Published on September 6, 2025
Design Within Reach
In the design world, the in-between spaces—those that are neither strictly private nor purely public—are having a moment. These “third” spaces, as sociologists once called the cafés, clubs, and libraries that offered community beyond home and work, have been reimagined by brands as immersive extensions of their identities. Today, a growing number of design houses and galleries are creating locales that are part showroom, part salon, and part cultural venue, where products are not just displayed, but also lived with and celebrated in new ways.
A traditional store or studio will show you the shape of a chair and provide an opportunity for a brief sit test. But a third space lets you get a feel for it as you eat dinner and chat with friends or try out a bed while becoming familiar with an artwork during an overnight stay in an architectural masterpiece. In a moment when the digital sphere has made everything endlessly scrollable, these environments offer the opposite: They ask visitors to slow down, to physically engage, and to deepen their connection with a brand. They invite you not just to shop, but to dwell on the way a sofa holds you during a long conversation, or on how a sculpture catches your eye while you pour a glass of wine. They remind us that design consists of not just objects, but entire worlds.
Here, we profile a few of the brands and designers doing it best.
Arsham Cabin, Kohler, Wisconsin
Image Credit: Kohler Wisconsin
The artist Daniel Arsham is no stranger to blending disciplines. Still, with a guest cabin he designed at the Kohler resort in Wisconsin, he has constructed an entirely new type of experience that allows visitors to inhabit his artistic universe. “This was an opportunity to create something that was all-encompassing,” says Arsham, whose work has been featured in museums around the world, such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris and MoMA PS1 in New York City. This two-bedroom retreat, which overlooks Lake Michigan, is a living, breathing showcase for his work, including pieces from his Landshapes collection with Kohler—a collaboration that highlights how art can be integrated into the rituals of daily life.
The cabin is full of Arsham’s touches, including bathroom tiles made of recycled material and amorphous glass sconces that appear to billow like fabric. “I approached the design of the house as something I would want to live in or spend time in,” he explains, and that sensibility infuses the entire property, with its art-filled living areas and Zen garden dotted with his large-scale bronze sculptures. The cabin’s setting, next to the property’s famed golf course, also informed Arsham’s work on the project. “I’ve always thought of golf courses as these kinds of massive earth artworks. Somebody sculpting the landscape. Having the cabin adjacent to that builds on this larger narrative around art as a part of everyday life.”
Casa Sanlorenzo, Venice
Image Credit: Federico Cedrone
For luxury-yacht brand Sanlorenzo, the transition from sea to land was natural. Having already engaged with the art world for years (showing works by legends such as Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri aboard its vessels), the shipbuilder sought a permanent home to host its cultural offerings. The result is Casa Sanlorenzo: a 1940s Venetian mansion reimagined by architect and designer Piero Lissoni, strategically located between the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and Punta della Dogana. “The idea was born to create a dedicated venue where Sanlorenzo can talk about art, design, architecture, or literature in a completely autonomous way,” explains Lissoni, who is based in Milan.
The building’s relative modernity (a rarity in Venice) and open floor plan made it ideal for his vision. “I was able to treat it with the purity that I believe a space dedicated to art deserves,” he says. Rather than imposing a new architectural identity, Lissoni aimed to be “as silent as possible,” preserving historical elements including brick facades and original flooring while introducing contemporary touches, such as a transparent-glass staircase. The design creates a space that feels both historic and modern, underscoring Sanlorenzo’s belief that industry is culture and offering visitors a tangible, in-person experience beyond the virtual. “You can’t truly experience a painting virtually,” Lissoni says, emphasizing the importance of real encounters with art. “Right now, all companies need to tell their stories in new ways. They need to communicate both the most complex and the most noble aspects of what they do.”
The Future Perfect’s Goldwyn House, Los Angeles
Image Credit: The Future Perfect
Step through the gates of Goldwyn House and you will see Los Angeles in an entirely different way. Here, Old Hollywood and contemporary design share the same living rooms, bedrooms, and gardens. Built in 1916 by architect Arthur S. Heineman and once home to seminal film producer Samuel Goldwyn, the mansion now serves as a residential concept space for contemporary-design gallery the Future Perfect. It is also the primary home to its founder, David Alhadeff, and his family, who, while designing the space, placed importance on maintaining its architectural character. “The moldings, the proportions, the quiet grandeur—it was too special to erase,” Alhadeff says. “Rather than impose a new vision, we chose to listen to the house and build upon what was already there.”
That dialogue between past and present plays out across its sunlit rooms and into the spacious backyard, where sculptures and site-specific commissions extend the curatorial voice outdoors. Inside, works by Casey McCafferty, John Hogan, Seungjin Yang, and others have created a conversation with the original design in ways that can feel pleasantly subversive. And when the gallery closes in the evening, the house returns to being a home. “Seeing a piece in a lived-in space makes it tangible,” says Alhadeff. “It becomes part of a story, not just an object. The Goldwyn House isn’t just a place to see work. It’s a place to feel something.”
Top: An installation by artist MyungJin Kim in the pool house at the Future Perfect’s Goldwyn House.
Design Within Reach Wave House, Palm Desert, California
Image Credit: Design Within Reach
Walter S. White’s 1955 Wave House ripples against the Southern California desert landscape like a mirage. After experiencing many years of neglect, the residence was acquired in 2018 by Los Angeles–based Stayner Architects and eventually furnished by modern-housewares brand Design Within Reach. In 2020, this dreamy escape debuted as a vacation rental—the result of a collaboration with Boutique, a travel company that offers a collection of vacation homes for design enthusiasts. Once a creative refuge for artist Miles C. Bates, the house was designed to match the rhythm of Bates’s life and became part creative sanctuary, part social hub. “The intention of the rental home was just that,” says Omar Nobil, DWR’s creative director, noting that they wanted to offer “a quiet, thoughtfully curated, and inspiring destination that could spark imagination as well as provide a stunning setting for gathering.”
Wave House is the company’s first rental property, and it collaborated with fashion designer Paul Smith to outfit the interior furnishings in the brand’s textile collection, which has warm hues and tailored patterns that feel ideal for the desert light. “The organic color palette of the region naturally complements the warm hues and refined patterns of Sir Paul Smith’s textiles,” Nobil says. “That was actually why we looked to activate it in Palm Desert.”
Guests are encouraged to live fully in the space, where morning coffee brews in a Hay French press, poolside afternoons are spent on Oliver James floats, and alfresco dinners happen amid DWR’s Terassi outdoor teak furniture (all of which, naturally, is for sale). “The rental home simply provides an opportunity to step into our world versus looking at it on a page,” says Debbie Propst, president of global retail at MillerKnoll. “That is the ethos of DWR,” adds Nobil. “Modern design for a life well lived.”
The Manzoni, Milan
Image Credit: The Manzoni
A mélange of social spaces—restaurant, showroom, and European headquarters for London-based Tom Dixon—the Manzoni is the designer’s vision of a place where every chair, glass, and candleholder around you can be yours. “Showroom shops tend to be quite dusty, cold, and slow-moving in terms of retail interaction, but the Manzoni is alive,” Dixon says. Opened in 2019, steps from the famed La Scala opera house, it’s one of the first third-space concepts, a venture Dixon tried after years of showing at the annual Salone del Mobile design fair. Rather than spending its marketing budget on five days in Milan, the company asked, “What could we have that would be a worthy investment?” The answer was this ultra-flexible hybrid space. Dixon notes of his special interest in restaurants: “In Italy, the best decisions happen at lunchtime.”
Merging dining and design offers more product interaction than the static and leisurely pace of traditional furniture retail. According to Dixon, in a typical showroom, it could be decades before a customer comes in a second time. “By contrast, restaurants are dynamic, living organisms,” he explains of the spaces constantly humming with activity. “People come back over and over. That vibrancy makes them more relevant to how we want people to experience our products.”