Furniture company MillerKnoll has consolidated several of its brands under one roof in time for Chicago Design Week, showcasing multiple new products and unveiling the first-ever Hay showroom in the United States.
The American furniture brand unveiled the new complex spread over two buildings for visitors to Fulton Market Design Days fair (Design Days), which sees several furniture brands open up their offices and showrooms in the West Loop neighbourhood.
Previously spread out over multiple buildings in the district, MillerKnoll has consolidated all of its subsidiaries under one roof, guided by vice president of interiors Chris Leong
Leong and his team were tasked with both organising offices and showrooms for the brands in a way that felt coherent along with curating spaces for each, many of which have archives that go back decades.
“The whole point is also be able to have each brand really express itself,” Leong told Dezeen, comparing the experience to working with a family with many different voices that form need to negotiate and harmonise to form a consistent whole.
Leong also said that each space, including elevator banks and other transitional spaces, was used to tell stories.
The designer leveraged his experience working in exhibition design with his architecture studio LeongLeong.
Throughout the showrooms and offices, the team treated the vast archive of contemporary and classic designs “like a menu”, picking and choosing items.
The first of the two buildings, 1100 West Fulton Market, has five storeys and features an entryway with a custom blue high-top table and wooden reception desk, both fabricated by DatesWeiser.
Here, Leong and his team created an exhibition for Design Days called Together By Design, a series of sculptural pieces made up of furniture from different brands, representing the coming to together of styles throughout the greater space.
Also on this floor is the Herman Miller offices, where a seating lab showcases the different task chairs from the brand.
A cork wall fabricated by Spinneybeck frames an entry lounge area anchored by an archival metallic Knoll D’Urso Occasional Table.
Meanwhile, MillerKnoll director of archives Amy Auscherman worked with design studio Standard Issue to create the Manufacturing Model exhibition, featuring historic chairs matched with imagery of their production.
The second storey features the office spaces for the company. Here, colour was prioritised to unify the different furniture types, and a large cafe area was separated out from the office.
Certain detail pieces unify the space, such as the Tolomeo lights that feature above work stations and in the row of phone booths at the back of the space.
An outdoor rooftop patio features outdoor seating from multiple brands including Hay, Herman Miller and Muuto, among others.
On another floor, Knoll’s lobby features a mix of historic designs, as well as some non-brand lights such as the Column pendant by Canadian lighting studio A-N-D. This leads into a workspace with muted tones set up to display the brand’s new Dividends Skyline work stations. The space was designed in collaboration with architect Pernilla Ohrstedt and colour expert Salem van der Swaagh.
A shared floor for Geiger and Datesweiser showcased the wooden Lijn chair by Carole Baijings Studio, placed on brick plinths, in reference to the material’s prevalence in Chicago.
On the fifth floor of 1100 West Fulton, the Maharam showroom boasted a custom installation by designer Leon Ransmeier called Stick Frame, a modular stainless steel rack system for hanging the brand’s fabric as well as those by Knoll Textiles and Edelman.
The 1144 West Fulton Market building sits lower to the ground and is devoted mostly to showrooms. Somewhat remarkably, American landscape designer Michael Van Valkenburgh, known for large-scale city parks, designed the tree-studded courtyard that provides a moment of reprieve and space for sitting in front of a door to the building.
The ground floor of this building features a Design Within Reach showroom, and upstairs are spaces for NaughtOne, for whom Leong and team worked with design studio REF to design a sculptural installation featuring white NaughtOne furniture suspended against a black backdrop.
NaughtOne debuted a table and seating collection by Japanese Keiji Takeuchi and the Fin Lounge Chair from British designer Dan Schofield for the opening.
Finally, on the third floor, a light-filled Muuto showroom leads into an elevator bay where Leong has set up an installation showcasing MillerKnoll’s sustainable initiatives, a continuation of a showcase put on by the company last year.
This installation and other moments like the courtyard create a moment for “pause” and “storytelling” in the midst of all the products, according to Leong.
On the otherside is the first American showroom for Hay, a light-filled space due to the skylights in the space, which has thick wooden rafters kept from the 1920s building shell. For the opening, the brand showcased stacks of chairs, such as Erwan Bouroullec‘s Traverse in front of metallic panelling, while the edges of the space were devoted to other collections.
Other news from Chicago Design Week 2025 includes a foamless chair from Isomi and an exhibition that sought to bring experimental design to NeoCon.
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