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“Bosque” by Lawson-Fenning
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Lawson-Fenning just turned their NoHo showroom into one of the liveliest rooms we’ve stepped into in a while, filling it with their new Bosque collection and a handful of makers whose work breathes real life into the space.
Bosque is at the center of it all, a 19-piece collection of upholstery and case goods that sits low and heavy and has a real presence to it. Rather than designing pieces to drop into a room, Lawson-Fenning approached them as the things a whole room gets built around. The starting point was the 1960s Japanese Metabolists, though Grant Fenning was quick to tell us it had nothing to do with the look. What pulled them in was the optimism baked into the movement, the idea that architecture could be modular, evolving, almost alive, and that it could shape the way people actually lived. You can feel that thinking in something like a Bosque sofa, which is broad and grounded enough that you naturally start arranging the rest of the room around it.
All of it is built in solid white oak and American walnut, made entirely in the US by the same fabricators and carpenters Lawson-Fenning has leaned on for most of its twenty-five years. Glenn Lawson told us those relationships are the whole game, and after two decades there’s a kind of shorthand between them, where they can come in with a half-finished sketch, get talked out of part of it, build a prototype, and figure the rest out standing around it together.
But the pieces we kept circling back to were the collaborations, which is the part of Lawson-Fenning we love most, the way they fold other makers into their world without flattening what makes those makers good in the first place. Glenn put it simply, that the collaborations start as friendships rather than strategy. He’s had Victoria Morris’s lamps in his own home and Ceramicah’s pieces in the showrooms for years, so these are people whose work they already lived with, and the partnerships grew straight out of that.
The launch pulled together a limited series of side tables with New York ceramic artist Bruno Grizzo, each finished with a hand-painted ceramic top and custom-fit so no two are alike, alongside Cuadra, Ceramicah’s first body of work in solid wood after years known for clay, all sharp lines and stacked, perforated forms, and 38 one-of-a-kind vessels from Victoria Morris Pottery, who’s been at the wheel for over thirty-five years. Each one is beautiful in its own right, and they fit the collection so naturally while still showing off exactly what makes each maker, and each collaboration, special.
What we appreciate most is that Lawson-Fenning never tries to absorb these makers into their own brand, and as Glenn told us, the goal was always to make something together that still sounds like the maker themselves, which is exactly what comes through in the room.
Read the conversation and explore the collection below.
Lawson-Fenning has worked with independent makers for most of its twenty-five years. How do you approach those collaborations, and what were you looking for when you decided to work with Bruno Grizzo, Ceramicah, and Victoria Morris for this launch?
Glenn: Honestly, most of these started as friendships. We live with this work. Glenn has Victoria’s lamps in his house. The Ceramicah pieces have been in the showrooms for years. Bruno we’ve known forever. So the collaborations aren’t strategic, they’re more like, we already love what this person is doing, what would it look like if we made something together.
Grant: What we’re looking for is someone with a real point of view. You can feel it when someone has spent years figuring out what they want to make. Bruno’s work is precise but warm. Ceramicah is architectural but you can feel the hand in it. Victoria understands color in a way most people don’t. There’s a Southern California atmosphere to it that you can’t really describe, you just feel.
Glenn: The other thing for Bosque specifically, we didn’t want the collaborations to feel like accessories. Like, here’s the furniture, and then here’s a vase on top of it. We wanted everything to be part of the same world.
The Bosque collection takes cues from the Japanese Metabolist movement but brings it down to the scale of a room. Walk us through how you translated that architectural thinking into furniture, and what you mean by designing pieces as “the architecture of the room itself” rather than objects in a room.
Grant: The thing that pulled us in about the Metabolists wasn’t really the look. It was the idea that buildings could be modular, evolving, almost alive. There was this optimism to it, that architecture could shape how people actually lived. We weren’t trying to copy the style. We were trying to take that thinking and bring it down to the scale of a room.
Glenn: With Bosque, we started thinking about a sofa less as a sofa and more as a piece of the room. Low, grounded, broad enough to organize the space around it. The tables do the same thing. They’re not occupying a room, they’re shaping it: where people sit, how they move, where the conversation happens.
Grant: We’ve always liked furniture that can quietly organize a space without taking it over. Bosque has a real physical presence, but there’s softness to it too. You can move things around. Live with it casually. It’s meant to adapt.
Bosque is made entirely in the United States by fabricators and carpenters you’ve worked alongside for most of Lawson-Fenning’s twenty-five years. How do those longstanding relationships show up in the work, what does that continuity allow you to do as designers, and how does that approach to collaboration inform the way you work with artists like Bruno, Ceramicah, and Victoria Morris?
Glenn: Those relationships are everything. When you’ve worked with the same people for twenty-plus years, there’s a shorthand. We can describe something half-formed and they already know what we mean. A lot of the work happens in conversation. We’ll bring a sketch in, they’ll push back, we’ll change it, they’ll build a prototype, we’ll all stand around looking at it. That’s where the pieces actually get resolved.
Grant: It also lets us push further than we could otherwise. We know what they’re capable of, they know what we care about. The restraint, the detail. That trust is what lets the work feel resolved instead of overworked.
Glenn: And honestly, it’s the same with the artists. Bruno, Ceramicah, Victoria. The goal was never to put a Lawson-Fenning stamp on their work. It’s more like, we trust you, you trust us, let’s make something together that still sounds like you. The best collaborations feel like a real conversation. Cohesive, but everyone’s still in it.
