Knoll : Materials Library

Knoll’s material library has historically supported the individual visions of its designers, preserving nuanced distinctions in color and material rather than imposing a singular language. My work with the library has sought to retain this generosity while reducing its complexity: creating a more coherent system without diminishing the richness of its expression.Central to this work is collaboration with Knoll’s designers, developing the colors, materials, and finishes that give individual products their particular identity. These material languages are developed in response to each designer and collection, while also considering how they enter into conversation with the broader Knoll portfolio. My design language creates the coherence. The material design and development reaches across the entire portfolio of contract and lifestyle products, showrooms, and retail spaces, establishing relationships between individual objects and the larger interior landscape. Colors are carefully calibrated and allowed to permeate the portfolio through different material expressions—lacquer, powder coat, stone, textile, and leather—while adaptable finishes such as metallics create relationships across a broad range of materials.The intention is not to make things match, but to create a shared language in which materials relate while retaining their individual character. At the scale of an interior, these relationships form a material landscape that can feel simultaneously rich, calm, and alive. Increasingly, the work explores designed shifts: controlled variations in color and finish that respond to light, context, and surrounding materials—precise and reproducible in manufacture, but dynamic in experience.This also creates a nice conceptual connection to the individual projects underneath it—Sam Chermayeff, Dozie Kanu, Jonathan Muecke, Eero Saarinen, etc. Those projects then become examples of how the larger material philosophy is applied through collaboration with very different designers, rather than feeling like a separate category of work.