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The Future Perfect’s Laura Young Makes the Case for Design as the Next Collecting Frontier

If someone is willing to invest deeply in paintings or sculpture, she says, objects like the sofa—the things we actually live with every day—shouldn't be treated as an afterthought.

The design auctions in June demonstrated the strength of a market that has continued to grow in both reach and value, particularly since the pandemic. Sotheby’s June Design Week alone generated a combined $27,568,552 across a three-day series of auctions, led by the $8.8 million Art & Design from the Collection of Barbara Gladstone sale and the $10.5 million Of Form and Color: Art and Design from the Emmanuel de Bayser Collection. Meanwhile, Phillips’ Design sale on June 12 realized $2.9 million with an 89.5 percent sell-through across its 76 lots, most of which met or exceeded their high estimates. Results at both houses reflected strong demand for French postwar design, as well as broadening interest in postwar American design, British ceramic artists such as Lucie Rie and rising contemporary designers like Vincenzo De Cotiis and multidisciplinary star Rick Owens.

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Observer recently met with Laura Young, managing director of The Future Perfect, a contemporary design gallery with spaces in New York, Miami, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Founded by David Alhadeff in 2003, The Future Perfect has distinguished itself through the breadth of its vision and curatorial focus and is known for introducing highly collectible works by seminal design talents such as Lindsey Adelman, Jason Miller and Piet Hein Eek to the market.

(It’s worth noting that our meeting required a degree of complex coordination, as the design world’s calendar does not always overlap with the art world’s; the two often alternate despite similarities in their market dynamics.)

Trained as a furniture designer at RISD and a maker at heart, Young is considered a tastemaker and authority in the field, which made her the ideal person to consult about where the market for contemporary design is heading. Since joining The Future Perfect in 2014, she has helped evolve the gallery from a showroom into a cultural institution rooted in experimentation, storytelling and risk-taking.

When we visited the gallery’s New York location—a beautiful four-story townhouse in the West Village—we enjoyed a dynamic series of exhibitions The Future Perfect launched during NYCxDesign, including the debut of Studio Athena Calderone’s “Assembler I,” D’Haene Studio’s first furniture collection and “DUDD LITE,” a playfully engaging, wide-ranging show of night lights as both functional objects and artistic forms.

The Future Perfect’s space is intentionally not a showroom. It can read at varying times like a white-box gallery and a domestic interior. “We work toward creating experiences, not necessarily traditional living spaces,” Young explains. Even when a presentation becomes especially polished or formal, the house format gives the work a different charge from a traditional retail or gallery setting. Programming varies: a rotation can be as short as six weeks or last considerably longer, depending on the floor, the installation’s ambitions and the timing.

Young does not draw a hard line between art, design and craft. “Every designer I work with has the right to call themselves an artist if they want to. It is their choice,” she says, as we sit on a beautiful sofa by Christopher Delcourt facing the patio, surrounded by translucent glass wall lamps and a coffee table by D’Haene Studio. For this collection, Jane Yang-D’Haene and her late husband Francis D’Haene collaborated for the first time. Inspired by Korean jogakbo, a patchwork textile that stopped them........

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