How 3 European Designers Build Independent Design Practices

To run independent design practices no longer means simply working alone or staying outside the industry. The more interesting shift is structural. Today’s strongest independent practices move across objects, installations, collaborations, publishing, exhibitions, and research—without losing their point of view. In this model, the object still matters, but it is only one part of a larger system. The studio also builds a public language, a recognizable world, and multiple ways for value to circulate. This broader pattern is visible across contemporary European practices, from Sabine Marcelis to Faye Toogood to Formafantasma.

This evolution in independent design is visible throughout the field. While the old image was that of a lone maker, today the independent designer looks more like a platform. Studios not only develop their own objects, but also shape environments, collaborations, discourse, and direct audience relationships. Independence now depends less on isolation than on authorship: the ability to move between commercial and self-initiated work while maintaining a distinct design logic. This shift helps explain why such practices feel contemporary. Instead of rejecting visibility or partnership, these studios set the terms for their engagement.

Based in Rotterdam, she works across object, installation, and spatial design, all defined by material clarity and pure form. Notably, her studio unifies objects, site-specific installations, and brand collaborations under a single identity, creating not just pieces, but distinctiveness. Her work is instantly understandable, giving each object significance beyond product value. In today’s crowded design world, this consistency itself becomes a business model.

If Marcelis demonstrates the power of a signature material language, Toogood exemplifies the advantages of a multidisciplinary approach. Building on this idea, Toogood’s London studio works across furniture, interiors, and homeware, while her wider practice spans art and fashion. On its own site, the studio describes a process where designers, furniture makers, sculptors, and interior designers cross-pollinate. More than a studio description, this is a strategic clue: Toogood’s practice creates value by refusing the narrowness of category. A chair, a room, and a garment can all reinforce the same authorship. The result is not diversification for its own sake, but a stronger cultural presence.

The model is pushed further by Formafantasma, who treat research as integral to design. Continuing the thread of expanded practice, the Milan- and Rotterdam-based studio, founded in 2009 by Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin, works across product design, spatial design, strategic planning, and consultancy, applying the same rigor to client commissions and self-initiated projects. Projects such as Cambio, commissioned by Serpentine, and Prada Frames, a multidisciplinary symposium curated with Prada, show how the practice operates beyond object production alone. Here, value is built not only through form, but through knowledge, framing, and public relevance. In other words, the studio does not just design outcomes; it shapes the conversation around them.

The connective thread among these practices is not style but structure. After examining how Marcelis, Toogood, and Formafantasma each builds beyond the object, a clear pattern emerges: each studio builds an audience-facing ecosystem around its work—a visual language, a set of collaborations, a mode of circulation, and a way of being understood. This overarching framework clarifies the real lesson of the new independent practice. In contemporary design, value is rarely held in the object alone. It is produced in the relationship between the object, the story, the context, and the audience that learns to recognize all four.