Apple stages 1,500-bead chair and banana palm lamp at Paris show

Apple opened the second edition of its Designers of Tomorrow exhibition at Design Miami.Paris today, showing a chair covered in 1,500 handmade ceramic beads and a lamp built from paper made of banana palms.

Four emerging designers and studios — Parafernalia, Yoonjeong Lee, Salem S Charabi and Isabel Rower — present furniture and lighting under the theme Design for Presence. Exhibition curator Rodman Primack selected them together with a jury that included Design Miami president Jennifer Roberts and designer Nifemi Marcus-Bello.

"Designers of Tomorrow celebrates the process – the art in the making," Apple said in a statement. The company framed the show around how its own products fit into creative workflows.

How does Apple frame its role?

Apple said it wanted to showcase how emerging designers use its products while making their pieces.

"Each of the designers use Apple products in a variety of ways within their creative processes, from early ideation to creation," the company continued. "Apple has long believed that the full potential of their products is only fully realised when put in the hands of the world's most talented creatives."

That's the mechanism of the show: finished objects on display, with Apple's tools positioned as the invisible layer behind them.

What are the pieces on show?

Egyptian-Danish designer Salem S Charabi contributes a delicate lamp made from date palm from Saqqara, limestone from the Galala Mountains and paper produced from banana palms in the Nile Delta. He approached the theme by asking "what is present?"

"A structure inspired by the date palm-cleaving methods of the qafassin, makers of boxes and trays used in the country's souks and bakeries," Charabi said. "A skin created by multiple layerings of banana stems, found in Beheira, in the Nile Delta of Egypt. A mass carved from limestone from the Galala Mountains, carrying the trace of its making through repetitive patterns."

Seoul-based artist Yoonjeong Lee started from a humble pencil stump — using a pencil to nail paper to a surface — and scaled the gesture into a lamp.

"For this project, I took that approach further, using wood to build a table that holds the pencil nail and paper, completing the piece as a three-dimensional lamp," Lee explained. "To make the table, I repeatedly stacked thin sheets of veneer to build a new, solid piece of wood – approximately 5,000 layers, perhaps more."

Isabel Rower built her chair from furniture found on the curb near her Brooklyn studio, reconstituted into a wooden armature and layered with papier-mâché and a pulp composite of wood glue, sawdust and shredded waste paper. After spraying it black, she glued 1,500 handmade ceramic beads across the surface.

Sebastián Zorrilla and Genki Matsumura of studio Parafernalia created MonoAmbiente 1, a piece they describe as a "landscape".

"Its acid-etched stainless steel surfaces invite closer observation as light reveals and conceals details across them," the designers said. "As it unfolds, the landscape unfolds with it: rocks become stools and a table, turning a distant scene into a place for two to converse, play, or share a drink."

Where and when can you see it?

Apple first launched Designers of Tomorrow at Design Miami.Paris last year, when exhibited pieces included a table designed to look like butter.

The 2026 edition runs from 21 to 25 October at L'hôtel de Maisons, 51 Rue de l'Université, 75007 Paris. With a curated jury and a second Paris outing, the show now looks like a fixed slot on Apple's design calendar rather than a one-off brand exercise.