Suzanne Tick: 2023 Interior Design Hall of Fame Inductee

Material innovator Suzanne Tick has the future on speed dial. She embraced sustainability before most of us knew what the word meant, developed a CEU on the post-gender society before it even happened, experimented with 3D knitting before it was a thing, and imbued the woven surfaces that surround commercial interiors with characteristics of transparency, digitalism, and illumination before we realized we needed them. Then there’s the fact that her New York–based textile brand, Luum, launched its Fabric of Space collection, with patterns based on star trails and the expanding universe, the very day the James Webb Space Telescope images of same were publicly released. “Everyone thought we were in cahoots with NASA!” she jokes.

No, Tick is not conspiring with the government’s space-research arm, but she has collaborated with a galaxy of big-name brands during her four-decade career: Tarkett, Tandus Centiva, and 3form are just a few for which she’s conceived upholstery and drapery fabrics, high-performance carpeting and broadloom, and cement-tile and LVT flooring. She has enjoyed a longstanding partnership with Skyline Design, for which she conceives etched panels that bring textile softness to hard glass, and maintains an active fine-art practice realizing tapestries, custom textiles, and experimental handweavings for such clients as the Gates Foundation and BlackRock.

Suzanne Tick on Her Futuristic Approach to Design

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For Tick, Sustainability is Top of Mind

Her approach has always been holistic and sustainable, ranging from development of raw material and structures to revamping of manufacturing methods. At Luum, for instance, “The majority of what we do is to develop new fibers and invent constructions. That’s why our fabrics feel different.” Her handweavings also utilize novel materials—salvaged objects like dry-cleaning hangers. For a financial company commission, she’s currently warp-and-wefting two centuries’ worth of shredded ledgers; for a paint brand, she’s weaving cut-up sample discards.

Tick, a self-described “fourth-generation recycler,” comes about her salvage mindset honestly. Business at her dad’s scrap-metal yard was the main dinner table topic growing up. At the same time, her family was “very cultured and creative”—her mother was a graphic and set designer—and tapped into Eastern philosophy. “My dad had all the books: the Bhagavad Gita, a library of Ram Dass.” Also stacked on those shelves were her mom’s interiors magazines. Tick owes a lot to those glossies, which helped her home in on a vocational track when, late in her college tenure as a printmaker experimenting with etching fiber textures onto copper, she set about figuring out what the heck to do after graduation. “Flipping through them, I saw ads by Jack Lenor Larsen, Brunschwig et Fils, Scalamandré. I thought I could work for a company that makes fabrics like those—and that I had to move to New York to do it.”

Meditation Meets Design Innovation

Manhattan proved an energizing yet scary place at the time. “I arrived at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. Designers we were creating custom orders for would just stop calling us back.” To handle the stress, she tried Zen meditation, but it never stuck. She gave the pursuit of higher consciousness another try seven years ago, after a period of discontent despite her many achievements, which at this point included a TEDxNavesink talk and work exhibited at international museums. A last-minute opportunity to attend an introductory Vedic workshop coincided with a weeklong staycation, her first in 30-odd years. She found the mantra-based practice transformative, and since 2020 has been teaching it to others. It’s become a cornerstone of her studio culture that she credits with unlocking higher levels of collective creativity. “If I could get more firms to realize how incredible this practice is for design teams! Your awareness becomes open, everything becomes much clearer, you just see what needs to be done.”

Part of de-stressing her nervous system, she continues, has involved “figuring out what I can do to be of help.” She’s doubled down on her commitment to giving back via free weaving workshops and serving on the board of The Light Inside, which teaches meditation to prison inmates and corrections officers. Tick pays it forward to Mother Earth, too. Back in the ’90’s, she was the brains behind Resolution, the first-ever solution-dyed panel fabric (and the first Knoll Textile product to sell 1 million yards); today, her studio recycles all textile waste it produces (almost a ton annually) and has been instrumental in shifting our perception of circularity via envelope-pushing product designs attuned to nature yet equally informed by technology, craft, and human ingenuity.

Watch the Hall of Fame Documentary Featuring Suzanne Tick

Explore Textiles Design by Suzanne Tick

Installations by Suzanne Tick on Display

View a Towering Installation in Spain Made of Silk

Years of research into the structural potential of standard textiles transformed silk into a towering installation in Spain by Paloma Cañizares Office.

Textiles are Transformed in the Silk Pavilion Installation

Paloma Cañizares Office used AutoCAD to develop Silk Pavilion, a temporary installation unveiled last spring at the Concéntrico design festival in Logroño, Spain.

The pavilion was formed from over a hundred yards of black silk that’s typically used to make clothing.

The fabric was draped over pleated molds, and then coated with resin, stiffening it enough for it to become a self-supporting structural panel.

Architect Paloma Cañizares and her team oversaw the process at the fabric manufacturer’s studio in Madrid.

For additional support, the panels sandwiched a thin layer of fiberglass.

Behind the Creation of the Silk Pavilion Installation

• 10 architects and installers led by founder Paloma Cañizares
• 0.5mm fabric thickness
• 26 feet tall
• 328 linear feet of silk
• 12 panels

The exterior panels of the completed Silk Pavilion, which first appeared in the courtyard of Escuela Superior de Diseño de La Rioja during Concéntrico last April before traveling to Madrid’s Nuevos Ministerios gardens for 10 days, were painted gold.

Beyond a semi-sheer entry curtain, also silk, the 57-square-foot interior contained custom benches in lacquered steel, the same metal as the triangular structural pillars supporting the pavilion’s roof.

The color and pointed folds of each panel—repeated 12 times to form a dodecagon—were intended to evoke a bright star.

Natural light, its pattern and shadow cast on the interior shifting with the movement of the sun, filtered through the narrow gaps around the roof oculus, also resembling a star.

Fashion Designer Arthur Arbesser Collaborates With Abet Laminati on Compelling Graphic Prints

The globe-trotting fashion designer Arthur Arbesser—a graduate of London’s prestigious Central Saint Martins and a LVMH prize recipient—adds another string to his bow. It’s a first-time collaboration with Abet Laminati, which, since its inception in the 1950’s, has infused its surfacing with compelling graphics by a veritable who’s who of design. Now, straight from the runway, comes Arbesser’s Whimsy collection comprising six prints, including Stripes, Zigzag, Sprinkles, and Cabbage, all as brilliantly colored and full of joy as the line’s name suggests. Whimsy made its Fuorisalone debut at the Triennale Milano cladding pieces of furniture in a fusion of fashion and design. To which we add, bravissimo.

6 Products to Spice Up Any Space

Warm tones are defining standout new products.

CF Stinson

Patty Madden’s C.A.R.E. x Stinson Too! woven and nonwoven high-performance textiles for healing environments.

Mayer Fabrics

Centric upholstery in polyester and post-consumer recycled polyester.

Extremis

Dirk Wynants’s Walrus outdoor sectional with galvanized-steel frame and legs, weatherproof tarpaulin upholstery, and Sunbrella-covered blankets and pillows (which can tuck into storage concealed in sofa back).

Mantra Inspired Furniture

Matt Cheadle’s Lowe Loop desk benching system in solid wood and steel with divider.

Patcraft

On Neutral Ground EcoWorx-backed carpet tiles in Eco-Solution Q100TM yarn with post-industrial recycled content.

J+J Flooring

Forces of Nature flooring collection in solution-dyed nylon with recycled content.

Designtex Launches a Trio of Graphic Goodies

Give a warm welcome to a trio of dimensional and graphically charged new goodies from the applied materials manufacturer Designtex. Circles decorated with colorful pinstripes animate Roll With It, a digitally printed cellulose-latex wallcovering that brings boundless energy to any room. Cutely named Wannabe Rib is, well, like a rib knit: felt wallcovering made from 100 percent recycled PET with thin vertical linear grooves texturing its soft, fuzzy surface. Then there’s the outdoor upholstery Hillside in solution-dyed Bella-Dura olefin yarn, its bold solid colors embellished with a dazzle camouflage stitch pattern.

Lori Weitzner Celebrates the Insect World in New Textile Collection for Samuel & Sons

Textile designer Lori Weitzner’s new Metamorphosis collection for the New York–based passementerie house, Samuel & Sons, celebrates the insect world. “Nature is always a source of inspiration,” she explains. “But this collection is specifically about all the living creatures that are so often hidden from our sight. With their beautiful colors, shapes, and patterns, butterflies, dragonflies, bumblebees, moths, and even the patterns of migration they take, all served as muse.” The entomologically inspired portfolio comprises Chrysalis, a cord with tape, along with 11 embellished borders including the appliquéd Honeycomb; the embroidered Queen Bee and Colony; the pleated Monarch; and the beaded Nymph and Ensemble—the last depicting a glittering menagerie of bugs, beetles, and other tiny critters that Weitzner admits is her favorite design: “We named it Ensemble because we felt like all these creatures were gathering for a party.” Available in a dazzling array of colors, the delightful trims will have you looking at our smallest fellow beings in a gorgeous new light.