Welcome to Storyflo Daily Design. I'm Dana.
The most-visited new design space in NYC this week: per Dezeen, Danish design brand Audo Copenhagen opened its first Audo House showroom outside Scandinavia — inside a landmarked New York City building on Laight Street, with interiors by Jonas Bjerre-Poulsen of Norm Architects. The opening coincides with NYCxDesign 2026. Audo House will display a rotating collection of furniture and objects and host events. The structural read for Scandi design in the US market: the conversion from "we sell at NYDC" to "we operate a destination space" is the move that creates the cultural anchor. Audo is the most-disciplined version of that play to date.
The Manhattan residential tower that's actually worth a look: per Dezeen, ODA clad The Harper — a 21-level, 63-residence Upper East Side building — in chamfered limestone, drawing from Art Deco and Bauhaus. The sculptural facade with setbacks and protrusions is what differentiates this from the blocky boxes that have defined NYC residential the last decade. ODA continues to be the studio that finds form-language within market constraints; The Harper is the strongest current example of that capability.
The student project Dezeen surfaced that actually deserves the attention: IE University's School of Architecture and Design exhibited a cemetery that generates renewable energy from cremation to power its memorial spaces. The piece doesn't soften the proposition: every cremation is a high-temperature event that releases significant thermal energy, and channeling that into infrastructure is a form of memorial that previous generations would have found startling. As a thesis project it sits at the right intersection of provocative-and-feasible. Worth tracking the team in the post-graduation cohort.
For product-design specs: Dezeen showed Neuvermoebelt's Tiny Kitchen Green Line — an Austrian modular kitchen system using bamboo, linoleum, and stainless steel. Curved end units with hot-rolled stainless worktops. The execution decisions (no glossy plastic, no MDF, fully material-honest) put this in a different category than the Ikea/Plain-aesthetic competition. Worth tracking distribution into the US market.
And another IE University project: a mixed-use building for dance and wellbeing, plus speculative proposals for a workspace built into an unused train station and an Amsterdam office. The pattern across these student projects: adaptive-reuse remains the dominant mode in continental European design education, in a way that US programs still don't match.
That's your Storyflo Daily Design. Sources in the notes. Dana out.
