Issue #00017: March 5, 2026

Hello readers,

We talk a lot in this newsletter about beauty being a distraction from chaos. And it is—until it isn’t. The war in the Middle East is no longer something happening on our screens. It’s in our shipping lanes and our project timelines. One of my salespeople, who often travels to Russia to visit clients, can no longer fly there. Italian airspace restrictions over the conflict zone have made the route impossible. A major project we’ve been developing is now delayed indefinitely due to flight disruptions across Europe. Design is a global business and everyone in our industry is starting to feel it. Of course nothing comes close to the grief felt by those who have lost someone they love in this conflict.

I was on the phone this week with a good friend, a master designer in Europe. He’s in the UK right now, installing a project for a Middle Eastern royal family. It’s an extraordinary townhouse, the kind of commission that makes you remember why you got into this business. He flew in a 19-year-old specialty artisan from France just to work on it. She’s talented beyond her years, but now she’s surrounded by the family’s armed security. There is paranoia in the air and men with massive machine guns patrolling the hallways of the home. The fog of war is seeping into the work. He told me he could see it in her hands. She’s spooked. We all are.

Times like these clarify the mission. People have always turned to beauty in the face of darkness. Not so much to escape, but to endure. Every room we design is a small act of defiance against the chaos. We are custodians of beauty, and that is no small thing. When the world feels like it’s unraveling, our job is to hold the thread.

Keep reading to find out about the medicine of design, what designers can learn from Pokémon, and why Philippe Starck describes AI as “a motorcycle for my mind.”

See you next week.

Stay sharp,
Mr. Thread

P.S. Don’t just read—play. We’ve woven a new mystery into this issue in our PLAYTIME segment. 0 Correct Guesses Last Week. Let’s see who has the “eye” to claim the win this time and secure a spot for our grand prize draw. Scroll to the bottom to join the fun! 

A sad turn in the Middle East
Regular readers know I’ve been optimistic about the Gulf as a growth market for luxury interiors. You might remember our coverage of The Italian Furniture Heritage Foundation’s partnership with Saudi Arabia. I was exploring making investments there myself, but I’ve put a pin in it.

Following the US-Israel attack on Tehran, Iranian missiles and drones were launched toward the Gulf, shattering the UAE’s carefully constructed image as the region’s safe haven. Chalhoub Group, which operates 900 stores for Versace, Jimmy Choo, and Sephora across the region, closed its Bahrain locations and made staff attendance “voluntary” in other markets. A five-star hotel in Dubai was hit. The US embassy in Riyadh took drone strikes. American citizens have been urged to leave.

Luxury stocks fell hard too. LVMH dropped 7.7% in two trading days. Kering is down 11%. Richemont, one of the groups most exposed to the Middle East, slid nearly 10%. In Business of Fashion, Morningstar senior equity analyst Jelena Sokolova put it plainly: “The Middle East has been one of luxury’s few bright spots over the past year, especially as demand from Chinese and American consumers has softened.”

The only way to get a new home these days? Death.
The Wall Street Journal reports that nearly one out of every five property transfers in California last year was made through inheritance—about 18% of all transactions, representing roughly 60,000 homes. That’s a record for the state and double the national share, according to real-estate data firm Cotality. The root cause is Proposition 13, which capped property taxes in 1978. A new buyer may pay 10 times more than their next-door neighbor who bought in the 70s. So people hold on until they die, and the only way for younger Californians is to outlive someone they love.

California is the number two interior design market in America. This is a sad one, and assuredly happening across all of America, not just California. For designers, a market where properties change hands through estate transfers means a different kind of client, one inheriting a house full of someone else’s choices, ripe for a full redesign. Keep an eye on Texas, which may overtake California entirely.

And with the aging boomer population decreasing, there is a massive transfer of home wealth on the horizon in the next 5-10 years. It will be a fascinating time to see what happens when these properties switch hands to the next generation. I think it will be a massive boom for our industry.

Furniture orders confirm what we know: flat 2025
The latest Smith Leonard Furniture Insights report is in, and Home Accents Today has the data: new orders among survey participants finished 2025 flat with 2024 levels. Shipments declined slightly. Forty percent of retailers cited economic uncertainty as their biggest concern. Smith Leonard said the year’s results reflect “a market that remained resilient despite a range of economic and geopolitical pressures,” calling it “perhaps a relative win in light of the challenges presented by the year’s disruptions.” 

This tracks. A quick look at my company’s profit and loss shows we were flat-ish last year, maybe a touch up. Knowing the broader industry was treading water too makes me feel okay about where we landed. The Smith Leonard report points to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East as a risk for the furniture sector, with escalating military action already disrupting oil markets and shipping routes, pushing oil prices higher and raising freight costs.

The good, the bad, and the ugly on tariffs
What a weird publication Furniture Today is. A blast from the past. I imagine inside their corporate offices looks just like Dunder Mifflin. But they’ve had a busy week, and we suffered through scrolling their archaic website so you don’t have to.

The Good: Senators Coons and Rosen introduced the Housing Tariff Exclusion Act, which would automatically exempt homebuilding materials from current and future tariffs. Roughly 60% of builders have already seen cost increases. This bill won’t fix everything, but at least someone in Washington is trying to be surgical about it.

The Bad (now less bad): A federal judge just cleared the way for IEEPA tariff refunds. Judge Richard Eaton of the US Court of International Trade ordered Customs and Border Protection to issue refunds to all importers whose entries were subject to IEEPA duties struck down by the Supreme Court. The administration brought in an estimated $130 billion from those tariffs. Dan Anthony of We Pay the Tariffs, a small-business coalition, called it “a victory” and demanded “a full, fast, and automatic refund process.” The payment process remains murky—but the ruling is real. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said a 15% global tariff (up from 10%) is “likely” this week as a replacement. So with one hand they giveth, and with the other they taketh away. Furniture Today has more.

The Ugly: Post-SCOTUS, the administration isn’t backing down. Trump signed an executive order imposing a new 10% global tariff under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, effective almost immediately. Section 232 duties of 25% on furniture remain untouched. Call your customs broker. Call your UPS guy. Until invoices start rolling in, most of us have no idea how much these tariffs have actually cost us.

Life of an Epstein designer
A new exposé has surfaced on the legendary French interior designer Alberto Pinto and his entanglement with Jeffrey Epstein. Pinto, who died in 2012, was responsible for much of the interior of Epstein’s notorious Upper East Side mansion at 9 East 71st Street. His name appeared prominently in Epstein’s contacts.

You see, at the highest levels, interior designers become something close to royalty. They enter the most intimate spaces of their clients’ lives—closets, drawers, bedrooms. Designers like Peter Marino travel with private security details. They get commissioned by the world’s most powerful people. And sometimes, that proximity pulls them into darkness. The closer you get to extreme wealth, the sharper your judgment needs to be about whose money you’re taking. 

This is salacious, well-reported, and worth your time behind the paywall. It reminds me of that New York Times exposé years ago about a design firm running a money laundering scheme through client accounts. Or this Tampa designer who allegedly ripped off a Yankee legend. These stories are rare in our industry—but when they surface, they’re always a page-turner.

Related: Designer Amy Vermillion tackles the ethical dilemma no one in the industry wants to talk about: Should you work with criminal clients?

What our industry can learn from Pokémon
Pokémon turned 30 this week. Domus published a brilliant essay on why the franchise is a masterclass in designing rarity—and the business lessons for our world are significant:

A Pikachu Illustrator card—one of roughly 40 copies in existence—just sold at auction for $900,000. The card itself is ink on cardboard. The value is documented scarcity inside a story shared by a whole generation. One of my companies has built something similar with our fabric patterns and colorways. Clients collect them the way devotees collect relics, almost like religious symbols. When a colorway is gone, it’s gone. This requires discipline, but if you can build scarcity into the DNA of your product from day one and create mythology around your work, you’ll make your customers say: “Gotta catch ‘em all!”

Design is medicine
House Beautiful just published a deep piece on neurodivergent-friendly  design—how lighting, acoustics, texture, and spatial layout can be calibrated to support the one-in-five people who process sensory information differently. There’s dimmable warm-toned lighting, transition zones, and flexible furniture that reduces cognitive load. How design makes people feel is everything. I’ve known this for a while and now the science is catching up. In May, my company is opening a design project built around neuroarchitecture. We’ll be measuring heart rates and emotional responses as real people walk through the door. Actually wiring up humans to understand what good design does to the body. The brands that figure this out first will own the next decade.

The Textile Hall of Fame: a fight over bragging rights
The International Textile Alliance (ITA) announced the launch of the Textile Hall of Fame—and the American Home Furnishings Hall of Fame is threatening legal action, claiming ITA copied its name and format. Board first vice president Gat Caperton said “the timing and manner in which ITA has chosen to position and launch its new venture is uncannily similar to ours.” The ITA says “Hall of Fame” is a common designation used across industries. The whole thing will launch at the Interwoven Textile Fair, May 19-21. Two industry organizations are suing each other over the phrase “Hall of Fame.” You can’t make this up.

Big box retailers and interior design
Havertys just released Q4 earnings and Furniture Today has the breakdown: revenue hit $201.9 million, up 9.5% year over year, with comparable store sales climbing 8.2%. 

Here’s the number that should concern every independent designer: the company’s in-house design services now represent 33.3% of total sales, with design-led average tickets jumping 11.9% to $8,072. 

That confirms what we’ve known for a while—free interior design services from big box retailers are taking a real bite out of the market for independent designers. At the AD100 level, this doesn’t touch you. But for designers in the long tail, figuring out how to articulate your artistic value against free-ninety-nine is becoming the defining business challenge of our time.

A reckoning for industry software
You may have noticed we talk about Dennis Scully a lot. There’s a reason: he’s one of the sharpest mouthpieces in the industry, a genuinely good guy, and he keeps giving us things to talk about. This week on Business of Home, Keith Granet (founder of Studio Designer and author of The Business of Design) discussed what design firms might look like in 2035. Granet talked about growing from three employees to 120, with 22,000 designers on the platform.

That’s not the flex he may think it is. In the age of AI, 120 employees serving 22,000 designers is a vulnerability, not a strength. Consider this: In 1998, Kodak employed 170,000 people. In 2012, when Facebook bought Instagram for one billion dollars, it had just thirteen employees. Large companies are not agile because they have huge payrolls to worry about.

Designers never leave these ancient systems like Studio because migration is painful and expensive. That moat has evaporated. AI tools can now move your entire history from one platform to another while you sleep. Look at Cal AI—two 16-year-old kids built a calorie-tracking app, threatened Under Armour’s MyFitnessPal, and got acquired for $435 million in 18 months. If a better platform for designers, like Programa, builds an AI migration bot, suddenly Studio Designer’s 22,000 users are up for grabs. Granet is a good operator and problem solver, but I’m very bearish on companies like his surviving the next decade without a radical pivot.

Philippe Starck uses AI to design less
Forbes profiles the iconic French designer’s ongoing collaboration with Kartell and Autodesk, where Starck uses generative AI as a creative accelerant—feeding it a brief and letting the algorithm propose structural solutions that a human mind wouldn’t reach on its own. Starck has called AI “a motorcycle for my mind.” His A.I. chair—made from 100% recycled material—asked a simple question: can you carry the human body with the least material possible? The result uses less plastic than any comparable production chair. This is a designer using AI as another paintbrush. He originates the idea and AI manifests his vision. Cool stuff by Mr.Keep an eye on Starck. We are intrigued enough to keep an eye on his next move. 

Etsy is as essential as Instagram for designers
Veranda published a deep guide on shopping Etsy as a designer—and it’s better than you’d expect. They call out stores like Fresh Vintage Market and Textile Trunk, which stocks antique fabrics from the 1790s and 1890s. My company has a modest Etsy presence, but beyond offloading inventory, Etsy is a legitimate sourcing tool. I use it to peep at retro rattan chairs, French tapestries, one-of-a-kind textiles you’d never find in a showroom. There are so many ways anyone in any level of our industry can use the giant platform of Etsy to find opportunity. Don’t sleep on it, it’s not just for cute grandma’s old ladies selling crochet.

The return of Rock ‘n’ Roll grit
Bloomberg reports that the hottest hotels and restaurants in New York and London are going small. The new metric is “content per square foot.” David Rockwell (who built his career on massive venues like Tao) is now designing intimate, considered spaces. Cozier, grittier, more human. The same impulse drove the Hotel Chelsea renovation, and if you haven’t watched the Architectural Digest documentary on the Chelsea’s redesign, kill 15 minutes with it this weekend. The music, the rock star history, the deliberate choice to leave design elements feeling roughed up and rustic—it’s fantastic eye candy and a case study in why Rock ‘n’ Roll grit has more soul than polish.

Analog makes a comeback
Architectural Digest reports that old-fashioned buttons, switches, and knobs are returning to the home—part of a broader “analog wellness” movement. As architect Yan M. Wang put it, a home where “technology is always in the background, working and listening, feels anxiety-producing.” Dwell recently named the decline of smart homes a top trend. And it’s not just interiors: Domus reports that from January 2026, the European New Car Assessment Programme will mark down cars that rely solely on touchscreens for basic functions like turn signals and wipers. Volkswagen brought back physical buttons for climate and audio. Mercedes replaced touch sliders with traditional switches. Even Jony Ive’s new Ferrari Luce goes back to physical knobs.

My wife has been shopping for an SUV for 10 months and has rejected six of them for one reason: no buttons. She can buy whatever she wants, but she refuses to drive a car without physical controls. And she’s absolutely right. Talking to your car to lower the fan speed makes no sense. Touching a glass screen at 70 mph to change the temperature makes no sense. This article will make her very happy.

And it makes us super happy to see this trend surging, as people start to reject technology for a more human touch.

Last Week’s Common Thread: TASTE
Congratulations to... well, no one! Last week’s thread proved elusive, leaving the field wide open. TASTE was the secret ingredient—a reminder that in design, the most refined details are often the ones we savor most.

Now, let’s see if you’ll be able to guess this week’s common thread. It’s playtime!

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

Good luck, Threaders!

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

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