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Every year, paint companies look into their magic crystal balls and, by the power of self-fulfilling prophecy, try to tell the future. They choose a color, give it a silly name, and tell us this is The Color of the Year. Sometimes they’re right. Sometimes everyone ends up painting their walls the c…

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Share Mr. Thread—The Weekly Journal on the Business of Design

Hello readers…

It’s October, and I’m already looking at Christmas ornaments. My textile company has been working on beautiful handmade decorations, including heirloom ornaments for the tree that fold away like a ninja until next year. It makes my heart sing, and if the forecast I mention below is correct, America is in for a $275 billion online holiday spending season.

The best thing is, since we don’t have public shareholders or any private equity bros to answer to, we’re taking our time with a new line of products, letting the team learn, and seeing what customers actually want to buy. There’s something wonderful about watching makers try something new. And there’s no better season to find out whether people love your idea.

That’s the cheery mood I’m bringing into this week. So I was surprised to read Derek Thompson’s excellent piece on the decline of having people over. My house is going the other way. My wife and I love cooking massive meals and opening our home. There’s no better way to show love and be loved. I’d like for design to help more people have that pleasure.

It’s also why I can’t stop thinking about a story I read about a group of friends in Oakland, California, who built a compound together. They live in separate homes on the same plot, share dinners, and the children all run around between the buildings. To me, it sounds like a dream come true.

My mother and her nine siblings each had an apartment in the same building in Egypt. When we visited in the summer, we’d run up and down between everybody’s apartments. Someone was always having tea, or my aunt was making kefta (a seasoned minced meat dish), or butchering a live chicken. There was always somewhere to go. A compound like this is just one way to cure the loneliness epidemic, I think.

I enjoy a version of this in Venice. I can be there alone over a weekend, walk down the street, and find a friend who wants an espresso or a beer. I’ve been telling my wife for years that I’d love a family compound, with enough space for everyone to have their own life and a short walk between the houses. Maybe I’ve always wanted to live in a sitcom, where Kramer stops by at any moment unannounced.

Imagine getting that brief as a designer. A small backyard home for elderly parents, somewhere the cousins can stay at Thanksgiving, a table that multiple families can break bread around. You’d have some fantastic problems to solve. If this really is the direction living arrangements are going, our industry could do so much good with it.

Keep reading for my solution to the ongoing destruction of heritage sites, and more good news about Christmas, especially if you’re in the furniture biz. Then, in Mr. Thread Insider, two color experts cut through the BS and tell us what they really think of the five popular picks for 2027. There’s “butter yellow turning saffron” and a blue-gray that reminded one expert of a car undercoat. This should be fun.

See you next week!
Mr. Thread

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🎲 P.S. Don’t just read—play. We’ve woven a new mystery 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.

💰OPPORTUNITIES

Your next design brief could be a whole compound
Here’s that story I was talking about. In Oakland, a group of friends has spent years living across seven homes at a compound called Radish. They share meals and childcare, and have a regular “baby happy hour.” Now the property is on the market for $3.95 million, the New York Times reports. Some residents are moving into new compounds nearby. Co-founder Phil Levin has also started Live Near Friends, a business helping other people put this sort of arrangement together.

I’d absolutely love it, providing that there are options for separation and space, and assuming nobody’s dog is pooping all over your yard. When I moved to North Carolina, I realized how much I missed having people close by. Working from home was wonderfully convenient. I could do everything on my own schedule and be there entirely for my growing family.

But there was a very deep hole where that everyday community had been. The serendipity of the water cooler, blowing off steam over a drink after work, and of course, seeing the style and personality our colleagues brought through the door every day. It is good to know I am not alone in yearning to be surrounded by people again.

For designers and architects, the opportunity is immense and gratifying. Think about the brief. You need places to gather and doors people can close. Kitchens for a crowd, somewhere to sit when a neighbor stops by, and a way for an older parent to feel part of the household without having to live in the middle of it. Architects and interior designers have plenty to contribute. Of course, there’s the less photogenic work of deciding who buys the groceries and takes out the trash. Radish’s co-founder Kristen Berman calls that the “coordination tax.” Fair enough.

I’d happily talk bins if there’s someone down the path who’s always got people over for Sunday evening gravy. Rooting hard for this trend to continue.

“What we basically learned over the course of Radish is like, there’s a pretty universal desire to live this way.”

— Phil Levin, Radish co-founder, via the New York Times

Furniture companies make Santa’s nice list.
An Adobe forecast expects Americans to spend $275.1 billion online this holiday season. Phew! I was thrilled to see furniture among the stronger categories, with sales expected to grow 7.3%. What great news for furniture companies, who have had a disastrous year.

But anyone in the interior design industry can cash in at Christmas and during the sales periods. A designer could offer past clients a living-room consultation around Black Friday. You might get a new project, or a referral to a daughter who’s getting married. A maker might try a small giftable object. You don’t have to invent an entirely new business before Thanksgiving. In fact, please don’t.

🏭 INDUSTRY

Make the AI giants pay for our heritage
According to a World Monuments Fund study in Wallpaper*, 86% of sites nominated for its next World Monuments Watch are suffering from a lack of funding and resources. That’s not shocking news. These beautiful heritage sites cost money to keep up. Somebody has to repair the roof, and the people who know how to do it properly need to earn a living. We can’t lose these places because nobody profits from paying the bill.

Why are these sites falling into disrepair while the SI industry builds data centers?

By the way, if you haven’t heard, it’s “SI” now. Super Intelligence. Trump signed an order this week directing federal agencies to use that name instead of AI. He also met with technology bosses and announced a voluntary agreement on overseeing their technology, which he called “morally binding.” That’s a doozy, Mr. President. (It sounds to me like the foxes guarding the chicken coop.)

I think the biggest SI companies should be required by law to pay a small share of their revenue into preserving cultural heritage. The government should make it part of the cost of doing business. They’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars building data centers so we can use LLMs to answer our emails, and I’d like some of that cash spent on keeping beautiful buildings going. I’d also base the contribution on revenue, not profit, so these companies can’t try and use Hollywood accounting to pretend they make no money.

I discovered that there’s already a useful example in India. Its corporate social responsibility law requires qualifying companies to spend at least 2% of their average net profits over the preceding three financial years on approved causes. Heritage restoration and the promotion of traditional arts and handicrafts are explicitly eligible. For these tech behemoths, contributing to society should be a legal obligation.

Does anyone have any ideas about how our industry can turn these words into real action? We would welcome your thoughts in the comments section.

A craftsperson should be able to pay the rent
Homo Faber’s Venice exhibition closed this week, but I hope the ambition behind it lasts a lot longer. In Surface’s interview with Alberto Cavalli, the Michelangelo Foundation’s executive director talks about helping talented craftspeople build businesses. The work can be difficult. Earning a living from it shouldn’t be made any harder than it already is.

That’s right in line with Mr. Thread’s mission statement. I know how hard it is to make a career out of being an artist or a craftsperson. You need someone who’ll talk honestly about the business as well as admire the work.

Cavalli wants people to see a future in their skills and stick with them. I love that. Imagine being brilliant at something and abandoning it because you can’t see how to pay the rent.

I want us to be the force that helps these brilliant creative souls not end up as the proverbial “starving artists.” In the coming robotic age, human-made arts will be the most valuable thing in the world. Let’s make sure that makers are paid the money they deserve.

“That there is a bright future for craft. That it is possible to earn a living from human skill. That there is an audience and a market for craft in today’s world and they do not have to abandon their passion out of fear or disillusionment.”

— Alberto Cavalli, executive director, Michelangelo Foundation, via Surface

📊ECONOMY

Lower asking prices, expensive mortgages
The Mortgage Bankers Association’s average 30-year fixed mortgage rate reached 7.3% in the week ending September 25, Realtor.com reports. Purchase applications fell 4% from the previous week. Separately, Realtor.com’s September report found that roughly one in five listings had a price cut. Basically, sellers are trying to get people through the door. I know people who are renovating a kitchen to improve their chances of selling.

If your pipeline depends on clients buying houses, you can see the problem. Instead, I’d talk to the clients who are locked into their homes. Maybe there’s a kitchen they’ve been putting off or a room they’ve stopped using. We can give people a reason to love where they live.

“Mortgage rates jumped to their highest level in almost three years, pushing borrowers to the sidelines.”

— Joel Kan, MBA vice president and deputy chief economist, via Realtor.com

Consumers are worried. They’re still looking at furniture.
The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index fell to 81.9 in September. (This monthly survey shows how real people feel about the economy and whether they plan to spend money.) Respondents were worried about prices and jobs. But in the board’s six-month average of buying plans, furniture remained one of the leading durable-goods purchases people were considering over the next six months. More good news for the furniture companies.

Those of us running a business need to pay attention. A client can still want to renovate a room, even if they have to look at the budget a little closer. Explain what they’re getting and be prepared to work with them on the cost. If consumers are in a buyer’s market for properties, they may feel the same way about buying a sofa. I’d make it very easy for somebody to ask a question before they buy. Answering the phone remains a fairly impressive sales tactic.

“Consumer appraisals of current business conditions became negative for the first time since September 2024.”

— Dana Peterson, chief economist, The Conference Board, via CNBC

📈TRENDS

NY NOW makes room for the handmade
NY NOW is bringing back its Handmade division for its winter edition. The show will have three sections: Gift & Lifestyle, Home, and Handmade. A jury will reviewing applicants for the Handmade section until October 15. I keep telling you, hand-made, artisanal crafts are BACK. How wonderful.

I talk all the time about protecting craft, but the real challenge is to get craftspeople paid fairly. A trade show can help, provided the right buyers turn up and the maker can afford to be there. If you’re exhibiting, treat it as a business decision. Have a plan for whom you want to meet and how you’ll follow up. Compliments are lovely, but they don’t pay the bills.

“We want to create a platform where the quality of the work, the story behind it, and the people making it are truly valued.”

— Dorothy Belshaw, CEO, NY NOW, via Home Accents Today

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🧵LOOSE THREADS

• Es Devlin’s rotating library opens tomorrow at London’s Design Museum with over 2,000 books. There goes my afternoon.

• A very funny piece from McMansion Hell that asks “what is going on with ceiling fans” (stay for the “Fandelier”).

• Check out the Skywalker Grill at the Lucas Museum in Los Angeles.

🎲 PLAYTIME

The UFO has landed
Last week’s Verner Panton prototype UFO lamp sold for $61,920, including buyer’s premium. Avner L. came closest with $45,000 and took this week’s entry in the October 15 grand-prize drawing. Congratulations, Avner!

How much is this 27-foot table for your family compound?

This week’s object is Object #MT-V1, a 2019 mirror-polished stainless-steel table by Zhang Zhoujie. It stretches more than 27 feet from end to end, which should make seating plans interesting when you buy that massive compound for your family and friends.

Your clues:

✅ Made from 304 mirror-polished stainless steel.
✅ It is actually ten independent tables. Each can seat one to four people, or join the others for a larger crowd.
✅ This is an edition of six: five pieces and one artist’s proof.

What is the asking price? The person who guesses closest to its final price wins!

Reply to this email or click the button below to submit your guess.

Submit your answer here

Honor system, please—no using Google to look up the answer! (If you do cheat, we still get the engagement, but you’ll have to live with yourself!)

The Stakes
Whoever gets the closest guess each week wins an entry into our grand prize drawing! We’ll be holding the final drawing on October 15th—the more weeks you win, the higher your chances! Our winning threader 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

In keeping with this week’s theme of community and compounds, I’ve selected a bunch of paintings that show families coexisting throughout history. Look at them all. Not a cell phone in sight!

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🕵🏼‍♀️ MR. THREAD INSIDER #00011 - One of 2027’s Colors of the Year looks like “car undercoat”

Our experts’ unvarnished verdict on next year’s biggest shades

Every year, paint companies look into their magic crystal balls and, by the power of self-fulfilling prophecy, try to tell the future. They choose a color, give it a silly name, and tell us this is The Color of the Year. Sometimes they’re right. Sometimes everyone ends up painting their walls the color of porridge.

I never advocate following trends blindly. I’ve been in this industry long enough to know that good taste doesn’t arrive in a press release. But color forecasts can be a tea-leaf reading of where people’s tastes, anxieties, and money are going. If you run a creative business, you should know what’s coming—even if you use that info to sprint in the opposite direction.

In this week’s Insider, we reveal five leading paint and color brands’ official 2027 shades and ask two color experts what they really think…

Read more

According to a September 24 tenant notice reviewed by Mr. Thread, a court-appointed receiver has been authorized to collect rents and take over management of the Decoration & Design Building annex at 222 East 59th Street in Manhattan. Public listings identify showrooms in the annex including Kettal, Christopher Peacock, McKinnon & Harris and Grande Central.

The notice says the New York State Supreme Court in New York County appointed Steven J. Smith as receiver under an order effective September 3, 2026. It identifies D&D 59th Street Building Company LLC as the property’s owner.

Tenants are directed to continue making rent payments payable to the entity named in their leases, but to mail them to Colliers International REMS US LLC. The notice says the receiver was in the process of engaging a management company and identifies Michael Gatto of Colliers, a Canadian investment management company, as the interim point of contact.

The address is identified as D&D annex in public showroom and property listings, and the building is home to many storied brands in the interior design business. The main D&D Building lists its address as 979 Third Avenue. The notice reviewed by Mr. Thread names only the East 59th Street property.

The notice does not identify a buyer or announce a transfer of ownership, but this is a breaking story, so remember to watch Mr. Thread for more.

Share Mr. Thread—The Weekly Journal on the Business of Design

Hello readers…

I’m back, I’m jet-lagged, and I’m feeling cranky. It’s been a great couple of weeks in Europe and now I’m ready to get back to other business. Good timing, because I just saw a Business of Home story titled “Why the design industry needs anonymous critics.”

I started reading what I thought was a beautiful love letter to Mr. Thread, the industry’s fastest-growing newsletter, written by yours truly, an opinionated, anonymous industry veteran.

The piece rattled on about the value of insiders saying what the polite design world won’t. It says anonymous writers can be useful because they don’t have to worry about offending clients, vendors or peers, or getting cut from a party list. All true. But instead of Mr. Thread, it mentions “The Grumpy Decorator,” a Substack that’s been going for…checks notes…only three weeks. It has published three posts to about a dozen followers.

I mean, come on.

No disrespect (because we feature an excellent Grumpy Decorator piece in this very newsletter) but Grumps will probably have given up publishing by Thanksgiving. Mr. Thread is a word-of-mouth sensation that has been growing for almost a year, and is read and respected by thousands of leaders of this industry. The email address of the CEO of a publicly traded company landed on our subscriber list last week, which blew our minds (guess who?). All told, we have published close to 200,000 words of deeply researched, sometimes cynical, but always passionate content.

I’m actually flattered that Business of Home considers us such a threat that they ignore Mr. T, and instead choose to cover “non-stories.” But I didn’t start this journal to compete with BoH. Frankly, who in their right mind would want to run that business model in this dawning age of the independent publisher? Instead, we’ve been effusive about their team, and probably send them more traffic than the dozens of daily emails they bombard you with.

But I get it. They’re going through their own version of enshittification having been acquired this year by another media powerhouse, Ziff Davis. Go figure… they’re slowly starting to lose their soul.

Alas, we have much bigger things to worry about here. I tell every entrepreneur I mentor: be the best you can be, focus on putting out the best you can put out, and the competition will stand no chance. That said, a little fire in the belly from “the competition” certainly helps push us on to greatness.

This week we have a massive issue with tons of opportunities to help grow your business. So keep reading to find out why show houses are a waste of money, why hotels are brilliant lead generation, and what artwork Johnny Depp is exhibiting this week.

This one’s another banger.

See you next week!
Mr. Thread

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🎲 P.S. Don’t just read—play. Scroll down to meet last week’s winner and guess the price of this week’s flying saucer

💰OPPORTUNITIES

Could a show house ruin your business?
The Kips Bay Decorator Show House has opened in Greenwich Village with 22 designers. Kips Bay is the godfather of show houses. Everybody wants in. It’s like winning an Academy Award, except the award comes with an invoice that’ll give you a stomach ulcer.

I’ve been involved with these things for decades. If a great designer calls one of my companies and asks for fabric, I nearly always say yes. Twenty years ago, the late, great Thomas Britt wanted roughly 150 yards of a red-and-gold fabric for a Kips Bay entrance. We gave it to him. The return was the relationship. I helped a great designer make a great room, and I’ve watched relationships like that turn into real business.

It’s a harder game for the designer. Kips Bay gives you the room, sure. Brands may give you free products. But nobody gives you the upholsterer, electrician, trucks, flowers, or insurance. Designers tell me they often spend at least $50,000 out of pocket, sometimes with four or five days to install it.

The math is super scary.

Say you spend $50,000 on a show house. If your 25% to 30% markup, plus the design fees, leaves you keeping about a quarter of every dollar billed, you need $200,000 in new work just to get your money back.

Then pay the studio and the staff, and count the weeks everybody spent making the room happen. If you’re really keeping 15 cents on the dollar, break-even jumps to about $333,000.

Holy shit. You’d better know exactly what you want that room to do.

So before you commit to a show house, you must ask yourself what do I want my business to get out of this? Defining the objective clearly is the key to success.

An established designer’s objective may be to flex their creative muscles, raise their profile, and make a room everybody talks about. Fine. They can afford it.

But a young designer who needs work has an entirely different objective. They must put their ego aside and make a room a potential client can imagine living in. If it’s an art piece to impress designers, expect a lot of applause, but no clients. You might as well light $50,000 in cash on fire.

“[A]n invitation to design a room here is a defining moment in an interior designer’s career.”

— Andrew Torrey, via Galerie Magazine

When your best client says no photographs
House Beautiful reports that a $40,000 kitchen project collapsed after a designer told the client to allow photography or pay a $300 exclusion fee. The client walked. This has kicked off a massive argument about privacy and portfolios.

This is one of the biggest problems interior designers bring to me. You finally get the really, really, really amazing project from a wealthy client. It may be the best work you have ever done. Then the client says: “This is my home. I don’t want it on your website. I don’t want it on your Instagram.”

I can’t tell you how many designers have cried to me about this. Literal tears. How do you get more work when you can’t show the best work you’ve ever done?

My advice is: Deal with it before the marble arrives. Put photography in the first contract. Decide early which rooms are fair game, whether the owner stays anonymous, and who approves the pictures. Some clients may allow a private portfolio shown only in person.

What about renderings? Could you recreate the room and change enough that the house can’t be identified? Maybe. Ask first and label it. The same goes for iPhone pictures. Would the client like you showing snaps of their private home?

These projects are your most important assets and the key to growing your business. You must give them the attention they require.

“There’s a very real opportunity cost when a project can’t be documented.”

— Ali Burgoon Nolan, via House Beautiful

Your next showroom might have 40 rooms and a pool
I spent four days in Crete with a visionary hotel owner. The trip was incredible, and it will produce our most important order of the year (I told you I’m a workaholic, I’m always closing, even when I’m in paradise). It also made something very obvious to me: luxury hotels are a very, very hot place for design brands to be.

Modern Retail reports that brands are already moving into hospitality. At a Lela Rose pop-up in the Montage Big Sky, 82% of customers were new to the brand. Public Goods told the publication that hospitality makes up roughly 75% of its B2B operation.

Getting your product into the right hotel is a brilliant lead-generation play. Guests live with it, touch it and ask what it is. You need them to remember it when they get home.

I do have one warning. In Venice I saw staff uniforms made from a famous company’s heavy jacquard. The workers looked fantastic. It was also 95 degrees and the poor people were suffering like crazy. The hotel may be a showroom, but the concierge is still a person.

“The hotels almost became our content studio.”

— Lizz Niemeyer, Quilt, via Modern Retail

🏭 INDUSTRY

Schumacher buys an archive I can’t pronounce
F. Schumacher & Co. has acquired most of the archive of Vanoutryve, a French-Belgian mill founded in 1860. Van Uchrey? Van-ou-tryve? However you say it, Schumacher now has its hands on more than 75,000 samples and 1,500 swatch books.

It turns out that Frederic Schumacher worked as a Vanoutryve agent before founding his own company in New York. I can see the good in this. Schumacher bought Tillett too. I know the owners; that company was close to going extinct. Schumacher saved it. So good on them.

But the real fear with consolidation is this: will enshittification eventually rear its ugly head? You have to remember these aren’t philanthropic organizations. They are massive businesses with revenue expectations and profit-and-loss statements.

Can they keep the beauty and the oddness of all these little companies alive or sacrifice themselves on the altar of shareholder value? I am certainly hoping for the former, but we’ll see.

“The collection ranges from classic Persian motifs and traditional European florals to early-20th-century French designs.”

— Home Accents Today

Lindsey Adelman refuses the usual ending
Lindsey Adelman has spent 20 years building a lighting studio so successful its glass globes are some of the most copied interior design products after the Eames lounge chair. Her anniversary profile in the Times says the studio is still completely hers. She has no shareholders and says she won’t sell the business carrying her name. Go, girl!

This is the antithesis of consolidation. She moved production to North Carolina and reduced her staff from 35 to 20, so independence hasn’t made every decision painless. But it has let her invest in workshops for employees and celebrate 20 years by deciding to work less. Magnificent.

What do they say? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I tell my own team to relax when it happens. I know it’s infuriating, but nobody copies the thing that nobody wants.

“The way I wanted to celebrate 20 years was to chill out for a minute and work less.”

— Lindsey Adelman, via the New York Times

The Pacific Design Center is becoming an office building
The Red Building at West Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center (PDC) has signed nearly 96,000 square feet of leases across seven deals, according to Commercial Observer. Hourglass Cosmetics is going in. Pattern Beauty. Princess Polly, whatever the hell that is. AllSaints is staying put. These are offices and headquarters, not new showrooms.

The dream was always that the PDC would be a massive design center. A good landlord could fill all three buildings and make it a design landmark for the world, never mind Los Angeles.

But this isn’t a good landlord; it’s Charles Cohen, who continues to lord over the collapse of the D&D. Maybe Charles could learn a thing or two from Jim Druckman, who keeps the New York Design Center alive as an industry and a community, without selling out to Polly Pocket or whoever they are.

“We’re not just a real estate project… We’re an industry with a soul.”

— Jim Druckman, via Business of Home

The Peloton of rugs is coming after your market share
Nothing quite zaps your inspiration like an Ernesta showroom. The custom-rug company was founded by three Peloton alumni and has just opened its 12th location, in Santa Monica. It raised $20 million in Series B funding earlier this year and wants 30 locations by the end of 2027.

The showrooms themselves are a real snoozefest. I don’t understand the sterile, soulless vibe they have created. This isn’t an Apple Store. Maybe that’s beside the point. They do understand consumer behavior. They make rugs to your exact size and show you a 3-D rendering.

If you’re in the carpet business, pay attention. These guys are going to eat your lunch. Of course, a bunch of tech bros building a heavily funded consumer brand made me think of Allbirds. The public company sold the shoe business and pivoted, for reasons I may never understand, into AI-computer infrastructure. So don’t be surprised if your favorite rug company turns into an AI company next month.

📊ECONOMY

Holy shit, what is happening to the 10-year bond?
The bond market is putting the housing market in a chokehold. Wednesday was a bloodbath for bonds. Investors sold after another round of inflation worries, pushing the 10-year Treasury yield (the number mortgage rates tend to follow) to 5.10%, its highest since 2007, Wolf Street reported.

By last week, the average 30-year fixed mortgage had already climbed to 7.12%, its highest in more than two years, according to Mortgage Bankers Association data reported by Reuters. Anyone waiting for cheaper money is shit out of luck.

Mortgage rates are horrible. Builders feel it, buyers feel it, and eventually our industry feels it because, as I seem to say every week, people who don’t buy houses don’t furnish them. I’m not calling it a collapse quite yet, but I’m going to keep my beady eye on permits and completions, and what I see going down inside my own businesses. That will tell you more than some “expert” yelling on CNBC.

The U.S. Census Bureau just reported that August housing starts ran at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.275 million, down 2.6% from July. Permits fell 2.7%, and completions fell 11.9%. Single-family starts went the other way, up 7.6%, although the bureau says the margin of error around that monthly number is wide.

“Privately-owned housing starts in August were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,275,000.”

— The U.S. Census Bureau

MillerKnoll got a refund, not a cure
MillerKnoll, the massive global furniture and design company, saw first-quarter sales fall 3.4% to $923.4 million. Orders rose 3.2%, which sounds better, until you dig deeper: North American contract sales fell 5.3%, international contract orders rose 17.3%, and global retail orders rose 4.3%.

My delicate boardroom assessment was that they’re getting their asses kicked. That’s a little unfair to the good parts of the quarter, but I tend to keep a close watch on the North American business I watch.

Tariff refunds also made the margin look healthier. Management admits the refunds added 110 basis points to operating margin. I wouldn’t say no to that refund, but I wouldn’t mistake it for sales.

“Orders of $913.9 million, up 3.2% as reported and up 3.5% organically.”

— MillerKnoll, Inc. Reports First Quarter Fiscal 2027 Results

I hate to say it, but RH chose the right street
RH has opened its first standalone RH Estates gallery in Greenwich, a 20,000-square-foot, two-story bet on traditional design. It sits near two existing RH properties and includes Cucina Angelina, the company’s first Italian restaurant in North America. Their hope is that you enjoy their spaghetti bolognese so much that you accidentally drop $20k on a cloud sofa on the way out.

Greenwich is the perfect market. People forget about Fairfield County because New York City sits next door, but this place is full of old country houses, old wealth, banking money, stock money and some of the most beautiful estates in America. It’s the Beverly Hills of the East Coast. RH now owns what feels like an entire corner of it.

Will the design community embrace Estates? I don’t know. I think the customers absolutely will. Using restaurants for lead generation is a smart play, and for once I salute you, Gary Friedman.

📈TRENDS

The luxury of getting lost
Everyone is talking about AI shopping, AI shopping, AI shopping. Make sure the machines can find your product. Make sure it shows up on ChatGPT.

Then go to the Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen (aka the Paris Flea Market). Monocle reports that five million people visit its seven hectares every year. Furniture, clothes, silver, paintings. And the place is completely AI-proof.

That creates romance. As the Monocle writer says, you go looking for a table and leave with 16 silver dachshund knife rests that make absolutely no sense in your apartment. An algorithm didn’t tell you to find them. You found them, and now you will bore everybody at dinner with the story.

Jim Druckman says designers come to 200 Lex not simply because they have to source something, but because they want to shop and participate—part of his strategy to make the New York Design Center a destination rather than just a building full of showrooms, he told Business of Home.

People want to get out from behind screens. Put them in front of a salesperson. Let them touch the product and discover something away from the computer. I am completely sold on that.

“The world’s largest flea market is a maze of human history that answers to no algorithm.”

— Susanna Schrobsdorff in Monocle

Everybody is a shelter magazine now
A recently launched Substack called Homebody has published a list of 10 favorite interior-design publications. I had never heard of half of them. House & Garden, fine. World of Interiors, of course. Then a Swedish property agency, and an Australian site, and Never Too Small. Jeez, how many publications are there?

Some of the work is beautiful. I clicked through one site, Scura, and thought, what the fuck is going on here? The website is deliberately a mess. Thumbnails of the stories dance around and try to avoid your click. It’s different for the sake of being different. Yet… beautiful. And the quality of the photography and the writing is next level. Who even owns it? A company named “Flawk,” whose website is equally ambiguous.

The obvious opportunity is for designers to publish for themselves. Jake Arnold has launched a Substack, Jake’s Take, with projects, sourcing discoveries and material from his library. A famous designer showing people how to choose green paint can reach an enormous audience. Mr. Thread talks to a smaller group of business readers. We’re all happy on Substack, which says it has more than 5 million paid subscriptions. Enshittification is surely next.

Would I tell a designer with something useful to say to start a Substack? Yes. Do I open all the Substacks in my own inbox? Absolutely not.

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🧵LOOSE THREADS

• Johnny Depp is now a sculptor. His first piece is a two-meter white-bronze half-man, half-rabbit carrying a “sword of truth,” cast in Milan and shown in Istanbul.

• LVMH is opening 71 workshops, hotels and boutiques across 13 countries for three days in October. I talked about this last week. Everyone wants to see how the sausage is made.

• A Florida family has become famous for fifteen minutes after alleging in a lawsuit that it spent more than $6.7 million on 200 fake Warhols. Allegedly, some cost just $30 to make.

🎲 PLAYTIME

Trey cost how much?
Last week Mr. Needle asked you to price Trey, the largely complete, 66-million-year-old Triceratops that spent nearly three decades at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center before appearing at Joopiter.

It sold for about $5,500,000.

Hillary Ellner came closest with a guess of $8.2 million and takes this week’s entry toward the October 15 grand-prize drawing. Congrats, Hillary!

What did the UFO lamp sell for?

This week’s object is a 1975 prototype “UFO” lamp by Verner Panton. It is plastic, steel, and aluminum, hangs nearly five feet, and was manufactured by J. Lüber AG in Basel.

Here are some clues:

✅ Panton gave us the first single-form plastic cantilever chair.
✅ This lamp is a prototype, not a later retail example.
✅ Its presale estimate was $4,500 to $5,500.

What was the final sale price, including buyer’s premium? The person who guesses closest to its final price wins!

Reply to this email or click the button below to submit your guess.

Submit your answer here

Honor system, please—no using Google to look up the answer! (If you do cheat, we still get the engagement, but you’ll have to live with yourself!)

The Stakes
Whoever gets the closest guess each week wins an entry into our grand prize drawing! We’ll be holding the final drawing on October 15th—the more weeks you win, the higher your chances! Our winning threader 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

This week’s art is inspired by “masks.” We led with a traditional tabloid “blind item,” and the theme of the intro was anonymity. Longhi, Manet, Tiepolo, Ensor, and Hermans all painted masked revelers, so imagine this week that our whole industry is one glorious masked ball.

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

INTERIOR LIVES #00002 - Jeffry Weisman

Jeffry Weisman is a San Francisco interior designer whose work combines glamour, theatricality, and meticulous restraint. He began his career designing corporate interiors before establishing a product-design consultancy with Charles Pfister. In 2000, he joined forces with artist Andrew Fisher to create Fisher Weisman, a design practice known for highly individual homes and handcrafted furniture, lighting, and accessories. Here, Weisman reflects on chairs, loss, textiles, difficult clients and why a smaller office became his better version of success.

I was 16 when I started in interior design. I was hanging out with a girlfriend in high school whose mother was a decorator in Los Angeles. Her mother asked if I could carry a chair into the house. She looked at me with a cigarette in her hand and said, “I like the way you carry that chair. Do you want a job?”

I started out as her gopher. In a short time I was promoted to shopping and selecting fabrics and doing more than that. I knew rapidly that it was something I loved, and that I could imagine it being a real career for me.

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Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our members-only section.

I went to Venice for Homo Faber. I saw the Biennale, a few factories, a few churches and ate an irresponsible amount of food. You can see a lot in a showroom, but you never get to see real artisans making things that take thousands of hours. That’s why Homo Faber is such a mind-blowing experience. …

Read more

Hello readers…

Maybe it’s the Negroni talking, but sunsets in Venice just hit differently. Everything’s alive here. The sky outside my hotel window has been doing ridiculous things every night, the streets are full, and everybody is on the way to their next Aperol Spritz. I’m here for Homo Faber, of course, one of my favorite weeks of the year.

I spent this week being a cultural ambassador, visiting factories, wandering around churches, and looking at work so good it made me question my very existence. I also ate my entire body weight in spaghetti alle vongole. The place next to our factory makes the most incredible dish with clams and maybe three or four ingredients. It’s simple and incredible.

I’ve told you before that Homo Faber is quickly becoming one of the must-see events on the design calendar. I was still not ready for this edition. It’s just such a mind-blowing experience — the way it’s curated, the way you walk around the island to see it, the way you travel from room to room. Even the staff are dressed in hand-dyed uniforms.

WWD just published a report on why our industry should take Homo Faber seriously. Sure, it’s getting much bigger, but it’s also putting furniture, marble, glass, metal, and textile makers in the same rooms as the people that matter. If you make incredible wallpaper or any other beautiful work by hand, this would be a great show to consider. Our readers should be paying attention.

The mission here is the same as Mr. Thread’s: to get people excited about craft again and give artists a venue where they can put their best foot forward. Every object here has a QR code, then visitors vote, and somebody wins. For too long, everyone has been too nice to each other about art. A little competition brings out the best in people, I say.

This week’s Insider is my full Homo Faber report. I’ll show you the best rooms, the objects that stopped me in my tracks, and the pasta I spilled on my shirt. I went to every exhibition we could get into, took the iPhone snaps, and came home with enough ideas to keep our showroom busy for a year. Be warned, this kind of show takes you outside your comfort zone. If you run a design business and believe that craft is one of the last great luxuries, you’ll see why you need to be there next year.

Also, keep reading to find out about a new American school teaching the classical building trades, the latest on tariff refunds, and why a former prison is currently Japan’s hottest new hotel. Then meet me in Venice below.

See you next week!
Mr. Thread

Leave a comment

🎲 P.S. Don’t just read—play. Scroll down to find out who guessed right on last week’s item, and enter this week’s challenge.

🏭 INDUSTRY

Congrats to the Godfather
Jim Druckman is getting the 2026 Design Leadership Award at the Design Summit in Los Angeles this November. Jim has run the New York Design Center since 1995, and under his watch 200 Lex became a trade-only home for nearly 100 luxury showrooms.

Jim has spent decades making the design business feel like a community. He gets designers and makers talking, and keeps 200 Lex a center of the design world. You can still go there, lounge in the chair, and run into an old friend.

He is a treasure for our industry and he means the world to me. For close to 2 decades he has been trying to get me to move my fabric company out of the doldrums of the D&D to his sunny and warm confines. I never took him up on his offer, but honestly, it feels like a decision I wish I could revisit.

I love this award. Enjoy your night in LA, Jim.

Charleston keeps the skills alive
Not far from where I live, the American College of the Building Arts in Charleston teaches carpentry, blacksmithing, plasterwork, and stone carving. Students work on real buildings while earning an applied-science degree with liberal-arts coursework. Sounds like a creative nirvana to me.

Everyone seems to be complaining that they can’t find skilled labour. Then they act surprised when the kids say they can’t find a way into a trade. Somebody has to shape the stone and lay the plaster; we can’t all be out there choosing paint colors and cushions. I’d hire the young person who spent a few years learning a trade over someone with a beautiful mood board any day of the week.

“Aut disce aut discede”

— the student body’s unofficial motto at American College of the Building Arts in Charleston. [“Either learn or leave.”]

Tariff refunds are not free money
This tariff-refund story in Business of Home gets it spot on: customers shouldn’t expect tariff refunds to come back to them. The businesses absorbed losses, watched demand get ruined, paid more to move things, and now new tariffs are landing on top of the old ones. We were getting crushed then, and we still are.

At my business we’ve only had a handful of people ask us for a refund. You’ve got to be pretty audacious to reach out and ask, I think. Nice try. But the refunds don’t line up with what smaller companies actually paid out. The big boys can turn it into a lovely quarter. Companies in the middle are still getting kicked in the ass.

Look at RH’s numbers. Its latest reported adjusted EBITDA included $55.1 million from tariff refunds. That is real money when you’re a giant company. For a smaller textile business, the refund cash just vanishes into the overhead.

“Everything we’ve received back has gone into reducing the ongoing increase in overhead costs. Shipping and fuel surcharges are through the roof these days.”

— John Greenawalt, Stout Textiles, via Business of Home

RH discovers traditional
RH beat forecasts this quarter, and as reported this week its new traditional Estates line is bringing in a new customer. That shows the power of traditional and classical, and how much it’s back. RH is changing the first floors of its galleries to show traditional furniture. They realized they had nothing for the biggest segment of interior-design clients.

My definition of modern? It never goes out of style. The Glass House is modern. RH is contemporary, and contemporary can go out of style in a snap. Have they gone too contemporary? Yeah. Estates seems like a smart play, and I think they’ll do well for a while. But they’re over-leveraged in other places, so I’m not buying a party hat just yet.

They’re trying to scale taste and luxury, which is a hard thing to do without making it a little hokey. Still, as much as I like to poke fun at Gary Friedman, I certainly wouldn’t bet against them.

“Perhaps RH had been ‘too modern’ for the past eight years.”

— Gary Friedman, chairman and CEO of RH, via Business of Home

💰OPPORTUNITIES

The warehouse becomes the gallery
R & Company has opened its Brooklyn Navy Yard warehouse to the public by appointment. I bumped into Zesty Meyers, the visionary behind R & Company, at Homo Faber and heard about the new 16,000-square-foot space. It’s experiential, it’s a warehouse, and it’s much more interesting than your average showroom.

Clients want to see the back of the house, the samples, the tools, the worktables. I say let them. We spend too much time trying to look perfect, and then everyone wonders why the room has no energy. Show your mess.

I’ve never met someone as passionate and knowledgeable about design and craft. Honestly, if we could elect a mayor of the design industry, he would get my vote!

“It feels so refreshing to be able to pull things out and just play.”

— Zesty Meyers, co-founder, R & Company, via ELLE Decor

📊ECONOMY

Five-percent money is back
The 10-year Treasury yield reached 5.04%, its highest level since 2007. If these numbers mean nothing to you, mortgage rates are still in the toilet. People aren’t moving house, and people who aren’t moving house aren’t taking on the big renovation and furnishing projects that follow.

Wayfair has had good reports and it’s still under pressure. Hermès is getting crushed. There’s a really bullish, bad vibe everywhere. I’m not hitting the panic button yet. The client already in the house still has a kitchen, a bedroom and a sitting room that need a change. Go find them.

📈TRENDS

The latest wealth flex is a tree

SPECIAL REPORT FROM MR. WEFT, WEST COAST EDITOR

I was walking my kid to a park in Bel Air, in Los Angeles, not long ago when I noticed a huge crane lifting a full-sized palm tree into what must have been a $40 million home. It was pretty close to the famous Spelling mansion, if you know the area. Anyway, I asked one of the crane operators what each tree cost. He said $180,000. I nearly fell over.

The New York Times has been onto this too. The super-rich are craning mature palms, banyans, baobabs, and whatever else they need to make their new-build feel as if it has been sitting there for 40 years. Because who has time to let trees grow?

Welcome to the K-shaped economy. The other flex in this neighborhood, apparently, is burying your power lines at the cost of half a million dollars or more. I mention it only so you can feel poor in a completely new way.

To be honest, I felt a pang of jealousy for the crane operator. This business didn’t exist five years ago, and now he’s spending his days lifting $180,000 palm trees, and eating the incredible tacos from the food truck that services the manual laborers of Bel Air (and occasionally, hungry dads on their way back from the playground).

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🧵LOOSE THREADS

• • Washington’s proposed 250-foot “Arc de Trump” has preliminary site and building-plan approval.

  • Japan’s former Nara Prison is now a 48-suite hotel, with each suite made from nine to eleven original cells.

  • A giant Poké Ball-shaped hotel is coming to Hokkaido. Gotta catch ‘em all.

  • Faye Toogood has named her crumpled-paper lanterns. Johnny. That’s British slang for a condom, she says.

  • Tom Dixon is showing new lights, tables and textiles at Coal Drops Yard for London Design Festival.

  • Studio Waldemeyer just put rechargeable Lumeable candles in a church. Even the Lord likes sustainability.

  • Raw Edges has added LightMass table lamps made from a single material. Less waste, more floating sculpture.

🎲 PLAYTIME

How much for Trey the Triceratops?
Last week’s item was an original movie poster for the classic Italian movie “La Dolce Vita” (1960). It sold at Sotheby’s last week for $17,125. Freddy V. came in with $16,500 and took the crown. Congrats, Freddy!

This week we’ve got Trey, a largely complete 66-million-year-old Triceratops skeleton. I mean, why not?

Here are some clues:

✅ Excavated in Wyoming in 1993, then restored and mounted in Germany
✅ Spent three decades on public display at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center
✅ The first fossil offered by Joopiter, the auction platform founded by Pharrell Williams

What was the final HAMMER price? The person who guesses closest to its final price wins!

Reply to this email or click the button below to submit your guess.

Submit your answer here

Honor system, please—no using Google to look up the answer! (If you do cheat, we still get the engagement, but you’ll have to live with yourself!)

The Stakes
Whoever gets the closest guess each week wins an entry into our grand prize drawing! We’ll be holding the final drawing on October 15th—the more weeks you win, the higher your chances! Our winning threader 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

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

🕵🏼‍♀️ MR. THREAD INSIDER #00010

Mr. Thread goes to Homo Faber
I went to Venice for Homo Faber. I saw the Biennale, a few factories, a few churches and ate an irresponsible amount of food. You can see a lot in a showroom, but you never get to see real artisans making things that take thousands of hours. That’s why Homo Faber is such a mind-blowing experience. I went to every exhibition I could get into, asked too many questions, took all the iPhone photographs and ate all the spaghetti. Let me take you on the tour.

Read more

Avner Lapovsky is a veteran of San Francisco’s design-showroom world and a longtime design community advocate. His career has included Kneedler-Fauchère, Randolph & Hein, and Sloan Miyasato, where he became co-principal and president—spending decades connecting designers with exceptional materials, furnishings, and independent makers. For…

Read more

Hello readers…

Did you know that cigarettes don’t count in Venice? Standing in the courtyard with employees, or out on the street with a spritz, these cigarettes are totally allowed. I don’t make the rules.

My brother is always making me take these post-dinner walks, and he finds the most dreamy corners. On our first night, jet-lagged and still floating around after working all day, he announced that there was a floating cinema around the back of Giudecca. We turned a corner and there it was: a screen on the water, rowboats ferrying people over, and master chefs cooking the most incredible food served on paper plates to round out the scene. Magical does not even begin to describe it.

Venice is unbelievable at this time of year. All the glitterati descend for the film festival, the city is alive, the weather is cooling, and this week I’m going to Homo Faber, Es Devlin’s magnificent celebration of the human hand. I’m super excited. We’ll report back next week.

That brings me to last week’s AI-rendering issue. It was one of our most successful issues ever: lots of opens, clicks and messages. I had a feeling the topic would resonate.

Then I saw the results of our poll. Only a third of you said you’d use an AI-rendered room to market your brand. More than half would keep it inside R&D and testing. Another 13% chose “over my dead body.” I’m surprised by it, but I don’t believe it.

For 30 years, I’ve watched people mock our industry for being behind the times. We’re always the last to adopt technology. We’re the little brother to fashion, years behind on websites, e-commerce, CRM, and back-end systems. We’re a cottage industry made up of tiny companies that couldn’t invest like the giant luxury houses. I think the design industry is like the Orthodox Church, protecting the past, conserving our heritage, keeping things the same.

AI has made these tools available to everyone, even a small company like mine. The question isn’t whether we could, but whether we should use AI. A professional designer can use it to work faster and provide a better service to their clients. But AI alone does not have the taste, training, or cultural memory of its own, or, more importantly, the humanity needed. The opportunity here is with the experts and tastemakers who know what to ask for and can spot the difference between slop and style.

Keep reading to find out which design firm is selling trend reports for just $18, the return of the dining room, and why Wayfair thinks the market for beautiful interiors is enormous.

See you next week!
Mr. Thread

Leave a comment

🎲 P.S. Don’t just read—play. Scroll down to find out who guessed right on last week’s item, and enter this week’s challenge.

🏭 INDUSTRY

Good taste gets an entry-level price
The sisters behind a design agency named Goesling Group have turned their boutique forecasting work into a subscription. Business of Home reported a launch price of $22 a month; the live “Deep Cuts” page now shows $18. Subscribers get monthly reports on color, materials, and finishes. It’s not really clear to me how this four-person team spots and analyzes trends, and I’m not critiquing their business, but this did connect to a wider trend I’m seeing in the marketplace.

Los Angeles designer Talia Laconi is doing a cheaper package too. Room Service costs $2,500 for one room, delivered in two weeks or less. The client gets a concept, two layouts, elevations, a shopping list and 30 days of access, then handles the buying. No meetings. In the automotive industry this is called “the Cayenne effect”: Porsche uses the Cayenne to bring in buyers who’d never have considered a 911.

I think there’s a massive latent demand for interior design. When Uber got its crazy valuation, it wasn’t based on the size of the taxi market, but a bet on revolutionizing the entire transportation industry. Designers like Laconi and the Goesling Group are aiming these products at customers who would ordinarily not pay for interior design or trend forecasting, not those who want it cheaper. These smaller services also give a new client access to an expert. The smart ones will turn a $2,500 room into a much bigger relationship.

“A ‘trend’ is more than a TikTok dance; it could be a 10-year movement that is going to impact your customer base, and even if you ignore it, it’s still going to happen.”

— Becca Goesling, director of design, Goesling Group, via Business of Home

The new tastemakers
Nikita Bier is a former product lead at Elon Musk’s X. He spent the weekend feeding simple photos from his home into AI. He uploaded various land and soil surveys, a Zillow listing, and satellite photos into AI and came out with what he called construction‑ready renovation concepts. Menswear critic Derek Guy quoted the post to make an uncomfortable argument: he thinks Bier’s right, but that it’s also bad news for taste.

His example is bespoke tailoring — once custom suits got cheap and easy to order, fewer people trained as tailors, competition thinned out, and even the top end of the trade got worse. His conclusion is that most people have no eye for design and are better off led by an expert who does.

Houzz’s new numbers back him up: 97% of us believe AI will reshape this industry within five years, but 80% of renovating homeowners still hire a pro, and the single biggest reason the rest skip AI tools entirely is that they’d rather have one (38%, true in every generation). The machine can render the room in a few seconds. It just doesn’t know if you deserve a nicer one.

“They would benefit from constraint — an educated group of people, in this case tailors, who gently guide them towards better choices.”

— Derek Guy, via X

Don’t knock the knockoffs
Danish furniture company OMHU has answered the knockoff market with a knockoff of its own. It released 50 bright-orange “Tedy” sofas at $799.99, made with the same materials as the original Teddy, which starts at $1,995. In other words, they sold out. This is a tale as old as time. Tom Dixon tried a similar move with his lights after watching cheaper copies of his Beat range go viral. If you can’t beat them, join them.

I understand the raging internal debate: do we knock ourselves off before someone else does? One of my companies makes fabrics by hand in a 100-year-old factory using original techniques. A digital version might look good in a photograph, but it wouldn’t carry the hand, the texture or the way it looks under different light. That’s not to say people won’t try. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, creating your own dupes is flattering yourself. But it just might save your business… as some people like to say: “Better to knock yourself off before someone else does.”

“With this campaign, we’re saying that being copied is iconic. If you’re a viral product or if you’re popular, then you’re getting copied.”

— Christine Smith, creative director, OMHU, via Business of Home

📈TRENDS

Bad architecture is worse than smoking
Designer Thomas Heatherwick told Monocle that banal buildings are the ultra-processed food of the design industry. His nonprofit, Humanise, is collecting evidence on how buildings affect the health of the people inside them and the poor souls who have to walk past their grim façades every day.

I gave Monocle a hard time last week, but I absolutely love this article. If bad architecture is bad for your health, our industry shouldn’t sell a beautiful home as a decorative indulgence. We sell a long and happy life. Light, proportion, color, craft and materials affect how your clients feel every day. That is an enormous promise. Yet more evidence that cigarettes in Europe are actually good for your health if you enjoy them surrounded by iconic architecture.

“We’re in an industry where, if the public doesn’t like what we do, we say that they’re stupid.”

— Thomas Heatherwick, designer and founder of Humanise, via Monocle

Neo Nouveau is coming for the beige box
Writer Laura Scalco has put a name to the decorative mood she sees forming across fashion, graphics, tattoos, and architecture: “Neo Nouveau.” Think whiplash curves, botanical motifs, elongated forms and delicate ornament, remade in chrome, resin, acrylic and metal mesh.

As you can probably guess, I’m pretty bullish on this. You can see classicism in its DNA, and classic is back everywhere I look. Fashion gets there first, then the ideas slowly trickle into interiors.

Art Nouveau rose when people were uneasy about industrial production. Scalco sees the same reaction to AI slop. This is fantastic news for designers and artisans. Let the machines produce the smooth, sensible milquetoast shit. Bring back the sexy curve, the embroidery and the unnecessary little flourish.

“Ornament is, and I suspect will increasingly become, a differentiator: the more bespoke, crafty and dainty the detail, the more it signals singularity, originality and a move away from the mass-produced.”

— Laura Scalco, The Taste Archive

The scent of Venice
Sanchita, who writes The Other HAFH, a weekly newsletter on hospitality design, argues that scent architecture starts long before a hotel chooses a branded candle. Timber, textiles, detergent, kitchens, pools, plants, humidity, and ventilation have already created an olfactory interior by the time the perfumer arrives.

My brother is an expert on this topic. He’s developing a scent for our company’s showrooms. It’s inspired by Venice and the jasmine and roses in our factory garden. The canals give you… other notes. That’s a little bit of an issue.

Anyway, a good interior should reach every sense, and smell is the one that conjures memory. It’s like a signature. You’ll know it when you step inside Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. The hotel has its own signature scent that is unforgettable and incredibly Californian.

“A hotel’s scent is already forming before a perfumer steps in.”

— Sanchita, The Other HAFH

Walls that demand to be touched
Selected Wallpapers just called tactile wall coverings a “defining force” in luxury interiors. I’m talking woven raffia, raised textile surfaces, and wood veneers that create a calm and serene environment that is good for the soul. After another day spent tapping away at glass screens and keyboards, it turns out people want a wall that makes them feel something when they run a finger across it.

One of my companies has just released a wallpaper collection full of leather, marble, stucco and wood-like textures (everything made by hand, of course), and it feels good to be ahead of the trend. That is one of the nice benefits of running Mr. Thread: we read about something six months ago, put it into the business, and then watch the rest of the world arrive. I hope you’re doing the same.

“Designers increasingly talk about how a room feels and sounds, not only how it looks.”

— Selected Wallpapers, via Dezeen

💰OPPORTUNITIES

The dining room returns
House Beautiful asked designers why clients want formal dining rooms again. I remember the 1990s and early 2000s when every house had a dining room. Now the call is more urgent: People need a place where dinner doesn’t compete with the washing-up, the Knicks, or TikTok.

Clever designers are adding hidden bars and little seating areas, and some rooms double as foyers or reception halls. That gives you permission to use the wallcovering, lighting, and materials that might be too dramatic elsewhere. Go nuts. Sell the dining room as the center of the family home, and, most importantly, ban phones.

“A dedicated dining room invites people to sit down, slow down, and enjoy a meal in a more intentional way.”

— Christopher Boutlier, designer, via House Beautiful

📊ECONOMY

Wayfair is feeling optimistic
Wayfair just told the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference that the home market across its core countries is worth roughly $400 billion to $500 billion. The company made $12.5 billion last year, so I listened to the recording so you don’t have to. Executives kept banging on about Perigold and how they believe online discovery and physical stores can open luxury brands to customers who, ordinarily, would never set foot in a design center.

I’m excited, but I’m not necessarily sure this is true. Many of the things we sell are complicated and can’t be reduced to a thumbnail and a buy-now button. But Wayfair’s confidence proves there’s tons of demand for the beautiful stuff we make. They’re using technology, logistics and shops to open the door a little wider. We should be paying attention to who walks through it.

“We do not believe that individual consumer is likely to defer to an agent to make all the decisions on their behalf about how they are going to outfit their home.”

— Niraj Shah, Co-Founder, CEO and Co-Chairman, Wayfair

LVMH is not enjoying the view
The view from Venice is less cheerful at the giant end of luxury. I just walked past one of LVMH’s biggest stores here and it was absolutely empty. I’m talking tumbleweed-and-a-distant-church-bell empty. One shop is only an anecdote and not a data point (maybe there was a fire drill?), so I checked the numbers: HSBC has downgraded the group after weak fashion and leather-goods trading, and the shares are down about 35% this year. Scarcity works until customers realize scarcity is just a bullshit marketing strategy and there are more LVMH bags on the street these days than Nike sneakers. There’s a really deep lesson in here. It will be amazing to watch if LVMH can turn this around… it feels way too early for me to bet against them.

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🧵LOOSE THREADS

• London Design Festival opens September 12 with craft and AI sharing the bill.

• Homo Faber has filled Venice with all-white Summa poufs. I’ll inspect them personally. Tough job.

• Canada’s new tariffs reach 50% on large American furniture. Ouch.

• Stainless steel is back in expensive interiors. I absolutely hate it. Begone.

• Brompton Design District calls its London program Perfectly Imperfect. At last, a trend name I can live with.

• Past Made Present puts student material experiments into 400-year-old Ham House.

• On Thursday, the British Museum opened its blockbuster Bayeux Tapestry exhibition.

🎲 PLAYTIME

Last week’s item was the Apollo 15 Hasselblad Lunar Data Camera. It sold at auction for a hammer price of $760,000. The winner was Jeffry W. with $775,000. Congrats!

This week’s item is an original movie poster for the classic Italian movie “La Dolce Vita.” (1960).

Here are some clues:

✅ Italian Style B Quattro Fogli, signed by artist Sandro Simeoni
✅ Linen-backed, unframed: 79 x 55 in. (201 x 140 cm)
✅ Sold at auction last week by Sotheby’s

What was the final HAMMER price? The person who guesses closest to its final price wins!

Reply to this email or click the button below to submit your guess.

Submit your answer here

Honor system, please—no using Google to look up the answer! (If you do cheat, we still get the engagement, but you’ll have to live with yourself!)

The Stakes
Whoever gets the closest guess each week wins an entry into our grand prize drawing! We’ll be holding the final drawing on October 15th—the more weeks you win, the higher your chances! Our winning threader 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

This week’s art has been chosen by my British West Coast editor. Naturally it’s Canaletto, the master painter of Venice. Over to Mr. Weft:

My grandfather was not an art forger, but he did make a living copying masterpieces. One of my earliest memories is taking one of his paintings with him to Sotheby’s in London to get it appraised. We walked in, and the lady behind the counter was on the telephone. She didn’t even look up or finish her call. She just looked at the painting and said to my grandfather, “The colors are wrong. I can see you’ve painted this from a book, and the calibration is off.” I learned an important lesson that afternoon that is even more urgent today: Even in this age of AI and digital reproductions, the experts, the tastemakers, can always tell a copy from the real thing.

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INTERIOR LIVES
Avner Lapovsky is a veteran of San Francisco’s design-showroom world and a longtime design community advocate. His career has included Kneedler-Fauchère, Randolph & Hein, and Sloan Miyasato, where he became co-principal and president—spending decades connecting designers with exceptional materials, furnishings, and independent makers. For more than 18 years, he has also supported vulnerable young people through At The Crossroads.

My chosen profession was show business. But it was difficult making a living in entertainment, so someone sent me to a job interview in a showroom. I somehow thought a showroom must have something to do with show business. In the end, it did.

Every morning, when I opened the showroom doors, I felt I was raising the curtain on the business. The lights went on, the air conditioning came on, the flowers arrived on Monday, and the displays became settings: living rooms, bedrooms, maids’ rooms, kids’ rooms.

A showroom is a kind of theater. The salespeople are the actors, the clients are part of the theater, and the staff is backstage operations. You are creating a world and inviting people to believe it can exist in their clients’ homes.

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Hello readers…

Is it just me or is everything quiet? A little too quiet? I like to spend these rare moments of serenity in research and development. Like many people in our industry, I’ve been tooling around with AI rendering products. They say the photo shoot is over. Now we can just wave our hands and the perfect catalog images appear, as if they were shot by Douglas Friedman for Architectural Digest. I wanted to find out how much of this is true, so we gave four rendering tools the same job and asked Brenda Nusenovich, a brilliant NYC-based creative director, to tell us which ones are worth the money.

Personally, I’m thrilled about this new technology. A small company like mine can see a custom fabric on a wall or a sofa before anyone has spent three months making samples. We can put a colorway in front of a client, get a reaction, and make a decision in minutes. Big companies have done that with serious R&D budgets for years. Now the rest of us can get in the game.

Of course, there’s a catch. There’s always a catch. Now anybody can take a fabric, render it beautifully, collect orders and then fail to deliver what the picture promised. That person is an idiot. Remember, a photograph can flatter a product too. People were having this type of existential feeling when Photoshop came along. And product photographers have been doing this kind of witchcraft long before anyone called it “retouching.” You know the ice cubes in the Coke in McDonald’s adverts? They’re made of solid crystal.

We spoke to Michael Bashour from HookPic, one of the leading companies creating AI rendering solutions. With this type of product you can create any rendering you can imagine to show off your furniture. You want a dog to sit on the sofa? Bulldog? Chihuahua? Doberman? The choices are now infinite, and if you’d asked me five years ago, I’d have said this would be heaven. Now it sounds like hell. AI isn’t making R&D and marketing easier; it’s making people like Brenda more important than ever. She’s the one in control of the robots, and it’s down to her impeccable taste to make sure they don’t destroy your brand’s legacy. The human eye just got a whole lot more power.

Meanwhile, the rest of the industry feels as sluggish as I do. AD says rooms are getting weird. Monocle and Business of Home are hoping that interior design can make us feel well again. Housing remains endlessly stuck.

See you next week!

Mr. Thread

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🎲 P.S. Don’t just read—play. Try our new guessing game in our PLAYTIME segment. Shout out to Freddy V., who gave the closest guess on last week’s item; Freddy guessed $850,000. Test your market eye this week—scroll to the bottom to join the game.

🏭INDUSTRY

Thibaut and the right way to consolidate
I just learned from BOH that Thibaut has acquired Pindler, the old-school California textile business founded in 1947. Terms were not disclosed. This is Thibaut’s third acquisition in four years, after it snapped up Coraggio and Rosemary Hallgarten. I really like this move and think Thibaut will do a great job continuing the Pindler legacy.

It seems like acquisitions are happening all over the place. Many of them are home runs where the acquiring brands truly understand the soul of the company they are buying. Some of my recent favorite pairings are Holland & Sherry acquiring Elizabeth Eakins, Schumacher buying Tillett Textiles, Kravet buying Brunschwig & Fils, and Fabricut buying Clarence House.

“Pindler has been built over 80 years on the foundations of extraordinary product and a relentless dedication to clients.”

— Rick Kilmer, CEO, Thibaut, via Business of Home

I think we are going to see this trend accelerate significantly. It’s the natural result of the K-shaped economy, applied at the macro level to the design industry. I’m praying for more of the right kind of acquisitions like those mentioned above. This is a good form of consolidation, where the acquisition feels less like a hostile takeover and more like a COLLABORATION with a natural respect for each other’s brands.

Sure, there are bad examples of consolidation. I won’t always trash Private Equity, but too much of it points to a scarier, murkier future for our industry. Same with publicly traded monstrosities like RH gobbling up heritage brand names.

The lesson for anyone trying to make money in this industry: build your company with an eye toward selling it someday. That means getting the fundamentals right: a repeatable model, assured growth, great operations, and a strong culture. Do that and you’ll have plenty of suitors, whether you’re a design firm or a wallpaper brand.

The best part is that setting up your company for acquisition doesn’t mean you have to sell. Running it that way gives you a fantastic business with real enterprise value as a byproduct.

📈TRENDS

Design is trending weirder
Architectural Digest says good taste is getting weirder. After years of the same low sofa, warm lighting, and algorithm-approved beigeness, people are bringing odd chairs, personal objects, and things with actual memories back into their homes. Thank God.

I’m here for five-legged Rococo chairs and a full-size polar bear in the living room. Bring it. Let’s have some fun. Put the strange object back in the middle of the room and let it cause a little trouble. Design should be about pure personal expression.

I think this is yet another human rebellion against artificial intelligence. AI-designed rooms skew normal and safe, because those programs, by their very nature, create a medium of what has come before. Anecdotally, I’m seeing a lot of hand-drawn art and risograph printing everywhere in marketing. This is great news for designers. Clients need bizarre and different design decisions, otherwise they’re just buying a wavy mirror and calling it a personality.

“The design that was dated the fastest is probably what was the safest at the moment.”

— Frances Merrill, Reath Design, via Architectural Digest

Neuro-architecture
What is Monocle? Can someone tell me? I pay for it, I love it, and it feels beautiful in my hands. But the writing has a lot of fancy words and no calories—to borrow a phrase from my British editor, Mr. Weft. I tried to enjoy its piece on neuro-architecture this week because it’s a topic that greatly interests me. Business of Home also did a very good job with its guide to wellness at home. Both pieces get at the same thing: a room should make you feel better when you walk into it—and there is now hard scientific evidence to support that. Today you should not be selling interior design services to your clients, but rather you should be selling them extra years of healthy life. It’s not an exaggeration for you to say that.

“The smallest things increase someone’s mental health and physical wellness.”

— Mike Quinn, principal, The Golden Design Group, via Business of Home

I’ll tell you why my office is the room in my house that makes me feel fantastic: On the wall I have the front pages commemorating the Knicks’ championship, Tiger’s Masters victory, and the Yankees’ 27th World Series. My wife put them up. I walk in and I feel great. That may be the least scientific definition of wellness ever written, but it is real.

The opportunity before us is clear. We as an industry literally sell products and services that make people live longer, healthier, happier lives. If you can communicate this to clients and deliver on the promise, there will be no limit to your success. What an exciting time to be alive!

📊ECONOMY

The home freeze continues
Mortgage rates remain above 6.6% and, no surprise, pending home sales fell again in July. The 10-year Treasury yield rose over the latest trading sessions, which is exactly the thing you do not want to see if you’re hoping people will start moving house again.

I’m sitting on a 2.75% 30-year fixed mortgage. I paid down points for it. There’s no world where I sell my house and buy another with a 7% mortgage. Friends of mine have had more kids, now their houses are too small, they need a yard, but they’re forced to stay put. Meanwhile, boomers are selling at outrageous prices, driving up supply. The younger generation cannot get into those houses at a price that makes sense. It feels eerily like a bubble ready to burst.

We also learned that boomers are complaining about paying property taxes. According to Reddit, boomers say that having paid off their homes and raised their children, they should not have to pay rising property taxes that are pricing them out on fixed incomes. Will no one think of the boomers!

RH catches a cold
RH stock tumbled 3.3% on September 1 to $144.48, nearly 7% in two weeks, and it’s drifting back toward its 52-week low ahead of Q2 earnings. Oof! People are asking whether opening those fancy overseas galleries was a good idea.

The affluent client is still spending. They just need a good reason. A beautiful piece with provenance and a proper story is easier to sell than another standardized luxury catalog item with a big retail markup. A fancy catalog can only do so much. (I want to know how many trees are sacrificed by RH for its catalog every year. Mine sails straight into the trash).

Q&A

SITDOWN WITH MR. THREAD
Michael Bashour is the co-founder and CEO of HookPic, a company building AI-powered product visualization that is becoming popular among owners of furniture and home brands including Moore and Giles, He came to the business from the technology side, after founding and selling a fintech startup, and now works with his co-founder Chase Kerlin to turn accurate product information into sales-ready visual content.

What does HookPic do?
We turn product truth into sales-ready visual content, using AI. AI is the production engine, but the catalog always remains the source of truth. What we deliver is a controlled catalog-to-visual system.

For an interior-design company, a textile company, or a furniture manufacturer, our goal is to help them sell more products. That might mean complete catalog photography, social-media posts, or personalized last-mile imagery: here’s your product, and here’s the specific version someone is looking at, in a scene that looks like their home. We’re finding more and more ways to be helpful to these groups.

What’s your background, and how did HookPic begin?
I approach this purely from the tech side. About two years ago, I started learning about image-generation models. Before that, I’d done a few startups, including one in fintech that I was fortunate enough to start, run, sell, and exit. Then I began looking for the next thing and discovered this image-generation technology. I thought it was fascinating.

I tested early models—DALL·E and Midjourney—and learned about LoRAs, low-rank adapters that modify some of those early models. I thought there was an incredible opportunity, so I started building a proof of concept.

Through a friend of a friend, I met my co-founder, Chase Kerlin, who lives in Austin and owns a company. He had a photo shoot fail just before a product launch, so he had no photography. We applied the prototype to his specific need. The results were stunning: beautiful lifestyle photography that was also incredibly accurate. That accuracy was what was most compelling.

We learned that we enjoyed working together and thought there might be a bigger product there. That’s how we started building HookPic. We began talking to furniture companies, people started signing up, and then textile companies told us they didn’t just need beautiful photography—they needed accuracy. That’s been our north star the whole time.

AI is cool, but it hallucinates. It gets a lot of things wrong. We’re trying to build the exoskeleton around these AI models that produces truly accurate visuals as well as beautiful ones.

What technology does it use?
We use a lot, and we’re intentionally model-agnostic. In the year and a half we’ve been going, we’ve used OpenAI, Gemini, and a number of models from Black Forest Labs. We use Blender for some of our 3D work, plus homegrown tools that help with prompt engineering.

Our goal is to be decoupled from any one model and give customers the advantage of whatever is leading at that time.

Why wouldn’t a brand simply use Gemini, Midjourney, or Firefly itself?
Generative results can look plausible at first glance but still be commercially wrong. You can get a different profile, different sheen, motif drift, color drift. Scale drift is huge among AI models: you tell it a pattern has an eight-inch repeat and it gives you a 16-inch repeat. That really matters for textiles.

That accuracy issue becomes even more important at scale. HookPic can ingest a PBR map, original digital art plus photography, or basic scans. The better the input, the more we can do. Rather than simply telling a model to put a pattern on a chair or drapery, we’re building literal shaders from the data a customer gives us, and 3D models that can scale up and become the source for image generation. That preserves sheen, reflectiveness, scale, and color—the things that matter when you’re selling an actual product, not just making a cool picture.

What does HookPic replace from the old photography process?
Photography is still critical, especially for data ingestion. I don’t think that will go away anytime soon. We still need people with an expert eye, the hardware and technology that make that initial data ingestion possible, and the same artistic eye for photography. The best imagery from HookPic is generated by people with a photography background. We see that all the time.

Where HookPic gets interesting for brands is the accuracy-at-scale piece. They don’t have to ship materials to a studio, arrange them, hire the people, set the lighting, edit the images afterwards, and do it ad infinitum for every combination.

We’re working on solutions for hex-code transfers for furniture with two-tone options. If a piece comes in 30 materials and can be two-tone, there may be 900 possible combinations. With HookPic, that becomes commercially viable from a production standpoint. Before, you couldn’t bring most of that to market, and most of it probably would never get manufactured.

You mentioned “last-mile” visualization. What does that look like?
It’s an incredibly exciting part of the purchasing process where we can be extremely powerful. It’s highly personalized. Someone can say: these are the three or 10 fabrics I’m interested in, these are the scenes I’m most likely to use them in, and this is the style of my home.

It also provides a little leeway. Even with all the work we do to lock in accuracy—and I stand by that—there can still be some wiggle room. With a one-on-one client, there’s more room for error than when you put something on your website and say, “This is the product.”

For companies that are skeptical of AI—and even as a purveyor of this technology, I share that skepticism at times—you can bring it into the final part of the conversation: “Let us visualize this uniquely for you. Understand this is an AI rendering, but this is a stack of imagery we’ve made just for you.” That’s a compelling sales technique compared with handing someone 10 squares of material swatches.

How are creative directors responding?
In the beginning, we had more pushback from people who were skeptical, almost offended. There may have been some defensiveness, which I find completely relatable and understandable.

But people who engage with this technology find that the time between having an idea and seeing it realized is so shortened that they get really excited. There’s also a high level of control when it comes to editing an image: “I want to move this bowl from here to there.” That’s actually pretty doable.

Who is moving the bowl? Is this software as a service?
[Brands] do it themselves. We’re a product company. We offer services with onboarding and configuring large amounts of textiles, which can be a bold process, and we do a lot to simplify it. We’ll often lend a helping hand in pursuit of accuracy. But people log in and have their catalog, materials, and images.

Our approach to AI imagery is like a barbell. In the middle is AI image generation. On the left is the catalog of product truth: the SKUs, materials, variants, perhaps pricing. On the right are the visualization surfaces: raw image output, Shopify visualizers, digital lookbooks, and other surfaces we’re exploring. The connective tissue is image generation. Our goal is to provide a complete ecosystem that takes a brand from product truth to commercially viable, useful visuals.

That middle part—the image-generation connective tissue—may commoditize very rapidly. If it does, I still think we’re in a fabulous position. AI makes it possible to create a lot of imagery, and if you have a lot of imagery, you need a way to organize it logically, collaborate around it, and publish it. HookPic doesn’t just create imagery. We provide tooling and support around the specific act of creating it.

What’s your view on disclosing that an image is AI-generated?
It’s highly context-dependent, but I’m generally in favor of disclosure. It shouldn’t be hidden or treated as something to be ashamed of. It’s an emerging technology. It shouldn’t be used to deceive or oversell anything.

The raw purpose of a visual is to communicate an idea, whether that’s a product, real estate, or something else. I don’t necessarily think disclosure needs to be mandated, but I like that there are invisible watermarks. Some customers literally write on their visualizer, “Hey, by the way, this is AI-generated,” and I don’t think it affects their sales at all.

Will photo shoots still exist in five years?
There will still be photo shoots. They’ll probably have a different meaning and significance. You’ll always need the raw input, and the photo shoot as an artistic act won’t go away. Will it be needed in the same commercial volume? No.

What’s the one item in your home that you couldn’t live without?
I have a print of Thomas Eakins’s “The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake” that my dad gave me. It’s just a print, but it’s very special to me because of the stories he told me about it when I was a kid. The original is an old hand-painted oil-on-canvas painting at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and it holds so much meaning for me.

My father died about two and a half years ago. I’d be devastated to lose it. It would be the first thing I’d rescue in an emergency.

It shows two rowers. My dad used to say, “That’s you in the front, that’s me in the back.” Now I say the same thing to my son. It still means the world to me.

Find out more at HookPic.com

*This interview has been lightly condensed for readability.

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🧵LOOSE THREADS

• George Lucas’s Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens in Los Angeles on September 22. It looks like a spaceship. Natch.

• In Los Angeles, Save Iconic Architecture is helping people rebuild after the fires and avoid turning their homes into quick, cheap, soulless boxes. Keep fighting the good fight.

• Norway’s Whale Museum opens next year with a roof that rises from the water like a whale’s tail.

  Puig CEO José Manuel Albesa has a brass box from the 1970s, a

• Japanese screen bought for $20, and a serious sleep kit. I loved this FT piece and saw it all over Twitter/X this weekend.

• A Venetian textile company is partnering with an addiction-recovery community on a handmade wallpaper collection.

🎲 PLAYTIME

In our last issue, we challenged you to put a price tag on Andy Warhol’s vibrant 1985 "Dolly Parton" canvas. Turns out everyone's financial optimism was running high, as every single guess overshot the mark. Even so, massive congratulations to Freddy V. for taking the crown as our closest contender with a bid of $850,000, earning a well-deserved win against the actual $604,000 hammer price!

This week’s item is the Apollo 15 Hasselblad Lunar Data Camera.

Here are some clues:

✅ Used by Astronaut Jim Irwin during the historic 1971 Apollo 15 mission.
✅ One of the exceedingly rare cameras brought back to Earth from the lunar surface.
✅ Sold at auction in 2014 following a furious bidding war. Japanese retail titan Terukazu Fujisawa secured the winning bid.

What was the final HAMMER price? The person who guesses closest to its final price wins!

Reply to this email or click the button below to submit your guess.

Submit your answer here

Honor system, please—no using Google to look up the answer! (If you do cheat, we still get the engagement, but you’ll have to live with yourself!)

The Stakes
Whoever gets the closest guess each week wins an entry into our grand prize drawing! We’ll be holding the final drawing on October 15th—the more weeks you win, the higher your chances! Our winning threader 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

I found René Magritte’s art perfect for the renderings topic. His most famous work, “The Treachery of Images,” is a painting of a pipe with the caption “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe)—it’s literally about the gap between representation and reality. Maybe it’s too perfect for a renderings conversation?

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

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THE MR. THREAD RENDERING CHALLENGE
We gave the latest AI tools the same fabric sample and a prompt to render it in the same scene. Pretty pictures are easy. The question is whether a textile company, furniture maker, or designer can show an actual product without embarrassing themselves.

Read more

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our members-only section.

Why we are doing this
The opportunity is massive. Until now, a serious photo shoot meant a studio, products being shipped back and forth, stylists, photographers, lighting, flowers, and a lot of patience. I have seen flower budgets on photo shoots that cost as much as a Tesla Model 3.

With AI, a crea…

Read more

I’ve just driven from Charlotte to Auburn to drop my son off at university, then Auburn to Miami, then Miami back to Charlotte. The Tesla drove 98% of it. Look Ma, no hands. What an experience.

When I got home to North Carolina, I discovered Walmart drone delivery is now a thing in my area. Flying robots are airlifting my neighbors’ shopping into their backyards. I got out of my self-driving car and, for a moment, found myself having an existential moment. The robots are taking over. What will become of our beautiful businesses?

Then I remembered what time of year it is. Factories are reopening in Italy. The kids are back in high school. Everybody who wasn’t already working is getting back to work. It feels more like a fresh start than January 1st. I’ve actually thought about changing our fiscal year to begin September 1st, but that’s a story for another day.

Anyway, welcome to the Back to School issue. Monocle just ran an inspiring feature about a Catalonian kindergarten redesigned to aid learning, and it really gets to the heart of why design matters. A well-designed school can change how children learn, concentrate, and feel energized during the day. That’s a pretty good reminder for all of us that great design has value. It makes people’s lives better.

There’s good news elsewhere, too. Williams-Sonoma is reporting very strong numbers, and the size of the market opportunity is incredible. Cary Kravet, President and CEO of Kravet, sent a reply to last week’s article and we’re running it without changing a comma. We also look at the homes of Dolly Parton, from a one-bedroom mountain cabin to a private 63-acre retreat. What a woman, and what a life.

Behind the paywall, we took Architectural Digest’s long, hard-to-read piece on designer pay and made it accessible. Think of us as Architectural Digest-Digest. These numbers aren’t going to give you the warm and fuzzies, but you don’t subscribe to Mr. Thread for sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns. You want the truth.

And it’s almost time to start talking about color. With the 2027 collections now in production, the work on 2028 begins. We’re here to be your guide, starting next week, with a look at the trending colors everyone will be talking about.

School’s back. The factories are back. Collection launches are right around the corner. Let’s go.

See you next week!
Mr. Thread

Leave a comment

🎲 P.S. Don’t just read—play. Try our new guessing game in our PLAYTIME segment. Congratulations to Martin R., who came closest without going over. Last week’s object was asking $175,000; Martin guessed $100,000. 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.

🏭INDUSTRY

A letter from Kravet
Last week I wrote about Kravet’s Pottery Barn collaboration. Cary Kravet sent a personal reply. Mr. Thread has opened up a conversation with one of the great men of our industry, and that is exactly what I want this newsletter to do. And it goes to show you the type of powerful readers on our mailing list.

Dear [Mr. Thread],

As always, it was a pleasure to catch up with you earlier this week. I love what you have created with Mr. Thread, but I do want to highlight some corrections to a segment that you published last week about my company going ‘whale hunting’.

First, I would like to start with our company’s vision statement- basically what is truly our whale. It is, “To be the design trade’s most trusted partner- carrying forward our legacy of beauty, craftsmanship and service while empowering the next generation of designers to create extraordinary spaces.”

Second, our relationship with Pottery Barn is as a licensor. My daughter, Sara, along with our licensing product development team, works closely with their talented and exceptionally professional team. Together, they curate the 35,000 items in our US archive to find designs to develop with our team. These products are completely exclusive to Pottery Barn. Every SKU we design in collaboration with Pottery Barn is unique to that partnership, with zero overlap with any SKU in our Kravet brand. The products and designs can ONLY be viewed or purchased through Pottery Barn, reserving the products we solely develop and produce on our own exclusively for designers.

“Our entire licensing strategy is predicated on supporting the trade and building recognition for our brands.”

— Cary Kravet

Third, our entire licensing strategy is predicated on supporting the trade and building recognition for our brands. In fact, it seeks to introduce an entirely new audience to the world of design. Our hope is that when they are ready to hire a designer, they already have our name in mind.

Finally, this is not a new strategy for us. It has nothing to do with my family inviting an outside investor into our company, as it well preceded that event. It has entirely to do with supporting our aforementioned vision.

Mr. Thread, thank you for the opportunity to speak to your audience.

Best wishes,
Cary

This is great. I’ve had my say; Cary has had his. Readers, what do you think?

Dolly Parton’s very Dolly homes
As you know, Dolly Parton died on Tuesday at 80. Realtor.com has gone through the homes she left behind, and the contrast is wild. She grew up as one of 12 children in a one-bedroom cabin in the Smoky Mountains with no electricity or running water. She ended up on a private 63-acre estate outside Nashville. She wrote a few hits in between. (I can’t get enough of this Islands in the Stream duet with Kenny Rogers).

“Dolly was a farmer, just like her daddy; he farmed the soil, she farmed songs and happiness.”

— Bryan Seaver, Dolly Parton’s nephew

In between, Dolly accumulated a secret Idyllwild cabin with a guitar-shaped toilet seat, a Solvang compound with a windmill and Dolly’s original wig room. Quite frankly, I don’t want to hear another word about restrained good taste. She lived a life as bright as rhinestones and left me wanting a wig room.

Dolly was so damned unapologetic and brave, and made a killing doing it. A valuable lesson for all of us in the creative industry.

📊ECONOMY

Williams-Sonoma hands us its AI playbook
Quarterly earnings are always a great opportunity to understand things about our industry and the world as a whole. I geek out on these things, which is one of the reasons I started Mr. Thread. Williams-Sonoma always puts out an illuminating report (check it out here). WS is reporting very strong numbers that should make everyone pay attention: second-quarter comparable sales rose 6.2%, net revenue reached $1.96 billion and operating margin hit 17.3%.

“We gained market share, continued to outperform the industry, and raised our annual outlook on both the top and bottom lines.”

— Laura Alber, Williams-Sonoma

I mean, look how much bigger they are than RH. The investor deck puts Williams-Sonoma at $7.8 billion in 2025 revenue beside a $290 billion US home category. At face value, that is roughly 3%—and it shows just how fragmented the market is. This is a consolidator’s wet dream scenario…until they realize there’s a good reason why this fragmentation exists (see Journal #00041).

Next, WS provided a whole page on exactly how they’re using AI: digital design, customer service, product discovery and content. There’s their playbook. These companies are growing, so you’d better be using this stuff too. Open the deck and steal the lesson.

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📈TRENDS

The GLP-1 home
When I saw the headline, I thought: come on, what a reach. What clickbait garbage. Then I started reading it. Well, wait a minute. Maybe Architectural Digest really is onto something here.

AD reports that one in eight American adults is currently using a GLP-1. In case you’re not paying attention, a GLP-1 is an injectable drug that staves off your appetite and makes you lose a lot of weight, super-fast. Designers are already being asked for smaller kitchens and pantries, bathroom fridges and hidden syringe storage. New fridges designed with syringe storage! Home design is changing because people are taking these medicines. Crazy.

“I think we’re going to be moving away from the big, big kitchens. The kitchen may transition to a secondary space rather than the social hub or heart of the home.”

— Elizabeth Valkovics, interior designer

Now, I’m not an expert in any way on these medicines, and this is all anecdotal. As AD points out, COVID changed the home office: open floor plans followed people’s desire for more connection in a digital age. So yes, a drug taken by millions of people could start changing the way homes are designed.

And although this all sounds quite dystopian, it represents an opportunity for our industry as we are uniquely qualified to provide clients with wellness benefits in their most intimate home lives. With great design we can help people live longer, healthier lives. You would think we would be rewarded handsomely for our services, but as you’ll read further below, we are not. But the more of us that speak up and prove our value, the more we can unlock this massive opportunity to grow.

A ticket to ride
Writing guru David Perell posted a very good piece on Twitter/X about tickets. The Guggenheim is one of the most iconic buildings in New York, and its ticket looks like the most economical thing somebody could make. How depressing! It’s also another clear example of ENSHITIFICATION. It’s time to bring back the golden era of ticket design!

A museum ticket, an old Japanese train ticket, a circus ticket — you used to put these things in a drawer and collect them. They were part of the day. Now we’ve stripped the little bit of beauty out of everything and then wonder why the world feels so flat. No one can collect a QR code, or reminisce over a digital ticket in your phone’s Apple Wallet.

There’s a huge opportunity here to bring back good design. We can lead the way by showing the business value of creating emotional experiences, even right down to the ticket. FIFA—by no means a bastion of beauty—sold souvenir tickets to fans who attended World Cup matches, who wanted more than a QR code.

The masses are starting to wake up and ask for better design. Let’s be there to serve them.

A reader letter about Holly Hunt
Last week, I wrote about MillerKnoll and Holly Hunt, and worried that consolidation could be taking down another iconic trade brand. Reader H.E. wrote in:

“Regarding your snippet about MillerKnoll and the Holly Hunt problem... overall, your point is correct but the part about HH underperforming is a bit of MK quarterly earnings called ‘mis-direction.’

It is political from what I know, but what any smart analyst knows is that a division that is basically $100M-$300M revenue cannot affect a company that is $3.B. No matter how much their margin has fallen. They are being conveniently scapegoated IMO. Not saying their business wasn’t down, or that their margins weren’t lower than expected. I am just saying that a business that is approximately 5% of their overall business (if that) is not bringing down the ship.

MK doesn’t really chase [the trade] audience from what I see — they are focused more on the well-off retail customer, and contract business of course. They don’t really understand the High Point/D&D customer. They moved Maharam’s showroom out of the D&D, in fact. It was placed there strategically years ago.”

“When HH was under Knoll, they had the leadership that understood HH’s magic and what it could mean for the overall Knoll brand. At this point, I am not sure there is anyone there recognizing the importance of the HH ‘uber wealthy audience.’”

H.E. says Holly Hunt is a wonderful furniture and textiles business that could be much higher with the correct caretakers. I agree. These brands are more than just another line item on the org chart.

🧵LOOSE THREADS

• Hermès’s London windows featured carrots dangling from a chandelier. Your furniture can provide calories now. Amazing.

• Manhattan is building a 335-foot jail in Chinatown for 1,040 people. A literal jailscraper. Lovely.

• 1stDibs found some really incredible pictures of dogs. Go brighten up your day.

• New-home sales ran at 607,000 in July, with 9.6 months of supply. Welcome to the eternal housing slump.

🎲 PLAYTIME

This week’s item is Andy Warhol’s “Dolly Parton”.

Here are some clues:

✅ It’s a synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas (1985)
✅ It measures 42 by 42 in.

What is the asking price? The person who guesses closest to its listed price wins!

Reply to this email or click the button below to submit your guess.

Submit your answer here

Honor system, please—no using Google to look up the answer! (If you do cheat, we still get the engagement, but you’ll have to live with yourself!)

The Stakes
Whoever gets the closest guess each week wins an entry into our grand prize drawing! We’ll be holding the final drawing on October 15th—the more weeks you win, the higher your chances! Our winning threader 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

🕵🏼‍♀️ MR. THREAD INSIDER #00007

WHAT INTERIOR DESIGNERS REALLY EARN
Architectural Digest published this enormous guide to interior-design jobs and pay. We did the digesting for them, rebuilt the graphics, and it’s still depressing as hell. Listen, I told you this was the dystopia edition! Read on to find out more…

Read more

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our members-only section.

WHAT INTERIOR DESIGNERS REALLY EARN
Architectural Digest published this enormous guide to interior-design jobs and pay. We did the digesting for them, rebuilt the graphics, and it’s still depressing as hell. Listen, I told you this was the dystopia edition! Read on to find out more…

Read more

Hello readers…

I’m in Miami. Sunny skies with a chance of shady dealings.

I just went to the supermarket with my wife. A bottle of hot sauce, some cheap bottles of Sauvignon Blanc, various sundries, and batteries at the local Publix just set me back $140. Sadly, none of this is surprising anymore.

We then had lunch at a nice Medi…

Read more

🌻 Help us get better…

Mr. Thread exists to help our creative industry build stronger businesses, and part of that job is deciding what deserves more of our time. So, I want to ask you directly:

Please click one. We want to know what will actually be valuable for you.

On to this week’s issue…

Hello readers…

Everyone in Spain went outside yesterday to stare at the eclipse. Totality lasted barely a minute, and it was a good reminder to stop working and look up once in a while.

Instead, I’ve had my head buried in a book. I finally finished From Bauhaus to Our House, Tom Wolfe’s mad little 1981 attack on modern architecture. It’s been on my list forever. Wolfe is all over the place. He’s crazy. I love his writing style. I’m a hippie at heart, so The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is next.

Wolfe wrote about hippies, space, architecture, New York society—he bounced everywhere. Mr. Weft tells me Wolfe once wrote a long, letter-like memo to his Esquire editor about an article he couldn’t start. They published the note, and that became his style. I thought, Okay, good. I’m allowed to be all over the place too.

Wolfe’s argument, in the simplest terms, is that socialism turned decoration, craftsmanship, and individual taste into dirty words. In the moral fight to make good design available to everyone—which, in spirit, is beautiful; who doesn’t want everyone treated fairly?—we ripped some of the soul out of art. We ripped out the color too.

Color used to be a serious luxury. To make Tyrian purple, you had to extract pigment from sea snails’ mucus glands—roughly 10,000 of them could yield just one gram. It was a color reserved for the rich. The people in the poorhouse wore beige.

It became offensive in elite architectural and academic circles to use color and ornamentation. And since these societies almost single-handedly enforced the direction of modern style, we ended up with a world of concrete and glass boxes, with clean modern interiors. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions… this is a great, if not catastrophic, example of that in action.

The Atlantic just published a sobering piece arguing that the color recession may be permanent. We keep hearing maximalism is back, and the fall reports you’ll read about further down are full of wine red, smoky purple, and layered green. But the paint companies still sell endless shades of Swiss Coffee and “greige.” I hope this isn’t a little blip before everyone gets brainwashed back into brown.

Read on for some billion-dollar market research from Arhaus, Usher’s cringe-tastic AD home tour, and a 3D printer making buildings out of mud. Our Insider interview is with the business coach who saved my ass when COVID sent my company remote. She’s back with us again giving some fresh takes on how creative companies can survive and adapt in the new AI world.

See you next week!
Mr. Thread

Leave a comment

P.S. Don’t just read—play. We’ve put our first Guess the Price mystery near the bottom. Honor system only… no Googling the sheep, okay?

📊ECONOMY

Free billion-dollar market research
Arhaus absolutely kicked ass in the second quarter. Net revenue hit a record $385 million, up 7.4%, and comparable written sales rose 12.5%. The top line for me is that about 90% of its 2025 sales came from clients who live within 50 miles of a showroom. If you are a furniture or interiors company thinking about your brick-and-mortar strategy, this should answer your questions.

Also, orders supported by an Arhaus interior designer carry an average value more than four times that of a standard order. Our industry continues to be the MVP of big-box retail furniture stores. Shocker!

But wait. The report reveals that Arhaus recovered $37.8 million in previously paid tariffs, and $23.8 million lowered its second-quarter cost of goods sold. We’re all paying more for furniture, and they got a very nice lift to the bottom line. D’oh! To its credit, Arhaus says it will reinvest some of the recovery in growth and use another portion against higher fuel and shipping costs.

The 1stDibs results went the other way aesthetically. Its press release looks like a high-school project, which is crazy for a design business. The actual business is doing fine: revenue rose 5% to $23.3 million and gross merchandise value climbed 7%, even as active buyers fell 10%. The business is the business is the business. 1stDibs is 1stDibs. They’re not really growing that much.

These reports are free, but no one in the business really reads them. Arhaus paid serious money for the market research sitting inside that investor deck: a $27 billion US interior-design services market, a trade channel, a showroom strategy, a supply-chain map. Guys, you can get free billion-dollar market research if you just take the time to read these things. I don’t know why I geek out on this stuff. I get my business education from it.

Check this out from the Arhaus document. I’ll say it again: Their customers who work with designers spend more than four times as much. That is a public company telling Wall Street, in plain English, that people need interior designers.

“GMV of $96.0 million came in above the high end of guidance, up 7%, our strongest growth rate since late 2024.”

— David Rosenblatt, CEO of 1stDibs

Falling into a K-hole
I don’t want to jinx it, but things are looking up. Inflation eased slightly in July and mortgage applications rose after a brief dip in rates. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared the K-shaped economy over and said lower earners were beginning to catch up. But the housing market didn’t get the memo. In the first five months of 2026, sales below $200,000 fell 14.4%, while sales between $1 million and $2 million slipped just 0.6%.

Look at the chart. Doesn’t it look exactly like a K? The expensive homes are up there and the cheaper ones are down there. We just saw it in Arhaus too, in real economic data. For now, if your clients sit on the upper arm, they’re still spending.

“Housing doesn’t support that story right now. The entry-level tier isn’t stabilizing.”

— Hannah Jones, senior economist at Realtor.com

💰OPPORTUNITIES

The paintings in the trash room
Bloomberg writes that nearly $1 trillion of art is expected to pass between generations over the next decade. The next generation won’t want all of it, museums don’t have room for it, and auction houses will only fight over the very best pieces. That leaves a great quantity of paintings and sculptures looking for a home, a buyer or, in the worst cases, a thrift store.

When I was younger, my father called me in his eloquent but thick Egyptian accent: “Come, come to the office.” He was moving his law firm out of the MetLife building, right above Grand Central, and told me to look through some old company files before they were shredded. I opened a small room absolutely rammed with boxes. It was a shit-ton of crap. Ninety-eight percent old financial and legal documents.

Then I found a weirdly shaped box in the corner. It looked like a frame was inside. I pulled it out, looked at the signature, and realized it was an original painting by the founder of one of my companies. I kept going. There were 12 of them, absolute treasures. They now hang over my mother’s sofa.

The bigger opportunity is the money moving with the art. My generation is reaching the point where we’ve had good careers, the kids are leaving, and we’re ready to invest in the forever home. We’re finally going to buy the great fabrics. That wealth is landing in the hands of people like me, ready to spend it on interiors.

I will keep yelling it from the mountaintops… there is no better time than now to be building in our industry!

“The next gen don’t want it. They want something different.”

— Philip Hoffman, chairman and founder of the Fine Art Group, via Bloomberg

Washington is hot, hot, hot, hot
Washington, D.C.’s luxury market is setting records. Inventory is down and prices are soaring. A Georgetown house just sold for a city-record $28 million, and agents say cabinet officials, tech leaders, and AI executives are competing for trophy properties. Many want the house turnkey and fully furnished. They don’t want to lift a finger.

We’re feeling it too. It’s a great market for us—great clients—but it’s so sketchy. Why is it hot? Washington is booming. Maybe these folks got rich off insider trading (have you seen Pelosi’s stock tracker?) Or AI. Or Trump Media’s new paid Truth API feed that I just read about.

The direct feed is called Truth API, and reportedly costs as much as $100,000 a month. It doesn’t give traders a post before Trump publishes it, but it can deliver his market-moving announcements milliseconds before ordinary users see them. If this isn’t the most brazen form of corruption I’ve ever seen in my life. Because if Trump posts tonight, “I have a deal with Iran,” the markets are going to move tomorrow, right? Oil is going to move. Not to mention the prediction markets.

In completely unrelated news: Click the button below to subscribe to Mr. Thread Insider.

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Can you imagine selling faster access to the news you’re giving out as president? I’m not bashing only Trump. I wouldn’t put this kind of caper past other presidents, only you’d never hear about it. Anyway, I don’t know whether any of that has anything to do with a $28 million house in Georgetown. But when this much money is appearing this close to power, I think I’m allowed to ask: why are you guys all so rich around there?

Look, the design opportunity is real, whatever you think of the politics. These buyers need designers. They’re purchasing speed and taste, and they want to bring their toothbrush—not their contractor.

“We’re in an AI race. These people are driving the market.”

— Daniel Heider, executive vice president at TTR Sotheby’s International Realty, via The Wall Street Journal

📈TRENDS

Human-made is the future
Fast Company argues that “human-made” is becoming the next big flex for luxury buyers, something I’ve been trumpeting since Journal #00001. As AI cheapens creative work, visible human curation becomes scarce. Organic food, craft beer, and handmade furniture are already showing us that customers will pay a premium for a story they can believe.

We’re on the right path. A large language model could scrape Mr. Thread and rebuild a perfectly serviceable version in five minutes that sends you links to interior design news. But it can’t give you commentary from 30 years of industry experience and it probably wouldn’t make fun of Gary Friedman every other week. That’s why readers constantly tell me Mr. Thread is a better read than the tired old trades.

What does this mean for us? Keep leaning into handmade, human storytelling, and authenticity. The demand for it will keep exploding in direct opposition to AI.

“The more AI-assisted creation becomes the default, the more conspicuous—and commercially powerful—unadulterated human involvement becomes.”

— Ben Sherwood, via Fast Company

The robot becomes an artisan
Architects are now 3D-printing buildings from local soil, lime, and agricultural waste. TECLA used 350 layers of raw earth to build two interlocking domes in Massa Lombarda, Italy. Near Barcelona, IAAC students and researchers created a separate project, Teixit, printing local soil into expressive walls. The nozzle leaves a delightfully natural texture directly in the structure. Check it out.

This is 3D printing as artisanal work. It takes mud out of the ground, and a robot turns it into a building. And it’s beautiful. We spend a lot of time worrying that machines will erase the human hand. This one is making art out of dirt, using AI and modern technology. I love that contradiction!

“This digital approach transforms robotic execution into an expressive medium guided by human minds.”

— Moises Carrasco, via ArchDaily

I need a third place
This one really resonated with me. Working from home can be very lonely. I’m desperate for a third place—a coffee shop where you can gather your thoughts, a library where I bump into people who like to read instead of scrolling, a shared workspace that gets me away from computers and social media to meet other like-minded entrepreneurs. Imagine a theater with a members’ club where you meet your buddies for a bourbon and then watch a movie. Who better than designers to create these places in our lives? We’ve lost a lot of them. Well, I have some good news… it seems they’re coming back.

Designers are rebuilding the space between home and work. This week, Hospitality Design’s report finds cafés with play areas built into the architecture, cinemas with real bars (not the depressing one at your local AMC), and mixed-use buildings combining coworking, wellness, food, and cultural programming. Come for coffee and stay for a workshop!

Howard Schultz, Starbucks’ former CEO, understood this years ago: Home, office, and then the other place. That was the insight. But the third place doesn’t have to be one coffee chain with the same chairs everywhere. It can be a cinema, a bathhouse, a hotel lobby, a library, a kids’ café, one of those Korean spas where they scrub salt into your whole body and make you feel like a fish. Just some place with enough of a heartbeat that you don’t feel lonely. That’s a real design problem, and a very good business opportunity.

Summer reading tip: Read the origin story of Starbucks and Howard Schultz in this excellent biography.

“We wanted to allow for people to be with a group or equally be alone but close to others and still feel welcome.”

— Rachel Coll, cofounder of TiggColl, via Hospitality Design

Autumn’s quiet color rebellion
Veranda just put out its fall color forecast and it says designers are about to move on from years of caramel, burnt orange, and chocolate brown. They’re pointing to green-tinged neutrals, smoky purples, and softened marigolds. None of it is loud. Every shade has been dirtied up a little, which apparently is the only way we can cope with color now.

“Color never moves in a straight line—it’s always an evolution rather than a revolution.”

— Ruth Mottershead, creative director, Little Greene

This is good news for designers whose clients say they want color, then select Swiss Coffee. You can give them a wine red that reads almost brown, or a purple with enough gray to not offend. Personally, I still want the proper stuff—strong color, a little danger, a room that doesn’t look staged for resale. But if softened marigold is the gateway drug, I’ll take it. Let’s get the people hooked.

🏭 INDUSTRY

The human touch is the watermark
The EU’s new AI transparency rules took effect this month. The rules say providers must make “synthetic” output detectable, while deepfakes and certain text must be labeled “made by AI.” Standard editing and some B2B uses may be exempt, but fines can reach €15 million ($17.3 million) or 3% of worldwide turnover. Ha-ha-ha!

My textile company will now have to put a disclaimer on our website when we show a beautiful AI rendering of our fabric on a sofa. Seriously? I understand protecting people from deep-faked videos of politicians and celebrities, but this feels like an overreach.

The bureaucrats don’t understand the line between bad actors and good actors, so everybody gets lumped in. And where does it end? Do I have to confess every time a retoucher corrects the lighting, expands an edge, or upscales a photograph—all of that is AI. And anyway, what about McDonald’s? Their photo of a Big Mac looks nothing like the burger they serve you, and I don’t recall ever seeing a disclaimer under the golden arches.

“Published text that has undergone human review or editorial control does not need to be labelled.”

— European Commission, Article 50 guidance

Lonni Paul on winning work when the phone stops ringing
Business of Home asked five designers how they find projects when business slows. Lonni Paul gave the best advice: stay visible. She uses quiet periods to reconnect with past clients, architects, builders and trades, while improving her portfolio, updating her website, and pitching. You may not win a project tomorrow, but the right client might remember you.

Getting new business as an interior designer is nerve-racking. It’s feast or famine out there. You can spend months chasing leads and making calls and hear nothing back. Then the projects come. In this K-shaped economy, fewer designers are getting access to the clients with the big money. You have to fight harder to reach them. Lonni is right on this one. Just keep showing up, keep your relationships warm and make sure your best work is impossible to ignore.

“Rather than focusing on selling, I focus on consistently showing the quality of our work and the experience we provide.”

— Lonni Paul, Lonni Paul Design, via Business of Home

🧵LOOSE THREADS

• COOKFOX has opened the Bruce Springsteen Center near the places that shaped his music. The Boss says the building feels like him.

• ArchDaily rounded up some joyful ice-cream shops. Apparently the universal design language of dessert is color and childish fun. Correct.

• Check out this design magic. Broadway’s “The Lost Boys” set becomes nearly 20 locations without a video backdrop. My wife and daughter tell me the house is the star.

• In the surprise hit movie “Backrooms”, fluorescent big-box emptiness supplies the horror while old furniture supplies the soul. Frightening commentary on what happens when design is intentionally ripped out of architecture.

• Summer Thornton turned a bland Cabo retreat into a kaleidoscope of Mexican craft. Twelve thousand color samples later. She went wild. I couldn’t help but dream of living in her brilliant design work.

• Usher’s Architectural Digest house tour has the house “performing” by day and “confessing” at night. Somebody get that poor sofa a therapist.

• I really want to eat at Graciela. It was designed by the super-smart team over at Home Studios from NY. Rustic interiors serving old-school Argentine steaks. Sounds like my happy place.

• Here are some groovy eclipse glasses.

🎲 PLAYTIME

Guess the price: Salvador Dalí’-inspired sheep

Check out our new weekly guessing game made just for our community of design fanatics. Let’s see how good you are at guessing prices of the objects we sell in our zany world.

Each week, we’ll share an image and clues about an item for sale. The person who guesses closest to its listed price wins!

Here are some clues:

✅ Set of 4 side tables
✅ Manufactured by BD Barcelona and Deyrolle
✅ Designed by Oscar Tusquets, inspired by Salvador Dalí
✅ Made from animal skin, metal and wood
✅ Approximate measurements: 34.3” W × 10.2” D × 28” H (head) and 23.2” H (back)

Playtime Instructions:

1. Guess the asking price (in U.S. dollars) for this rare set of four limited-edition Xai sheep tables.

2. Click the button below to submit your guess.

Submit your answer here

Honor system, please—no using Google to look up the answer! (If you do cheat, we still get the engagement, but you’ll have to live with yourself!)

The Stakes
Whoever gets the closest guess each week wins an entry into our grand prize drawing! We’ll be holding the final drawing on October 15th—the more weeks you win, the higher your chances! Our winning threader 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

This one was super fun. I found so many incredible paintings across every style and period imaginable of the Sun. I ended up going with some more modern, abstract selections.

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

🕵🏼‍♀️ MR. THREAD INSIDER #00006

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our members-only section.

Melissa Lentz on the robots already sitting on the org chart
Melissa was my coach. She saved my ass after my beloved startup went belly up, and then COVID shut down my factory at my other company. Her advice on how to navigate change as an artistic heritage company was invaluable.

That’s why we’re talking to her. Before founding M. Hatter Consulting over a decade ago, Melissa worked at Ogilvy, Tribal DDB, and MRY. She has since advised many of the world’s biggest brands on change, and now rebuilds companies to operate in this faster-moving world, so change is something they drive instead of something that runs them over. She is also certified in Hogan, a psychometric assessment, which is where we started.

Read more

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our members-only section.

Melissa Lentz on the robots on the org chart

Melissa was my coach. She saved my ass after my beloved startup went belly up, and then COVID shut down my factory at my other company. Her advice on how to navigate change as an artistic heritage company was invaluable.

That’s why we’re talking to her. Before founding M. Hatter Consulting over a decade ago, Melissa worked at Ogilvy, Tribal DDB, and MRY. She has since advised many of the world’s biggest brands on change, and now rebuilds companies to operate in this faster-moving world, so change is something they drive instead of something that runs them over. She is also certified in Hogan, a psychometric assessment, which is where we started.

Read more

🕵🏼‍♀️ MR. THREAD INSIDER #00005

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our members-only section.

The summer trend report.

This week, we hunted through the latest batch of industry trend reports to pull out the insights that actually matter to you.

Now, I never advocate for following trends blindly. But understanding what the market is feeling is essential. It forces us out of our own bubble. It exposes new opportunities and points out any obvious blind spots. Our goal at Mr. Thread is to serve as your design sherpa, giving you the context you need on your journey to build a resilient creative business.

Here are the key takeaways from the Summer Trend reports…

Read more

Hello readers…

How is it August already? Across Europe many of the factories send their staff on a month’s long vacation. My phone is quiet enough that I can hear myself think. This is my time for obsessing and planning.

Two weeks ago we published our exclusive on how Chinese factories are reverse-engineering the RH catalog. It is still the most-read thing we have ever put out, and the number keeps climbing. We’re still getting mail about it.

Mehnaz R. called the investigation “Equally exciting and scary,” and Freddy V. sent this: “Terrifying issue. Huge disinflationary force, but I think/hope, more so for large companies producing at scale. Scale = some degree of commoditization. Unique skill sets and craftsmanship may help smaller, more nimble brands have some kind of moat… but I may be smoking my own supply.”

Imagine this: You fly to Foshan, China, for two or three weeks. You hire a local agent who knows the lay of the land. You get introduced to owners, walk the factories, you take notes, and you come home with a source book of the 20 best ones. You hire a digital marketer. You build one simple sales funnel. And the most you spend is a couple thousand dollars on some airline tickets.

Your customer is every American who needs a new sofa or armchair, but is getting crushed by inflation and can’t stomach the prices at the big box stores. She visits RH, or Arhaus, or wherever, and sits on the sofas until she finds the one she wants. She photographs the fabric tag, and sends it to you. You order it direct from a factory in Foshan that builds it to the same spec, at half the price, and ships it direct to the customer via sea freight. You keep 20 to 30 points in the middle and everybody in the chain is happy.

Think about it. Every RH, West Elm, Crate & Barrel, and Arhaus in the country is your showroom. The entire sales script is: wherever you live, there’s a furniture store on Main Street. Go sit on the sofa you like, take the fabric sample, send me a photo, and I’ll take care of the rest. Now add the dining table, eight chairs, a second sofa, and six armchairs, and you’re talking real money.

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece on the rise of the million-dollar company with one employee. I’ve written more about it below in Opportunities. This is one of those companies. There is no such thing as building an easy business. But I swear to you, this is as close to a business in a box as there is.

Of course, I’m conflicted. I’ve spent 30 years defending the people who make things, and this is a business that exists entirely because someone else built the gallery, hired the salesperson, paid the designer, and printed the catalog. But as we found out in the original piece, nothing about it is illegal. But is it ethical? Post a comment below, we would love to hear from you.

Leave a comment

In the meantime, keep reading to find out which color is the new summer trend, and why the pyramids are making a comeback.

See you next week!

Mr. Thread

P.S. I’m late to this, but I love to play Housle! We’re working on a new game that might be a bit like this.

Subscribe now

🏭 INDUSTRY

Perigold and the Spotify problem

Wayfair absolutely crushed their Q2 earnings and their stock is soaring this week (up over 25%). Here’s why: they have brilliantly executed on their high-end strategy with Perigold. The K-shaped economy strikes again.

Wayfair’s CEO Niraj Shah told investors this week that Perigold, its luxury side hustle, now clears $400 million a year (you should read his opening remarks—eye opening). That’s only 3.6% of Wayfair’s US revenue, but it’s grown double digits every year since it launched in 2017, including more than 20% in both 2024 and 2025. Well-heeled customers are spending nearly three times what a Wayfair.com shopper spends on disposable furniture.

Perigold targets 15 million high-income American households, carries nearly 3.5 million SKUs from 1,500 brands, and relaunched its trade program earlier this year with deeper discounts for designers. Every year they ask one of my companies to list and we keep saying no, because our secret sauce is our people who sell the product. We don’t want to sell on Wayfair. It’s tempting though to join the platform where everyone else is. But you know? Ask any musician how Spotify worked out.

Wayfair’s logistics network is unmatchable. And because of their scale, they can sell at better prices and deliver other people’s products faster. They also have search, personalization, and a checkout that rocks—none of us could copy this, even if we had decades to do it. Remember, Perigold doesn’t own a stick of what it sells. It’s just a marketplace. So what is actually being built here is the backbone of our industry, and whoever owns the backbone is the gatekeeper.

But it’s a trap. If you list your fabric there it becomes just another red swatch in a sea of a thousand red swatches, ranked by an algorithm. And you just handed over the designer relationship that is your entire business. And if you stay away, one day you’ll find all the demand has been aggregated over there and you’re invisible. Musicians never chose Spotify. They got strong-armed onto it, and now there’s a wall between them and their fans, and the algorithm only feeds the big acts. Either way, you’re renting space and paying a tax on your own sales to a multi-billion-dollar tech company sitting in the middle.

There is another version of this, where the independents band together and take the economics of consolidation on our own terms, without handing anyone a controlling interest in our businesses. That one requires us to move first. But organization has never been our strong point.

“Prior to Perigold, the wealthy customer had no real digital destination that matched the way she actually wants to shop. The best design brands in the world were locked behind exclusive showrooms available to the trade only or scattered across single-style, single-category competitors.”

— Niraj Shah, CEO, co-founder of Wayfair.

Free fodder for Foshan

RH gave WWD a sneak peek at its 496-page 2026 RH Modern sourcebook on Monday. It includes the Pietrasanta sofa collection by Amsterdam-based Jan te Lintelo, Pleated Crystal lighting by Alison Berger, the Montaigne collection from Thomas Bina and São Paulo’s Ronald Sasson, and the Latitude oak collection Bina designed with Edward Robinson. It follows June’s first RH Estates book. RH posted $3.44 billion in net revenues for fiscal 2025. We stayed neutral on our own RH exclusive two weeks ago because the reporting deserved to speak for itself.

But now when I look at this catalog, I just imagine it pasted on the wall in Foshan factories, while the workers race to copy it. Gary Friedman keeps commissioning the world’s best designers, and you know what they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

“The Sourcebook presents the largest curated and fully integrated assortment of modern furnishings, lighting and décor under one brand in the world.”

— RH, via WWD

💰OPPORTUNITIES

Party of one

Stripe took a look at all its customers, and noticed a lot of solo operators on its platform pulling in more than $1 million a year. In fact their ranks doubled between 2023 and 2025. The number crossing $10 million nearly tripled in the same stretch. The Wall Street Journal found Ben Broca, 40, who launched an AI tools company from his living room in Sausalito last December, added 10,000 paying customers, and is on track for $10 million this year with nobody else on payroll. He’s employee of the month, every month.

Claire Vo coded an app while working full-time as a tech executive, listed it at $1 a month, and now has 100,000 users and is on track for seven figures of profit. New business applications in the information sector are up nearly 45% in a year, according to Bank of America Institute figures cited by the WSJ. The middleman business I described up top is this same arithmetic pointed at furniture. I run Mr. Thread with the support of three freelancers, and I keep telling the team, we’re aiming at $10 million.

There is no better time than now to build the business of your dreams. AI has made things so much faster and cheaper to get off the ground. Let’s go out and do it!

“I think people over-index on how easy AI is and under-index on how much I did to get to this point.”

— Claire Vo, founder, via The Wall Street Journal

The great wealth transfer hits UK property

London buying agent Jo Eccles wrote in the Financial Times about two entrepreneurs who built and sold an AI company in nine months and went looking for London property with £5 million ($6.7 million) each. One estate agent assumed they wanted a one-bedroom rental, because they were 20 and wearing jeans and trainers.

I was in London last week, where the Sunday Times 40 under 40 Rich List features 34 entirely self-made captains of industry. On that side of the pond, an estimated £5.5 trillion ($7.4 trillion) will pass between generations by 2050. Every client Eccles has represented who spent £20 million ($26.9 million) or more in the past five years has been in their thirties or forties. The great transfer of wealth has started. I’ve been writing about it here for a while, as regular readers will know. I believe there’s a massive boom coming to our industry, and the ones who are prepared will benefit from it!

“Clearly, agents who assume that ample funds and traditional trappings of wealth still go hand in hand are missing a trick. And in my experience, many young, wealthy buyers are keen to build new relationships on their own terms, often preferring to appoint their own advisers rather than rely on existing family relationships, keen to demonstrate they can stand on their own two feet and make decisions independently of their parents.”

— Jo Eccles, founder and managing director of Eccord, via the Financial Times

📊 ECONOMY

A vote of no confidence

The Fed held short-term rates steady on July 29. The 30-year Treasury yield rose 0.11 percentage points to 5.20%, its biggest one-day move since March and its highest level since 2007. The 30-year breakeven rate, the market’s read on inflation three decades out, had its largest one-day jump since the day after the 2024 election. If these numbers mean nothing to you, and you’re the sort of person who changes the channel when they start talking about this on TV, let me tell you, this flows straight through to us. The Mortgage Bankers Association put the 30-year fixed at 6.81% for the week ending July 31, and purchase applications fell 4% on the week and 3% on the year. People aren’t buying houses, which means they’re not refurbishing houses.

Trouble at Etsy

Etsy is cutting 220 jobs, about 12% of its staff, most of them in product and engineering. The company insists this is not cost-cutting and not AI, and the quarter backs that up. Sales came in at $668.3 million against a $649.1 million estimate. It also sold Depop to eBay for $1.4 billion, five years after paying $1.6 billion for it. Ouch. The number worth your attention sits further down the release. Etsy now has 5.7 million sellers, up 5.9%, and 87 million active buyers, down 0.4%. Supply is growing and demand is not. The shares fell about 7%. The writing is on the wall.

“You’ve heard me say that our first priority was to get the business growing again. Our ultimate goal, though, has always been to take Etsy to the next level of growth so we can fully deliver on our mission and our potential. We are now at the point where we need to make that shift — to build the team, culture, and organization that will make that possible.”
— Kruti Patel Goyal, CEO of Etsy, in a memo to staff, via CNBC

Keeping the American dream alive

JPMorganChase says it will pump $750 billion into housing through 2035 under its American Dream Initiative, more than $200 billion above what it put in over the previous decade and close to a 40% increase. It wants to build or preserve 1 million affordable units, help 500,000 homebuyers ( including 200,000 first-timer buyers), and hire 850 new home-lending advisors. In San Francisco it has committed $200 million to a single 342-unit building. I think it’s interesting that a commercial bank is now underwriting national housing supply—something the federal government should be doing itself.

“An affordable and resilient housing market is essential to driving economic growth and increasing opportunity. We’re focused on helping more people access quality housing they can afford—and we’re working across the real estate community, local governments, and nonprofits to scale housing solutions throughout the U.S.”

— Michelle Herrick, head of commercial real estate for J.P. Morgan

──────────────────────────────────────

SITDOWN WITH MR. THREAD

Bill McIntosh and Martin Raffone on becoming their own worst clients.

William McIntosh Design is the New York firm behind highly polished, livable interiors in some of Manhattan’s most desirable addresses — 432 Park Avenue, the Plaza, the Puck Building, Herzog & de Meuron’s 160 Leroy Street — plus projects in Miami, Palm Beach, San Francisco, London, and retreats including St. Barths and Morocco. Bill McIntosh and Martin Raffone run it together and are married to each other. Bill takes the architecture, Martin takes the textiles and furnishings. Between them they have been featured by Architectural Digest, Elle Decor, Departures, and 1stDibs Introspective. We caught them at their house in Litchfield County, Connecticut, where a 1980s bathroom is currently in pieces on the floor.

Hello guys. What are you excited about right now?

Martin: Our renovation on our house. We have a 200-year-old house that currently has a 1980s single bathroom, and we are ripping that out and turning it into two bathrooms. The contractor just removed the old floor, and we got to see the structure of the house, which is amazing. How they built houses 200 years ago. It’s all post and beam and old timbers. It is sort of exciting, not only from a historic point, but having to design spaces for ourselves is sort of a treat.

How is the process different when you’re designing for yourselves rather than a client?

Martin: It’s insane.

Bill: It’s sort of the classic story. When you’re doing it for yourself, suddenly you become a total idiot. You’re the worst client. Never wish it upon yourself. Decision-making is prolonged, and the things we do so instinctively, almost without overthinking—is just belabored.

Martin: My favorite little anecdote to this: we went to Waterworks to look for tile for our bathrooms, of which we need four. We go there all the time and we can select tile for client projects in literally minutes. She started pulling out the sample boards, and I turned to her and I said, “How the hell do you work this thing?” And she turned to me and she said, every single designer that comes in here who’s doing their own project has the same reaction. They just have no idea what they want.

Bill: It’s like 40 years of experience out the window.

How does your design partnership work when it’s your own home?

Martin: We’re really in alignment when we’re working on client projects. Bill has a very particular component to the work, which is very architectural, and I sort of do more of the textiles and furnishing, so we mesh together incredibly well.

Bill: We get the big picture lined up, and then you always know what to go back to when you’re making decisions throughout the process.

Martin: But when you’re doing your own project, it’s harder to have the big picture. The house is 200 years old. It’s very simply designed on the interior, and that’s sort of the storyline—which, if this was for clients, we would refer to constantly. When we’re doing it on our own it’s hard to reference. And suddenly we become very budget conscious.

Do you still check all the boxes—the mood board, the scope of work—or are you winging it?

Martin: We’re winging it. But we did have lots of inspiration images. We knew we wanted a walk-in shower with beautiful little tile. We’ve been planning this for years, so we knew that. But when it comes to the point of actually jumping off the bridge, that becomes more stressful. Do we really want to spend that much money on this beautiful tile?

I just got the West Elm catalog in the mail. Every page is brown. What’s going on?

Martin: We did get that catalog. It all looks like Pierre Yovanovitch. I think these companies are quite clever. It’s like fast fashion—they are quickly absorbing the zeitgeist of design, and they are able to produce and pump it out there so quickly. We both looked at it and we remarked that it was pretty amazing. It really is knockoffs of Pierre Yovanovitch furniture and of his whole mood.

Bill: When West Elm first came on the scene it had a freshness to it. This isn’t necessarily fresh, but maybe it’s fresh for them, because they went really down in the toilet, I think, for several years. So it seemed a return to at least design.

Martin: It’s pretty, but it doesn’t interest me, because I can clearly see where they’re deriving all of this from, and I think it’s incredibly trendy. Pierre’s work is beautiful, but I’m sort of tired of it. You need Pierre’s architecture, the chateau in Provence. Put that furniture on Third Avenue in a little co-op and you’re not quite getting it.

Why do you think the big retailers are looking backwards? I’m thinking about RH and Michael Taylor.

Bill: Security. It’s a financial sure bet. If everybody’s just following the trend, the beige, soft, curvy furniture styles, you’re going to pump out as much beige, soft stuff. But try and determine where the trend came from, because certainly some corporate design team didn’t come up with this look.

Martin: They’re sucking it all off Instagram. They need to bring something to market, and then they blanket everything in cream bouclé, because you know that it’s easy to live with. RH recently changed their whole tune about custom color. Before that, you couldn’t get anything on their upholstery except beige fabric. And they’re looking back because that’s sort of the trend. We’ve been cycling through trends. We started with mid-century modern, which just was exhausted, and then we moved into the ’60s, and now we’re up to the ’80s. Michael Taylor.

“We don’t really need Instagram because we have our own Instagram in our brain. It’s like, remember that door we saw in Paris 20 years ago, and it was shiny and it was purple.”

— Martin Raffone, William McIntosh Design

You say “trend” like it’s a naughty word. When you’re working for clients, how do you create designs that have longevity?

Martin: We try never to make them trendy.

Bill: The people who come to us are not trend followers, and maybe it’s because they’re not necessarily young. They’re more established in their lives and financially. We’re not dealing with 20-year-olds or even 30-year-olds. When somebody looks at our work they see things that are just not trendy. So they’re not coming to us for that. I don’t think anybody’s of such strong fiber that you’re not going to be tempted by a trend here or there, and maybe it keeps things kind of youthful and present.

Martin: We’re not immune to it, and trends often come from good places. Pierre Yovanovitch is doing intelligent, beautiful work with gorgeous colors and fabulous textures, and of course that’s going to enter into the work. We’ve been to his showroom, we’ve used some of the furniture he’s producing. But trying to recreate somebody else’s design because it’s trendy—no one has ever asked us to do that, and we wouldn’t want to. It wouldn’t be interesting.

What else has your eye at the moment?

Martin: Speaking of RH. It’s interesting that Gary is going back to traditional brown furniture. I don’t know if you could call that a trend, but it seems like people are starting to talk about antiques again, which I think is a nice idea. Anything not ’60s or ’70s. Real old brown furniture. I like to mix things that are historic, and we really go deep dive into references. We’re currently working on a beach house where the client went and stayed at a hotel in Puglia, and that’s been the genesis of the design of their house. Not that we’re trying to create a Pugliese retreat on the ocean, but all of those textures and colors—and then we expand the story to include all of Italy. Because we don’t really have a signature look, each project brings its own story.

Bill: At the other end of the spectrum, we just wrapped up a little renovation of an ’80s beach house in the Hamptons. All angles and curves. It was so much fun. We knocked it out in less than a year, 10 months, and it was simple, easy. It looked like what it was supposed to look like, which totally tuned in with the clients’ vibe. That was a total joy.

Last one, for both of you. Favorite city?

Martin and Bill [In chorus]: I think it’s Paris.

Editor’s note: This interview has been lightly condensed for clarity.

Find out more at: williammcintoshdesign.com

🤖 TECH

Christmas is already in the cart

Attentive surveyed 600 US consumers and found 71% plan to start their holiday shopping before Black Friday, and 46% before November even begins. Two-thirds (67%) have used Gemini, Perplexity, or ChatGPT to manage a purchase in the last three months. Among Gen Z that number is 80%. Of those shoppers, 58% ask AI about a specific product, 51% compare brands and features, 45% want a recommendation, and 43% hunt for a deal. Setting discounts aside, free shipping is the top motivator, at 68%. It’s the first week of August and here’s where we’re at: customers are using LLMs to make their December decisions. If your descriptions, dimensions, materials, and lead times are not designed to attract artificial intelligence, you’re on the naughty list already.

“Consumers are discovering products, comparing options, and deciding which brands they trust long before the holiday rush. The retailers that win this holiday season will be the ones using AI to understand and deliver on individual customer preferences, serve timely, personalized experiences across every channel, and strengthen relationships well before promotions begin.”

— Jema Birkmeyer, vice president of strategic sales at Attentive, via Retail Dive

📈TRENDS

The rise of grandma hobbies

The New York Times spent two days at Green Door Folk School, a farmstead school in northern Michigan that teaches basketry, spoon carving, quilting, felting, and natural dyeing. As you can imagine, Millennials and Gen Z are the majority of its students. John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina, the oldest still operating in the country, now runs a waiting list for a teen program. It’s the same at Ely Folk School in Minnesota. More than 100 folk schools operate across the US, and Pinterest searches for beginner sewing projects have quadrupled in a year, driven by users under 34.

Every one of those hobbies runs on what we already make. Soft goods, fabrics, thread, batting, trim. Knitting, sewing, crochet, quilting — the crossover between the home textile world and the grandma hobby world is enormous, and the quilting industry on its own is massive and growing faster than anything in our category. One of my brands is researching a niche ancillary line into it right now. Two things are pushing this. People have more time on their hands because of AI, or work from home, or whatever you want to call it, and they want off their screens.

Underneath that is anxiety. You make something beautiful with your hands and it does something for you that feels so much healthier than doom-scrolling. We talk constantly at one of my brands about beauty and suffering, about how it helps the human condition to make something beautiful while you are hurting. Then you look at the finished thing—a puzzle, a plate, a little cushion you crocheted—and you made that. Wonderful.

Some people are already doing it. Jacob Long has spent more than a decade making American wool manufacturing cool again, and he’s high on my list to interview. The Urban Electric Co. made a hand-built lighting factory in Charleston. And look at Hellman-Chang’s marketing: Eric Chang carving furniture in a Canali suit and a silk tie. Making things with your hands is finally being sold as glamour. It’s only taken this business 30 years to work that out.

Anyway, the quilting business is enormous and growing fast, and I’m testing a way to get into it with my company. The kids are now paying real money for the privilege of doing badly, by hand, something a machine could do in 1910.

“Grandma hobbies reconnect us to ourselves. These activities are hard, in that they require time and concentration to master. But they also offer clear and fulfilling rewards.”

— Cal Newport, professor of computer science at Georgetown University, via The New York Times

The summer report

Sherwin-Williams published its Colormix 2027 forecast, 1stDibs pulled together the year’s best indoor-outdoor rooms, and Elle Decoration named contrast piping the furniture detail of the season. And a West Elm catalog landed in our editor’s mailbox this week drenched in one earthy color—can you guess what it is? The whole summer report is in Mr. Thread Insider, below.

🧵LOOSE THREADS

• Jisu Yoon has invented a collapsible hand-woven a sofa out of shape-memory alloy.

• ArchDaily has rounded up six houses shaped like pyramids, which has pleased this Egyptian.

• UNESCO has added 13 buildings and ensembles by Aino, Elissa and Alvar Aalto to the World Heritage list, along with 10 in Tashkent. Soviet concrete is finally cool.

• MAD spent eight years on a 2 million-square-foot culture complex on Shenzhen Bay. It is quite frankly, stunning.

• Herman Miller has pulled three Alexander Girard patterns out of its own textile archive and had Pendleton weave them into $325 blankets. I want one.

• Somebody has built a listening museum for 36 mechanical keyboards. Get ready to lose a couple of hours.

🎨 THIS WEEK’S ART

I must admit. This was a tough week for finding art. I just couldn’t find any inspiration that made sense with this week’s content. But alas, after exhaustive work searching through the archives, I found an interesting one. He is Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and the critic John Ruskin is said to have called him the “Worst painter of the 19th century.” I found that kind of harsh, but I do get how his very literal paintings can come across as cheesy. Nonetheless, I loved the subject matter and the vibrancy of the brushstrokes, realism, and color that has brought this week’s journal to life!

Enjoying Mr. Thread?

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🕵🏼‍♀️ MR. THREAD INSIDER #00005

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our members-only section.

The summer trend report.

This week, we hunted through the latest batch of industry trend reports to pull out the insights that actually matter to you.

Now, I never advocate for following trends blindly. But understanding what the market is feeling is essential. It forces us out of our own bubble. It exposes new opportunities and points out any obvious blind spots. Our goal at Mr. Thread is to serve as your design sherpa, giving you the context you need on your journey to build a resilient creative business.

Here are the key takeaways from the Summer Trend reports…

Read more

IN THE WINTER OF 2025, Chloe McGrath* flew from her home in New York to start a new life in Hong Kong with her husband. She soon found herself at the window of her new apartment, looking out at the twinkling skyline—thousands of towers, lit up at night, stacked with seven and a half million people on a strip of land wedged between the mountains and the sea. “It was an adventure moving to Asia,” she says. There was only one problem: their apartment was totally unfurnished. It was like living in an empty box.

“The furniture options in Hong Kong were really limited,” she says. There were designer Italian galleries priced for hedge-fund money, or IKEA and Zara Home. What she wanted was something more like Restoration Hardware. “The RH-style stuff that’s really popular, especially in America, it’s actually quite minimalistic,” she says. It was also expensive. What if they spent a fortune on sofas, and Hong Kong didn’t work out?

At first Chloe outsourced the problem. A woman in Hong Kong made her living sourcing furniture directly from Chinese factories on behalf of expat clients, and Chloe hired her. She ordered a few essential items, and they were affordable and well made. “But she has a little bit of a different style than us,” she says. And so she set out to do it herself.

On Reddit Chloe discovered a small, obsessive community that had figured out how to buy furniture directly from Chinese factories that copied famous American brands like RH and Arhaus. She started chatting with sellers on WeChat and WhatsApp. One was a sales representative who went by Rose, who handled international sales for a factory in Foshan called Zhenúr. Rose sent her a catalog. It ran to 148 pages.

The PDF was bilingual and organized like RH’s doorstep-sized catalog. There were chairs, coffee tables, side tables, dining tables, even outdoor furniture. The first thirty pages were sofas—long, low, modular designs in cream and ivory and dove gray, photographed in airy white rooms, just like RH. The prices were astonishing. “They’re able to make basically anything you would get from a Western retailer for a fraction of the cost,” Chloe says.

Read more

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our members-only section. This is where we dive deeper into the big story of the week.

Caitlin Penny
Caitlin Penny trained as a designer, then took a job dressing the interiors of private jets for Gulfstream Aerospace, where she first crossed paths with Rose Tarlow. A decade ago she joined Tarlow’s Los Angeles furniture and …

Read more

Hello readers…

I’m writing this from the wrong side of the road. We’re somewhere between Richmond and Windsor, it’s pushing 35 degrees here (that’s mid-nineties in real money) and I keep clipping the curb on the left because I’m used to driving on American roads. This is my one family vacation of the year. Kew Gardens this morning (no shade where we walked, it felt like standing in a desert) and Windsor Castle tomorrow. The kids demanded the Ted Lasso pub. We found the Ted Lasso pub. Believe!

A confession about vacations: I have never once set an out-of-office. I push everyone at my brands to take real time off. Go be with your families and decompress. But I sell fabrics. I’m not a brain surgeon. If you have a fabric question, call me. Taking an hour on the road to work on this journal is not stressful. I love it too much for it to feel like work.

We just toured Buckingham Palace, and to be honest, the interiors were “meh.” I expected something grander. Then we walked into the Palace of Westminster, and the Lords Chamber took my breath away. I’ve been to every Newport mansion, every Venetian palazzo, Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, and the Lords Chamber is the most beautiful room I have ever stood in. The carving, the gold leaf, the color, the works. It’s over the top, but it all came together anyway.

I found myself lecturing my kids about it. I told them, this room is a paradox. This is the house of a lot of criminals. Think how many people you could feed with the money behind one square inch of one statue in one corner of that palace. But without governments and crooks commissioning at this level, nobody makes anything this beautiful, and beauty at this level inspires the next generation to greatness.

London gets it, by the way. My kinda place. Every restaurant and hotel room in this city gets the lighting and the proportions right. We ate in a room covered, ceiling included, in one very risky green, and they somehow pulled it off. This may be the most design-literate city on earth, which is why it’s such a strong market for my brands. I even spotted a wallpaper in Parliament that looked like one of our own designs, and I’ve already told my youngest son to start working on the next palace commission. The wall coverings in there now are beautiful and predictable. We can do better.

Back in the ol’ USA, the government dropped new tariffs last Friday, a California recycling law landing on textile houses, a designer was arrested in Lake Arrowhead, and Missouri is leading the way on the professional licensing idea we’ve been hoping for. Government gives and government takes, I guess.

And thank you to everyone who shared last week’s RH exclusive. That one was our most-read issue ever.

See you next week.

Mr. Thread

Subscribe now

🏭 INDUSTRY

Interior motives.
This one caught my eye. A 58-year-old Lake Arrowhead interior designer is sitting in the West Valley Detention Center facing nine felony and misdemeanor charges, including grand theft and diversion of construction funds. According to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, a client paid her firm, Coronado by Design, $67,500 in October 2024 to remodel a kitchen and three bathrooms, then the designer ghosted them. According to Houzz, her project budgets range from $100,000 to $2 million, and detectives believe there could be more victims. Money flows through a designer’s hands by the millions. Clients hand money to unlicensed strangers and hope for the best, and on most projects nobody checks. Which leads me to the next story…

“[The designer] delayed the project with various excuses for nearly a year.”

— San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, via SFGATE

Licensed and bonded.
We have been calling for this forever. On July 13, Missouri governor Mike Kehoe signed Senate Bill 1233, an omnibus licensing bill that converts interior designer registration into full licensure and gives NCIDQ-certified interior designers the right to sign, stamp, and seal their own blueprints, no third-party architect required. Designer Kerry Schuette and her St. Louis colleagues won it the hard way, borrowing a play from Missouri’s cattle ranchers who lobby the state capitol every single week. Interior design is now regulated in 31 states plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, and 20 of those allow sign-and-seal. Ours remains the one profession anyone can claim by waking up tomorrow and printing a business card. Clients rarely question an architect’s fees. A license, or stamp of approval, like the black rooster on a bottle of real Chianti, is how our industry could earn the same respect.

“They walk in with their big cowboy hats and their big belt buckles and everybody knows it’s Wednesday at the capitol. We made the decision to strategically speak to every senator and representative that we possibly could.”

— Kerry Schuette, founder of VVell Studio, via Business of Home

Off the charts.
A quick thank-you. Last week’s exclusive on the Chinese factories reverse-engineering the RH catalog reached 216% of our typical audience — our most-read issue we’ve ever put out. People passed it around and talked about it all over social media, especially on Reddit. Our chemical testing surprised people most: a Duke University lab screened sofa fabric from RH and from a Foshan dupe factory, and both came back clean. One Redditor summed up the mood better than I could. See below. If you missed the story, catch up now. If it made you smarter, send it to a colleague. This is how a four-person editorial team thrives.

“Luxury furniture pricing has always been a performance art, so honestly whoever outperformed them deserves some kind of award.”

— Redditor sam-otter90, via Reddit.com

The $76 million fixer-upper.
Ken Fulk is on the A-list of designers; he’s the man behind Sean Parker’s “Lord of the Rings” wedding and the Carbone restaurants, and a great longtime client of one of my brands. In 2022 he paid $13.3 million for four storied West Marin properties owned by the late chef Margaret Grade, vowing to resurrect the legendary Manka’s Inverness Lodge. Instead he inherited $2.3 million in undisclosed hotel taxes, zoning nightmares, and a renovation loan that has ballooned past $17.1 million. Now foreclosure lurks on the horizon. Fulk is now suing Grade’s estate and associates for $76.3 million, and his own description of the deal explains the whole disaster: “handshakes instead of documents.” Get it in writing, even with a dear friend. Especially with a dear friend.

“Ken works well with tech billionaires and oligarchs and people who literally have no idea what to do with their vast amounts of wealth. Ken has plenty of ideas of what they can do with their vast amounts of wealth.”
— Mayer Rus, West Coast editor of Architectural Digest, via The San Francisco Standard

📊 ECONOMY

Nobody moves, nobody buys.
Georgia Furniture Mart, the Atlanta-area dealer that opened in 1986, is shutting its two stores, joining Big Lots, Value City Furniture, American Freight, and 17 independent dealers that have shuttered this quarter, according to Furniture Today. Per eMarketer, sales at furniture stores are down about 8% since 2022, and the first two months of this year fell another 4.8% year over year. With mortgage rates and home prices this high, housing turnover sits near historic lows, and people who don’t move don’t buy wardrobes.

“The combination of elevated mortgage rates and home prices has pushed housing turnover rates near historic lows. And if people aren’t moving, there are fewer consumers in the market for a new couch or dining table.”

— Zak Stambor, senior analyst at eMarketer, via Business of Home

🤖 TECH

The end of busywork.
Avoice, a Y Combinator-backed startup, says it has built the first AI agents that can run the entire back end of an architecture studio. They claim the AI can handle specs, schedules, invoicing, timesheets, and all the boring operational stuff. Project management is information flowing back and forth. Is it in stock, how many yards, what’s the price per yard, when does it ship, where is it going. That is the easiest work in the world for AI, and its arrival in design firms will be a monumental shift. I’ve signed up for demos of these platforms as a potential client. I’ll write full reviews for Mr. Thread Insider readers August, so you don’t have to sit through the sales calls.

“An email lives in Gmail. The spec lives in one tool. The schedule lives in a spreadsheet. QA markups live in a PDF. The budget lives somewhere else. Every time something changes, someone has to manually stitch it all together.”

— Chawin Asavasaetakul, co-founder of Avoice, via Dezeen

🧵LOOSE THREADS

• A recent book, Claying Architecture: Making Machine and Material Kin, gathers 30-plus architects and researchers on clay 3D printing: 10,000 years of mud meets the robot arm.

• Enjoy some color porn: A Dictionary Of Color Combinations Vol 1 (Japanese Edition).

🎲 PLAYTIME

Congratulations to Rachel vdB., Hillary E., Justine B., Tullia P., Amy G., and Freddy V. for correctly solving our final word of the season: EXPAT! Outstanding work, threaders!

Thank you for an amazing Playtime season 2!
A big thank you to all threaders who played along.

🏆 The grand raffle winner

Congratulations, Martin R.! You’ve won the grand raffle draw! You will be receiving:

• A featured spotlight for you and your firm in an upcoming issue of Mr. Thread.

• A special mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle.

🎉 Special Honorable Mentions: A massive shoutout to Tullia P. and Hillary E. for topping our leaderboard with the highest overall points this season! While the random raffle draw crowned our single grand winner, your weekly precision throughout Season 2 was an incredible feat.

Playtime Season 3 is brewing!
Thank you all for being such loyal threaders. Rest up, because Playtime Season 3 is already brewing behind the scenes with fresh clues and new surprises. Keep an eye on your inbox for our upcoming launch date!

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

🎨 THIS WEEK’S ART

Mr. Weft here, Mr. Thread’s British editor, taking over as art director for the week. This edition’s art is by Sir John Lavery, a Belfast-born, Glasgow- and Paris-trained painter of great rooms, active from the 1880s to the 1940s. Lavery is best known as a society portraitist, though he also recorded the great ceremonial and legal interiors of his day. In the Commons, members address each other in the third person, and a Privy Counsellor is ‘the right honorable gentleman.’ It’s hard to explain to Americans, but in English, that phrase is also a devastating insult. Try it yourself.

🕵🏼‍♀️ MR. THREAD INSIDER

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our new members-only section. This is where we dive deeper into the big story of the week

A SIT DOWN WITH MR. THREAD

Caitlin Penny

Caitlin Penny trained as a designer, then took a job dressing the interiors of private jets for Gulfstream Aerospace, where she first crossed paths with Rose Tarlow. A decade ago she joined Tarlow’s Los Angeles furniture and textile house, moving from sales into operations, and today runs the business as Managing Director. That means Governor Newsom’s new law is her problem. Signed in September 2024, SB 707 makes California the first state to hold clothing and textile makers responsible for collecting, repairing, and recycling what they produce. Penny, who also chairs the board of the West Hollywood Design District, is registering Rose Tarlow now, and thinking hard about what a law written for fast fashion means for a house built on furniture designed to last forever. We had a lot of questions…

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