The SIT Furniture Design Award has announced the winners of its 2025 edition, spotlighting the designers, architects, and creative thinkers reinventing how we live, sit, rest, and connect with our surroundings. This year, over 400 projects from 44 countries competed across categories ranging from indoor innovation to outdoor transformation, and the jury had the formidable task of selecting works that not only inspire but challenge and advance the future of furniture and interior design.
The Interior Designer of the Year award goes to A-01 (A Company / A Foundation), a practice based in both Costa Rica and the Netherlands, for their No Footprint Wood House. Perched along the lush Pacific coast, this bioclimatic structure goes far beyond aesthetics. It blends with its jungle setting, breathes with the landscape, and functions as both a home and a prototype for regenerative design.
In the Furniture Design of the Year category, Foster + Partners won for Gather and Tiers, two sculptural collections developed with Barcelona-based concrete experts ESCOFET. Made from ultra-high-performance concrete, these public seating systems offer privacy and flexibility, inviting us to reclaim the outdoors with elegance and intention.
Emerging talent is equally celebrated. The Emerging Furniture Designer of the Year title goes to Elay Dagan for The Saddle stool, a sculptural object that captures the illusion of softness within a rigid material. The piece, born of experimentation with movement and material tension, plays with space as much as form.
Alongside these headlining honors, this year’s competition welcomed an exceptional variety of standout designs: from the serene Floating Bed by Winzeler Holzdesign to the rippling concrete forms of TOPOS Outdoor Furniture Collection by Zaha Hadid Architects. Other highlights include the playful Biscuit armchair by WOWIN.UA, the elegant Ribbon Desk by Scot Distefano, and Canopy House by Studio Mk27.
The selection was made by a prestigious international jury of designers, architects, and educators, including Lilian González-González, Alain Gilles, Nima Bavardi, Christina Chen-Chiao Kuo, Bo Zhang, Richie Moalosi, Fereshteh Haji Gholami, and Javier Palomares, to name only a few. Their collective expertise reflects the award’s global scope and growing impact in shaping design dialogue across continents.
“We created the SIT Furniture Design Award to celebrate excellence in this often-overlooked but fundamental design discipline,” says Astrid Hébert, Co-Founder of the Awards. “What’s truly exciting this year is the extraordinary range, from iconic studios like Foster + Partners and Zaha Hadid Architects to promising new voices like Elay Dagan. It’s a sign that SIT is no longer a niche platform; it’s becoming a key destination for discovering what’s next in furniture and interior innovation.”
As the industry continues to blur the lines between architecture, product, and spatial design, SIT remains a vital platform for designers whose work speaks not just of objects, but of how we inhabit the world. For the complete list of winners and jury bios, visit www.sitaward.com.
Header: Furniture Design of the Year. Gather and Tiers. Foster + Partners , United Kingdom. Photo: HISM
