If that was version 1.0, then 2025 marks its Paleolithic evolution: Welcome to Caveman Core. Minimalism has given way to something more monumental: elemental materials, brooding monoliths, mirrors cast in molten resin, tables that recall Stonehenge, and furniture inspired by Martian rock formations.
According to interior designer Sam Colamussi of the New York- and Miami-based Cola Studios, this shift speaks to a deeper craving. “No one’s really asking us to build them a cave,” she says. “But there’s a definite pull toward things that feel handmade and raw. People are tired of perfection—this is a reaction to that.”
At the start of this year at New York’s Friedman Benda gallery, British designer Faye Toogood displayed an expanded view of her Assemblage 7: Lost and Found II collection, featuring the addition of a marble table with an uncanny reference to Stonehenge. In a press release, Toogood likened her process of working with raw materials to “an archaeological dig.”
By September, at the contemporary design fair Collectible, a number of emerging talents independently delved into aesthetics of the ancient. Colombian designer Marcela Cure, who showed a suite of resin furnishings, says resin has a “visual kinship with amber—a material that is in conversation with history and evolution.” As a material, she says, resin is “unpredictable,” one that “cracks and warps during transformation, evoking tectonic plates, shaping and recording history at once.”
For Turkish designer Buket Hoscan Bazman, brass serves a similar narrative role. The metal’s surface naturally patinas, mutating with time “much like ancient artifacts that carry the traces of their making,” she notes. Her sculptural bookshelf and semicircular floor lamps possess a molten heft—their softened edges appearing raw and time-weathered.
Artist and designer Sébastien Léon’s latest series, on view at Ralph Pucci gallery in New York, “imagines the relics of a distant civilization—but not one from Earth,” he says. Inspired by science fiction and a location on Mars, his pieces, made of metal, resin, fiber, and plaster, appear ancient with a touch of alien—the Obsidian Chair seems as though it has been dipped in lava, cooled, and hardened; the Vestige chair looks as if crudely chiseled from the side of a mountain. (It is in fact molded from a block of clay and then executed in plasterglass).
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Another booth at Collectible contributed to the caveman dialogue. Belgian artist Linde Freya Tangelder works with dark, impregnated, varnished wood to create chairs that take raw and primitive shapes; she also uses aluminium wax cast to fashion tables and benches that look like slabs of stone with metallic sheens. A floor lamp of stacked Murano glass cubes becomes a tower of glowing rocks. Tangelder says she’s inspired by “a merging of natural or primitive references, stone, or ancient archetypes.”
For Tangelder, her work is defined by “handmade traces,” something she thinks is needed in 2025. Buzman agrees. The Caveman Core movement comes “from a collective need to reconnect with something primal and tactile,” she offers. “After years of sleek digital aesthetics, there’s a renewed desire for honesty in materials—for things that feel grounded, imperfect, and real.”
