“I learnt that process wasn’t a means to an end—it was the work,” shares designer-maker Marlo Lyda on the narratives embedded in making that underpin her work. Early influences and a strong intuition have been equally important, helping to shape a designer whose work is tactile and emotionally attuned. In this interview, Lyda lifts the lid on the driving force behind it all.
For designer and maker Marlo Lyda, creating has always been second nature. Raised in a home layered with timber offcuts and fabric swatches, her earliest memories are steeped in materiality. Despite this early introduction, her work isn’t bound by nostalgia. Rather, it’s about process. The long, often nonlinear path from intuition to object.
Having studied at the revered Design Academy Eindhoven (Netherlands) her practice straddles the line between collectable and functional.
What drew you into design, furniture and making?
Marlo Lyda: Making has always been my most fluent form of literacy. I navigate the world visually, instinctively, and through touch. To express anything internal or imagined, I had to build it, sketch it, mould it—it was never optional.
The polished version of the story is that I grew up inside my mother’s living showroom, wrapped in a world of European hardwoods and fabric swatches. I spent my childhood curled between armchairs, and my teens working the shop floor, learning the rhythms of the trade. What captivated me most about the pieces we sold wasn’t just their form, but the stories they carried—told through texture, grain and materiality.
But the deeper truth is I never exactly chose this path. I just kept following an internal pull, an urge to make sense of the world through shaping, constructing, experimenting. Over time, design became a language I could speak instinctively and with love, when other forms of communication felt incomplete.
Designer-maker Marlo Lyda with her Turning (Camphor) lampshades | Photography by Byron Martin
Photography by Michael Pham
"To express anything internal or imagined, I had to build it, sketch it, mould it—it was never optional."
– Marlo Lyda
Turning lampshades and bedframe, made from Camphor Laurel | Photography by Tess Kelly
Do you see a distinction between collectable design and manufactured or more commercial pieces? Where do you see your work sitting?
Marlo Lyda: Back at Eindhoven, my best friend and I wandered through some of the first editions of Alcova, Collectible Fair (Belgium), and Object Rotterdam like wide-eyed anthropologists. We were admiring them, but also decoding them, trying to understand what this new world of “collectable design” meant for our future, and for the industry we were entering.
I think the shift into collectable points to something deeper: a generation of designers craving autonomy. Not just creative independence, but freedom from systems that are often costly, gatekept, and slow to adapt. Many of us aren’t classically trained craftspeople, we’re resourceful, occasionally obsessive generalists doing our best to bridge our vision with the tools we have. We learn by doing, by playing, by getting it wrong and then getting it almost right.
I consciously tread that line between collectable and commercial. My work carries the tactile nuance and intentional imperfection of collectable design—visible hand-makership, asymmetry, a kind of intimacy—but most importantly, it’s made to be lived with. To function. To last. I want my objects to be cherished in homes, not just on plinths.
Photography by Michael Pham
You studied at Design Academy Eindhoven. What did you take away from that experience?
Marlo Lyda: Eindhoven cracked me open in all the right ways. It was part philosophy lab, part material playground, part emotional reckoning.
I found myself surrounded by peers from all over the world—people for whom English was often a second or third language—but somehow, design became our shared dialect. Our love language.
What I learned there is how valuable uncertainty is. The school didn’t reward glossy, resolved outcomes, it rewarded enquiry, vulnerability, persistence. I learned how to be comfortable in the fog. To keep moving without knowing exactly where I’d land. I learnt that process wasn’t a means to an end—it was the work.
How would you describe your design process?
Marlo Lyda: My process always begins in one of two places: people, or play. So many projects have come out of casual conversations, passing moments with makers, chats with fabricators, a friend’s offhand comment. And the rest emerge from instinctive, hands-on days where I let curiosity drive the tools.
Accidents are my greatest collaborators. The seed for KIN, my latest collection, came from a pile of conical lampshades I’d made for something else – stacked on the studio floor, oddly beautiful in their imbalance. The table lamp from the Toile/KIN series is almost a carbon copy of that clumsy moment.
A friend recently said they admire how I trust my instincts. I don’t know if it’s trust so much as a wilful naivety – or maybe just a deep need to create, to see what happens if I follow the thread all the way through.
What’s something you wish people knew about your work
Marlo Lyda: That underneath the forms and finishes, there’s a quiet ritual of making that I treasure. The slow stitching, the sanding, the repetition.
There’s something sacred in those small, private gestures, like tiny prayers embedded in the grain. If you look closely at Remnants, Turning, or KIN, you might see them: the traces of time, the nuances of autonomous processes, the subtle rhythm of a maker losing and finding themselves again.
Photography by Tess Kelly