No diploma required

Issue #00031: June 11th, 2026

Hello readers…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you next week.

Mr. Thread

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

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

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