10 Show-Stopping Best of Year Product Winners

In case you haven’t heard… submissions are open for Interior Design‘s Best of Year Awards—the design industry’s premiere design awards program honoring work by designers, architects, and manufacturers around the globe. Be sure to submit your top products and projects by September 7, 2022, or sooner! Early bird pricing ends August 12. In case you’re looking for a bit of inspiration, we compiled 10 product winners from last year.

Transition Carpet Collection by Ege Carpets

Winner for Modular Carpet

WireLine by Flos

Winner for Chandelier

OutLand by Ralph Pucci

Winner for Residential Occasional Tables

Big Talk by Blå Station thru Scandinavian Spaces

Winner for Contract Lounge Seating

Shibui by Paola Lenti thru West | Out East

Winner for Outdoor Seating

Garden District by Artistic Tile

Winner for Materials

Levels by Hightower

Winner for Contract Bench + Stool

Hortensia by Moooi

Winner for Residential Lounge Seating

Decors and Panoramiques by Arte

Winner for Fabric Wall Covering

Designtex Crypton Pure by Crypton & Designtex

Winner for Healthcare Textiles

Interested in submitting products or projects for this year’s Best of Year Awards? Get submission details here.

Healthcare Giants 2022

We gather here today to look back at the stabilizing effects 2021 had on the Interior Design Healthcare Giants. But in doing so we find we just can’t quit 2020. In our tracking of business trend data for the group of top 40 firms doing significant work in the healthcare arena since 2019, we have seen huge fluctuations driven by the pandemic. But within those ups and downs, we are just now beginning to see what normal business for the sector might look like. 

Vitale Design Directors Envision a Playful Dental Clinic in Castellón de la Plana, Spain

There’s nothing fun about cavities, especially for kids. Keeping that in mind, design directors Lucía Chover, Carlos Folch, and Santiago Martín—who founded Vitale in eastern Spain’s Castellón de la Plana in 2006 after meeting at its Universitat Jaume I—envisioned a playful clinic that would actively destress anxious children and parents for Isabel Cadroy, Dentista Infantil, a local pediatric dental office.

Cheery neo-Memphis colors, simple geometries, and a dash of biophilia suffuse the two-level, 3,760-square-foot space. It’s a stark contrast to Dr. Cadroy’s previous office, which had “no person­ality and was on an awkward mezzanine level,” Chover explains. To inject creativity into the new city center location, the Vitale team employed wood and tile to draw on tropes of learning, since teaching children about oral health is the fundamental principle of Dr. Cadroy’s work. At the entry, a plywood arch slots together like a construction game. Farther in, doors and paneling are routed with a puzzle design. Walls, columns, and restrooms clad in uniform white square tiles take inspiration from the gridded notebooks children use to learn to write. Birch-plywood chandeliers incorporating minimalist shapes nod to mobiles over a crib yet don’t descend into infantilism. “We focused on the sensations of comfort, warmth, familiarity, and well-being,” Folch notes.

Throughout, rounded shapes and indirect lighting soothe. Additional fear-reducing measures include the waiting area’s capsule-shape seating nooks, which cocoon and foster a sense of protection. In the main corridor, a series of pitched roof structures provide a homey feeling. One serves as a transition between the waiting area, restrooms, and radiology and post-treatment rooms. Beyond, the second roof structure, or “tunnel,” as Martín refers to it, funnels little patients to the pair of skylit treatment rooms, which both look out to a mood-boosting vertical garden. In fact, green is one of the three main colors in the project’s palette. Pantone 7723 C, a calming fern, Pantone 1635 EC, a warm terra-cotta, and Pantone 121 C, an optimistic yellow, appear in everything—from the tile grout, vinyl flooring, and logo typography to the waiting-area and treatment-room seating.

Fun Connection Design Turns to Sunny Hues for a Children’s Hospital in China

2021 Best of Year winner for Clinic

For any children’s hospital, employing cheery color is nearly obligatory. For this renovation of the project type, located approximately a three-hour flight west of Shanghai, founder and design director of Fun Connection Design Yaotian Zhang chose a sophisticated, residential-esque palette of pale blues and sunrise oranges for furnishings and built-ins but also for the chips in the terrazzo flooring that runs throughout the 2,152-square-foot facility. There are also abundant clean white surfaces, homey rounded archways, and surprise peek-a-boo tunnels and cutouts for kids to explore. “The goal is to provide a visually warm environment that makes patients and visitors feel comfortable,” Zhang says. Of course, maintaining and promoting health is paramount, too. Ample biophilia populates the hospital, whether it’s the live plants at the entrance with which people entering interact or on the terrace. Further, the firm installed smart air-conditioning and thermal glass and lighting systems.

Jacky.W Design Crafts a Calming Dental Clinic in Wenzhou, China

A dental clinic must accomplish two crucial goals: It has to be safe, meeting complex medical requirements, while also feeling safe for clients nervous about delicate procedures. Jacky Wang, chief designer of Jacky.W Design—a 2018 Best of Year Award winner—balances both objectives elegantly with the 2000-square-foot Ruixiang Dental Clinic in China’s Wenzhou City. 

Some things couldn’t be changed, including a quartet of load-bearing walls within which Wang sited rooms like bathrooms that didn’t need natural light. For the rest, beveled whitewashed corners and walls clad in warm Boxwood created the necessary—and necessarily separate—circulation routes for doctors, patients, and discarded medical supplies. And also a sense of ease, buttressed by cheerful signage of glowing green boxes and natural greenery. The design, Wang says, “gives a sense of a cozy house decorated with plants and woods in the spring sunshine.” Not a bad feeling for a busy doctor’s office.

DA Integrating Limited Transforms a Shenzhen Dental Clinic into a Work of Art

The dentist office is a place many people rarely want to even visit, nevermind linger. But DA Integrating Limited is out to change minds with a 5,800-square-foot clinic for the U-DENTAL chain in the mixed-use community One Shenzhen Bay.  

“We were inspired by the atmosphere of the contemporary art space,” says design director Chinman Ngai, “which is like a container: peaceful, comfortable, a place in which people want to stop and stay.” The foyer empties into a waiting area where guests are framed like subjects in a painting, before entering into a passage loop illuminated by linear fixtures. A rectangular plane unites consulting and operating rooms, with ample glazing to allow natural light to filter through landscaping and warm up the otherwise neutral palette of white and beige. And the dental chain’s U-shaped logo appears in curved details within ceilings, emphasized by recessed lights to remind patients of a clean, white smile. 

Neighboring Brownstones Shaped the Design of This Medical Facility in Brooklyn by Perkins Eastman

2021 Best of Year winner for Healthcare.

Current scientific research confirms that visual art and design can enhance well-being and thus accelerate healing. Perkins Eastman processed that data, and added plenty of both, alongside a thoughtful consideration of local context, for this 400,000-square-foot medical facility in the Park Slope neighborhood.

Surrounded by brownstones, the six-story center was built with a complementing brownstone base and a custom-mix limestone body. For an installation outside the main entrance, principal Cristobal Mayendia and senior associate Sebastian Medina analyzed, photographed, and synthesized the palette of nearby structures, then translated the colors into vertically arrayed, terra-cotta baguette tiles in stone, burnt-orange, and saffron shades, forming a vibrant statement piece that measures 18 by 45 feet. The composition signals that patients and visitors are entering a special place. “The tension between the more contextual exterior and the sleek, modern interior gives the building a unique character,” Mayendia explains.

Inside the lobby, in the waiting area, a large portrait by Kehinde Wiley—the work a continuation of his majestic depictions of men of color—mixes seamlessly with terrazzo flooring, a Calacatta marble feature wall, and a geometric desk. Art is placed throughout the rest of the center, including in the hospitalitylike treatment pods, much of it by New Yorkers.