.
Another special mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle.

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

#00026 - The beauty of being there

Mr. Thread — Thu, 07 May 2026 20:20:00 GMT

Alessandro Varotari: Madonna con bambino

Enjoying Mr. Thread?
Hit reply and tell us what you think. We read every one—and we write back.

Hello readers,

I’m writing to you from Venice, Italy, where the Art Biennale has just kicked off—and the city is absolutely buzzing. Every two years, the entire art world descends on this place for one extraordinary week. Gallery owners, politicians, celebrities, creative directors, collectors—all crammed into the most beautiful city in the world. The people-watching alone is worth the airfare, which is also insane. Imagine the Met Gala dropped right into the middle of the Venetian lagoon, except everything is happenstance. Reunions on bridges, chance encounters on vaporetti, beauty everywhere you look. And then there’s me—the biggest doofus in the room, wearing Gap denim and J.Crew khakis while everyone else has diamond brooches, embroidered velvet shoes, and hats by designers I couldn’t name if my life depended on it.

This week also marks the opening of the Fondazione Dries Van Noten at the 15th-century Palazzo Pisani Moretta—over 200 pieces, from Comme des Garçons to Christian Lacroix couture, all under the banner The Only True Protest Is Beauty. (There were real protests here, too, if you watch the news.) I was lucky enough to get a private tour from the Palazzo’s architect, Alberto Torsello. Imagine the difficulty of renovating a 15th-century palace, with no electricity or indoor plumbing on some floors.

I love being in Italy. No one really talks about America here, which is a breath of fresh air for this North Carolina resident. Sure, I’m keeping up with the news back home: President Trump told a crowd this week that “we’re going to bring all the furniture back to North Carolina.” Meanwhile, The New York Times just published a piece on Hickory, North Carolina, showing the real recovery has come through healthcare, data centers, and fiber optics—not manufacturing. There, Century Furniture’s CEO says his tariff bill is 10 times what it was before. The politics are loud, but the reality is quieter and more complicated. I need another Americano.

Our industry is alive and well with the best yet to come! See you next week.

Mr. Thread

P.S. Don’t just read—play. It’s the first week of our brand new quiz. Scroll to the bottom to join the fun and secure a spot for our grand prize draw.

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Industry

Giovanni Battista Piazzetta: Madonna and Child with an Adoring Figure

A new home for Business of Home
Big media moves in the home world. Ziff Davis—the digital company behind CNET, Mashable, and TheSkimm—has acquired Dwell, Domino, and Business of Home from Recurrent Ventures. The three titles land under a new lifestyle group at Ziff Davis, with BOH founder Julia Noran Johnston running the show.

A hearty congratulations from all of us at Mr. Thread. I have been reader number one since day one. I also happened to be one of the first guests on Dennis Scully’s wildly popular podcast. Julia and her team built something all of us in the industry desperately needed: actual journalism with a voice and a community behind it. Class acts all around.

(And between us, a few readers have mentioned that since Mr. Thread started publishing, they detect a certain Mr. Thread-style attitude creeping into BOH features. We’re flattered.)

The last tassel maker
Jessica Light might be the last person in London’s East End still weaving passementerie by hand. Every tassel, tieback, and rosette is hand-woven to order using techniques dating to the 16th century. She’s worked for Vivienne Westwood and Buckingham Palace. At this year’s London Craft Week (May 11–17), she’ll unveil two new bodies of work and open her workshop for a one-off tassel-making class. In a city where traditional trades are vanishing, Light continues to prove that old textile skills can feel radical and unmistakably modern. This is the kind of craft story our industry needs more of.

“For the exhibition [Jessica Light] is unveiling two new bodies of work. The first, The Phoenix and the Carpet, is a series of home and body wares inspired by imagined cities and urban landscapes, with shades that recall brass, wet tarmac and weathered steel.”

— Selvedge

Ashley’s luxury problem
Ashley Furniture—the country’s largest furniture retailer with 1,100+ stores globally—just launched Ashley Luxe across 70% of its locations. Sofas start at $1,000–$1,200, sectionals run $2,900–$6,000, and the new face of their campaign is actress Hailee Steinfeld. Business of Home reports this is their biggest bet yet on moving upmarket (if you consider $1,000 sofas luxe, which, clearly they do).

The whole thing just seems off. How do you put “luxe” and “Ashley” in the same sentence? The K-shape recovery we’ve been tracking answers that question—the top of the market is spending while the middle gets squeezed, and Ashley sees daylight. This is a diversification play, I think. They won’t abandon the lower market—that’s the golden goose—but straddling both ends during a downturn is a dangerous game. We’ve seen that movie before.

“The timing of this introduction is very intentional. We believe the consumer today is more discerning. She wants better value without compromising style and quality. She wants luxury at a price.”

— Lisa Fanaro, EVP of brand strategy, Ashley Global Retail, via Business of Home

Trends

Tintoretto: Mother and Child

Uncle Sam’s search for beauty
The Trump administration has created a National Design Studio, appointed Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia as Chief Design Officer, and just named branding executive Peter Arnell as Chief Brand Architect. Say what you want about POTUS (and I gave him a hard time in last week’s issue), but he’s fully MABA (Make America Beautiful Again.)

Don’s two executive orders—Improving Our Nation Through Better Design and Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again—mandate classical or traditional styles for new federal buildings. The GSA is now hiring a senior architectural advisor with “classical” appearing eight times in the job listing.

I love the idea—this may be the first president in our lifetime who’s actually prioritizing building design. But execution is everything. If you go to the New York Public Library, it’s glorious. If you go to the DMV on Long Island, it’s a war crime. If you’re serious, Don, start there.

“This government, unlike many, wants to move at lightning speed. We’re living in an environment that’s a different type of government and one that demands ‘yesterday’ as a deliverable date.”

— Peter Arnell, Chief Brand Architect, via Dezeen

Desperation marketing
I’m shaking my head in disbelief. Beauty brands are staging fake scandals to game the algorithm and attract more eyeballs. ColourPop posted a phony apology. Lancôme sent intentionally misdirected PR packages. Dieux announced a fake AI pivot. Business of Fashion calls it “2026 guerilla marketing.”

You see, follower counts are dead, and brands now chase shares and saves—the primary engagement signals the algorithms reward. But this new tactic is bait-and-switch dressed up as strategy. This will expire fast, believe me. The second consumers realize the drama is manufactured, trust evaporates—and you can’t get it back. The whole thing feels creepy—a race to the bottom.

“It’s basically 2026 guerilla marketing. The Internet thrives off drama and shock, and here’s a new way to do that.”

— Katie Martin, executive vice-president and managing director of agency Front Row Group, via Business of Fashion

Death to LEDs
I’m writing this from Venice, where the streetlights glow rose. I’m not being poetic, it’s the city’s policy. When gas lighting hit the city in the 19th century, Venetians hated it. Artists complained about the harshness. The fix was rose-tinted glass lanterns that filtered glare into something closer to candlelight.

Light here is never seen directly—it bounces off brick, Istrian stone, canal water, mist, old plaster. A hard white bulb would be considered an act of violence here. Meanwhile, back in New York, Curbed reports that apartments from Crown Heights to the West Village are turning amber. Residents are ripping out cold LEDs for warm smart bulbs from Philips Hue, Govee, even $6 Ikea options.

LEDs make you sad, make you look terrible, and the science says they’re bad for you—blue light kills melatonin, and a Norwegian hospital found orange lighting reduced patient aggression. Maybe this is why my blood pressure drops every time I fly from JFK to Venice.

Once again, we see massive opportunity in this welcomed trend. As people start realizing how bad it is for you, they will begin searching for products and designers to help them “healthify” their spaces.

“Venice’s streetlights are rose-colored because the city learned that light, like fabric or glass, has to be tuned to its surroundings.”

— Mickey Riad, Fortuny

High Point trends
Last week, Chad Smith gave us the insider’s view of High Point—the reps in bad suits, the showrooms running on the same tired script, and the 313 Space shaking things up. Now AD PRO has published its trend report from Spring 2026 Market. (It’s worth noting that Mr. Thread delivered our High Point report five days earlier than the best of the shelter mags!) Anyway, the signals confirm what Chad was feeling on the floor: the industry is finished with sterile minimalism.

Here are AD’s highlights: Vanguard’s showroom was dripping with passementerie—triple-decker fringe in silver, marigold, and terracotta, “enough to outfit a dozen Gilded Age mansions.”

Nikki Levy debuted a Draped Desk at Abner Henry with undulating wood supports that mimic a wall of curtains. Outdoor furniture from Harbor, Century, and Four Hands is now fully upholstered and indistinguishable from your living room. Coastal blues are the counterpoint to last year’s boring aubergines. Menswear fabrics—tartans, tattersalls, suiting plaids—are dressing up everything from slipper chairs to beds. And the quest for bigger continues: James Martin is pushing vanities to 120 inches, Arteriors is supersizing chandeliers, and Janus et Cie’s extendable dining table stretches to 106 inches.

Everything is getting larger, louder, and more layered.

“In a world that has felt increasingly digital and sterile, people are craving rooms that feel warmly human again where they can be more expressive.”

— Laura White, VP of marketing and creative, Vanguard Furniture, via AD PRO

Ernesta gets aggressive
Ernesta—the direct-to-consumer rug brand founded by Peloton’s John Foley—just opened its eighth store, in Manhasset, New York, with seven to eight more planned by year’s end. Foley estimates the business will hit $100 million this year.

Home Accents Today reports that everything is custom-ordered from rugs sourced globally and fabricated in Cartersville, Georgia. This is all well and good, but just look at that showroom photo—swatches on rails, sterile lighting, zero soul. This is commerce dictating design, and the last time that happened, the entire world turned beige.

A tech guy started a rug company, and it looks like a tech guy started a rug company.

Opportunities

Lorenzo Lotto: Madonna and Child with Saints

Put the YOU in ADU
Homes built for multigenerational living—think in-law suites, accessory dwelling units, extra kitchens—are commanding a 65% premium over standard listings, with a median asking price of $709,000. Fast Company reports that demand is strongest in California, where Los Angeles (23.7%), San Diego (22.7%), and San Jose (18%) lead the pack. The economics make a lot of sense: per-square-foot pricing hits $262 versus $215 for traditional homes. For designers, this is a growth category worth chasing.

There is a big opportunity here. These buyers need thoughtful space planning—and they’re willing to pay for it. Especially with the boomer generation in their twilight years, I expect this boom to continue for a while.

“Multigenerational living is a meaningful force in the housing market. A sense of shared purpose and care is at the heart of multigenerational living, a housing arrangement that is quietly shaping American family life.”

— Hannah Jones, senior economic research analyst, Realtor.com, via Fast Company

Economy

Giovanni Bellini: Madonna and Child

Louisville is off to the races
Louisville, Kentucky, sold 287 homes above $1 million last year—up from just 43 in 2010. What’s happening there? The Wall Street Journal reports that young buyers from Charlotte and Nashville are driving the boom, drawn by what locals call “lifestyle arbitrage”—the cultural energy of neighborhoods like NuLu and Butchertown at a fraction of coastal prices.

Developer Gill Holland likens NuLu to New York’s East Village circa 2005: “creative energy and cheap rent.” Top-tier Kentucky Derby tickets now run $18,000 for two days (did anyone happen to catch that insane comeback at the race last week?) Some visitors spend over a million on a single Derby trip. Hunter S. Thompson would be spinning in his grave. The money is real, and it’s reshaping the city.

For designers and brands, Louisville is a market to watch.

“We’re at this point where we’re trying to figure out how we invite others in, while still keeping what’s important to us.”

— Jessica Fey, director of operations, Eternal Optimist Hospitality, via The Wall Street Journal

Loose Threads

A $400 million LA home just became the most expensive listing in American history. Ka-ching!
Business Insider ranked the coolest building in every state—most of them should be on every designer’s pilgrimage list.
This Instagram post shows how designers can use Claude Design, and it is sick.
Frank Gehry’s Sirmai-Peterson residence in LA just sold. A piece of architectural history changes hands.
Diane Keaton’s legendary eye for interiors goes under the hammer—Bonhams is auctioning her collection. (See the house tour here.)
In Venice? Don’t miss designer Chahan Minassian’s third curation of the historic Fortuny Palazzina.

Playtime

This is it, Threaders—the official launch of our brand-new game! We’ve retired the old format to bring you a game of wit and deduction. Every correct answer you submit each week earns you points toward our next big giveaway. Let’s see if you can crack this week’s code. It’s playtime—good luck!

The Clue: The mastermind behind our weekly issues.

Piece together the mystery word based on the clue provided above.
Click HERE to submit your answer.
Type your answer in the subject field and hit send!

A featured spotlight for you/your firm in an upcoming issue of Mr. Thread.
Another special mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle.

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

#00025 - The reckoning at the D&D

Mr. Thread — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 20:20:00 GMT

Claude Monet: Rain at Etretat

Hello readers,

I’m writing this from Venice, where my morning lungo macchiato comes with a side of canal fog and the sound of delivery boats hitting the dock at dawn. My schedule here is reversed—daytimes are for Venice, evenings for New York—and I’m running on clams, caffeine, and adrenaline. Massive week ahead.

We’ve got an insider’s take on North Carolina’s High Point Market—that’s right, Mr. Thread operatives are everywhere this week. We’ve also got the biggest story we’ve ever published on the troubled D&D Building: a candid conversation with a veteran Midtown commercial broker about what Fortress really wants, what might happen to the building if Cohen defaults, and what showroom tenants should do right now.

We also dive into another huge story about the looming tariff refunds, and the big question everyone is beginning to ask: if I get a refund, should I be giving it back to my clients? No easy answers here.

Next week, I’ll be at the Fondazione Dries Van Noten in a 15th-century palazzo on the Grand Canal—Comme des Garçons, Christian Lacroix couture, and contemporary art under Tiepolo ceilings. I can barely sit still.

Read on for the tariff refund debate nobody wants to have, why mohair is out, and what Taylor Swift trademarking her own voice means for every creative in our industry.

See you next week,

Mr. Thread

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Industry

John Constable: Rainstorm over the Sea

What Happens to the D&D Building Now?
I went to Shun Lee Palace in Midtown with a veteran broker I’ve known for years—a family friend, three decades in the market. I’m not naming him because I want him to keep talking to me. A judge gave Charles Cohen 45 days to raise $135 million or lose 979 Third Avenue to a court-appointed receiver. If he can’t, Fortress steps in. Over egg rolls and pork fried rice, I got the answers our industry needs. Here are the edited highlights of our conversation…

Let’s start at the beginning. How did we get here?
Cohen borrowed $533 million from Fortress in 2022—largely to refinance prior debt—and put up a portfolio of properties as collateral along with a $187 million personal guarantee. His portfolio started missing payments. Fortress ran out of patience. What followed was two years of legal maneuvering, delay tactics, and asset transfers that a court didn’t buy. He already lost the Design Center of the Americas in Florida to a foreclosure auction in late 2024. The D&D and the Pacific Design Center in LA are what's left.

The number that matters: $135 million—approximately what’s still owed on the personal guarantee. The court-ordered deadline was 45 days from March 9. We’re right at that window.

What happens if he can’t come up with the money?
The receiver takes over. That’s Fortress’s man—David Moson—who already has authority over 16 of Cohen’s ownership entities. His job is to sell assets until the debt is satisfied. The D&D is explicitly on that list. Fortress could sell to a third party, or acquire it themselves through a credit bid—exactly how they got the DCOTA.

So could Fortress become the landlord of the D&D?
That’s the more likely scenario. The D&D isn’t a Class A office building you can hand to another operator. It has 100-plus specialized tenants and a niche market. Fortress saw it up close for years as Cohen’s lender. They understand the asset better than most potential buyers would.

What would they do with it?
When Fortress took over the DCOTA, they didn’t padlock the doors. They hired Jamestown—one of the best mixed-use operators in the country—put $3 million into improvements immediately, and started running it like a real business. They weren’t stripping it for parts.

Fortress is now majority-owned by Mubadala, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund. These are not cowboys. The firm manages roughly $53 billion across its strategies, with a long-running real-estate book in senior housing, industrial, and multifamily across the US, Europe, and Japan. If they end up with the D&D, they’re going to want it generating income, not sitting vacant.

But they’re not going to run it like Charlie Cohen did.
And that’s the opening for tenants. Cohen’s reputation among his own showrooms—at least in private—was not great. Deferred maintenance, poor marketing support, declining building quality. Fortress would approach this differently. Not because they're generous. Happy tenants are the asset.

Can a new owner cancel existing leases?
It depends on your subordination language. Most commercial leases contain a clause where the tenant agrees their leasehold interest is subordinate to any mortgage—meaning the lender’s rights come first. If a foreclosure happens, that provision can give a new owner the right to terminate leases that predate the mortgage.

The protection against that is a Non-Disturbance Agreement—the “N“ in an SNDA (Subordination, Non-Disturbance, and Attornment Agreement). If Fortress signed one with you, they’re contractually obligated to honor your lease after foreclosure, as long as you’re not in default.

So the question every D&D tenant should be asking: do I have an SNDA with Fortress?
Exactly. Does your lease contain a non-disturbance provision, and was it signed by the lender, not just the landlord? A subordination clause without non-disturbance is actually worse than no subordination at all. That said, a financially rational new owner doesn’t typically empty a fully-tenanted building. That destroys value. What you’re really worried about is someone buying the building to redevelop it.

“I went home and checked my own lease. Every D&D tenant should be doing the same thing this week.”

— Mr. Thread

Can someone knock this down and build a luxury tower?
979 Third Avenue sits in Midtown East with a floor area ratio of roughly 10x to 12x for commercial uses. The building is approximately 580,000 square feet, 18 stories, built in 1963. Real development potential in theory.

In practice: 100-plus tenants with leases to buy out. Floor plates too deep for residential conversion, limited light penetration, and 10 elevator cores in an 18-story building—no residential building that height needs 10 elevators. Any buyer looking at the D&D as a redevelopment play is thinking 10 to 20 years minimum.

So the near-term scenario: new ownership, same building, probably better management.
That’s my read. What matters now is how you position yourself when the transition happens. Fortress is going to need to understand this building quickly—which tenants are healthy, which are anchor draws, who represents the institutional knowledge of what makes this place work.

The D&D is a community with its own rhythms—Fall Market, Spring Market, the relationships between showrooms, the foot traffic patterns. If you’re a strong tenant who’s been there a long time and runs a tight ship, you’re not a problem for a new owner. You're an asset.

Should tenants be reaching out?
Carefully. Not panicked outreach, not a desperate call. But if you have a credible perspective on how to make the building work better—what amenities it needs, what programming draws traffic, where Cohen dropped the ball—that’s a conversation a new owner would want to have.

What’s the downside risk?
Three things. Make sure your rent is current and your lease obligations are clean—the first thing a new owner does is review who’s in default. Know your lease cold: expiration, renewal options, subordination clause, SNDA status. Get your attorney to review it now, not when you get a letter from a receiver.

And if Fortress sells to a third party, you want to know before it closes. New buyers sometimes restructure leases as a condition of purchase. You want to be in the room for that conversation.

Is this ultimately bad news for the design industry?
Not necessarily. Cohen’s tenure wasn’t loved. The building needed investment, management, and programming. A new institutional owner with real capital might actually be better for tenants than a landlord who couldn’t pay his own bills.

UPDATE: As we were finalizing this story, Business of Home reported that Cohen secured a 30-day extension—pushing the deadline to May 20. Fortress agreed after Cohen reported progress on a deal he says will fully cover the outstanding principal, interest, and $12 million of the lender’s attorney fees. They wouldn’t have given him 30 more days if they didn’t believe he had a legitimate shot. Based on the conditions in the building and the way things have been going, I see this as a bad outcome. Almost universally, every tenant colleague of mine agrees. The place could use a new owner.

Economy

Claude Monet: Rain in Belle-Ile

Inside the tariff refund dilemma
As of April 20, US companies can request refunds for tariffs the Supreme Court ruled illegal—roughly $175 billion in total. But Modern Retail reports that most brands can’t simply hand the money back to customers. Wild Rye paid $250,000 in tariffs but estimates total costs at $750,000 after pausing production, raising prices, and canceling trips. Baby’s Brew paid $50,000 in duties plus interest on credit lines. Dame refunded its $5 “Trump Tariff Surcharge”—but that was just $10,000 total. The bigger brands can’t cut checks that easily.

At one of my brands, we itemized our tariff surcharge on every invoice so we could strip it away cleanly. That transparency felt like the right call. Now it complicates things—because clients can see the line item and point to it. But we were also paying tariffs on every input we bought to run the business, and nobody is refunding those upstream costs. The surcharge was a partial offset against losses coming from both directions simultaneously. Any government refund isn’t a windfall—it’s the first recovery on a loss that’s still larger than what’s being refunded.

My advice: document your full damage, wait for refunds to actually materialize, and communicate proactively. Have a clear, principled position ready before your clients ask. Because I can tell you: the phone rang this week and it was a client asking for us to remove the Tariff charge on an invoice. It’s happening.

“Looking at giving money back to consumers, [we’d] still be at a loss. It isn’t a one-to-one.”

— David Suk, CEO, Baby’s Brew, via Modern Retail

From the mind of

J. M. W. Turner: Rain, Steam and Speed

High Point Market according to Chad Smith.
North Carolina’s sprawling furniture and design showcase, High Point Market, ran April 25–29. We spoke to Chad Smith, a 30-year veteran who has seen this show from every possible angle—retailer, rep, distributor, consultant, and now the guy trying to drag legacy brands into the age of AI. His wife is a designer. His mother is a designer. She's 78! There’s probably no human who has spent more hours on the floor at High Point than Chad Smith. That’s not something he’s proud of. He drove up from Charlotte every day to this market, and we called him while he was still decompressing.

I am usually underwhelmed.
High Point is where most of the legacy brands show up twice a year and try to encourage designers, retailers, distributors, reps, industry people to pay attention. I’ve personally been going for 30-plus years, and some things have changed—a lot of things have stayed the same.

Designers are now like the prettiest girl in school.
That’s the biggest shift. They’re the ones that everybody wants to get the attention of and bring into the showroom. Brands see them as a way to be like an unpaid sales force for them.

I find it slightly embarrassing.
You see younger designers there with somebody filming them, or one of those iPhone things that they hold out in front of them as they walk through. I saw a handful of quasi-influencers walking around with a little posse behind them. Brands in our industry, in my opinion, have always kind of sucked at marketing, and designers are proving to be a lot better at it.

Most of the professionals aren’t going to some bullshit cocktail party at some random showroom.
In these uncertain times economically, people are not there for shits and giggles. They’re there to do business.

You see the same rep in the same bad suits they’ve been wearing for 10 years.
They’re standing out in front of these old legacy showrooms, talking from the same script. High Point is freaking huge—50 to 75,000 people show up over five days.

There’s nowhere for people to stay.
No hotels. People have to either fly into Charlotte or fly into Greensboro or Raleigh. And most people stay in Greensboro and go out to eat there and entertain and whatnot.

313 Space is far and away the best place to be in High Point.
There’s a new building that just launched, and it’s where all the new cool brands are showing. They’ve spent a ton of money, and it’s very well done. A lot of the new brands, like Pookie, don’t want to be in the IHFC building, just because it's the same shit every year, and it's really expensive for these brands to show.

Many brands are invisible on AI, and they don’t know it yet.
They were invisible before because they were trade only, and Google forgot about them. Now they don’t know how to list and get their data right for AI, and they're going to be invisible again. So they’re invisible twice. Our industry is always a solid decade behind on adopting technology, and this is about to run over a lot of people. AI is going to summarize their brand in one sentence, and they have no influence over what that sentence is.

Data is the new showroom.
Most of these brands have not invested in it. They see it as an expense. If you’re searching for a product and you can’t find it on your own website, then how is AI supposed to help you? I’m trying to address this problem with the new platform I'm building. We've got a tool that lets them see where they’re missing out, and then we have a tool that fixes it for them. We’ve got a free scorecard they can take. A handful of brands I’m consulting with right now have realized it, and the gap is just massive. All of their ecom managers know it, but don’t know what to do about it, and they don't get any budget.

It’s never been easier to launch your own line.
The barriers to entry for starting your own private label brand are really coming down. Because everybody’s so scared, a lot of the big minimums are being shrunk. If you have a point of view and some taste, AI can give you a website. You don’t have to fly to China and visit a factory anymore.

I try my best not to pay for food at things like this.
Universal Furniture is my go-to. I ate there every single day. They do first-class catering. Yesterday was salmon and couscous, and it’s clean, healthy, good food. I avoid the food trucks that charge you 15 bucks for a smash burger or some second-rate Mexican fajita, but I would bet Universal is getting a very good return on their catering budget, because that’s where everybody goes.

“There’s literally 99,000 smaller designers that now have the same tools as the top 1%, and the ones that figure out how to hustle and market themselves can easily grow to a brand online now.”

— Chad Smith, 30-year industry veteran and design-tech entrepreneur

Chad Smith runs Tradescope.pro. They audit home furnishing brands’ digital presence and fixes the data, schema, and structure problems that make them invisible to AI.

Trends

Pierre Bonnard: Montmartre in the Rain

Stay away from Mohair
TJX and Macy’s just committed to banning mohair across their stores—TJMaxx, Marshalls, HomeGoods, and Macy’s private labels including Charter Club, Bar III, INC, and Alfani. The ban came after PETA shared footage from facilities in Lesotho and South Africa showing workers violently striking goats and shearing animals so roughly they were left wounded. They join Zara, Gap, Banana Republic, ASOS, Uniqlo, Ralph Lauren, and Express on the ban list, according to Home Textiles Today.

Mohair is everywhere in our industry—a beautiful, durable velvet popular in upholstery and drapery. We used to carry it at one of my brands but discontinued it because it was too expensive in our supply chain. Now there’s another reason to move on. Just a heads-up to check your supply chains. PETA is pushing H&M to reinstate a ban it lifted in 2020.

Here’s one golden business rule: Don’t mess with animal rights activists.

Tech

Vincent Van Gogh: Rain

Will Taylor Swift save the arts?
Taylor Swift just filed three trademark applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office—two sound marks covering her voice (“Hey, it’s Taylor Swift” and “Hey, it’s Taylor”) and a visual mark covering a specific concert photograph. Variety reports the move follows Matthew McConaughey’s similar strategy to stop anyone using AI to copy how he says his famous catchphrase: “Alright, alright, alright!” (and other intellectual property).

IP attorney Josh Gerben explained the logic: federal trademark infringement suits apply nationwide and carry stronger enforcement than state right-of-publicity claims. As polarizing as Taylor may be, this is exactly the kind of heavyweight legal muscle the creative world needs. If TS can set the precedent, every artist, designer, and craftsperson benefits.

Meanwhile, the backlash against AI keeps building. A Quinnipiac poll found 55% of Americans now say AI will do more harm than good—up from 44% a year ago. Business of Fashion reports that luxury brands using AI-generated imagery face customer revolts: Prada, Gucci, and a small brand called Selkie have all taken heat. The gap between executive enthusiasm and consumer reality keeps widening: 82% of ad execs think Gen Z feels positive about AI ads, but only 45% of Gen Z actually does.

We’re manifesting the world back to humanity, and it’s happening faster than I thought.

“Theoretically, if a lawsuit were to be filed over an AI using Swift’s voice, she could claim that any use of her voice that sounds like the registered trademark violates her trademark rights.”

— Josh Gerben, IP attorney, Gerben IP, via Variety

Opportunities

Otto Eduard Pippel: After the Rain

Design for college kids
Williams-Sonoma just relaunched Dormify—the dorm-room furnishings brand it acquired for $1 million out of bankruptcy last May. The new site is live with a 3D bed visualizer, washable rugs, and pickup at Pottery Barn and West Elm stores. President Jennifer Kellor told Modern Retail they see "a lot of runway for growth" in a category where they still have a small share. The timing is deliberate: May 1 is Decision Day, when seniors commit to colleges. Dormify is seeding products to influencers and wheatpasting ads near NYU. This is a life-stage play—catch them in the dorm, convert them to West Elm customers for the next 30 years. All I can say is, it’s a long way from my college dorm, which I shared with several cockroaches.

“Dorm furnishings are a very big category in the market, and we have a small share today. With Dormify, we’re really hoping to leverage our expertise in this segment and extend our reach. We’ve specifically targeted a more casual and modern aesthetic, and it’s very function-forward, which I think is critical.”

— Jennifer Kellor, President, Dormify / Pottery Barn Kids / Pottery Barn Teen, via Modern Retail

Loose Threads

Milan Design Week is finally over. If you’re still hungry, here are the best photos from Fuorisalone, the most stylish furniture debuts, and six trends including inflatable furniture and sci-fi aesthetics.
Dries Van Noten just opened his Fondazione in a 15th-century Venetian palazzo. I’m going next week.
David Bowie’s Central Park apartment is up for sale. Fun fact: Bowie used to ride the New York Subway without being bothered by fans: his only disguise was reading a Greek newspaper.
Chloé just debuted its first piece of furniture—the Tomato Chair, made with Poltronova. Fashion houses making furniture is becoming a full-blown trend.
McDonald’s built a ball pit at Milan Design Week with Damien Hirst. Yes, you read that correctly.
The Future Fabrics Expo exists and I had no idea. Worth a look.

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#00024 - The truth about Milan Design Week

Mr. Thread — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 22:57:00 GMT

Ennio Morlotti: Vesconia

This week, Mr. Thread hands the microphone to our correspondent on the ground in Milan, our Italian spy, who spent six straight days elbowing her way through Design Week. Names have been changed. Opinions have not.

P.S. Read to the end to find out who won our PLAYTIME quiz!

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Milan Dispatch: Our Guest Editor Files from the Fuorisalone

Ciao lettori,

Okay, please keep my name out of this, I don’t want my clients to read it.

Let me start by saying the weather in Milan was perfetto. Sun, mild air, the type of April that makes you feel guilty for spending six days inside Palazzos.

But let me tell you the truth: Milan Design Week is basically a networking event now. Fuorisalone has turned into a competition over who can stage the most deranged installation of the week. Moncler built a giant octopus. I will not explain it because there is nothing to explain. It is a huge octopus. People queued to stand next to it and post a Reel.

One installation moved me: Loro Piana put on a show with all the heritage and craft: embroidery, needle punching, appliqué, Jacquard, hand-weaving, baby cashmere. I mean, it was really amazing. They were showing works of art. No octopus required.

The parties were the same parties, the same people, the same Gucci bags. I went to the Vanity Fair party at Piscina Cozzi, which I heard is hosting its final installation before the building converts into a spa, so enjoy it while you can. Da Vittorio catered and it was out of this world. I cannot tell you what I ate because finger food at this level does not look like what it tastes like; you put things in your mouth and say wow. I do not drink. That is how I survive on my feet until half past midnight.

Kelly Wearstler brought her H&M collaboration to one of the Palazzos. I knew before I walked in that the Palazzo would outshine the installation, and it did. Kelly wasn’t there. If she did show up, it was at a VIP party away from the masses. I knew that I wasn’t going to be impressed by what she had done, and I was right, but what was I expecting from H&M? What else. The Door la Repubblica party at Palazzo Crivelli worked because the garden was so incredible.

No one talked about Trump or America, or even the war in Iran. They did talk about the war in Ukraine, which feels more immediate in Europe. But mostly people ask each other where did you go? What did you see? What am I missing? You cannot see everything. This year Milan tipped past overwhelming into absurd. Jewelry brands, fashion brands, everyone doing something because everyone is afraid of not doing something.

The longest line I saw was for ‘Polish Modernism: A Struggle for Beauty,’ hosted on the 16th floor of the iconic Torre Velasca. I can’t waste one hour of my life on a line, just for that. It’s crazy. Without a press pass or VIP pass, you will spend half the week in a queue and the other half hunting a taxi at midnight that does not exist. There are no Ubers, no taxis. Friends of mine walked home for an hour in heels. I will not name them because they have suffered enough. I had to get home in a van last night. Hardly a sophisticated mode of transport for such a grand event.

My advice if you go next year: skip the octopus madness, find the craft, wear flats, RSVP to everything, and book your taxi before dinner.

Baci,

Your friend in Milan.

Economy

Ennio Morlotti: Girasoli Verdi

Luxury dies without the USA
America is the one luxury market still holding its nerve, thank goodness. Any talk of New York City’s downfall looks foolish right now, as it just retook the crown as the world’s top destination for luxury store openings, with activity up 23% year-over-year. WWD reports that 56% of New York’s new openings landed on Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue, and North America carried 27% of global luxury expansion activity. Watches of Switzerland grew 20% in the US in its first fiscal half despite the wretched tariffs. LVMH called American client behavior “quite homogeneous,” with improvement every month of the quarter. (“Quite homogeneous” is probably a compliment in France.) Even Gucci, bleeding almost everywhere else, called the States a bright spot in this terrible moment.

However, Morningstar’s Jelena Sokolova says the recovery is young and fragile — US luxury sales grew 25% a year from 2019 through 2022, then the hangover arrived. The canary in the coal mine is the stock market. If the AI-driven top of the Dow wobbles, the ultra-high-net-worth customer wobbles with it. For now, the Dow traded above 49,000 this week and the rich are spending. Everyone has been betting against America for a decade, but it goes to show: don’t write off Uncle Sam yet.

“The best thing [luxury brands] can do is give people a reason to come to you. The luxury houses need to double down on service and that dream of luxury. Make people feel special, give them a reason to come to you. In the last few years with luxury, the regular price increases, the lack of innovation in the market has sort of made people a little bit disenchanted with the industry.”

— Nora Kleinewillinghoefer, luxury and fashion lead, Kearney, via WWD

Inside the LA land grab
A Redfin analysis of purchases in Los Angeles’ fire-scarred zones found that real estate investors — LLCs, corporations, and offshore buyers — are now buying roughly 40% of the land changing hands. In the 90272 zip code of Pacific Palisades, 48 of 119 lots went to investors, up from zero the year before. In Altadena, 27 of 61. In Malibu, 19 of 43.

Los Angeles magazine is reporting that a single anonymous overseas buyer has already dropped $65 million on nine burn-scarred oceanfront lots along the Pacific Coast Highway. And in a clip circulating on X via @WallStreetApes, Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt (yes, the former reality television star) tells Joe Rogan that the number-one buyer of Palisades dirt lots is China — routed through New Zealand shell companies to mask the money. The federal data lines up: Chinese buyers account for 15% of foreign purchases nationwide, 36% of their US buying lands in California, and 71% of those deals close in all cash. Ka-ching.

However, a friend of Mr. Thread’s in Malibu construction says this is a repeat of what happened after the 2018 Woolsey fire: foreign buyers scooped up burned lots sight unseen, not knowing that California Fire Code rules had made some of these parcels effectively unbuildable. (There’s no way to widen a driveway to fit a fire truck without pushing into environmentally sensitive habitat or Coastal Act territory.) Some of these foreign buyers spent tens of millions on useless dirt.

Either way, the broader impact on our industry is bad. The people buying burned properties blind probably don’t invest heavily in bespoke interiors. They will never hire a California artisan wallpaper shop or splurge on a custom sofa from a local workroom. They see these plots as a financial instrument, chips scattered on a roulette table. For the bespoke high-end part of our industry, this is a loss.

“The number 1 buyer of Pacific Palisades dirt lots is China. China is taking over Los Angeles and Karen Bass is just letting them take it.”

— Spencer Pratt, Los Angeles mayoral candidate, via @WallStreetApes on X

The furniture suffering continues
Last week we walked through the body count in furniture retail: Conn’s liquidating 550 Badcock stores, American Freight shuttering all 328, At Home’s $2 billion write-down, Big Lots closing most of 900 locations. RH, Williams-Sonoma, and Ashley are scrambling to stay right-side up. This week the same pain has arrived at home decor and storage.

Modern Retail reports that Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. just closed its acquisition of the Container Store — along with Elfa and Closet Works — for $150 million. This is the same Container Store that was $264 million in debt, entered bankruptcy in 2024, and needed a $40 million lifeline from Beyond Inc. just to keep the lights on. Now it’s one more piece in a stitched-together portfolio alongside Kirkland’s.

I usually skim the news about companies like these, but this development completes the picture of headwinds in the sector: home sales are the worst in three decades, the median home price is up 30%, and housing turnover is at near-record lows. The survivors are the ones with clean balance sheets, strong cash flow, and a premium customer. Everyone else is a victim.

“Companies like Container Store and Kirklands failed for a reason. Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. now needs to pause, really solidify the proposition and get operational discipline to some of these businesses in order to grow. Buying a lot of quite weak things and putting them together, it rarely generates success unless you really work on reengineering the proposition.”

— Neil Saunders, managing director, GlobalData Retail, via Modern Retail

Tariff refunds
US Customs and Border Protection’s CAPE portal went live April 20, and every importer in the country is scrambling for a piece of the pie. CBS News reports the federal government may owe up to $175 billion to companies that paid tariffs the Supreme Court ruled illegal under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in February. Initially, CBP will process about 63% of claims within 60 to 90 days. The other 37% could take years. My claim is already in.

But the truth is, this refund creates a real dilemma. At one of my brands, we itemized our tariff surcharge on every invoice, deliberately, so we could remove it cleanly. Other companies passed the expense on through higher prices. Some did both. Then I remembered what Kyle Bunting told us in Mr. Thread issue #00019: “The only statement we issued was direct and succinct: my tariffs are not your problem. We absorbed everything. And used it as a moment to improve.”

Either way, the tariffs cost us millions. If we get the refund, should we give it back to our clients? Do they then give it back to their clients? This will be a very interesting debate to watch play out. I currently don’t have any answers, and wish we had a community where we could discuss this together. It is a tough problem, with no easy answers. The money was never really ours to keep.

Tech

Ennio Morlotti: Calendole

Fabric is harder than steel
Amy Pretzel, a former Apple product design engineer, dropped a powerful thread on X this week arguing that softgoods (textiles, leather, foams, laminated woven composites) are among the most demanding disciplines in product engineering, and almost nobody is building tools for it. A block of steel is isotropic. Pull it in any direction and it behaves the same way. CAD can model it in a single line. A piece of woven nylon has a warp and a weft with completely different mechanical properties.

This really hit home for me, as the owner of a company that is still hand-printing fabrics in an Italian factory. Meanwhile, the Patagonias, Arc’teryxes, Nikes, and luxury brands of the world have whole R&D floors dedicated to what a fabric does over a million flex cycles. We do not. If I had twenty minutes with Amy, I’d ask how handmade and high-tech textiles can reinforce each other. The future of textiles belongs to the houses that put both kinds of brain in the same room.

“Softgoods means anything flexible: textiles, leather, foam, films, woven and knit composites, the laminated stacks inside your shoes, the fabric on your headphones, the case on your laptop sleeve. It’s the part of the product that has to bend, stretch, breathe, drape, and hold its shape across years of human abuse. And it’s much, much harder to engineer than rigid parts.”

— Amy Pretzel, former Apple product design engineer, via X / @amypretzel

Trends

Ennio Morlotti: Landscape

Collectibles, human made
Critic Debika Ray just published the sharpest essay of Milan Design Week. In a Dezeen opinion piece on the rise of collectible design at Salone, she walks through the new Salone Raritas pavilion — featuring Sabine Marcelis, Milanese gallery Nilufar, Dubai’s Collectional, Herzog & de Meuron, and Italian glassmaker Salviati. She argues that as mass production has become morally compromised, prestige has shifted to rarity. Per ArtTactic and Bank of America, design, furniture, and decorative arts sales grew 20% in the first half of 2025 (we’re talking high-ticket sales at auctions and galleries, not at Container Store, of course). In fact, design is outpacing several fine art categories. Who’s buying? Minted millennials.

We’ve been writing about this for months. The luxury giants are overexposed and the handmade renaissance is real. The market is quietly rewarding work that is slow to make and hard to find. When Ray writes about someone pouring their own personal identity and culture into an object they make by hand, she is describing the exact economic engine our industry runs on. Read the piece twice.

“There is no greater luxury than getting someone to spend hours skilfully building something for you by hand with scarce materials, pouring their own personal identity and culture into it while doing so. That’s why collectible design is so often defined by the aesthetic of craft: fingerprints suggest a human touch, imperfections imply a laborious process, and natural materials hint at sustainability.”

— Debika Ray, arts and design journalist, via Dezeen

On the other hand — here’s more enshittification
If collectibles are the top of the market, here’s the bottom. The Wall Street Journal reports that US home builders are systematically stripping the quality out of new construction. Particle-board cabinets replacing hardwood, countertops going thinner, and hollow-core doors replacing solid wood. KB Home now builds 65% of its communities with footprints under 1,600 square feet. The median new-home size has fallen from 2,466 square feet in 2015 to 2,153 in 2025. John Burns Research expects the average number of windows per home to drop from 21 to 18 by 2027.

I’m living this one at home. I just replaced every interior door handle in my own house after the mechanisms started squeaking within a year. Real handles run $1,000 each. The enshittified version runs $100 and dies in 12 months. This is the quiet tragedy of American housing — and it’s exactly why craftsmanship matters. (Check out @inspectorjordan on Instagram. He finds everything wrong with American new builds, especially wobbly kitchen islands.)

“Many new homes now feel very cookie-cutter and very much like they’re just slamming them together as quickly as possible. It’s just kind of that feeling that we get that things aren’t built as well as they used to be.”

— Ana Wilkinson, first-time home buyer, via The Wall Street Journal

Opportunities

Ennio Morlotti : Paesaggio di Brianza

Golf sims are the new game room
There were more than 9 million golf simulator players in the US in 2025 — a 150% jump from 2019 — and the National Golf Foundation forecasts another 60% growth over the next one to two years. The Financial Times reports that just over half of those “sim players” have not set foot on an actual course in the past 12 months. The average installed sim costs $45,000, and custom residential built-ins run $70,000 and up. Trackman’s global sales grew 300% between 2019 and 2025. The Pendry Residences in Nashville are building three Full Swing bays into a 146-unit building. The Ritz-Carlton Residences in West Palm Beach include golf sims as standard.

This is a lane interior designers should be running in. A good sim requires an entire room: Flooring, acoustics, lighting, seating, bar, wall treatments, a finished ceiling high enough to swing a Callaway. I put one in my own office, did most of the build myself, and saved $10,000. Pick up the phone and call the client whose kid is trying to shave three strokes off a handicap. Call the developer in your Rolodex. This may not be the Versailles you signed up to decorate, but a $50,000 install a few times a year keeps the lights on and opens the door to the next real commission. Fore!

“The reasons for wanting a sim vary — sometimes it is ‘I want to be better at golf’, sometimes it is ‘I want my kids to be better at golf’, sometimes it is even to help enhance a child’s college admissions opportunities by having a low golf handicap.”

— Alex Yeazel, director of sales, Trackman, via Financial Times

Loose Threads

USM x Labubu: Swiss modular godfather meets viral kawaii in a Milan capsule. Buy it for your niece. Or yourself.
Issey Miyake and Ensamble Studio pressed waste paper into marbled furniture — looks like stone. This is where softgoods could go.
Check out how thousands of years of foot traffic have worn down ancient marble stairs.
Mexico rerouted a high-speed rail line around 16 newly discovered cave paintings. Bravo.

Playtime

After weeks of clever guesses and suspiciously confident DMs, we have a champion. Congratulations to Parker W. Well played!

Runners-up who came achingly close: Chad S. in first and Erin F. in second. Nice try, but no cigar. You live to guess another week.

Parker, check your inbox. You’ll get a calendar link to book your 1-hour private Zoom with Mr. Thread (bring your toughest business challenges), plus a mystery gift from Mr. Needle in the mail.

And for everyone else — tune in next week. Mr. Needle has been thinking up something new.

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

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How can we make this better? Reply to this email and tell us. We read every message and genuinely want to know what you think.

#00023 - An ugly week for a beautiful industry

Mr. Thread — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 22:35:00 GMT

Lucas Cranach: “Ill-matched Couple (Young Man and Old Woman)”

Hello readers,

There’s an exhibition at Bozar in Brussels right now that really caught my attention. It’s called Bellezza e Bruttezza (Beauty and Ugliness in the Renaissance) and its thesis is that you cannot have one without the other. The masters knew it five hundred years ago. Titian painted gorgeous goddesses alongside toothless drunks and leering tax collectors, because beauty only means something when ugliness is standing right next to it. This resonated with me because the economic news this week is ugly. Hideously ugly.

Hermès shares plunged 14%. Gucci revenue slid 8%. LVMH has stalled. Furniture stores are shuttering by the hundreds: Conn’s, the Texas-based owner of Conn’s HomePlus and Badcock Home Furniture & More, shut all 550 of its locations (who knew Badcock had so many stores?). American Freight liquidated all 328 of its stores. Even Circle Furniture closed nine shops that had been selling couches since Truman was president.

I stumbled on a graph showing the National Association of Home Builders’ Housing Market Index going back to 1985, and it matches the performance of the interior design industry with uncanny precision. Every boom, every bust, every COVID spike and crash. Right now, the arrow is pointing down. Wars, tariffs, AI doom, housing crisis, mortgage rates. There’s a relentless stream of headwinds blowing at our industry (just ask RH’s Gary Friedman), and it’s scary out there.

But here’s the beauty standing right next to the ugliness: Poliform—the family-owned Italian furniture maker—just posted €350 million in sales, grew 5% last year, and operates 120 flagships worldwide. Their new CEO, Marco Spinelli, just 42, told WWD that “our 2026 started incredibly well with great expectations.” They are renovating their New York store—opening in September—expanding into Rome, Madrid, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi, and just took over Trussardi’s iconic Piazza della Scala in Milan for a three-story retail space with a café. They are just one of many independent luxury brands that are thriving because they offer an exceptional product, made with humanity and soul. Meanwhile, Kering launched an entire university dedicated to luxury craft, and the shoe company Golden Goose is turning its stores into artisan workshops. There are beautiful opportunities everywhere if you know where to look (hint: we see tons of opportunities in the human-made space).

The editor-in-chief of Furniture Today, Bill McLoughlin, just told the industry to stop waiting for a return to normal, because this is the ‘new normal.’ I think he’s right. And if the Renaissance taught us anything, it’s that the ugly times are exactly when the most beautiful things get made. That’s why Mr. Thread exists. Tax day is behind us, the birds are singing for spring, so let’s get into it.

Keep reading to find out why performance fabrics are now in the hot seat, why trouble is brewing in the prosperous NYC luxury real estate market, and how 20,000 micro-lights created Hong Kong’s trippiest bar.

See you next week.

Mr. Thread

P.S. Don’t just read—play. We’ve woven a new mystery into this issue in our PLAYTIME segment. Three correct guesses last week. Congratulations to Dianne M., Chad S., and Parker W.! Let’s see who has the “eye” to claim the win this time and secure a spot for our grand prize draw. Scroll to the bottom to join the fun.

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Industry

Henry Fuseli: The Nightmare

Pied-à-TERROR in NYC
New York Governor Kathy Hochul is proposing a new tax on city second homes worth $5 million or more, aligning with Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s push to shake down the ultra-wealthy. Mamdani pointed directly to Ken Griffin’s $238 million Central Park South penthouse as exhibit A. The mayor’s office projects $500 million in annual revenue from this new tax.

The Real Estate Board of New York is furious: President Jim Whelan says the tax “will eliminate thousands of construction jobs, lower property values, and raise costs for New Yorkers.” Serhant’s Ravi Kantha is blunter, calling it: “Death by a thousand cuts.”

But here’s the bit I can’t understand. Manhattan commercial property sales just hit a five-year high in Q1—92 transactions totaling $3.7 billion, a 37% increase year-over-year. Multifamily alone exploded 141%. So while Albany squeezes the golden goose, the golden goose keeps laying. New York is the largest interior design market in America (most likely in the world), and this new wave of tax policy aimed at the wealthy is a story we are tracking closely. How it plays out will ripple through every showroom in the country.

“It’s death by a thousand cuts. There is a breaking point for every place in the world where you make it so difficult and so expensive to live there that even the wealthiest people say I want nothing to do with this.”

— Ravi Kantha, Serhant, via Realtor.com

The heat is on Lululemon
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton just launched an investigation into Lululemon over PFAS (aka “Forever Chemicals”) in their athletic wear. The concentration is reportedly highest at the crotch (yikes). We’ve been tracking this story for weeks, and the Overton Window is now wide open. If a state attorney general is going after the biggest name in activewear, the reckoning is real and heading straight for us next. I’m looking at you, outdoor textile and carpet manufacturers.

It’s not just about non-toxicity, it’s also about having a more beautiful product: There’s something about synthetic fibers that makes it hard to capture the colors of nature. If fashion is about to face a major backlash against synthetics, the home industry is right behind it. The first company to crack all-natural beautiful performance owns the future.

Meanwhile, there has been some progress in the science world: Researchers at Flinders University in Australia have developed nanosized molecular cages capable of removing up to 98% of PFAS from water—a breakthrough that could reshape how the textile industry deals with chemical contamination. Watch this space.

“While some long-chain PFAS can be partially removed using existing water treatment technologies, the capture of short-chain PFAS—which are more mobile in water—remains a major unresolved challenge.”

— Dr. Witold Bloch, Flinders University, via WWD/Sourcing Journal

The nightmare continues for furniture stores
As I mentioned earlier, furniture stores are closing at a terrifying pace. Conn’s shut all 550 of its Badcock stores across 15 states in 2024. American Freight liquidated all 328 of its locations. Circle Furniture—selling to Bostonians since 1952—closed nine stores after sales plummeted 20%. Weir’s Furniture in Dallas, open since the Cold War, shuttered four locations. American Signature’s 89 Value City Furniture locations are boarded up.

Annual sales for furniture stores are down about 8% since 2022, with January at its lowest since the pandemic. The New York Times connects the dots: mortgage rates have climbed since the war with Iran began in February, housing turnover is at near-record lows, and when people stop moving, they stop buying furniture.

Throw tariffs on top and these companies are getting squeezed from both sides—pressure on revenue and pressure on costs. Ashley Furniture, the largest manufacturer in the US, is shutting a Texas plant and cutting more than 250 jobs.

The renovation market is booming, yet the furniture market is barely surviving. It’s hard to fully reconcile those two data sets. But the editor-in-chief of Furniture Today said it best: after eight years of tariffs, pandemics, and wars, this is what normal looks like. Get used to it or get out.

“There’s been greater fallout in the furniture business over the last few years than in any time in history.”

— Gary Friedman, CEO, RH, via the New York Times

Economy

Vasili Vladimirovich Pukirev: The Unequal Marriage

The titans of luxury are shrinking
Hermès, Gucci, LVMH—the titans of luxury—all reported earnings this week. Cue the sad trombone. Hermès shares plunged as much as 14% after Q1 sales rose just 5.6% versus the 7.44% analysts expected. UBS called it “a relatively weak start to the year.” Gucci revenue slid 8%—nearly double the 4.3% decline Wall Street predicted. LVMH group sales rose just 1% to €19.1 billion, with the critical fashion and leather goods unit falling 2%. When the three biggest names in luxury stumble together, our industry pays attention because their customers are our customers.

The cause is twofold. Consumer confidence among the ultra-wealthy is shaky—the Middle East war, surging gas prices, and tariffs again. But I’ve said it before: there’s also a self-inflicted wound here—overexposure. Too many influencer ambassadors, too much social media, too much chasing scale at the cost of scarcity.

UBS analyst Zuzanna Pusz put it plainly: “People are concerned that the sector is not growing, that LVMH is big and not growing.” Bernstein’s Luca Solca agreed this is “likely not enough to convince investors to step off the fence.”

I’m hopeful a realignment is already underway, moving toward smaller artisanal brands, quiet luxury, and handmade goods. More on that below.

“Gucci remains our top priority. A comprehensive turnaround is underway, with decisive actions across client, distribution and, above all, the offer.”

— Luca de Meo, CEO, Kering, via Business of Fashion

America’s builders have stopped believing
The National Association of Home Builders’ Housing Market Index is basically a monthly mood ring for America's homebuilders. Every month, the NAHB calls up about 900 builders and asks them three simple questions: How are your sales right now? How do you think sales will be six months from now? And how many people are actually walking through your model homes?

This month the sentiment index dropped to 34—its lowest in eight months. NAHB Chairman Bill Owens: “The year started with hopes for housing momentum growth, but risks with respect to the Iran war, energy costs, and declines for consumer confidence have slowed the market.” NAHB Chief Economist Robert Dietz reported that 62% of builders said suppliers have raised material costs due to higher fuel prices. Existing home sales fell 3.6% in March, and NAR’s Lawrence Yun slashed his 2026 forecast from a projected 14% increase to just 4%.

Meanwhile, inflation soared to 3.3% in March; gasoline is up 18.9%; fuel oil up 44.2%. Real weekly earnings fell 0.9%. The spring selling season is off to the slowest start in years, and it’s easy to see why.

“The year started with hopes for housing momentum growth, but risks with respect to the Iran war, energy costs, and declines for consumer confidence have slowed the market.”

— Bill Owens, Chairman, NAHB, via Realtor.com

Trends

Domenico Ghirlandaio: An Old Man and his Grandson

The handmade revolution
The signals are everywhere. Kering just launched the Accademia per le Eccellenze—a full learning ecosystem with capacity for 1,000 to 2,000 students per year, starting Sept. 2026. Golden Goose CEO Silvio Campara is turning his 232 stores into arts-and-crafts workshops, offering 90-minute sessions in clay, textile printing, papier-mâché, and woodwork, guided by local artisans. Artemest launched Champions of Craft and partnered with Gachot Studios on a 36-piece collection of all-handcrafted furniture. And the Times just profiled San Patrignano, the Italian rehab where recovering addicts create handmade wallpapers for Chanel, Loro Piana, and every Rocco Forte hotel.

While the luxury giants stumble from overexposure, a quiet renaissance is forming around the handmade. Kering CEO Luca de Meo says the brand’s Accademia is about “preparing for the future” of luxury. Golden Goose’s Campara—whose company just posted €734 million in revenue, up 15%—says people “want to rediscover the pleasure of doing things together.” Artemest’s Ippolita Rostagno says when artisans collaborate with international designers, “they’re absorbing a new way of thinking.” And Paolo Moschino, who has worked with the San Patrignano rehab since 2018, says “the craftsmanship was extraordinary. We’d never been anywhere like it.” The handmade wallpapers run about $175 a meter—and every penny goes back to the community.

I think we’re seeing a realignment of what luxury means, and that meaning thankfully appears to be human.

“Creativity and excellence are at the very heart of luxury. Preparing for its future demands long-term commitment, shared standards, and sustained investment in craftsmanship—deeply rooted in the heritage and savoir-faire of Made in Italy. With the Kering Accademia per le Eccellenze, we are building a platform to nurture capabilities, reinforce excellence, and support the evolution of luxury métiers over time.”

— Luca de Meo, CEO, Kering, via Kering.com

Tech

Artemisia Gentileschi: Susanna and the Elders

Beware the AI trap
Business of Fashion reports that AI-generated marketing is a minefield for luxury brands. Gucci’s Primavera campaign was attacked for using hyper-polished AI images that felt generic. Prada pissed off customers with uncanny AI-generated birds. But Moncler pulled it off—explicitly telling audiences they used AI to create “impossible” scenes that could not be staged by human hands.

I think the difference comes down to honesty. Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) data reveals a brutal disconnect: 82% of ad executives believe Gen Z feels positive about AI ads, but only 45% of Gen Z actually does.

The takeaway is simple: use AI honestly or not at all. If you’re a century-old brand selling handmade textiles, the last thing your customer wants is to feel like a machine made the pitch. But Moncler can pull it off because its whole shtick is high-tech, futuristic fabrics. You need to make the call for your own brand.

“If we all blindly rely on AI, the risk is that we get to a sort of flattening effect that erodes the distinction that is at the heart of luxury.”

— Emanuela Prandelli, professor, Bocconi University, via Business of Fashion

Loose Threads

I’d like to go on a trip with this designer. Studio Paolo Ferrari’s Peridot Bar in Hong Kong looks like it was designed inside a hallucination—and I mean that as the highest compliment.
Prince’s former Beverly Hills estate at 77 Beverly Park Lane is up for sale. He lived there for … one year.
LACMA’s Peter Zumthor-designed expansion is finally opening this week. Those concrete walls lit up in red and blue are reason enough to visit. Reporting back soon.

Playtime

Congratulations to Dianne M., Chad S., and Parker W. for guessing last week’s common thread: TEE!

This is it, Threaders—the absolute final game before our grand prize drawing! Let’s see if you can crack this week’s common thread to rack up one last point for the raffle. It’s playtime—good luck!

Analyze the puzzle below and guess the one word that connects all four images.
Submit your answer HERE, or simply email us at mr@mrthread.com.
Type your answer in the subject field and hit send!

The Stakes: Every correct guess earns you an extra raffle entry, so play every week to boost your odds! We’ll draw the winner on April 22 and announce them in the April 23 issue. Our lucky winner gets:

A 1-hour private Zoom call with Mr. Thread to untangle your toughest business challenges.
A mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle!

Good luck, Threaders!

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

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#00022 - The Masters master the business of beauty

Mr. Thread — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 21:57:00 GMT

Vincent van Gogh: Green Wheat Fields

Hello readers,

Spring is in the air, the azaleas are blooming, and I can’t stop sneezing… which means one thing… it’s Masters week. The best week of the year. And I know what you’re thinking: what does golf, the most beautiful sport in the world, have to do with the interior design industry? But stay with me, because Augusta National is one of the greatest case studies in brand discipline on this planet, and there’s so much for us to learn.

Picture this: 30,000 people crammed into a single stretch of rural Georgia, every single one of them desperate to be there, and not a cell phone in sight. Phones are banned at these hallowed grounds. No one wants an obnoxious ringtone to disrupt the beauty: the cathedral of pines, the manicured emerald grass, the coveted Green Jacket. With every connection and resource I have at my fingertips, even I could not score a ticket this year without having to fork over $15,000 to a sketchy third-party salesman. I’m not ashamed to reveal that this week I worked with Claude to create a 20-year plan to get myself invited. I wish I were joking. Imagine having a brand that makes people act like this.

When you have something beautiful and unique, scarcity becomes the most expensive currency in the world. And Augusta National prints it without trying. They are crystal clear on their mission—they exist to serve the game of golf—and from the Chairman down to the patrons watching from the greens, everyone knows it. That is the lesson for every business in the world of design reading this, big or small. Scarcity is a superpower, but it only works if you actually deliver the world-class beauty and experience on the other side of it. Fake scarcity with a mediocre product is the fastest way to get found out.

Spare a thought for the absurdity of all of this. I’m a grown man watching other grown men swing a stick at a small white ball, while the rest of the world is seemingly on fire. Maybe this sport, and the beauty it splashes on your screen, is not a distraction from reality, but a counterweight that keeps the bad news from dragging you under. That feels like our mission to be “custodians of light in a dark world.” Beauty matters, and it is a purpose I pursue intensely.

Anyway. Read on to find out about the giant wealth transfer about to crash into our industry, why I think the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe is the biggest opportunity nobody’s talking about, and what Schoolhouse going bankrupt should teach every founder thinking about taking a private equity check.

See you next week.

Mr. Thread

P.S. Don’t just read—PLAY! We’ve woven a mystery into this issue in our PLAYTIME segment. Four correct guesses last week. Congrats to Erin F., Lindsay F., Ted L., and Parker W! Scroll to the bottom to join the fun.

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Economy

Gustav Klimt: Avenue in the Park of Schloss Kammer

Our customer base is growing
The Wall Street Journal reports that 31% of Americans were in the upper middle class in 2024, up from about 10% in 1979, according to a new American Enterprise Institute report. AEI defines “upper middle class” as a family of three earning $133,000 to $400,000. These are the people buying $1,700 bassinets, artisanal dog food, and business-class seats. They are also the people RH is built to serve, and the people independent designers have completely failed to capture.

There is a huge segment of interior design customers that nobody is serving well. The 1% of the 1% buys from Roman & Williams. The bottom half buys from Wayfair and West Elm. But this huge upper-middle-class client in the middle—the one with a $100,000 to $200,000 budget who is designing his own kitchen because he has nowhere to go—is wide open.

The independent designer who can package a clear value prop, deliver on time, and stay on budget can build a massive business here. While these may not be the grand estates splashed on the pages of Architectural Digest, or the “dream projects” that let us unleash our creative talents, this is a massive opportunity to bring great design to a whole new market and build a stellar business.

“I view myself as an average Joe. I don’t have to have a fancy car. I don’t have to have the greatest TV. But when I want something, I go get it.”

— Randy Shilling, 58, upper-middle-class Texan, via The Wall Street Journal

Trillions with a capital T
The seeds of the Great Wealth Transfer are beginning to flower, and it’s going to be a massive opportunity for our industry.

Boomers currently control 41% of all US residential real estate, roughly $20 trillion in value. Over the next decade, Coldwell Banker’s 2026 Trend Report estimates $2.4 trillion in US property will change hands, with 65.7% of that value sitting in the $5 million to $30 million net worth band. Wealthy Gen X and Millennial heirs already spend 14% more on their homes annually than Boomers do, and total US remodeling spend is projected to hit $522 billion by the end of 2026. That, I don’t need to tell you, is a lot of cash.

Right now, there is a “renovation supercycle” hitting an industry that, on its best days, struggles to deliver a kitchen on time. I’m already positioning my companies for this—I want our sales reps prospecting designers and getting in the door before the inheritance checks clear. If you’re a designer and you’re not building the relationships now with the Gen X heirs, you’re going to be watching this wealth transfer through someone else’s window.

“The next generations are inheriting a historic amount of wealth and approaching luxury with intention. They are choosing homes that reflect their identity, support their day-to-day lifestyles, and protect long-term financial value. For many, real estate has become a strategic piece of their wealth planning and a sanctuary for their well-being.”

— Michael Altneu, Vice President, Coldwell Banker Global Luxury, via PR Newswire

We called it. LA is popping again
Last week we planted our flag in Los Angeles, and this week the data validates the call. Realtor.com reports that international demand for LA luxury homes hit 18.2% by the end of December, with foreign buyers paying all-cash and looking at $50 million-and-up properties as primary residences and piggy banks for their extreme net worth. Sotheby’s agent Nicole Plaxen spent eight hours last week showing a Brazilian family with an $80 million budget; a Japanese investor just bought multiple homes like he was picking groceries at Ralphs. The proposed California wealth tax has Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Peter Thiel quietly shifting assets to other states—but the exodus is opening the door for global capital to come pouring in.

This is exactly what happened in New York City a decade ago, when a BuzzFeed News investigation uncovered that 77% of luxury condos in one Lower Manhattan building were purchased all in cash by anonymous shell companies, likely owned by international buyers.

The LA luxury market is not collapsing but changing hands. It’s hard to discern yet if this is positive, right?

International investment sounds good from a business perspective, but what about the implications for community and culture? (Some of the grandest houses in Los Angeles are never slept in. They’re just places for the rich to park money.) And California, by the way, just supplanted Japan as the world’s fourth-largest economy—up 40% to more than $4 trillion in GDP. Anyone telling you to write off this state is reading the wrong newsletter.

“Most people understand that it’s kind of a status symbol not to leave. You can’t replicate the ecosystem here, you can’t replicate the weather, you can’t replicate the location. There’s no place like Los Angeles.”

— Nicole Plaxen, Walters | Plaxen Estates, Sotheby’s International Realty, via Realtor.com

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Opportunities

Vincent van Gogh: Green Wheat Field with Cypress

The DIY Eames home
Charles and Ray Eames spent their lives chasing one idea: the best for the most for the least. Their famous home-studio in Pacific Palisades was built in the 1940s out of prefabricated panels, and the result was always meant to be just one of infinite possible configurations.

Now, nearly 80 years later, you can actually buy the panels. Domus reports the Eames Pavilion System—developed by Demetrios Eames and Kettal—debuts at the Milan Triennale from April 20 to 26, with two life-size pavilions and models of eight houses. (Admission is free.)

I think there’s a real opportunity here. The Eames House is a shell. It’s beautiful, modular, but completely empty. Whoever buys these panels still needs an interior. This is exactly the Gen X heir we were just talking about, the one with the inheritance check and no time to learn architecture.

Designers, the brief is open: pair the most iconic prefab kit in design history with the fabric, lighting, and furniture that make it a home, one that is true to the mid-century aesthetic. Whoever moves first owns the category.

“Anyone making one thing—that’s very nice, to make one thing. But to be able to keep the quality in mass production is the only reason we’ve been working so hard. Because we could easily turn out a nice thing, and another, and another. But to figure a way that the hundredth, and the five hundredth, and the thousandth would have the original character.”

— Ray Eames, Eames Office archives

Nevada is hot, hot, hot
If you want to know where the California money is actually going, look across the lake. Forbes reports that Sergey Brin paid $42 million for the Crystal Pointe estate in December. Another off-market lakefront just sold for a record $125 million (Bloomberg traces it to early Tesla investor Steve Jurvetson). And Beach Boys cofounder Mike Love just listed his 18,922-square-foot Incline Village mansion at $43 million after 40 years of ownership. The Nevada side of Tahoe—Incline Village, Crystal Bay—is suddenly the hottest ultra-luxury market in the country. There are mountains, snow, it’s an hour’s flight from Silicon Valley, and crucially, no state income tax.

Kelly Wearstler is already designing the interiors for the Cal Neva Lodge revival, which reopens in 2027 as the Lake Tahoe Proper with 198 rooms, a members-only Proper Club, and wine cellars in the historic tunnels. That tells you everything about where the smart design dollars are heading.

If in doubt, follow Kelly’s Louboutins. If you are working in Tahoe right now, get loud—Mr. Thread wants to hear from you.

“We’re seeing a clear acceleration of ultra-high-net-worth buyers moving from California to Nevada, driven by both lifestyle and tax strategy.”

— Bill Dietz, president of Tahoe Luxury Properties, via Forbes

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Tech

Claude Monet: The Water-Lily Pond

The Louvre gamifies heritage
The greatest art museum in the world has decided that augmented reality is good for the art, not a threat to it. Domus reports that the Louvre has launched The Incredible Unknowns of the Louvre with Snapchat’s AR Studio, a free experience built around six masterpieces, calling it “the gamification of heritage.” Visitors scan a QR code next to works like the Code of Hammurabi, the bust of Akhenaten, and the Greek Korè, and the camera does the rest—reconstructing lost polychromy on the Korè, animating Bernard Palissy’s Renaissance basin, and translating Babylonian cuneiform in real time. The Met has gone further: their app lets you wear 15th-century Japanese armor or Vincent van Gogh’s straw hat as a Roblox avatar.

This is the Overton Window opening on AR in real time. (Overton Window = the moment when ideas become acceptable to the mainstream population.) If the Louvre is comfortable with it, the rest of the culture is about to be too. And the application for the design industry is obvious and overdue: imagine a client pointing a phone at her bare kitchen wall and seeing it lined in the wallpaper she just picked from a website, in her actual light, before she signs the contract.

Generative AI got us close, but AR powered by even smarter AI is the next step. Designers, brands, factories—start prepping your business for this. The cost of building it is collapsing, the cultural permission just arrived, and the first movers in our industry will own the conversation.

“Augmented reality allows us, in just a few seconds, to grasp the essentials. These works are silent today. This experience allows them to regain their voice.”

— Gautier Verbeke, Director of Mediation and Audience Development, the Louvre, via Lens Studio

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Industry

Paul Cézanne: Grand pin et terres rouges

Private equity is the boogie man
Schoolhouse, the beloved Portland home goods brand, was just acquired out of bankruptcy for $2.2 million—down 95% in four years from its $48 million valuation. Inc. has the autopsy, and it is brutal. After Food52 bought Schoolhouse in 2021 with backing from The Chernin Group, the new C-suite tried to gaffer tape together a heritage brand built on taste. They burned through cash on vanity projects, canceled vendor orders, and laid off nearly every employee without severance the week before Christmas. Game over.

This is the fear I cannot shake about consolidation in our industry. Private equity rolls in because the fundamentals look great—real cash flow, real customers, a real brand—and they cash out the founder who is tired and ready to take risk off the table. Then they hire the bankers in Connecticut who wear those quarter-zipper fleeces to run an artisanal company they will never understand. They are too “growth” focused to see the soul in things. I’ve said it directly to a partner who runs a private-equity-owned company: do not lose the soul of the founder. Art and commerce must coexist. Schoolhouse is the warning.

“The product was there, the employees wanted to work, and the customers loved the brand. TCG and the people they put in charge were all directly responsible for the downfall.”

— A Schoolhouse product developer, via Inc.

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Loose Threads

Enshittification of the week: golf style. I could rant on this topic for endless hours. The greatest golfers used to be trendsetters. Now it’s all Nike sneakers and Lululemon pants. Bring back the plus fours.
Speaking of New York taste: this $22 million Flatiron loft at 175 Fifth Avenue is exactly the kind of trophy pad that the wealth-transfer heirs will want.
On the other coast, 501 S. Hudson Avenue in Hancock Park is a reminder that Los Angeles still makes the most beautiful houses in America.
They are seriously talking about turning the Chrysler Building into apartments. No one wants to go to offices anymore, that’s for sure.
Check out this incredible pencil drawing commissioned by golf star Rory McIlroy.

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Playtime

Shout out to Parker W., Erin F., Lindsay F., and Ted L. for nailing last week’s common thread: CALIFORNIA!

We’ve only got two more games left before our grand prize drawing! Let’s see if you can crack this week’s common thread to rack up more points for the upcoming raffle. It’s playtime—good luck, Threaders!

Analyze the puzzle below and guess the one word that connects all four images.
Submit your answer HERE, or simply email us at mr@mrthread.com.
Type your answer in the subject field and hit send!

A 1-hour private Zoom call with Mr. Thread to untangle your toughest business challenges.
A mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle!

Good luck, Threaders!

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

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How can we make this better? Reply to this email and tell us. We read every message and genuinely want to know what you think.

#00021 - All in on LA

Mr. Thread — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 22:14:39 GMT

Paul Klee: Ad Parnassum

Hello readers,

I’m going to level with you. This has been one of those weeks where I’m awake each morning at 3 a.m., staring at the ceiling, second-guessing every decision, wondering if the whole house of cards is going to collapse. I’m a 50-year-old entrepreneur with 30 years of experience, and I was rattled. For no good reason, sometimes it just happens. The boss had a bad week. I’m telling you this because I want my team, my readers, and my industry to know: I’m human. I learned that being fearless is an absolutely terrifying business.

This week it is Los Angeles that has my stomach in knots. The city I love more than anywhere on earth, and a city I cannot even come close to figuring out. It is so crucial to my business and so many of us in the American design industry, and it feels like what’s happening there is the canary in the coal mine for the rest of the country.

The Wall Street Journal just published devastating data on Hollywood’s job market collapse—a 30% drop in production employment from its 2022 peak. Everywhere I look in West Hollywood, storefronts are boarded up. The new tax policy is driving our target customers away in droves. Then I read this story in Vulture about the creative exodus from the city, and wondered if investing in LA is a major mistake:

“The vibes in L.A. got very ‘We’re all so sad, we’re all so broke.’ It just made me feel hopeless. Not one person gasped or asked ‘Why?!’ when I told them I was moving. Everyone was like, ‘Good for you.’ Or even whispered conspiratorially, ‘I wish I could do that.”

— Lauren Bans, Vulture

But then I think of people like Michele Trout—who lost her home in the Palisades fires and turned around and organized 35 designers to create a guidebook for rebuilding with soul. I see the amount of business that’s going to flow to our industry from the rebuild, more fabric than I’ve ever sold in my life, potentially. I remember that LA still has the largest port in the world, aerospace, venture capital, tech, and weather that makes the East Coast feel like Siberia. Even if showbusiness scatters (and it’s looking increasingly likely) this is different from Detroit. Detroit only had one industry; LA has ten. Along with the most glorious weather and coastline to add to its spoils.

So all week I’ve been flipping: bearish, bullish, bearish, bullish. And here’s where I landed. We’re pushing our chips to the middle of the table. We’re ALL IN on LA. The city that gave us the Eames house, and an obsession with light and space that’s not done yet. Sure, the city will need new leadership. Something institutional has to change. But LA is a city of comebacks—that’s the most American thing about it.

I write this newsletter to help everyone stay informed and find new opportunities. But I also write because I yearn for community. I want more than anything a place to share my struggles, my fears, my greatest losses. Thank you for hearing me out. I hope one day this grows to be a place for all of us to help each other through the hard times, as well as the good times.

Enough with the sappiness…read on to find out how to get your tariff cash back from Donald Trump, why the Japanese are building American homes, and which country makes the best Easter chocolate.

See you next week.

Mr. Thread

P.S. Don’t just read—play. We’ve woven a new mystery into our PLAYTIME segment. Just one correct guess last week: Congrats Parker W. Scroll to the bottom to join the fun.

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Q&A

Michele Trout on rebuilding California with soul
Michele Trout lost her home in the Palisades fires. Instead of retreating, she rallied. A 15-year member of the Design Leadership Network, Trout helped assemble New California Classics—a collective of more than 35 architects and designers who spent one weekend building a guidebook to save the architectural character of two devastated neighborhoods.

How did you put it all together?
I'm from the Palisades, and my house burned down in the fires, and I realized that we had an opportunity to really come together as a community and do something. One of the things that was brought up was that we need to preserve the architectural integrity of the Palisades in Altadena, because there was quite a history, and we didn't want to see that all just disappear.

We identified seven different architectural styles that we wanted to see repeated in those areas. It was really an effort led by Jamie Rummerfeld, who also started Save Iconic Architecture. We just put out an all-hands-on-deck bulletin and said, who wants to help with this? And we spent a weekend together putting this all together. People flew in from all over the country. There were 35 people that came together that weekend. We divided ourselves into seven different teams, and each team was given a style. You didn't get to pick your style.

Are you providing actual architectural plans or just designs?
Just designs. This is really just a guidebook to be inspired by and to follow to give to your architect. Or you can give it to someone who is a draftsman—that's another avenue, it's much less expensive, and then hire an expediter to take it to the city. It just requires more legwork. But it's really for purists who want to build a beautiful home.

I think one of the biggest problems that these neighborhoods are facing is that these are not people who would ever design a custom home. Now you have over 8,000 people designing a custom home who never would have done that before. That's a whole other ball of wax. It requires so much thought, it requires tremendous resources, it requires time. It's not something you can do quickly, and I think people are just wanting to get things up and go, and that's a problem as well.

Of the seven designs in the book, which is your favorite?
That’s a great question. I thought to myself, Storybook—what is that? Is that the witch's house [in Beverly Hills]? And it turns out that the first rental house that we lived in after the fire was, in fact, a storybook house from 1927, and it's such a charming style, and I ended up really loving it. Storybook is a very charming style, and you can build a small storybook house that makes a lot of impact.

Is there a risk that people will rebuild in that horrible concrete box style you see all over Beverly Hills?
Yes, they're doing that. Price is a big problem right now because people were very underinsured, and so they are just trying to figure out how they can get this done and not spend all their money doing it, because it's very expensive to build right now. I do think that people are going to go to people who do prefab homes, people that do these kind of Thomas James homes.

I don't think that a lot of the houses are going to look very good. I'm really, actually quite upset about it, because people are trying to do it fast and inexpensively and that's never good. And these houses aren't going to last. They're not going to be the 100-year houses. They're just not going to last because people are trying to do it too inexpensively.

“I don’t think that a lot of the houses are going to look very good. I’m really, actually quite upset about it, because people are trying to do it fast and inexpensively and that’s never good. And these houses aren’t going to last. They’re not going to be the 100-year houses. They’re just not going to last because people are trying to do it too inexpensively.”

— Michele Trout, Design Leadership Network

Why were so many people underinsured?
This is where it gets ugly. So State Farm, in November—the fires were in January—they canceled many, many people's insurance. Once State Farm canceled your insurance, your only option was to go to California FAIR Plan. And California FAIR Plan, the maximum amount of money that they will give you is $3 million, and that $3 million covers your house, your contents, and your living expenses until you rebuild the house. An average lot in the Palisades before the fire was probably $4 million, so you're not even getting lot value. There's a lot of lawsuits going on right now. People think that they were unjustly targeted because they had expensive homes.

What will the Palisades look like in five years?
I think it'll be 75% rebuilt, and I think that it's going to look like a complete mishmash. I'm already looking in my neighborhood, and it's a total mishmash. There's no direction, there's no architecture review board anymore. There's no HOA, there is nobody supervising this. So you can build any kind of house you want.

In the alphabet streets, you can max out your lot. You cannot believe how big these houses are going to be in the alphabet streets. And the alphabet streets are the smallest lots in the Palisades. The streets are very narrow, and they're maxing out the lots and building these huge houses. It's going to look like Manhattan Beach. It's going to be terrible.

What would you say to someone considering building a cheaper, prefab home?
I would tell them to really take their time, that they have time. They're making a big investment in money and time. And also, I would ask, what is it that you want to put out into the world? Do you want to put out something really special and beautiful, or do you want to put out something like everybody else is doing? There's going to be many, many of those kinds of homes in the Palisades. But I think if you have the means and the inclination, you should perhaps consider something more special.

Find out more at: New California Classics.

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Industry

Paul Klee: Black Columns in a Landscape

Cohen’s empire keeps crumbling
One more bank has joined the list trying to collect from Chuck Cohen, and this one is focused on a rather unknown portion of the Decoration & Design Building, one that houses some of this industry’s treasures.

US Bank has filed to foreclose on 222 East 59th Street, according to The Real Deal. The lender says Cohen, who is up to his eyeballs in debt, defaulted in September and hasn’t paid his bills. The building is technically separate but considered part of the D&D Building—home to more than 100 showrooms.

This is the annex building on 59th Street that Cohen developed around 2001 and interconnected to the D&D through the fifth floor. Companies have long-term leases there.

What happens if just that building gets partitioned off in foreclosure? Forbes estimates Cohen has lost about $2.1 billion in net worth between 2023 and 2025. Earlier this year he lost 750 Lexington Avenue in a foreclosure auction. Fortress Credit scored a $187 million personal judgment against him.

I’ve spoken with several real estate broker colleagues who tell me Cohen is cooked, but they won’t go on the record saying so—because he still has influence in the city.

Ol’ Chuck won’t stop me from trying to get more info… stay tuned.

Kelly hits the high street
Kelly Wearstler is launching a 29-piece furniture, lighting, and accessories collection with H&M Home—her first time showing at Milan design week, and H&M Home’s first-ever furniture collaboration. The collection drops in 40 countries from September. Dezeen reports it will be unveiled at Palazzo Acerbi, a 17th-century baroque palace in central Milan. Fancy.

We talked about the Birkin bag a couple of weeks ago and how luxury companies aren’t just doing badly because of the economy—they shot themselves in the foot with overexposure.

Kelly is a treasure for our industry, and I hope she doesn’t stretch too far. She is just too damn good… I don’t expect her to mess this one up.

“I love that I can reach that higher collectible audience, but also now having this partnership with H&M and doing something that’s super accessible, I love that dichotomy. This is my Milan Design Week debut, and H&M Home is the perfect partner. Their global presence and genius for storytelling align perfectly with my vision. Bringing this collection to life in Milan and showing people how the pieces come alive in a real space. That’s what excites me.”

— Kelly Wearstler, Dezeen

1stDibs’ new podcast is a snoozer
1stDibs has launched “Objects of Desire,” a biweekly podcast where guests talk about a single art or design object that holds deep meaning for them. Furniture Today covered it—which tells you everything about how exciting it is. (I couldn’t even bring myself to listen.)

Mr. Thread has been begging 1stDibs to do something bold. They sit at the most unique position in our industry—an institution, a name, a marketplace with incredible reach. And they just came out with…a podcast about objects. It reads like someone asked ChatGPT to “make me a podcast for 1stDibs.” Nothing original, nothing authentic, nothing that makes you want to tune in.

This company keeps squandering every business opportunity to become the backbone of our industry.

You must be wondering, what’s the opportunity here? Why am I going out of my way to bash a podcast from a furniture marketplace?

Because I see a huge opportunity in the podcast space. Something fresh, edgy, original, and raw is what we are missing. Our industry keeps putting out safe and sanitized content.

For the brave who zig, while others zag, a huge design media empire could be built.

It’s never too late to learn
Architectural Digest just published its list of the 17 best interior design schools worth applying to in 2026. It’s a solid roundup—Parsons, Pratt, RISD, Auburn, the usual suspects. AD100 Hall of Famer Jamie Drake puts it well: formal schooling is an absolute necessity at the high end.

But flip through every one of those 17 programs and you’ll notice something missing: the business of design. It’s all drafting and AutoCAD and STEM certification.

Where’s the course on how to make a living? How to set fees? How to run a P/L? These schools are churning out brilliant creatives who can’t pay for the education they just received. Mr. Thread exists partly to plug that hole—business advice for an industry that’s starved for it. One of my dreams is to build an academy that teaches both art and commerce.

Perhaps Mr. Thread is the first step?

“To really work in the high end of the industry, formal schooling is an absolute necessity. It isn’t just about whether you can say, Oh, that floral looks good with that stripe. It’s about mastering foundational design principles and developing fluency with the rendering and software tools required of day-to-day work. It’s about designing to satisfy a question.”

— Jamie Drake, AD100 Hall of Fame, Architectural Digest

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Economy

Paul Klee: Fish Magic

RH: the audacity of mediocrity
“Reclamation” Hardware just reported Q4 earnings and the stock cratered 19% in after-hours trading—down to $112 from $139. The Wall Street Journal reports that revenue came in at $842.6 million against expectations of $873.2 million, with $30 million lost to tariff-related resourcing and another $10 million to bad weather. The stock is now down 40% over the past year.

I sat through Gary Friedman’s annual presentation set against this boring-ass piano music, just so you don’t have to. The man starts off predictably agitated—defending the numbers, rattling off free cash flow up $466 million, EBITDA growth, yada-yada. The metrics he cherry-picks look fine. But Wall Street doesn’t buy it, and I don’t either.

His whole thesis is flawed: he wants to “scale taste.” He compares the business to Louis Vuitton and Hermès. He calls RH “the arbiter of the home.” The audacity of this guy: Home is too personal for any brand to own.

The greatest designers in the world cringe if you can identify their signature. Studio Peregalli doesn’t want you to know it’s a Studio Peregalli room—the signature is the homeowner, the light, the color… the feeling.

RH has the opposite problem: you know exactly what an RH yacht, an RH restaurant, an RH estate would look like before you see it. In the business of home, that’s a death sentence.

RH is inauthentic and unoriginal, and educated consumers can smell it. Their European expansion on the Champs-Élysées—renting a gorgeous building and filling it with poorly-made furniture—shows a total lack of cultural understanding. What they call “interior design” is a shopping service for their own door-busting catalog with a factory of mid-level designers churning through projects. It’s a net negative for our industry.

But there’s so much to learn from this very intriguing company, so we will keep letting it live rent-free in our heads.

Tariff portal is coming
Business of Fashion reports that a US tariff refund portal is about to open, though it will exclude one-third of imports at launch. If you lost money in these tariffs and you’re hoping for a refund, be vigilant. Follow the links and keep checking back.

I’ve already instructed my team: the moment that portal is live, I want us to apply by the end of day. If Uncle Sam sends me back a check for half a million dollars, all is forgiven. Industry readers, whoever is tracking this for you—light a fire under them. The COVID relief money went to the people who got online fastest and this may or may not be different. But I do know this… when it comes to government refunds, I know I’d rather be first in line.

UPS has a guide on what you can do now.

Japan bets big on American homes
Japanese builders have acquired 23 US single-family home builders since 2020—more than double the number from 2013 to 2019. The Wall Street Journal reports that by some estimates, Japanese builders are set to own about 6% of the US home-construction market. Sumitomo Forestry’s $4.5 billion acquisition of Tri Pointe Homes will make it the fifth-largest home builder in America. This is fascinating to me.

So, Japan’s birthrate has declined almost every year for a decade. Their domestic market is shrinking. Now they’re playing the long game, and the long game in American housing makes sense. Factory-built housing is far more common in Japan, and some of these companies are starting to bring prefabricated construction to the US—higher quality, faster builds, more efficient processes. But this business model only pencils out in a dire economy, which isn’t a great sign for the American housing market.

“If the economy was going gangbusters and all you had to do was stick a sign out in front of the house to sell it, no one would have any interest in Sekisui House technology.”

— Toru Ishii of Sekisui House, The Wall Street Journal

Foreign-led big money deals run on local expertise. Show up with taste, connections, and ground-level knowledge and you can win massive contracts.

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Trends

Paul Klee: Temple Gardens

Mr. Thread’s top 5 from the DLN study
The Design Leadership Network just published its latest industry survey in The Quarterly, and the data tells a stark story about where business is heading.

We already love DLN, their founder and their mission. Now we love them even more. DLN published this survey freely. They should be charging for it. But Mr. Thread found it, and we’re sharing it with you. We don’t gatekeep the good stuff.

Here are the five stats that matter:

73% of small firms say business is flat or worse. Firms with fewer than five employees are getting buried. 36% said business decreased, another 29% said it stayed about the same, and 8% said it decreased significantly. That’s nearly three-quarters of small practices treading water or sinking.
85% of large firms expect revenue to grow. Firms with 100-plus employees are bullish—85% expect their revenue this year to be significantly better than last. Of the smallest firms, 63% say they expect the same or less. The gap between the top and bottom of our industry has never been wider.
Lighting leads the way—again. 95% of interior designers specify lighting on their projects, making it the number one vendor category for the 20th year running. Every room needs light, obviously, but furniture—which every room also needs—comes in at 85%. If you’re in the lighting business, congratulations.
(The Financial Times has further reading about the return of the chandelier, here.)
50% of designers want to buy more art. When asked which vendor categories they’d like to engage with more over the next 12 months, half said art and accessories. The desire is there. The question is whether they have the clients to match.
The software landscape is stuck in 2015. 41% of designers surveyed use Studio Designer. 41% are on Microsoft Teams. Very few are using modern tools like Notion or Trello. 99% of software use is for project management alone. The industry is ripe for disruption.

The stitch that money can’t mass-produce.
The New York Times’ Jason Diamond profiles a small but growing movement of chain-stitch embroiderers who are building thriving businesses. Emily Simpson of Chain Smoke uses a 1966 Singer machine to sew lettering into vintage army jackets for clients like Josh Safdie and Stevie Wonder. Brian Blakely stitches custom varsity jackets out of Bushwick for Calvin Klein and ASAP Rocky—upward of $700 a pop, and people can’t get enough.

In 1972, 9,400 embroidery workers operated within six miles of road in New Jersey, but the industry nearly died when the work went overseas. Now it's coming back, one stitch at a time, because consumers are rejecting fast fashion in favor of the handmade.

This is what Mr. Thread has been saying all along: the human Renaissance is real. People crave what a machine can't fake, and as you know, I’m super bullish on handmade.

"Without sounding woo-woo about it, there’s a spiritual connection between physical human hands being in the process that makes it more special. I will absolutely accommodate if I have clients who really want to do something that requires a couple of stitchers. But clients choose to come to Chain Smoke for her work."

— Emily Simpson, Chain Smoke, The New York Times

Apple turns 50
Apple celebrated its 50th anniversary this week, and both Wallpaper* and The Verge published beautiful retrospectives with some truly great photos. When Steve Jobs came back to a company selling beige boxes and turned to Jony Ive to create that blue clamshell iMac—has there ever been a greater example of art and business joining together in one explosive moment?

Apple is the greatest luxury company ever built, even if most people don’t call it luxury. Time, hedonism, the experience of opening the box—it checks every principle.

But let’s not leave them unscathed. Since Jony Ive left, there has been zero innovation. The software is a disaster. Liquid Glass is illegible, basic browser tabs require six clicks, and the Vision Pro botched the one experience that could have saved it: live sports.

Unfortunately, at this point, Apple has become a public utility, like the gas companies. I think their ability to create once-in-a-generation iconic products is over.

The Salone opportunity
Milan’s Salone del Mobile is the most spectacular design show on earth, and Domus has just published a gorgeous guide to the hidden historic palazzi you can visit during Fuorisalone 2026. This is what makes the show so extraordinary: It’s like you’re strolling through 17th-century courtyards watching the most avant-garde, original thinkers put on incredible exhibitions in the middle of Milan.

I’m not going to be at Salone this year, and it kills me. I’m working on getting boots on the ground for a report. In the meantime, I encourage every reader who can make the trip: go with no agenda. Just keep your eyes open for opportunity, see trends, shake hands.

The most valuable business connections I’ve ever made happened at trade shows where I had zero plan. And yes, Gary Friedman just announced he’s dropping an RH gallery right in the middle of Milan so he can ride the Salone wave too. Imagine. The most authentic design show in the world, and this guy parks a catalog store in the center of it. That’s why people don’t think he’s authentic. (Sorry, I had to fit in one last petty insult.)

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Tech

Paul Klee: Red Balloon

Pinterest for people with taste?
Business of Home’s Fred Nicolaus profiles Cosmos, a visual curation platform that just raised $21 million and is quietly becoming the mood board of choice for serious designers. Teams at Nike, Apple, and Chanel are on it. It’s being sold as a clean, beautiful alternative to the algorithmic slop bucket that Pinterest, Instagram, and TikTok have become. Cosmos uses machine learning to rate every image on the platform and de-ranks anything below a certain quality threshold—that’s robots fighting robots, if you’re keeping score. The killer feature for our industry is “research captions,” which automatically tags images with provenance: click on a green art deco staircase and you'll learn it's from Cranbrook Academy of Art, designed by Eliel Saarinen in 1925.

"I think one of the biggest problems in visual culture is the lack of provenance, and the idea that as an artist or a creative, you upload your image onto the internet and you're under this weird invisible contract that your thing is going to be ripped off and reposted, and you're going to kind of lose control over that thing. We're trying to serve the creatives and make them the pillars of the platform."

— Andy McCune, founder of Cosmos, Business of Home

The reality is, Pinterest could quickly spin up a quality filter and a provenance tool tomorrow and wipe this out overnight. That would leave Cosmos looking like a high-end stock image library with AI search bolted on. I’ve seen this play before: a beautifully curated startup that solves a problem a bigger platform can copy in one sprint cycle. Show me the moat. Until then, this is a big yawn for me.

Tinder for sofas (Happy April Fools’ Day)
Furniture Today reported, with a straight face, about Intiario’s new app that lets you swipe right to select your dream sofa—a “first-ever Tinder for sofas” that collects style preferences through a swiping interface. I downloaded it, swiped for a few minutes, and learned the whole thing is a prank. Furniture Today fell for it, but in their defense, they did catch this one about an anti-gravity blanket.

(In other April Fools news, Ken Fulk nearly caught us out with this one.)

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Loose Threads

432 Park Avenue is the enshittification of the week: a concrete middle finger from Billionaires’ Row to every New Yorker with taste.
Another casualty of the war: Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Mastaba in Abu Dhabi (what would have been the largest sculpture on earth) is now at risk of never being built.
Venice gets the Carlo Scarpa it deserves: a new exhibition of three houses by the master of Venetian detail. Can’t wait to visit this next month.
A judge halted the White House ballroom project, and meanwhile a Trump video skyscraper presidential library has been proposed, because subtlety was never his brand.
Stunning Easter chocolates from around the world, because I can’t help myself. I’m going to eat my body weight in chocolate this Easter, and so should you.

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Playtime

Congratulations to Parker W! He correctly guessed last week’s magic word: COMMUNITY.

Now, let’s see if you can guess this week’s common thread. It’s playtime!

Analyze the puzzle below and guess the one word that connects all four images.
Submit your answer HERE, or simply email us at mr@mrthread.com.
Type your answer in the subject field and hit send!

The Stakes: Every correct guess earns you an extra raffle entry, so play every week to boost your odds! We’ll draw the winner on April 22nd and announce them in the April 23rd issue. Our lucky winner gets:

A 1-hour private Zoom call with Mr. Thread to untangle your toughest business challenges.
A mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle!

Good luck, Threaders!

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

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How can we make this better? Reply to this email and tell us. We read every message and genuinely want to know what you think.

#00020 - The power of the pack

Mr. Thread — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 21:45:00 GMT

Allegory of California: Diego Rivera

Hello readers,

den historic palazzi you

I got back from Los Angeles this week with one thought stuck in my head: community. I spent the week visiting showrooms, meeting designers, and walking through the Pacific Design Center—all three buildings of it, green, red, and blue, like a massive Lego structure dropped into West Hollywood. You feel the scale the moment you enter. It’s continuous, like a grand piazza. You start doing square-footage calculations: four football fields across, by three widths. Maybe 200,000 square feet per floor? You can see how a space this size transforms the business of design, where proportion and light are the raw materials.

Then you see how empty it is.

Vacant hallways stretch for miles, drywall hangs loose, some of the escalators don’t work. An empty building inspires nothing. The D&D Building collapsed the same way. COVID hit and companies took road sales to designers instead of waiting for designers to come. The PDC emptied like there was a fire alarm. Management failed to spark new energy. Before long you’re walking through a deteriorating husk of a building where creativity used to live. Owned by a man, Charles Cohen, who never seemed to care—and cares even less now, distracted by his current financial woes.

I have a vision for how the PDC could thrive. Architects work alongside contractors. Fabric houses sit next to furniture makers, and younger designers learn from established ones over a shared resource library. The designer, the architect, the contractor, the stone fabricator, the upholsterer—all vetted, all aligned, all feeding referrals and ideas to each other, all under one roof. Designers and contractors alike struggle to find clients, but bring them together and the problem disappears. The PDC represents a lost opportunity to create that community, that design utopia.

You see, artists learn by gathering. The Impressionists famously painted together in cafés, argued about light, borrowed techniques, and pushed each other forward. Every jeweler in Manhattan’s diamond district sits next to his competitor, and the proximity keeps everyone sharp. The fish market in Venice works the same way. So did the D&D Building in its prime—five-year wait lists because the curation mattered. You learn interior design in practice, by touching materials, by watching how light enters a space. This work demands presence, and it demands a pack of fellow creatives around you

I spent years trying to build this kind of community in New York City. Some of it worked. Some of it almost destroyed me financially. But that’s a story for another time.

So read on to find out why the wealthy are driving 50% of US spending, how war is threatening luxury’s recovery, and why everyone’s talking about Prada’s AI campaign.

See you next week.

Mr. Thread

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Industry

Joseph Kleitsch: Laguna Road II

The coworking question
Speaking of designers and community, Business of Home’s Fred Nicolaus explores the history of coworking in our industry, and how it’s still thriving in some places. In Raleigh, North Carolina, a company called Workup is opening 8,700 square feet of shared space: a sampling library, warehouse, and conference rooms for the local design-build community. Owner Hilaire Pickett Martin built it because solo practitioners need community. Meanwhile, in Atlanta, designer Tish Mills moved from a standalone office to shared space and found that bumping into neighbors in the kitchen lifted her productivity.

“Designers share common workflows, challenges, timeline hiccups, success stories. The property includes a shared sampling library and warehouse and conference spaces, as well as flexible per-diem work desks, and aims to build community in a town that lacks design-centered gathering places.”

— Fred Nicolaus on Workup, in Business of Home

California rebuilds with character
Three stories landed recently that paint the same picture of California’s investment in beauty. New California Classics—a collective of more than 30 architects and interior designers—published a guidebook for rebuilding fire-ravaged homes in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena. There are seven distinct styles: California Ranch, Spanish Revival, Craftsman, California Modern, Storybook, Cali Cod, Colonial Revival. Each section lays out rooflines, window proportions, tile selections, and landscape plans with fire resilience baked in. National Today covered how Marvin Windows partnered with NCC to execute three of those styles with custom-engineered windows that honor the original proportions while upgrading performance. And Elle Decor profiled the broader mission behind the effort: one palette of home styles, one shared purpose. This is a genuine movement and it’s incredible to see.

While politicians argue over building codes and developers chase the cheapest option, the design community did what it does best—created something beautiful and handed it to the people who need it. (The New California Classics website is a design icon in itself). The homes that rise from these ashes will define a generation of Southern California architecture. This is community in action.

Next week: we sit down with Michele Trout from New California Classics to talk about how the project came together, what the team learned, and what it means for the future of rebuilding in California. Stay tuned.

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Economy

Ben Norris: Discouraged Workers

War threatens housing and luxury comebacks
Analysts predicted 2026 would bring luxury back with 4–6% organic revenue growth across the sector. Then the war in the Middle East killed everyone’s buzz. Business of Fashion’s Eric Sylvers reports that luxury stocks fell sharply as the conflict escalated—LVMH, Kering, and Richemont all dropped. The Middle East makes up less than 10% of global luxury spending, but organic revenue there rose about 7% last year, outpacing every other region while the rest of the market stayed flat, according to Bernstein and Altagamma.

“Whether the conflict ends quickly or drags on for months, executives and analysts say the impact on luxury will not be defined by a sudden collapse in local sales. Instead, the greater risk lies in second-order effects: disrupted tourism flows, renewed oil price volatility feeding inflation fears, stock market swings that dent appetite for big-ticket purchases and a broader deterioration in consumer sentiment at a moment when confidence remains fragile.”

— Eric Sylvers, Business of Fashion

“There is a symbolic value that is stronger than the war per se because it gives the sensation that you’re not safe anywhere. After September 11, the big impact was not the event per se, but rather the fear, the spreading fear regarding traveling and enjoying life and planning your holidays and the trust in the future.”

— Claudia D’Arpizio, senior partner at Bain & Company, Business of Fashion

HSBC’s Erwan Rambourg says recovery arrives regardless: “What hurt the sector for the past three years was not so much macro as self-inflicted pain and what potentially saves the sector this year and beyond is possibly not the macro but addressing those self-inflicted issues.” In other words, the luxury sector broke itself, and it can heal itself.

At my company, the wealthy are still buying and business is good. But war chills everything, especially the housing market: Barron’s reports on how the conflict is hitting the US housing market through rising oil prices, Treasury yields, and inflation fears.

Sell to the rich
The Wall Street Journal reports that households earning more than $250,000—the top 10% of all earners—now drive 49.7% of consumer spending in America. That’s a record in data going back to 1989, when the same cohort was responsible for just 36%. The top earners increased their spending by 12% between September 2023 and September 2024, while working-class households cut back. (This is the K-shaped economy I was talking about last week.) The US now has 24 million millionaire households—more than China, France, the UK, Germany, Canada, Japan, and Australia combined. And America mints more than 1,000 new millionaires every day. Ka-ching.

“This group is driving the economic train with their spending. If they pull back, they’ll take the economy with them . . . Much of the resilience among high-income consumers is being supported—indirectly but powerfully—by the explosive run-up in AI-related stocks.”

— Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, via The Wall Street Journal

I keep saying it, but the opportunity sits at the top. Money pools among the wealthy and keeps rising. At my company, the war hasn’t slowed us down—we’re taking million-dollar renovation commissions. Middle-market designers fight for scraps, but luxury clients keep spending. Target them. They’re the ones buying.

MillerKnoll grows 5.8% while the stock tanks
MillerKnoll—parent company of Herman Miller, Knoll, Design Within Reach, HAY, and Muuto—hit $927 million in Q3 sales, flexing 3.8% organic growth. Retail comps climbed 5.5%. CEO Andrea Owen says the company offset tariff costs and plans to double its store count over the next few years with new locations opened in Fort Worth, Pittsburgh, and Phoenix.

But the Middle East will definitely ding its Q4. Stock is dropping, but the balance sheet looks healthy: debt is down $41 million, leverage at 2.75x. Regular readers know I track groups like MillerKnoll as a bellwether for our industry. When they grow, it means commercial projects are moving and retail appetite for quality design is holding up. The retail expansion tells me they see something in brick-and-mortar that the DTC crowd missed: people need to sit in a chair before they drop $5,000 on it.

Mortgage rates highest since October
CNBC reports that the 30-year fixed mortgage rate hit 6.43% last week—the highest since October 2025. In response, mortgage applications dropped 10.5% and purchase applications fell 5%. Two weeks ago, rates slipped below 6% for the first time since 2022, then came the war and oil jumped to $119.48 a barrel on March 9. The 10-year Treasury yield climbed from 3.96% to 4.21% in two weeks. It’s like we can’t catch a break.

“Higher mortgage rates, coupled with affordability constraints and economic uncertainty, pushed some potential homebuyers to the sidelines. The threat of higher-for-longer oil prices continued to keep Treasury yields elevated, and mortgage rates finished last week higher. If the Iran war drags on, the most likely outcome for the spring selling season is a replay of last year, when market turmoil contributed to existing-home sales stuck at an anemic pace of just over four million.”

— CNBC

We’ve been predicting 5.5% as the rate that cracks the housing market open. But we’re heading the wrong way. Rate spikes kill renovation budgets. Homeowners locked into pandemic-era rates below 3% sit tight and wait for better math. Nothing moves until that logjam breaks.

AI antithetical to luxury
Prada released its Spring/Summer 2026 campaign—a collaboration with artist Jordan Wolfson featuring eerie, bird-like humanoid creatures alongside Nicholas Hoult, Hunter Schafer, and Liu Wen. The images are disturbing and they divided the internet. Business of Fashion’s Marc Bain reports that Prada confirmed AI was one of the technologies used, and the backlash came fast. Photographer Jack Davison commented on Prada’s post: “Oh great! More AI that no one is asking for.” CNN fashion critic Rachel Tashjian praised the strangeness but posted: “I hate AI.”

“The underlying feeling seems to be that AI imagery is antithetical to the idea of luxury, which is supposed to celebrate human craft and creativity, to take its time and to spare little expense to offer the best possible product. AI, by contrast, is viewed as a way to be fast, cut costs and replace human creatives, whose work AI models were trained on without consent or compensation. At a moment when luxury’s value proposition is being scrutinised following years of rising prices, AI campaigns threaten to undermine the work brands are doing to win over customers.”

— Marc Bain, Business of Fashion

The smartest companies use AI for back-office work and keep it away from every client-facing touchpoint. At my brands, we are starting to shoot all brand photography analog—cinematic, old-school, through the artist’s eye. Consumers sense it when content is fast and cheap. That perception destroys luxury brands built on heritage and craft. AI is a brilliant operations tool but it’s a terrible creative director. Prada just found that out the hard way.

Trends

Emil Kosa Jr.: Near Modesto

Designing for longevity
Architectural Digest published a series on the longevity home—how your bedroom, your lighting, your spatial flow add years to your life. The science confirms what designers have known for decades: space changes how you feel and how long you live. AD also examines whether a home can help you live forever and makes the case that a longer life starts in the bedroom, including dimmable warm-toned lighting, transition zones, and flexible furniture that reduces sensory overload.

“When lighting is properly balanced, materials feel tactile, and space flows naturally, the body relaxes, and mental resilience improves.”

— Francesca Muzio of FM Architettura, Architectural Digest

The word is neuroaesthetics. Calming colors, relaxing curves, and materials that welcome touch. At my company, we’re opening a new showroom in Venice next month built on neuroarchitecture—we’re wiring guests with probes to measure heart rate and emotional response the moment they enter the space. Imagine an interior designer boasting on their website that their work extends your life. It sounds like marketing but it’s actually science. There’s an untapped market for designers who master wellness spaces: hospitals, therapy centers, and luxury residences for aging clients.

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Loose Threads

Banksy has been unmasked, making some fans mad.
Watch how the iconic Eames chair is made, and meet the man who breaks chairs for a living.

Playtime

Last week’s secret word was extra tricky. Entries flooded in, right and wrong alike. The answer? OPPORTUNITY. Our jurors are deliberating as we speak, and we’ll crown a winner next week.

Now, let’s see if you can guess this week’s common thread. It’s playtime!

Analyze the puzzle below and guess the one word that connects all four images.
Submit your answer HERE, or simply email us at mr@mrthread.com.
Type your answer in the subject field and hit send!

A 1-hour private Zoom call with Mr. Thread to untangle your toughest business challenges.
A mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle!

Good luck, Threaders!

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

Enjoying Mr. Thread?
How can we make this better? Reply to this email and tell us. We read every message and genuinely want to know what you think.

#00019 - The coming human Renaissance

Mr. Thread — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 18:28:50 GMT

Jan Vermeer van Delft: The Glass of Wine

Hello readers,

I’m writing to you from a hotel in West Hollywood, getting ready to meet Mr. Thread’s West Coast editor, Mr. Weft, for the first time. I just looked out my window and was struck by a glare of red light like Kramer getting hit with the Kenny Rogers Roasters neon sign in Seinfeld. It’s the Pacific Design Center, one of two design centers owned by Charles Cohen, who has six weeks to come up with $135 million or lose everything. I’d rather be anyone but him right now. More on him in a moment.

I’ve been in Miami and Los Angeles this week meeting with designers, visiting showrooms, and doing what I love most—listening to what’s going on in our world. And I keep coming back to the same theme: opportunity is everywhere right now, if you have the eyes for it. The art market just posted $59.6 billion in global sales. Luxury real estate is booming. The wealthiest Americans have more money than ever. And yet the housing market is frozen, luxury stocks are getting hammered, and 74% of Americans can’t stand AI.

It’s a K-shaped world. The top is flying. The bottom is stuck. For most creative businesses, that means you’ve got to sell to the top, or get super creative to survive.

In Miami I jumped in an Uber, and my driver told me something that sparked an idea for our readers. He wasn’t a regular driver—he was driving a $150,000 car and doing Uber to meet people and find business opportunities. We started talking about textiles, and he told me he’d made serious money through government contracts. He introduced me to sam.gov, a website where the US government posts open contracts for everything from hospital curtains to textiles for tank seats. I spent two minutes on it and found the Air Force looking for case goods for their headquarters in Germany and the Army Corps of Engineers sourcing furniture for new classrooms. There are fortunes being made on this site and it certainly has captured my attention. More on that below.

The spirit of this week’s issue is the human Renaissance. People are pushing back against the algorithm, rejecting enshittification in favor of rebeautification. There it is. Mr. Thread just coined our first word.

Read on to find out why Uncle Sam spent $12,000 on fruit basket stands, who has five aquariums in their Beverly Hills mansion, and why Florida’s lifeguard towers are a design disgrace.

See you next week.

Mr. Thread

P.S. Scroll to the bottom for PLAYTIME—our weekly puzzle game. Last week's Common Thread: MACHINE. Congratulations to Chad S., Sophia K., and Marco F.—you cracked it. Nice try but no cigar to Mia R., Parker W., and Cathy C. Better luck this week, Threaders.

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Industry

Hans Holbein the Younger: The Ambassadors

Shelter magazines are back
I just read some great news in this piece by The New York Times about the resurgence of interior design magazines. I didn’t expect this. I thought the shelter magazine business model was getting crushed. I thought the internet had all but killed them off.

There’s something about print that a screen will never replicate. As much as I research the web for Mr. Thread, it’s the shelter magazines I love to sit down with and really absorb. The pictures, the paper, the weight of it in your hands. Cabana magazine deliciously wraps its cover in fabric. These are objects you want to make sweet love to.

Sorry, back to business…

The takeaway for brand owners: reconsider your print advertising. We’ve all been chasing digital funnels and attribution models, and if shelter magazines are surging, there’s an audience we’ve been ignoring. And in my opinion, it is the more beautiful medium for showing the beauty we create, instead of that wretched little device that has become a permanent extension of our hands.

Denver leads the way on design centers
I've never been more energized and more bullish about the industry than I am now. My optimism for us all knows no limits. I genuinely believe we’re at the dawn of a new Golden Age of Design.

The Denver Design District is undergoing a major transformation under the awesome leadership of Amy Gagliana, reports Business of Home. The center is expanding from 45 to 55 showrooms, adding a bakery café, a restaurant, and opening its doors to the public. Phillip Jeffries and Verellen just opened showrooms. Romo, one of the big fish of textiles, is coming soon.

Amy is a star in our industry, and she won’t mind me telling you that she was an early Mr. Thread subscriber. I met her in Paris at PDO. We love what she’s building. Denver is showing that the future of design centers is open, experiential neighborhoods where designers and the public coexist.

I wish someone could bring this energy to other iconic design centers. Speaking of which…

Charles Cohen has six weeks
A court has granted Fortress Investment Group’s motion to appoint a receiver to oversee the sale of Charles Cohen’s properties—including the Decoration & Design Building in New York and the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles—with a 45-day deadline to recover $135 million in outstanding debt. Cohen’s design center portfolio is down to two buildings after losing the Decorative Center Houston. He’s on the ropes.

This is personal. My brand has had a showroom in the D&D Building for 60 years. As I mentioned, I’m looking at the Pacific Design Center from my hotel window as I write this. And I have a million questions, and feel a little queasy with all this uncertaintity. If their heads aren’t stuck in the sand, many of my fellow tenants surely must be feeling the same.

We need answers, and Mr Thread is going to try and help get them. Stay tuned.

Virtual try-on is coming for interiors
Nvidia and Antoine Arnault (son of LVMH billionaire Bernard Arnault) have invested in Catches, a startup building physics-based virtual try-on technology called RealFit. Before now, most virtual try-on tools were kinda terrible:

"It's just painting an image onto an image. It doesn't have any knowledge of all the important stuff, the draping, the textures, the cut."

— Ed Voyce, founder and CEO of Catches, Business of Fashion

RealFit simulates how fabric actually drapes, moves, and fits on a real body. And this technology is coming for our world next. Imagine showing a client exactly how a curtain would drape in their living room before they spend $50,000. We’re always second to the fashion industry on tech, and AI is helping narrow the gap. Get ready for this.

Beauty at the Oscars
Conan O’Brien hosted the Oscars this weekend and I was blown away by the stage design. Misty Buckley and Alana Billingsley created an incredible leafy courtyard garden. And Conan left us with a line for the ages:

“Every film we salute is the product of thousands of people speaking different languages, working hard to make something of beauty. We pay tribute tonight to the ideals of global artistry, collaboration, patience, resilience, and that rarest of qualities today—optimism.”

— Conan O’Brien, Oscars speech, 2026.

Bravo! Best way to keep optimism in our lives, and beauty at the center of what we do, is to keep politics out of it!

Silicon Valley takes on custom rugs
Business of Home’s Fred Nicolaus reports that Ernesta, the custom rug startup founded by Peloton’s John Foley, just raised $20 million in Series B funding, bringing total investment to $57.5 million. The company has doubled revenue year over year and plans to grow from six showrooms to 30 by the end of 2027. That’s a lot of rugs.

I spent time on their website this week. The product is solid—hand-loomed rugs made in India, custom-cut to any size, delivered in as little as two weeks. The UX is excellent. Even my mom in Florida could use this for her oddly shaped apartment. They started as direct-to-consumer and quickly pivoted to trade—because, as every rug company discovers, designers command the budgets.

This is a case study in doing custom well at scale. People have been saying forever that you can’t do custom in our industry. Ernesta is trying to prove them wrong.

From the mind of…

Kyle Bunting is the founder of the eponymous Austin-based studio that pioneered decorative hide rugs over two decades ago. What started as a childhood connection to hide has grown into an operation spanning more than a million square feet of rugs, wall coverings, art, and wool and silk carpets.

What does a typical day look like for you?
When you love what you’re doing, you’ll never work a day in your life. That cliché has never been more true for anybody I know than it has been for me. I work all the time and relentlessly, and I’ve never felt the difference. But what’s happening right now is like a second wind, a sugar high, being driven by the renewed potential for the creative-maker-artist that’s being ushered in through AI. It’s almost been like a can’t stop, can’t sleep, can’t stop thinking, can’t stop dreaming moment that is making me, and I hope my colleagues, feel like every day is Christmas Eve.

How are you feeling about the tariff situation?
My business realized this wasn’t about us, but more about how we’d react, and how that reaction would make our clients feel. So the only statement we issued was direct and succinct: my tariffs are not your problem. We absorbed everything. And used it as a moment to improve. We became better manufacturers, more efficient, faster, and we listened more carefully to our clients, their needs, and what it would take to help them be more successful. The result: growth with nominal economic impact. We used it as an opportunity to sharpen our steel and improve the business.

Full disclosure, my exposure was light, as most of our work is made here in Austin. But I saw people play the tariff card to raise prices and take advantage of the situation, which was a disappointment. And I saw others send emails announcing pricing changes that were really just passive-aggressive shots at the administration. Like most things, significant change and challenges will bring out the best and the worst of people. But everything does, doesn’t it?

What did you make of [custom rug maker] Ernesta raising $20 million?
I’m neutral with no bias on how a good idea, or even a bad idea, finances itself into existence. There’s no magic or romance on bootstrap versus private equity. Who cares? I don’t think the consumer or the trade ever even thought about where the financing behind what was possible from that brand ever came from. The question itself is a mystery to me.

Natural materials are having a moment. Is the market finally catching up to what you’ve been doing for 24 years?
I think younger designers are more sustainability-minded. Something more natural and tactile for environments that can bring a respite from everything that might feel produced around them makes sense. For us, our vertical business—art and wall coverings—has exploded in the last 36 months because we’ve entered non-residential segments: hospitality, workplace, retail, etc. At the same time, hide was a limiting factor in residential because somebody would look at a whole house and place what we did in one or two showcase locations. Our wool and silk program addressed the limitation and was built on our ability to do custom from a couture point of view. The fact that our expanded portfolio can go into new and unique environments has been the key to fundamental scale.

What’s the number one mistake consumers make when buying a rug?
They don’t give enough coverage for nesting the chairs on a round rug. They’ll measure the top of the table and say, oh, it’s a five-foot round table, a seven-foot round rug sounds great. Then the chairs are hanging off the edge of the rug. The other mistake is they assume everything comes in standard sizes. What do you have, a 9 by 12? Sounds great, I’ll buy. They assume, and don’t grasp the essence of “made to order.” Designers, through experience, and sometimes error, know these old tricks. That’s one of a million reasons why the TRADE matters and why designers are comfortable owning the liability of ordering the right thing for their clients.

Best restaurant in Austin?
Jeffrey’s [1204 W Lynn St]. No question. Corner table in the bar, fried oysters, bucatini, a Caesar, perhaps the soufflé if I'm in the mood. Especially on a Sunday when bottles of wine are half price.

The color you’re most excited about in 2026?
If I think it, and I see it, I want it—Paint It Black.

What trend are you done with?
Large-scale glass entry doors. Every time I pass anything that’s been developed in the last 10 years and I can see straight through the home, I keep thinking, that’s going to be regretted one day. Feels like a “remember when that was all the rage” moment is near.

Last thing you bought for your home that you’re excited about?
Gary McQueen's Kintsugi Skull, 3rd of 50. It’s fantastic. And Gary, by the way, I still can’t get the lighting right—please come back to Austin.

Any parting shot?
I’ve never been more energized and more bullish about the industry than I am now. My optimism for us all knows no limits. I genuinely believe we’re at the dawn of a new Golden Age of Design.

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Economy

Jan Vermeer: The Art of Painting

The art market bounces back—for the rich
ArtNews reports that the global art market hit $59.6 billion in 2025, according to the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report—a 4% increase that snaps a two-year slide. The recovery is lopsided. Auction sales of works priced above $10 million jumped nearly 40%, while dealer sales grew just 2%. The middle of the market barely moved.

This is the K-shaped economy I was talking about earlier. The ultra-wealthy are spending aggressively on trophy assets—art, real estate, luxury goods—while everyone else is treading water. For our industry, the lesson is clear: the money is at the top. The top 1% hold 90% of the wealth in America. Position your brand, your services, and your pricing to serve the people who are actually spending. Andrea Favaretto Rubelli said it best back in Mr. Thread issue #00015: “Those who target the high end of the market have usually more success than those who target mass markets.”

The housing freeze deepens
Fast Company reports that the annual income needed to purchase a typical American home has risen 79% since 2020, to roughly $93,000—while average wages have grown just 25%. Young people can’t buy homes. My son is out of college, wants to be a history teacher. There’s no way he will be able to afford a house on the salary he is expected to receive, even in the best case.

There’s a counterweight coming, though: the largest generational wealth transfer in history. As boomers pass, their estates will flow to their children. My uncle just turned 90—that generation is in the winter of their years. Over the next decade, trillions in real estate will change hands. The question is whether estate taxes will gut those transfers before families see a dime. Blue states are trying to drop the minimum below a million dollars. If your parents spent their whole lives paying off a house and want to leave it to you, that might not happen unless you can come up with a $300,000 tax bill. To me, that feels like confiscation.

Luxury stocks are getting crushed—and the rich are spending more than ever
Luxury stocks face their most bearish sentiment in years, according to UBS analysts and Business of Fashion. The war in the Middle East has spooked investors, and the long-expected demand rebound keeps getting pushed further out.

At my business, our first month with a new strategic partnership has already put millions in the pipeline—$15,000 bedspreads (worth every penny), and a million-and-a-half-dollar curtain commission. The uber rich are spending.

So why are the luxury brands suffering? My take is they shot themselves in the foot. Social media killed their scarcity. The Birkin bag, the Kelly bag—they’re so common now. Not everyone can own one, but everyone knows what they look like thanks to social media over-exposure. These brands understood scarcity better than anybody, and they blew it. The Business of Fashion also reports that Hermès’s positioning as a discreet, logo-free alternative is being undermined as its flagship products become ubiquitous.

The lesson for our industry: protect your scarcity. The greatest interior designers play this game brilliantly—Peter Marino will tell you to wait two to three years. Chahan Minassian won’t even take your call. And they thrive because of it.

Rooting for 5.5%
Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices sees 5.5% as the magic number that could unlock the housing market, according to Realtor.com. Rates recently dropped to their lowest in over three years, and purchase activity remains sluggish. Many homeowners are handcuffed to pandemic-era rates and won’t sell until the math works. We’re watching this closely—when that dam breaks, renovation spending will follow.

Opportunities

Johannes Vermeer: Young Woman with a Water Pitcher

Your tax dollars are buying Herman Miller chairs
I mentioned earlier about my Uber driver who gave me a hot tip. He’d made serious money connecting suppliers to government projects through sam.gov—the federal database where every open contract is posted. (Go poke around, there are entire careers to be built on that site.)

The reason I’m bringing this up now: Fast Company reports that the Department of Defense burned through $93 billion in September 2025 alone—a record for the Pentagon, according to government watchdog Open the Books. The annual “use it or lose it” budgeting means that every fall, the military signs checks left and right to dry up its congressionally allocated budget before the fiscal year ends. One of the largest bulk expenditures was $225 million on furniture.

That included $12,000 on fruit basket stands and over $60,000 on Herman Miller chairs, including at least one order of their Aeron Chair at $1,844 a pop. This spending spree happens every year regardless of who sits in the White House—Open the Books has tracked it for over a decade. For anyone in the furniture and design industry, this is a staggering amount of money flowing through a system that most of us have never even looked at. Too bad there aren’t contracts open for luxury hand-painted fabrics from Italy, I could be retired by now.

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Tech

Hans Holbein the Younger: Le Marchand Georg Gisze

Please talk to my AI assistant
I saw users on Twitter/X talking about a new AI assistant tool this week that handles project management through natural conversation. This is where interior design is headed. Imagine texting your AI assistant, “Is the fabric going to arrive on time?” and getting an instant answer—no phone calls, no logging into systems, no chasing down your project coordinator or assistant.

The amount of turnover in designer assistants is staggering. They come in thinking they’ll be picking color samples and fabric swatches, and they end up writing purchase orders and estimates all day.

An AI assistant that understands the context of interior design—your software, your workflows, your suppliers—could handle all of that in seconds. I guarantee that within months, someone will build exactly this product. The designers who adopt it early will run circles around everyone else, while making tons more profit and freeing up their time to do more of what they love… design!

Trends

Nicolaes Maes: Young Girl peeling Apples

AI is making everything look the same
Algorithms are creating a hive mind of sameness in the art collecting world—and to be honest, I’m seeing the same force hitting interiors. An art dealer at Art Basel Miami Beach noticed a mounting sense of déjà vu entering collectors’ homes and asked the question we should all be asking: why does everyone’s art collection look the same right now?

“Belgian art collector Alain Servais reports having similar experiences in Istanbul, Mumbai, Dubai, New York, and Paris. He says of Olafur Eliasson’s kaleidoscopic glass spheres: ‘One name I cannot see anymore.’ The algorithm, the Instagram feed, the advisor network—they all converge on the same 50 artists, the same palette, the same 'quiet luxury' aesthetic."

— Bloomberg

I saw this same force at work walking the beach in Miami this week. The lifeguard towers used to be beautiful—wood, natural materials, character. Now, as they age and need replacement, they look like a mini mental institution dropped in the middle of the sand. Aluminum piping, institutional gray siding, zero soul.

This is the enshittification of the built environment—the convenience economy strip-mining beauty from public spaces because it’s cheaper and faster. A politician is never going to sign away the budget for a nicer lifeguard hut. The opportunity is making the beautiful option just as affordable. Lowering the barrier to beauty so that governments, developers, and builders don’t have to choose between cost and craft. That’s what will defeat it.

I’ve dedicated 30 years to bringing more beauty into the world. Mr. Thread matters to me deeply as a vehicle for this message. The human Renaissance is coming. People are rejecting the algorithm, pushing back against sameness, and craving authenticity. Bring more beauty in the world, stop the uglification caused by the capitalistic convenience economy, and make the world a prettier place for future generations. Let’s fucking go!

Life guard stations in Miami

Loose Threads

Prada turned Fifth Avenue scaffolding into high art. Semitransparent green scrim paper by agency 2×4, moiré effect that shifts with light and weather. Most brands hide renovations. Prada made theirs the most photographed building on the block.
Bottega Veneta commissioned Max Lamb to create 421 chairs from expanded polystyrene for their Milan runway. Great example of scaling something cool.
Entrepreneur Andrew Yang predicts how AI automation will mean the end of the office. Mr. Thread readers might consider how to enter the office-to-residential renovation market.
New York City just completed a $176 million restoration of five Carnegie libraries. Double-height ceilings, arching windows, civic temples. This is how public architecture should be done.
Full House creator Jeff Franklin has five aquariums in his Beverly Hills mansion. I want to see his weekly fish food bill.
Steven R. Gambrel designed a penthouse at 200 E. 79th St. that just listed for $18 million on Elliman. Who is crazy enough to sell a home designed by this genius?
DLR Group—the firm redesigning San Quentin into a Nordic rehab center—was found to be working on an ICE detention facility in Oklahoma. Over 75 employees spoke out. The CEO pledged to donate $300,000 in profits. Yikes.

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Playtime

Last Week’s Common Thread: MACHINE
Listen up, Threaders. Mr. Thread already gave the shoutouts in the intro, but for those of you who skimmed: Chad S., Sophia K., and Marco F.—you saw the cogs turning. MACHINE was the word. To Mia R., Parker W., and Cathy C.—uhm, better luck next time! 😁

Now, focus. We’ve got a raffle to run and a consultation to give away. It’s playtime!

Analyze the puzzle below and guess the one word that connects all four images.
Submit your answer HERE, or simply email us at mr@mrthread.com.
Type your answer in the subject field and hit send!

A 1-hour private Zoom call with Mr. Thread to untangle your toughest business challenges.
A mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle!

Good luck, Threaders!

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

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How can we make this better? Reply to this email and tell us. We read every message and genuinely want to know what you think.

#00018 - The machine and the maker

Mr. Thread — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 21:20:11 GMT

Santiago Ramon y Cajal: Calyces of Held in the nucleus of the trapezoid body

Hello readers,

An NBC News poll just dropped that stopped me mid-scroll: AI has a 26% favorability rating. That’s lower than ICE. Meanwhile, a new Anthropic study reports that architecture and engineering are among the professions most exposed to AI automation—up to 70% of tasks could theoretically be done twice as fast by robots. And yet only 6% of practicing architects are actually using it. The gap between fear and adoption has never been wider.

I totally get it. How do you embrace a technology that’s supposedly coming for your job, strip-mining creative IP, and selling it back to its victims—built by people who make it very hard to root for them? I mean, have you seen these guys talk?

But, I’ll level with you, I’m in the 26% that loves it. So let me tell you exactly how I use AI as a heritage brand owner.

I run one of the most artistically uncompromising textile companies in the world. Our patterns are sacred. Our factory in Italy is a working museum. And I spend 14 hours a day at my computer right now experimenting with AI, not because I’m scared of it, but because it’s making me dangerous.

We put our entire brand history into NotebookLM and created a training module for how to sell our fabric. The results are phenomenal, and we’re rolling it out for a new brand partnership next month. I would have had to hire a team of graphic designers and copywriters to do this in the past. I now do it while sipping an Old Fashioned during overtime hours.

I sent my super smart assistant to Claude Cowork bootcamp to learn how to build bots to do the deep business research that used to eat entire afternoons—finding articles, tracking competitors, surfacing data. This newsletter wouldn’t exist without it.

I used to call a lawyer for everything. Now we handle 60–70% of our legal work with AI. I still go to the attorneys for the big stuff, but the day-to-day legal reviews are faster, cheaper, and better with AI.

And here is the biggest one of all, two years ago, we made a big bet and moved our entire company’s operations and CRM to big, bad Oracle’s NetSuite. A tiny company spending six figures on an Oracle product is kinda wild. And it’s paid off. We saw the future and were not afraid to embrace it. Now Claude is connected to our ERP, and tomorrow morning I have a meeting about giving it the ability to create transactions, not just read data. The back office that once required a small village will soon run conversationally—no more manual data entry, no more administrative drag. My team gets to stop feeding the machine and start growing the business. The mundane is replaced by the invigorating.

And because I run a remote business across the USA and Europe, I gave AI access to all of our chats, emails, and documents. Now it provides a weekly summary on each of our six to eight ongoing projects—where the blockers are, where things might critically fail. It saves every project owner, including me, hours of status-chasing every week.

There are more ways than I count on how we use AI to elevate our company. None of it touches our art… it simply gives us the space to focus more of our time on it. And the results are profound. My company is running better than ever, and I’m raising a team of leaders and giants, not training a group of monkeys to press buttons.

For high-agency people—the ones who control their own destiny and refuse to assign blame—AI is the greatest tool in the world. It’s a motorcycle strapped to my mind with 30 years of experience. It feels like I am in a gold rush and I can’t get enough of it.

My advice to business owners in our industry who are still on the fence: you can maintain your humanity, your authenticity, and your artistic integrity while running a much, much better business. And it’s never too late to adopt. I’m 50 years old, I still type with two fingers, and in the past few months I’ve dragged a hundred-year-old business into the AI age. What are you waiting for?

Anyway, keep reading to find out who lives in Miami’s “billionaire bunker,” how sponsored content died, and why Pussy Riot is mad at the Venice Biennale.

See you next week.

Mr. Thread

P.S. Don’t just read—play. We’ve woven a new mystery into this issue in our PLAYTIME segment. Five incorrect guesses last week! Nice try Sophia K., Chad S., Dianne M., Brenda N., and Teresa G. The answer was “peace.” Scroll to the bottom to join the fun.

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Industry

Santiago Ramon y Cajal: The human brain

Supreme court declines AI art
Reuters reports that the US Supreme Court declined to hear the case of Stephen Thaler, who sought copyright protection for a piece of visual art generated entirely by his AI system, DABUS. Lower courts had already ruled that AI-generated work without meaningful human involvement can’t be copyrighted. The Supreme Court let that stand.

The copyright law is clear: only humans can be authors. A photograph is yours because you framed the shot, chose the subject, clicked the shutter. With AI, you type a prompt and the model goes pattern-matching across other people’s work to generate something new. That’s the fundamental difference.

I think the court got this one right. AI-generated works that receive no meaningful human creative input have no business being protected. But AI-assisted works—where a human originates the idea and AI helps manifest it—that’s a different conversation entirely. We mentioned Philippe Starck’s AI chair last week. He set the brief, the algorithm proposed structural solutions, and the result uses less plastic than any comparable production chair. That’s a designer using AI as a paintbrush. And if you are on the creative side, that is the model I would look to for success (if that just so happens to be your thing!)

The gold rush moves south
The New York Times reports that Mark Zuckerberg just closed on a $170 million estate on Indian Creek Island in Miami—the most expensive home purchase in Miami-Dade County history. Indian Creek Village is a man-made island sealed from public access by a gated bridge, and locals call it the Billionaire Bunker.

“Among its residents are President Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner; retired N.F.L. quarterback Tom Brady; and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns three homes there. The home Mr. Zuckerberg purchased is a few doors down from two of Mr. Bezos’ properties. The richest Americans have amassed enormous wealth in recent years, while most Americans have seen theirs stagnate. The net worth of the top 0.1 percent doubled from 2020 to a collective sum of $24.9 trillion in the third quarter of 2025, and now accounts for 14.4 percent of the total household wealth, according to the Federal Reserve.”

— The New York Times

Florida is one of the most underrepresented states on the AD100. If you have real taste and real ambition, the market is wide open: the billionaires are there, the demand is there, but genuinely great design talent is shockingly thin on the ground. A sunny place for shady people just became the hottest luxury real estate market in the country.

The broader Southeast is the same story. Wealth migration is accelerating—and it’s driven entirely by economic policy. On the same day Washington state announced a 9.9% income tax, Howard Schultz announced he’s moving Starbucks headquarters to Tennessee. Starbucks is an iconic Seattle brand. That tells you everything.

A central part of our strategy this year is focusing on establishing business in these regions. They get as much of our budgets now as California used to get. Sounds crazy but it’s true. I really don’t see this trend going anywhere anytime soon. The more blue states keep imposing tax policy that hurts corporations and the wealthy, the more red states like Florida will be there with open arms welcoming them to their tax base. The cycle will get worse.

Economy

Santiago Ramon y Cajal: Drawing of cells

Who gets the refund?
This week Ray Allegrezza of Furniture Today writes: “Somewhere right now, a furniture importer is sitting at a desk staring at a stack of invoices, a calculator, and a bottle of aspirin wondering one very simple thing: How exactly is this refund supposed to work?” The courts have spoken—Trump-era IEEPA tariffs were illegal, and the money importers paid must be returned. But as Allegrezza points out, the tariff money didn’t sit quietly in a vault. It spread through the entire supply chain. Now the government has to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

“Most importers didn’t eat every bit of those costs. They passed some of them down the chain. Retailers paid more at the dock. Consumers paid more at the register. Suppliers may have split the pain. In short, the tariff money didn’t sit quietly in a vault; it spread through the system like sawdust in a three-shift case goods plant.”

— Furniture Today

Nine home companies have already filed suit seeking refunds, including City Furniture, American Furniture Warehouse, Flexsteel, Rugs America, Jaipur Living, and Culp Inc. For a company our size, going it alone is brutal—legal retainers, document preparation, a mountain of customs entry numbers to match.

We’ve spoken to a couple of lawyers, and what we really wish existed is a class action. Every company in the D&D Building is affected by this. Where is the industry-wide lawsuit? Why aren’t industry organizations like the DFA and DLN stepping up to advocate for its members instead of throwing another cocktail party? This is exactly the kind of moment where an industry organization could actually earn its keep.

For now, we wait—or we lawyer up on our own. Neither option is cheap.

Opportunities

Santiago Ramon y Cajal: Complex cells

Using real estate listings for lead generation
During my extensive research this week for Mr. Thread I discovered a fascinating resource that should get every luxury salesperson hot and bothered.

Every week, Donna Olshan publishes the most detailed luxury real estate report in New York City—every contract signed above $4 million, with listing photos, broker names, and sale prices. According to Realtor.com, Manhattan saw 43 luxury contracts totaling $422 million last week, the highest weekly count in 10 months. The most eye-watering deal is a condo at Extell Development’s 50 West 66th St. asking $35 million. Second: a $29.75 million combination unit at the Waldorf Astoria Residences—roughly 4,700 square feet, five bedrooms, seven bathrooms, and a 1,300-square-foot terrace to watch the sun set over Manhattan’s skyline with a cocktail.

For fabric houses, furniture brands, and interior designers, this is pure prospecting gold. Every one of those 43 buyers needs to furnish a home. We’re looking into building a tool that surfaces the top-priced home sales across the five biggest states every week. In the meantime, read Donna’s report and start cold-calling. This data is free, it’s updated weekly, and almost nobody in our industry is using it.

Trends

Santiago Ramon y Cajal: Human neurons

People hate AI, but prefer its writing
You just read my slobbering love letter to AI above, but here’s the paradox of 2026: the public can’t stand it. And yet, The New York Times ran a a blind writing test with 86,000 readers—and 54% preferred the AI-generated passages over the human ones. Journalist Molly Jong-Fast called the results “a moment in hell.” I failed—predictably. Though I’m not sure that says more about me than it does about the test.

People hate AI in the abstract and prefer it in practice. That’s exactly how I’ve experienced it in our workplace. We ran an AI-generated Easter post on Instagram a year ago—it went viral. After a few more posts, engagement flatlined. We abandoned AI for content entirely and went in the other direction: full analog. Our brand team is now shooting everything with a cinematic, old-school aesthetic. Heritage brands built on craftsmanship can’t afford to look artificial in any way. The smartest companies are using AI everywhere behind the scenes and keeping it out of every client-facing touchpoint.

Spaces that heal
Homes & Gardens just published a piece on LALA Reimagined, a design firm founded by Azar Fattahi and Lia McNairy that creates therapy centers where the rooms themselves are part of the treatment. Lighting, color, texture, and spatial flow—all calibrated to reduce anxiety, support children with special needs, and create environments where people feel safe enough to recover. Designers who position themselves as experts in healing spaces will own a market that’s enormous and almost entirely untapped. Hospitals, therapy centers, retail environments, homes for families with special needs—this is where our industry can use beauty to make the world better.

“What began as a chance meeting has grown into a shared statement about the power of spaces to heal, and about the extraordinary strength that emerges when women come together to create with empathy and vision. Because sometimes, healing begins the moment you walk into a room.”

— LALA Reimagined

The slow death of sponsored content
Business of Fashion reports that 68% of shoppers are frustrated by the volume of sponsored content on social media, and 65% follow fewer fashion influencers than they did a few years ago. The scripted captions, the gifted product, the discount codes—consumers have figured out how the sausage is made, and they’re over it.

At my company, we still believe celebrity association matters. But we do it differently. In April, we’re bringing celebrities to our factory for a red carpet event. They’ll walk around for weeks afterward talking about it. The difference between “I was paid to post this” and “I want to be where that person was” is the entire game. If the fashion industry is admitting this model is breaking, the interior design industry should take note.

Furniture crashes Paris fashion week
Vogue and WWD both covered Matter and Shape, which returned for its third edition in Paris’s Tuileries Garden, running March 6–9 alongside ready-to-wear shows. Seventy exhibitors, impeccable curation, and a guest list that blended fashion and design, including Ann Demeulemeester, Luca Guadagnino, Byredo, Birkenstock 1774, and Bang & Olufsen. The 2026 theme was “Scale,” exploring relationships of proportion between objects, bodies, and spaces. Unlike trade shows that feel like flea markets with as many booths as possible, this one was beautifully curated. Cultured magazine called it “the design world’s favorite Fashion Week detour.” Brands looking for alternative channels to grow should pay attention.

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Loose Threads

Russia returns to the Venice Biennale for the first time since invading Ukraine. The biennale says it “rejects any form of exclusion.” The band Pussy Riot is furious.
Kelly Wearstler just designed her first piano, for Edelweiss. What can this woman not do?
The Golestan Palace in Tehran was damaged in a US-Israeli airstrike. Just another reason why war sucks.
Cary Grant's Palm Springs retreat just listed for $12.68 million. The vibes are incredible, I would never leave if I lived here.
Johnny Carson's Bel Air estate hits the market at $40 million. All proceeds go to charity. What a legend.
Donna Kelce’s home renovation has gone viral for all the wrong reasons.
Frank Lloyd Wright's last residential design in Phoenix is back on the market.

Playtime

Last Week’s Common Thread: PEACE
No one got the right answer last week, Threaders! The word was PEACE. Dust yourselves off, because the points are ripe for the taking today. Who’s going to break the streak? It’s playtime!

Analyze the puzzle below and guess the one word that connects all four images.
Submit your answer HERE, or simply email us at mr@mrthread.com.
Type your answer in the subject field and hit send!

A 1-hour private Zoom call with Mr. Thread to untangle your toughest business challenges.
A mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle!

Good luck, Threaders!

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

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#00017 - The war on beauty

Mr. Thread — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 23:22:54 GMT

Kamal-ol-Molk: Ammameh landscape

Hello readers,

We talk a lot in this newsletter about beauty being a distraction from chaos. And it is—until it isn’t. The war in the Middle East is no longer something happening on our screens. It’s in our shipping lanes and our project timelines. One of my salespeople, who often travels to Russia to visit clients, can no longer fly there. Italian airspace restrictions over the conflict zone have made the route impossible. A major project we’ve been developing is now delayed indefinitely due to flight disruptions across Europe. Design is a global business and everyone in our industry is starting to feel it. Of course nothing comes close to the grief felt by those who have lost someone they love in this conflict.

I was on the phone this week with a good friend, a master designer in Europe. He’s in the UK right now, installing a project for a Middle Eastern royal family. It’s an extraordinary townhouse, the kind of commission that makes you remember why you got into this business. He flew in a 19-year-old specialty artisan from France just to work on it. She’s talented beyond her years, but now she’s surrounded by the family’s armed security. There is paranoia in the air and men with massive machine guns patrolling the hallways of the home. The fog of war is seeping into the work. He told me he could see it in her hands. She’s spooked. We all are.

Times like these clarify the mission. People have always turned to beauty in the face of darkness. Not so much to escape, but to endure. Every room we design is a small act of defiance against the chaos. We are custodians of beauty, and that is no small thing. When the world feels like it’s unraveling, our job is to hold the thread.

Keep reading to find out about the medicine of design, what designers can learn from Pokémon, and why Philippe Starck describes AI as “a motorcycle for my mind.”

See you next week.

Stay sharp,
Mr. Thread

P.S. Don’t just read—play. We’ve woven a new mystery into this issue in our PLAYTIME segment. 0 Correct Guesses Last Week. Let’s see who has the “eye” to claim the win this time and secure a spot for our grand prize draw. Scroll to the bottom to join the fun!

Economy

Kamal-ol-Molk: Golestan Palace

A sad turn in the Middle East
Regular readers know I’ve been optimistic about the Gulf as a growth market for luxury interiors. You might remember our coverage of The Italian Furniture Heritage Foundation’s partnership with Saudi Arabia. I was exploring making investments there myself, but I’ve put a pin in it.

Following the US-Israel attack on Tehran, Iranian missiles and drones were launched toward the Gulf, shattering the UAE’s carefully constructed image as the region’s safe haven. Chalhoub Group, which operates 900 stores for Versace, Jimmy Choo, and Sephora across the region, closed its Bahrain locations and made staff attendance “voluntary” in other markets. A five-star hotel in Dubai was hit. The US embassy in Riyadh took drone strikes. American citizens have been urged to leave.

Luxury stocks fell hard too. LVMH dropped 7.7% in two trading days. Kering is down 11%. Richemont, one of the groups most exposed to the Middle East, slid nearly 10%. In Business of Fashion, Morningstar senior equity analyst Jelena Sokolova put it plainly: “The Middle East has been one of luxury’s few bright spots over the past year, especially as demand from Chinese and American consumers has softened.”

The UAE and neighboring Gulf states have invested time, energy and vast sums of money to create a corner of the Middle East that is meant to be shielded, literally and figuratively, from the chaos that periodically engulfs the wider region. That sense of security was shattered in recent days following a barrage of Iranian missiles and drones launched toward the Gulf in response to the US-Israel attack on Tehran that began on Saturday.

— Business of Fashion

The only way to get a new home these days? Death.
The Wall Street Journal reports that nearly one out of every five property transfers in California last year was made through inheritance—about 18% of all transactions, representing roughly 60,000 homes. That’s a record for the state and double the national share, according to real-estate data firm Cotality. The root cause is Proposition 13, which capped property taxes in 1978. A new buyer may pay 10 times more than their next-door neighbor who bought in the 70s. So people hold on until they die, and the only way for younger Californians is to outlive someone they love.

California is the number two interior design market in America. This is a sad one, and assuredly happening across all of America, not just California. For designers, a market where properties change hands through estate transfers means a different kind of client, one inheriting a house full of someone else’s choices, ripe for a full redesign. Keep an eye on Texas, which may overtake California entirely.

And with the aging boomer population decreasing, there is a massive transfer of home wealth on the horizon in the next 5-10 years. It will be a fascinating time to see what happens when these properties switch hands to the next generation. I think it will be a massive boom for our industry.

Furniture orders confirm what we know: flat 2025
The latest Smith Leonard Furniture Insights report is in, and Home Accents Today has the data: new orders among survey participants finished 2025 flat with 2024 levels. Shipments declined slightly. Forty percent of retailers cited economic uncertainty as their biggest concern. Smith Leonard said the year’s results reflect “a market that remained resilient despite a range of economic and geopolitical pressures,” calling it “perhaps a relative win in light of the challenges presented by the year’s disruptions.”

This tracks. A quick look at my company’s profit and loss shows we were flat-ish last year, maybe a touch up. Knowing the broader industry was treading water too makes me feel okay about where we landed. The Smith Leonard report points to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East as a risk for the furniture sector, with escalating military action already disrupting oil markets and shipping routes, pushing oil prices higher and raising freight costs.

The good, the bad, and the ugly on tariffs
What a weird publication Furniture Today is. A blast from the past. I imagine inside their corporate offices looks just like Dunder Mifflin. But they’ve had a busy week, and we suffered through scrolling their archaic website so you don’t have to.

The Good: Senators Coons and Rosen introduced the Housing Tariff Exclusion Act, which would automatically exempt homebuilding materials from current and future tariffs. Roughly 60% of builders have already seen cost increases. This bill won’t fix everything, but at least someone in Washington is trying to be surgical about it.

The Bad (now less bad): A federal judge just cleared the way for IEEPA tariff refunds. Judge Richard Eaton of the US Court of International Trade ordered Customs and Border Protection to issue refunds to all importers whose entries were subject to IEEPA duties struck down by the Supreme Court. The administration brought in an estimated $130 billion from those tariffs. Dan Anthony of We Pay the Tariffs, a small-business coalition, called it “a victory” and demanded “a full, fast, and automatic refund process.” The payment process remains murky—but the ruling is real. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said a 15% global tariff (up from 10%) is “likely” this week as a replacement. So with one hand they giveth, and with the other they taketh away. Furniture Today has more.

The Ugly: Post-SCOTUS, the administration isn’t backing down. Trump signed an executive order imposing a new 10% global tariff under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, effective almost immediately. Section 232 duties of 25% on furniture remain untouched. Call your customs broker. Call your UPS guy. Until invoices start rolling in, most of us have no idea how much these tariffs have actually cost us.

Industry

Kamal-ol-Molk

Life of an Epstein designer
A new exposé has surfaced on the legendary French interior designer Alberto Pinto and his entanglement with Jeffrey Epstein. Pinto, who died in 2012, was responsible for much of the interior of Epstein’s notorious Upper East Side mansion at 9 East 71st Street. His name appeared prominently in Epstein’s contacts.

You see, at the highest levels, interior designers become something close to royalty. They enter the most intimate spaces of their clients’ lives—closets, drawers, bedrooms. Designers like Peter Marino travel with private security details. They get commissioned by the world’s most powerful people. And sometimes, that proximity pulls them into darkness. The closer you get to extreme wealth, the sharper your judgment needs to be about whose money you’re taking.

This is salacious, well-reported, and worth your time behind the paywall. It reminds me of that New York Times exposé years ago about a design firm running a money laundering scheme through client accounts. Or this Tampa designer who allegedly ripped off a Yankee legend. These stories are rare in our industry—but when they surface, they’re always a page-turner.

Related: Designer Amy Vermillion tackles the ethical dilemma no one in the industry wants to talk about: Should you work with criminal clients?

What our industry can learn from Pokémon
Pokémon turned 30 this week. Domus published a brilliant essay on why the franchise is a masterclass in designing rarity—and the business lessons for our world are significant:

More than a simple card game, Pokémon built a portable micro-economic infrastructure. Every card functions as an interface: it combines image, numerical data, rarity symbol, and condition into a single graphic object. Within a few square centimeters, hierarchy, desire, and market logic converge. It is systemic design that translates abstract concepts—scarcity, prestige, valuation—into a language immediately legible even to a child. In this sense, the Pokémon card may be one of the most sophisticated pedagogical devices of the past thirty years.

— Domus

A Pikachu Illustrator card—one of roughly 40 copies in existence—just sold at auction for $900,000. The card itself is ink on cardboard. The value is documented scarcity inside a story shared by a whole generation. One of my companies has built something similar with our fabric patterns and colorways. Clients collect them the way devotees collect relics, almost like religious symbols. When a colorway is gone, it’s gone. This requires discipline, but if you can build scarcity into the DNA of your product from day one and create mythology around your work, you’ll make your customers say: “Gotta catch ‘em all!”

Design is medicine
House Beautiful just published a deep piece on neurodivergent-friendly design—how lighting, acoustics, texture, and spatial layout can be calibrated to support the one-in-five people who process sensory information differently. There’s dimmable warm-toned lighting, transition zones, and flexible furniture that reduces cognitive load. How design makes people feel is everything. I’ve known this for a while and now the science is catching up. In May, my company is opening a design project built around neuroarchitecture. We’ll be measuring heart rates and emotional responses as real people walk through the door. Actually wiring up humans to understand what good design does to the body. The brands that figure this out first will own the next decade.

The Textile Hall of Fame: a fight over bragging rights
The International Textile Alliance (ITA) announced the launch of the Textile Hall of Fame—and the American Home Furnishings Hall of Fame is threatening legal action, claiming ITA copied its name and format. Board first vice president Gat Caperton said “the timing and manner in which ITA has chosen to position and launch its new venture is uncannily similar to ours.” The ITA says “Hall of Fame” is a common designation used across industries. The whole thing will launch at the Interwoven Textile Fair, May 19-21. Two industry organizations are suing each other over the phrase “Hall of Fame.” You can’t make this up.

Big box retailers and interior design
Havertys just released Q4 earnings and Furniture Today has the breakdown: revenue hit $201.9 million, up 9.5% year over year, with comparable store sales climbing 8.2%.

Here’s the number that should concern every independent designer: the company’s in-house design services now represent 33.3% of total sales, with design-led average tickets jumping 11.9% to $8,072.

That confirms what we’ve known for a while—free interior design services from big box retailers are taking a real bite out of the market for independent designers. At the AD100 level, this doesn’t touch you. But for designers in the long tail, figuring out how to articulate your artistic value against free-ninety-nine is becoming the defining business challenge of our time.

Tech

Kamal-ol-Molk: Mirror Hall — Domus

A reckoning for industry software
You may have noticed we talk about Dennis Scully a lot. There’s a reason: he’s one of the sharpest mouthpieces in the industry, a genuinely good guy, and he keeps giving us things to talk about. This week on Business of Home, Keith Granet (founder of Studio Designer and author of The Business of Design) discussed what design firms might look like in 2035. Granet talked about growing from three employees to 120, with 22,000 designers on the platform.

That’s not the flex he may think it is. In the age of AI, 120 employees serving 22,000 designers is a vulnerability, not a strength. Consider this: In 1998, Kodak employed 170,000 people. In 2012, when Facebook bought Instagram for one billion dollars, it had just thirteen employees. Large companies are not agile because they have huge payrolls to worry about.

Designers never leave these ancient systems like Studio because migration is painful and expensive. That moat has evaporated. AI tools can now move your entire history from one platform to another while you sleep. Look at Cal AI—two 16-year-old kids built a calorie-tracking app, threatened Under Armour’s MyFitnessPal, and got acquired for $435 million in 18 months. If a better platform for designers, like Programa, builds an AI migration bot, suddenly Studio Designer’s 22,000 users are up for grabs. Granet is a good operator and problem solver, but I’m very bearish on companies like his surviving the next decade without a radical pivot.

Philippe Starck uses AI to design less
Forbes profiles the iconic French designer’s ongoing collaboration with Kartell and Autodesk, where Starck uses generative AI as a creative accelerant—feeding it a brief and letting the algorithm propose structural solutions that a human mind wouldn’t reach on its own. Starck has called AI “a motorcycle for my mind.” His A.I. chair—made from 100% recycled material—asked a simple question: can you carry the human body with the least material possible? The result uses less plastic than any comparable production chair. This is a designer using AI as another paintbrush. He originates the idea and AI manifests his vision. Cool stuff by Mr.Keep an eye on Starck. We are intrigued enough to keep an eye on his next move.

Etsy is as essential as Instagram for designers
Veranda published a deep guide on shopping Etsy as a designer—and it’s better than you’d expect. They call out stores like Fresh Vintage Market and Textile Trunk, which stocks antique fabrics from the 1790s and 1890s. My company has a modest Etsy presence, but beyond offloading inventory, Etsy is a legitimate sourcing tool. I use it to peep at retro rattan chairs, French tapestries, one-of-a-kind textiles you’d never find in a showroom. There are so many ways anyone in any level of our industry can use the giant platform of Etsy to find opportunity. Don’t sleep on it, it’s not just for cute grandma’s old ladies selling crochet.

Trends

Kamal-ol-Molk: Persian Musicians

The return of Rock ‘n’ Roll grit
Bloomberg reports that the hottest hotels and restaurants in New York and London are going small. The new metric is “content per square foot.” David Rockwell (who built his career on massive venues like Tao) is now designing intimate, considered spaces. Cozier, grittier, more human. The same impulse drove the Hotel Chelsea renovation, and if you haven’t watched the Architectural Digest documentary on the Chelsea’s redesign, kill 15 minutes with it this weekend. The music, the rock star history, the deliberate choice to leave design elements feeling roughed up and rustic—it’s fantastic eye candy and a case study in why Rock ‘n’ Roll grit has more soul than polish.

Analog makes a comeback
Architectural Digest reports that old-fashioned buttons, switches, and knobs are returning to the home—part of a broader “analog wellness” movement. As architect Yan M. Wang put it, a home where “technology is always in the background, working and listening, feels anxiety-producing.” Dwell recently named the decline of smart homes a top trend. And it’s not just interiors: Domus reports that from January 2026, the European New Car Assessment Programme will mark down cars that rely solely on touchscreens for basic functions like turn signals and wipers. Volkswagen brought back physical buttons for climate and audio. Mercedes replaced touch sliders with traditional switches. Even Jony Ive’s new Ferrari Luce goes back to physical knobs.

My wife has been shopping for an SUV for 10 months and has rejected six of them for one reason: no buttons. She can buy whatever she wants, but she refuses to drive a car without physical controls. And she’s absolutely right. Talking to your car to lower the fan speed makes no sense. Touching a glass screen at 70 mph to change the temperature makes no sense. This article will make her very happy.

And it makes us super happy to see this trend surging, as people start to reject technology for a more human touch.

Loose Threads

Mind blowing stuff. This guy generates full home tours using only a Zillow listing in eight minutes.
And this AI turns a floor plan into a fully-rendered movie of your family walking through the home. Decorated any way you want. What are we even doing anymore?
I’m not a Starbucks fan, but I think they really nailed this chair.
The Rijksmuseum just confirmed a painting lost for 65 years as an authentic Rembrandt.
Swarovski x Shrek. No one saw this coming. If you know me, you probably already know I love it.
Stark launches “Seeking Simplicity,” a new rug collection of textural whites and wax paper neutrals. Chad Stark must not have gotten the memo that stark white design is on the outs.
Who doesn’t love Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous? It’s super fun to browse through the most expensive homes ever sold in US history.
Jazz legend Charlie Parker’s townhouse on Avenue B is for sale. If these walls could talk.

Playtime

Last Week’s Common Thread: TASTE
Congratulations to... well, no one! Last week’s thread proved elusive, leaving the field wide open. TASTE was the secret ingredient—a reminder that in design, the most refined details are often the ones we savor most.

Now, let’s see if you’ll be able to guess this week’s common thread. It’s playtime!

Analyze the puzzle below and guess the one word that connects all four images.
Click HERE to submit your answer.
Type your answer in the subject field and hit send!

A 1-hour private Zoom call with Mr. Thread to untangle your toughest business challenges.
A mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle!

Good luck, Threaders!

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

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How can we make this better? Reply to this email and tell us. We read every message and genuinely want to know what you think.

#00016 - The art of the fight

Mr. Thread — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 23:25:22 GMT

Hendrick Avercamp: Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters

Welcome to Mr. Thread, thanks for being here! Every week, I bring you the interior design news and industry intel that actually matters to your business. This journal will help you stay informed, grow your business, and uncover your next opportunity. Please reply directly to this email and let us know what you think. We read every message.

Hello readers,

The Supreme Court just ruled Trump’s IEEPA tariffs unconstitutional in a 6–3 decision. This was a shock result, but keep the champagne on ice for now. The administration has other tools, and new tariffs are already being drawn up. Section 232 duties of 25% on furniture remain intact, rising to 50% in 2027. For the interior design business, the chaos continues.

Here’s the view from where I sit. We’ve lawyered up and we’re filing a lawsuit to recover what we’ve paid over the last year plus. For a small textiles business, we’ve spent a fortune in additional tariff costs that were, in the words of the court, “unconstitutional.” Our rates tripled—from an average of 5% to 16%. We implemented a tariff surcharge, and surprisingly, the response from customers has been zero pushback. Every business owner I know in this industry has passed the majority of these costs on to their clients. And none of us are happy about it.

I’m actually all for the spirit behind bringing manufacturing back to America. We used to have a brilliant textile and furniture industry in this country. Policy changes in the early '80s gutted towns from Fall River, Massachusetts, to High Point, North Carolina. The factory closures decimated entire communities.

I know this firsthand: my family runs a factory in an ancient city and hires skilled local workers. Keeping it open isn’t always the best move for our bottom line, but we stay because we believe our business is more than numbers on a spreadsheet. I recently met Jacob Long, an entrepreneur who bought a shuttering textile mill from Loro Piana in Connecticut. His mission is to make artisanal manufacturing cool again: You know, carpentry, cutting, sewing, the kind of deep, purpose-filled work that built the USA. The spirit behind tariff reform is dear to my heart. The execution is another story.

Managing against uncertainty is what business owners get paid to do. This week, I’ll be on the phone with colleagues across the supply chain, polling my sales team, and modeling out scenarios across the tariff spectrum. Now, the craziness is a known quantity. We know the maximums and the minimums. There’s no excuse not to be managing our businesses, our customers’ expectations, and our supply chains accordingly. So we file our papers, plan for the worst, and keep building. None of this dampens my optimism about the year ahead.

Finally, the read of the week. The Culture Explorer published a piece that articulates something I believe deeply: beauty is essential to how we live, think, and build. Worth your time.

See you next week.

Industry

Jacob Isaacksz van Ruisdael: Winter Landscape

You can’t buy taste
House Beautiful assembled three experts to debate whether taste is taught or innate. Emmanuel Platt of MoMA says you can learn it through exposure. Omar Nobil of Design Within Reach says you can only let people form their own filter. Jeremiah Brent calls it curiosity and audacity. After 30 years selling handmade textiles to the best designers in the world, I’ll add the ingredient they’re missing: exposure with intention. I wasn’t born with taste. I don’t dress particularly well. Don’t ask me to pick complementary colors. But after decades immersed in this world—surrounded by people with extraordinary eyes—taste has seeped into me by osmosis. My wife has an art history degree. My brother has some of the sharpest aesthetic instincts in the industry. That kind of proximity, sustained over years, changes what you see and how you see it. (I can spot a quality textile on a sofa from 100 feet).

The designers who develop the sharpest eye aren’t the most naturally gifted—they’re the most relentlessly curious. They want to know the origin of the weave, the history behind the pattern, the reason a certain hand-finish exists. Stop sending your junior team to Pinterest. Start sending them to mills, archives, and showrooms. Taste lives in your hands and your eyes. Drink it in.

Show house season is upon us
The Kips Bay Decorator Show House in Palm Beach just opened with two homes this year. Double the design inspiration. Designers love these projects because there’s no client to manage, just pure creative freedom across wildly decorated rooms. This is where serious buyers are paying attention. More show houses will follow throughout the year. We’ll cover them as the season unfolds.

Economy

Jacob Grimmer: A Winter Landscape

Arhaus just showed its hand
The company posted $1.38 billion in revenue for 2025, up 8.5%, with comparable sales climbing 3.6% after a brutal 2023. I spent this morning reading their Q4 earnings report while waiting for my kid’s bus. The data says that clients using Arhaus’s in-house design services generate average order values four times higher than clients who don’t. That single data point should be pinned to every designer’s wall. Arhaus is also bringing its supply chain in-house, transitioning its Dallas distribution center to internal management and manufacturing 70% of upholstery domestically from its North Carolina facility. On the macro side, the company flagged the kind of things you read about in Mr. Thread: tariff uncertainty, skilled labor shortages, and a wealthy customer base whose spending tracks stock market volatility. They called the $100 billion US premium furnishings market “highly fragmented.” By the way, that’s corporate-speak for “ripe for consolidation.”

The Supreme Court rules—but the chaos continues
Despite the Supreme Court’s surprising ruling about Trump’s tariffs being unconstitutional, Section 232 tariffs of 25% on furniture remain intact. The de minimis loophole stays shut—a sneaky, painful ruling for wallpaper and fabric companies shipping smaller orders from warehouses abroad. Roughly 80% of our orders fall under de minimis thresholds. Business of Home’s Fred Nicolaus raised a sharp point this week: if companies that passed tariff costs on to customers now get refunds, do those customers have a claim? Legally, no—the importer paid the invoice, the refund belongs to us. But the question of whether it’s good business to keep those refunds is one worth thinking about.

Nobody is moving, just renovating
Lowe’s just confirmed what Home Depot reported last week: Americans are staying put. Lowe’s Q4 sales hit $20.6 billion—up more than 10% year over year—but CEO Marvin Ellison says the company is “still dealing with a housing market that does not have a lot of tailwind.” Comparable sales grew just 1.3%. The “lock-in effect” of low pandemic-era mortgage rates is keeping homeowners in place and forcing a renovate-in-place culture. The average American home is now 44 years old. That’s a lot of deferred upgrades.

Mortgage rates hit a four-year low
The 30-year fixed mortgage dropped to 5.95% as of Feb. 25—down from 6.85% a year ago. It’s nice to see a number in the fives, to be completely honest. Trump directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities, which helped push rates lower. Refinance applications have more than doubled over the past year. But purchase activity remains sluggish—just 8% higher year over year. Fannie Mae expects rates to hover around 6% through 2027. A thaw, not a flood.

Consumer confidence edges up
Here’s some good news. After a brutal January, consumer confidence ticked higher in February. Expectations for additional Fed cuts are helping, but inflationary pressures and tariff uncertainty keep the mood cautious. Consumers aren’t panicking, but they’re not spending with reckless abandon either.

Tech

Jan van Goyen: Winter Scene on the Ice

AI-generated focus groups are here
Fashion brands are using synthetic consumer research—AI-modeled audiences that simulate how millions of users would react to a product, campaign, or website before launch. Business of Fashion reports brands are testing their sites against AI-generated user data that behaves like real consumer feedback.

The applications for our industry are staggering. Imagine modeling 5,000 designers reviewing your fabric collection before you even launch it—testing reactions, preferences, and purchasing patterns without waiting two years for real-world data. The risk: design by algorithm. Chase patterns in data and you lose the art. But used alongside human judgment as a validation tool, synthetic research could change how brands develop products. I’m tracking it closely.

Using AI is becoming a dirty word
Also in Business of Fashion this week, a report finds that fashion brands are quietly using AI across their operations but actively avoiding talking about it.

This makes sense to me because people unconsciously associate AI with laziness. Psychologist Justin Kruger and his colleagues proved it in a 2004 study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Show someone identical work and tell them one version took 26 hours and the other took four, and they’ll rate the high-effort version as better in quality, value, and liking every time. The human mind equates time and effort with quality.

This is why Mr. Thread is and will always be human-made. For luxury brands built on craftsmanship and heritage, admitting to AI use is a serious brand risk. The irony is that the smartest businesses are using it everywhere behind the scenes—they’re just wise enough not to admit it.

Trends

Aert van der Neer: Winter Landscape with Skaters on a Frozen River

Great creative businesses need to step up, then step back
A new documentary on Franca Sozzani (Paving the Way—Franca’s Legacy) just premiered at the Fondazione Sozzani in Milan during Fashion Week. Sozzani ran Vogue Italia for 28 years. She gave her photographers complete creative freedom: choose your models, pick your subjects, take the shot you want. They stayed for decades and worked for less than competitors paid. Her best-selling issue came from that trust, not a boardroom.

Every designer knows the tension: You hire talented workrooms, installers, artisans—then hover around like a helicopter parent because your name is on it. Sozzani’s legacy is proof that stepping back produces better work than leaning in. But I have found that stepping back only works if you step up first. She spotted raw talent early, invested in developing it, and only then let go. If you’re a leader, find people whose instincts you trust, train them until their standards match yours, then get out of the way and let them cook.

This connects to something I’ve always admired about the Giancarlo Giammetti and Valentino partnership—every great artist needs someone to protect them, empower them, and create the conditions for their best work. Sozzani did that for an entire generation of photographers.

Dining rooms are back
This one will make Dennis Scully happy. Anyone who follows his excellent Business of Home podcast knows that Dennis has been dining room-maxxing for years, as the kids might say. Elle Decor calls the return of the formal dining room the biggest trend of 2026. After years of being sidelined by open-concept layouts, the dining room is one of the most energized spaces in the home. Homeowners want fully realized, design-forward rooms—not weird spaces wedged between the kitchen and the living room. Round tables are making a comeback. Bold jewel-tone palettes are replacing stark minimalism. The data finally agrees with Dennis: Even if you only use it twice a year, a great dining room earns its place. My wife would never, ever think of getting rid of ours. It’s her favorite room in the house.

The $400 million ballroom nobody asked for
The White House East Wing—home to every first lady’s office since Eleanor Roosevelt—is gone, demolished to make way for President Trump’s gilded ballroom. The project has doubled in cost and ambition since it was announced: from $200 million to $400 million, from 900 seats to 1,350. Original lead architect James McCrery stepped down in December after clashing with Trump over scale. The Commission of Fine Arts approved it unanimously despite 99% of public comments opposing it (guess what? All seven commissioners are Trump appointees). A federal judge is weighing whether it’s even legal without congressional approval. The interior will echo Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Grand Ballroom: coffered ceilings, crystal chandeliers, and plenty of gold leaf. For an industry built on preservation and craft, razing a 120-year-old wing to replicate Versailles-by-way-of-Palm-Beach is a tough watch.

But the government can do good too
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy created the Beautifying Transportation Infrastructure Council to advise on making highways, bridges, and transit hubs more attractive. The council held its inaugural meeting February 2 and is already planning a national design competition and a guidebook titled Beauty and Transportation. When public spaces are beautiful, people are less stressed; they take care of things; there’s less crime. I’m completely behind this. The administration has been consistent on this front—from Chief Design Officer of the United States Joe Gebbia heading up design efforts to returning federal architecture to neoclassical style. The execution will matter, though. The idea that infrastructure should uplift the human spirit is one this newsletter will always support.

Loose Threads

I thought I had IP issues. Imagine fighting Taylor Swift fans over trademarks?
LEGO and The Met just released a 3,179-piece set recreating Monet’s Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies. My kids have filled my home with Lego to the brim, but this is one I would make room for.
Architects just can’t seem to catch a break this year. The Pritzker Architecture Prize has been delayed after Tom Pritzker was named over a thousand times in the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Concretl has developed a 3D-printed building material made from corn. I’d rather build my house with corn residue than fry my chicken in it.
RIP Areaware, the beloved 22-year-old design brand behind the Cubebot. They were like a more sophisticated Sharper Image. Sad to see them go.
If this is what I missed at KBIS 2026, thank God I swerved it.
BD Barcelona is reissuing original Antoni Gaudí furniture. I wonder if there’s an audience for this?
Design junkies will love this one. SOM teamed up with Rarify to launch a furniture collection at LuisaViaRoma in New York.

Playtime

Last Week’s Common Thread: VELVET
Congratulations to everyone who spotted the luxurious connection! VELVET was the word that tied it all together—a reminder that in design, texture is often the silent protagonist.

Let’s see who has the “eye” to untangle this week’s common thread. Good luck, Threaders!

Analyze the puzzle below and guess the one word that connects all four images
Click here to submit your answer via email.
Type your answer in the subject line and hit send!

A 1-hour private Zoom call with Mr. Thread to untangle your toughest business challenges.
A mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle!

The race is on, Threaders. Let’s see those answers.

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

Enjoying Mr. Thread?
How can we make this better? Reply to this email and tell us. We read every message and genuinely want to know what you think.

#00015 - How design predicts love

Mr. Thread — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 22:12:13 GMT

Titian: Bacchus and Ariadne

Welcome to Mr. Thread, thanks for being here! Every week, I bring you the interior design news and industry intel that actually matters to your business. This journal will help you stay informed, grow your business, and uncover your next opportunity. Please reply directly to this email and let us know what you think. We read every message.

Hello readers,

I just read a Harvard Business Review article by UC Berkeley researchers who found that people who have voluntarily adopted generative AI are working more hours than before, not fewer.

I’ll put my hand up: this is me.

This week I connected Claude directly to our business management software. Now I can ask the AI questions about our numbers in plain English: how are we tracking against last February? Where are the gaps? What needs attention? I get answers instantly, and the boring parts of my job, the formula-hunting and data-cleaning that used to eat my Tuesday afternoons, are handled. This has left space for thinking, plotting, and building. I’m doing more of that than ever.

It’s also freed me up for more side missions. This newsletter being the most obvious one. While Mr. Thread is entirely human researched and written by our small team, it wouldn’t exist without AI taking care of all the monotony. Some people are still sitting around worrying about AI stealing their jobs, but for the majority, AI is just taking care of the busywork that gets in the way of the fun stuff.

The creators who figure out how to use this newfound capacity for work that actually requires taste, judgment, and relationships will own the next decade. Mark my words: A new human Renaissance is coming, and there’s never been a better time in history to be involved in creative businesses.

As Carnevale wraps up in Venice and Mardi Gras fades out in New Orleans, Lent arrives right on cue, the official signal that the parade is over and it’s time to get back to business. This has been a busy news week and there’s lots to unpack, including a Mr. Thread From the mind of with the brilliant and kind Andrea Favaretto Rubelli, CEO of Rubelli. More From the mind of’s will follow—so you if you have anyone you want to see featured, let us know.

So let’s get into it. Keep reading to find out why Pinterest is struggling, why your sofa says more about you than your star sign, and why the ultra-wealthy are spending $10 million on home security.2

Also, this week we are psyched to present our first game, hosted by Mr. Needle! Make sure you scroll down to the bottom to play. We hope you enjoy it!

See you next week.

Trends

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo: The Minuet

Swipe right on good taste
Hinge just added “A dream home must include” as a profile prompt for online daters—and House Beautiful reports that users who engage with it are 39% more likely to go on an actual date. Turns out design taste is a better compatibility signal than star signs.

This makes complete sense to me. Walk into someone’s home and you know everything: what they value, how they live, whether they’re a maximalist or a minimalist, whether they cook or just own pots. Designers have been reading people this way for decades. And anyway, a shared love of conversation pits beats a shared love of brunch or movies every time.

Joy is good ROI
A new Thumbtack survey has a number every designer in business development should memorize: 76% of homeowners are now decorating for themselves rather than prioritizing resale value. House Beautiful reports that 31% of homeowners plan to spend over $10,000 on home projects this year—led by outdoor pools, home gyms, built-in bookcases, and hobby rooms. Hot tub requests are up 135%. Over 40% of millennials say they’re willing to lose money on a renovation if it makes them happier.

“There has been less focus on resale value and more on designing for the individual. This allows clients to take the pressure off of making choices for anyone other than themselves, which makes room for much more play.”

— Avery Cox, interior designer

The client chasing resale value makes conservative choices. The client designing for joy hires you for your ideas, not your predictability. Present your most interesting work to attract more of these clients.

Open concept, case closed?
Interior designer Krysta Gibbons of Kipling House Interiors built her own family home in St. Paul, Minnesota, as a direct argument against open-plan orthodoxy—and it’s working. Homes & Gardens profiles a house designed to emulate a 1920s New England Colonial, complete with formal dining room, butler’s pantry, and deliberate vestibules.

“We fought the new ‘open-concept’ with all our might. I prefer spaces to feel intentional, which just so happens to lean into the story that this is an ‘old house.’”

— Krysta Gibbons, Kipling House Interiors

The result: guests routinely ask when they did the remodel, mistaking the new build for a century-old home. The home boasts sixteen wallpapers, a three-stone checkerboard entry floor combining Carrara, Crema Marfil, and limestone, and a kitchen inspired by “the working kitchens of estates from the turn of the century.” Rooms designed for a purpose hold their meaning longer than zones designed for flexibility. The clients spending serious money on renovations right now want rooms, not zones.

Bottle it
The super brains at MIT have just figured out how to turn recycled plastic into structural floor trusses for housing, potentially solving one of the construction industry’s biggest environmental problems. Dezeen reports that the MIT HAUS research group 3D-printed construction-grade trusses from a composite of recycled PET plastic (mostly recycled bottles mixed with glass fibers). What they made can withstand more than 4,000 pounds before buckling, exceeding US building standards.

It’s not production-ready yet, but keep an eye on this innovation. Would love to see a lot more of this in the luxury soft goods market. If the most creative brands can make recycled fabrics beautiful, it could be a magnificent solution to one of earth’s most dire problems.

“We’ve estimated that the world needs about 1 billion new homes by 2050. If we try to make that many homes using wood, we would need to clear-cut the equivalent of the Amazon rainforest three times over.”

— AJ Perez, research scientist, MIT

Security: the latest renovation niche
The Wall Street Journal has published a poignant piece this week—and it has serious implications for the design industry:

“Pausing at a steel double gate in front of the house, he warned that the security system kicks in even before visitors reach the front door, which is fashioned out of three-inch thick solid steel and has 13 deadbolts. Widerhorn said even the landscaping was designed to be a deterrent: There are sour orange trees with four-inch spikes in concrete planters on the edge of the property; just beyond those trees, separating the house and street, is a moat.
If you try to run through that bush, it will be a bad day for you,” Widerhorn said. Should anyone get past the trees, lasers will detect motion and the system will call the police. Inside the house, three ear-piercing alarms will go off and a fireplace surround in the great room—which is made out of cristallo quartzite and can change color—turns red.”

In Surfside, Florida, the developer of the Delmore—a planned 37-unit ultra-high-end condominium designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, with units priced up to $200 million—has engaged a Washington, D.C., firm founded by a former US Marine Scout Sniper to design the building's security systems. It includes biometric access and iris scanning. Companies offering personal security benefits to CEOs increased 10% between 2023 and 2025, per a Goldman Sachs survey.

Security architecture is moving from bolt-on to built-in. The clients spending at the top of the market want this conversation. This could be the niche that changes your design business.

2026: the year of more
Luxe Interiors + Design’s annual trends report is out, and the consensus is clear: maximalism is a permanent shift. This won’t come as a surprise to regular Mr. Thread readers, but listen to what these designers are telling Luxe:

Atlanta’s Bradley Odom of Studio Dixon Rye calls it “an honesty of form—spaces that feel masterfully mixed and effortlessly lived-in.” Multiple designers point to specialty paint finishes like lacquer and plaster as the next frontier in surface treatment. Clients want rooms that feel personal, layered, and permanent. Nobody is predicting a return to beige. Not a single soul.

“I see 2026 as the year maximalists fully take over. It’s about pushing it further: More pattern, more contrast, more personality.”

— Jenna Gross, Colordrunk Designs

From the mind of

Andrea Favaretto Rubelli leads Rubelli, the historic Venetian luxury textile firm founded in the 19th century. Son of president Alessandro Favaretto Rubelli, he serves as co-CEO with his brother Nicolo. I’ve known Andrea for years. His company represents the very best of culture, creativity and commerce. So much to learn from this wise man!

As a fifth-generation businessman, why do you think so many creative people are not very good at the business side?
It’s not that they’re not intelligent enough to get it; they just get bored by it. It’s not true for all creatives. There are exceptions, but here’s what I think: If you’re a great creative, you’re not necessarily a great businessman, but those who are, I think, are the best entrepreneurs.

Why is velvet having such a major moment right now?
Velvet comes and goes. It’s a normal cycle of interior design trends. Velvet, I think, is the most noble of all textiles. We still have four of the looms that my great-great-grandfather, five generations ago, acquired in 1889, and they’re still operating in our mills. So we have velvet in our DNA, in our blood. I think velvet is trendy now because somehow people are very sensitive. In a way, people are going back to the things that are safe. It makes you feel like you’re safe, you’re soft, you’re surrounded, you’re wrapped. Nothing can happen to you when you’re sitting in a good velvet chair.

Other than your historic looms, how else do you preserve the Rubelli traditions?
Well, we have the Rubelli Foundation, where we keep our tradition and our history alive. So half of what we do is looking back and preserving our traditions, and half of what we do is to innovate, find new processes, invent new textures, and do something that hasn’t been done before—but is somehow inspired by a tradition.

What’s the biggest misconception designers have about using high-end textiles?
Well, the biggest misconception is about performance. “Oh my goodness, it’s delicate. It’s gonna wear out.” But it’s not just about when the fabric ages and looks worn out, but how it ages and how it looks worn out. I always think of Iris Apfel, who used to be a big client of Rubelli—she’s a person who became better with age—like a silk velvet, she aged so beautifully, becoming more and more enchanting.

What is it about Italian craftsmanship that consistently produces products considered “the best” in their category? I’m thinking Ferrari cars, Rubelli velvet, even La Marzocco espresso machines.
Well, thank you. It’s something that we have in our DNA to build things that last and to build things that are beautiful, that taste good, because we grow up in this environment that is so particular. We’re a small country, there’s not room for everything and everybody. We have a very high cost of energy, so we pay a lot of attention to what we do with it, and the cost of labor is very high. So those who target the high end of the market have usually more success than those who target mass markets. If you make things in Italy better, make the best of what you do, you can succeed.

What color or trend are you seeing in luxury interiors right now?
It was blue a few years ago. Right now, we’re seeing more demand for green.

Where do you like to go in Venice to have a coffee and think?
Well, you know our habits in coffee are like, you stand, you drink coffee, and you go away. That’s our way of having coffee. I never sit down to have a coffee, really. But if you want to get inspired, if you want to think, there are a lot of great places you can go. I love going by boat. I like rowing, which is a great thing to do in Venice. That’s my favorite thing, to go out and “wash my brain,” and think creatively.

What’s the best piece of business advice anyone has ever given you?
You have to think every day when you wake up, what is the reason for your company to be there? What makes you unique? Why does the world need you? You need to do things that people will buy every day, and they can’t buy from your competitor. The market doesn’t need followers. The market needs lighthouses. A lighthouse you can recognize from far away, that, I think is a very important point in business strategy.

Economy

Canaletto: The Stonemason’s Yard

Mr. Thread watches the stock market, so you don’t have to.

Wayfair is back in growth mode
Here’s a pleasant surprise. The online furniture giant just posted $12.5 billion in 2025 sales—up 5.1%—its first annual gain since 2020, beating Wall Street on both revenue and profitability. Adjusted EBITDA hit $224 million. Looks like value-seeking consumers who like affordable (I say disposable) furniture are spending again. For an industry that’s been white-knuckling it through a brutal housing market, this is a signal worth watching.

Toll brothers is building our pipeline
Let’s take a look at Toll Brothers, America’s leading luxury homebuilder. They construct high-end single-family homes across the country with average prices nudging $1 million. Their fiscal first quarter was strong—profit of $210.9 million, up from $177.7 million a year earlier, with revenue jumping 15% to $2.15 billion. The company holds 75,000 lots and expects community count to grow 8%–10% annually through 2026 and beyond, with average delivered home prices hovering around $980,000. That’s a lot of luxury interiors waiting to be designed. When the country’s premier luxury homebuilder is sitting on that kind of inventory and projecting steady growth, designers should be paying attention. New Toll Brothers homes don’t furnish themselves.

Frozen out
Home sales fell 8.4% in January, the biggest monthly drop since February 2022. Sales landed at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.91 million, per the National Association of Realtors. Economists had forecast a 4.6% decline but January delivered worse news. Snowstorms, shaky consumer confidence, and a rising median home price of $396,800—all kept buyers on the sideline. NAR chief economist Dr. Lawrence Yun was measured about it: “The decrease in sales is disappointing. The below-normal temperatures and above-normal precipitation this January make it harder than usual to assess the underlying driver.” That’s diplomat-speak for: we don’t know if this is the snow or something deeper.

The Wall Street Journal reports that homes are sitting 46 days on market, up from 41 a year ago. Mortgage rates at 6.1% aren’t getting buyers excited. Two-thirds of 2025 buyers paid below listing price. Florida dominates the distress list—Realtor.com flags Kahului-Wailuku, Hawaii (down 8%), Napa (down 7.1%), and Cape Coral (down 6.2%) among the sharpest declines, driven largely by skyrocketing insurance costs in wildfire-exposed markets.

For designers, homes sitting longer mean clients with more time to invest in where they’re staying. Watch the spring numbers.

Kering’s painful reset
We track luxury fashion closely. What happens to the runway soon affects the showroom. Kering’s 2025 results were rough: revenue is down 10% to €14.7 billion, operating income is off 33%, and Gucci—the group’s engine—continues to drag them down, sliding 19% to €6.0 billion. There were some bright spots: Bottega Veneta grew 3%, Saint Laurent held a 20% margin, and jewelry brands Boucheron and Qeelin posted double-digit Q4 gains. Q4 overall was only down 3%—a meaningful improvement. The reset appears real. So watch this space.

Tech

Veronese: Perseus Freeing Andromeda

Who let the bots in?
You might have seen Claude’s Super Bowl campaign, featuring ordinary AI chats hijacked by predatory “sponsored” suggestions. The joke landed because ChatGPT has made it real. OpenAI just opened its platform to advertisers, and big brands are lining up.

The Verge reports that Target, Williams-Sonoma, Adobe, HelloFresh, Ford, Mazda, and Audemars Piguet are among the first advertisers in OpenAI’s pilot. Ads hit free users and subscribers to the $8/month Go plan. Paid subscribers stay clean—for now. Williams-Sonoma says it plans to “surface relevant, high-quality products” at “decision-making moments.” That’s a polished way of saying: catch someone prompting about kitchen design and sell them a Le Creuset Dutch oven.

OpenAI is essentially conceding the browse-to-purchase pipeline belongs to AI now. Google built an empire on the moment between intent and action. OpenAI is coming for that gap. For design brands, the question isn’t whether to show up in AI search results—it’s what it’s going to cost you to appear there, and what happens to your brand when a rival, or worse, a dupe, outbids you for the top spot.

Wayfair CEO on AI
Furniture Today’s Ray Allegrezza sat down with Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah and came away with a line worth keeping: “Furniture has always rewarded taste and experience. The next decade will reward math. And math rarely loses to intuition.”

The details back it up. Wayfair’s generative-AI tool lets customers upload a room photo and restyle it instantly, and every item is shoppable. Ka-ching. More importantly, multimodal AI now validates supplier product data against imagery, cutting the costly “it looked bigger online” return cycle.

My view: the designers and brands who combine deep client relationships with AI-assisted efficiency will eat everyone else’s lunch. The rest compete on price. That’s a race nobody wants to win.

Pinterest gets the blues
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Pinterest projected first-quarter revenue of $951–$971 million, missing Wall Street’s consensus of $981 million. Shares dropped more than 13% in after-hours trading. The company laid off hundreds of workers in late January to shift focus toward AI products, and is now down more than 28% for the year.

Pinterest facilitates 80 billion monthly searches and recently launched “Pinterest Assistant,” marketed as the first AI-powered, visual-first shopping collaborator. How ironic. Pinterest has been the visual discovery platform for interior design for over a decade, and it’s struggling just as AI is making visual discovery more powerful than ever. Someone is going to own this space. Right now, it isn’t Pinterest.

Industry

Carpaccio: St. Augustine in His Study

Rise of the micro-collabs
André Mellone—14 years running Studio Mellone, clients including Lauren Santo Domingo and Rockefeller Center—just launched his first-ever product line with Stockholm’s Nordic Knots. The collection comprises four rugs. That’s not a typo. Just four rugs.

Pond, Indore, Dots, and Normandie—the last inspired by a striped plaid rug Mellone spotted aboard the legendary Art Deco ocean liner SS Normandie while tumbling down a YouTube rabbit hole. “I dream about it—I know every corner of that ship,” he told Wallpaper*. (Prices start at £995/$1,343.)

In an industry drowning in product, restraint is the most radical move you can make. This is the micro-collab done right.

Havenly strikes again
Havenly has agreed to acquire The Expert in an all-equity deal—terms undisclosed, reported by Business of Home’s Fred Nicolaus. I’ve been watching The Expert closely since launch, so let me give you the real download on this.

The Expert started as something genuinely interesting: an invitation-only platform where the best designers in the business could sell an hour of their time. A 55-minute Zoom with a top-tier designer for $750 to $1,500. For designers, it was side-hustle income that paid for a Hamptons weekend or a business class ticket to the Paris flea market. For the platform, it was a way to build the most exclusive roster in the industry.

Then came the marketplace. The moment The Expert introduced commerce (selling bath mats and candle holders alongside consultations), the incentive structure shifted. It stopped being about elevating the designers and started being about moving products.

Then came the final sell-out, the Havenly acquisition. Havenly CEO Lee Mayer was direct enough:

“They had things we couldn’t do on our own, and we had things they couldn’t do on their own. We realized we’d be more together than apart.”

— Lee Mayer, CEO, Havenly

The thing is, the designers who staked their reputations on The Expert did so precisely because it was exclusive. Havenly, for all its acquisitions, is a consumer business. If I was the brand manager for a top AD100 designer on that platform, I would call this penny wise and pound foolish. I know the financial reality of this industry—designers who appear wealthy on the outside are sometimes deeply in debt, stretched thin between the lifestyle they’re exposed to and the money they’re actually paid. But there’s a cost to being available for $750 an hour when your day rate is supposed to be immeasurable.

For me, this acquisition is the death blow to The Expert ever becoming the high-end marketplace it could have been. And let’s be honest about Havenly’s playbook: they don’t write checks. Every deal is all-equity—Havenly shares traded for businesses that are, at their core, more vision than revenue.

Oh, and here’s an interesting experiment. Pick one of the top designers on The Expert and check out their calendars. All I’m saying is…there’s plenty of availability.

The lawyer who knows where the money is
I caught a great episode of the Business of Home podcast this week. Attorney Seth Kaplowitz, who advises more than 100 design firms from solo practitioners to AD100 studios, dropped a decade’s worth of business acumen into one sitting. His verdict is unambiguous: it’s all about hourly wins. Designers on flat fees lose 9.5 times out of 10. He also has a counterintuitive take on press: a one-paragraph mention in The New York Times drives more inbound business than a 15-page spread in Architectural Digest. High-net-worth clients read the FT and WSJ, not shelter books. If you bill clients for your time (like you should be), this one’s required listening.

Playtime

Greetings, Threaders! I’m Mr. Needle, your design quizmaster. I’m launching a brand-new competition starting from today until the 16th of April. The game is simple, but the challenge is real!

Analyze the puzzle below and guess the one word that connects all four images
Click here to submit your answer via email.
Type your answer in the subject line and hit send!

A 1-hour private Zoom call with Mr. Thread to untangle your toughest business challenges.
A mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle!

I’m waiting on those answers, Threaders. Don’t keep me hanging!

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

Loose Threads

John Edelman has joined Haworth Lifestyle as President, North and South America. One of the best men in the business. Well deserved John!
Three sexy homes. A Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret in Switzerland; The Kappe House in the Pacific Palisades; An LA home that once belonged to Ol’ Blue Eyes. All on the market for sale… I wish.
The curling stone, a century-old chunk of Scottish granite, has quietly become design’s most unlikely muse.
Ten examples of oddly satisfying architecture. Eye candy for those who love cool structures.
Should you have a TV in your bedroom? Ummmm, no.
Wall rugs are having a moment. I’ve always wanted shag carpets on my walls. It may finally be socially acceptable!
The reality of renting your home for photo shoots. (“I’m still getting over the disappointment of having our apartment make it to the final-two round for a 2014 Diet Coke commercial featuring Taylor Swift and dozens of kittens, only to get the dreaded note from Andrea: ‘It went away, release the hold.’ Meow.”)
The New York Times asks: “Can artists help shape American cities again?”

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Mr. Thread

#00034 - A fortune in the desert

~ In Memoriam ~ Dave Dawson

—Kyle Bunting

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#00024 - The truth about Milan Design Week

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~ In Memoriam ~
Dave Dawson