FEATURE
Enso
Collection
Soft Grounds
Type
Highlight
Contact
Enso names every piece in their Soft Grounds collection after fruit. The Durian Lamp for its spiky oddness, the Fig Ottoman, the Tamarind Sconce, the Plantain Plinth. What started as a joke became their framework, giving them permission to think about design through feeling rather than formality.
Yuria Kailich and Joel Harding spent years at interior design studios like Gachot and Ashe Leandro before launching Enso, where they now work across both interiors and objects. Their object-making practice stems directly from that background, born from constantly searching for pieces that didn’t exist for specific corners or angles. They evolved from their first collection of wall-mounted pieces to furniture and lighting that can hold the center of a room. This shift in scale changed everything, pushing them to think about construction not just as sculpture but as objects people actually live around.
We love how they bring a folk sensibility to contemporary design, where materials like patinated metal, ceramics, slate, wood, and vintage silk talk to each other naturally. They work collaboratively with local fabricators while handling ceramic, metal, patina, upholstery, and wiring themselves. The result feels honest, with clean welds next to small imperfections that reveal the human hand.
What excites us most is their approach to personification. Each fruit name connects to its piece conceptually, maybe through a hard outer shell or a soft glow reminiscent of fruit flesh. They’re creating furniture that feels less like products and more like characters with personality, bringing warmth and playfulness to spaces without over-designing. We’re eager to see where their hundreds of sketched ideas take them next as their taste and vision continue to shape their output.
Your second collection, Soft Grounds, marks a shift from objects that hang on walls to pieces that live in the center of a room. What prompted this evolution in scale, and how did it change your approach to making?
The first collection lived more on the walls and edges of a room — they were quieter pieces. Honestly, those early works were small because that’s what we could manage at the time — things we made after work, tinkering away. I’d be at the ceramic studio, Joel would be at home cutting metal, and we’d be giddy about the potential of what we were building.
This time, we wanted to make work that could sit in the middle of a space and carry its own weight. We’ve been thinking a lot about form and proportion — how something can hold a room just by the way it’s built. We ultimately want to make more furniture. We love functional and practical design just as much as we care about a candleholder anchoring a forgotten corner. Both are equally important — they just pose different challenges.
The shift in scale changed everything. We had to think about construction differently — not just as sculpture or object, but as something people will actually live around. We thought it would feel like a natural jump, but it really pushed us to rethink how we build and finish things. It was fun collaborating with our millworker, asking questions, and learning new techniques from peers who work in metal ceramics and wood.
Each piece in Soft Grounds is named after a fruit, which seems like an unexpected choice for furniture and lighting. How did fruit become the framework for this collection, and what does that naming system reveal about your design philosophy?
We started calling one of the early pieces the Durian Lamp as a joke — it was spiky and kind of odd — and then it just stuck. It felt fun and weirdly right. From there, every piece started taking on its own personality: the Fig Ottoman, the Tamarind Sconce, the Plantain Plinth.
We researched fruit and made sure each name connected to the piece somehow — not always physically, but conceptually. Maybe it had a hard outer shell, or a soft glow that reminded us of the warmth of fruit flesh. It gave us permission to think about design less formally and more through feeling.
And honestly, not everything needs a deep meaning — we’re the first to admit that. We liked that fruit is universal but also sensual and alive. It bruises, changes, decays — there’s something human about it. Naming the pieces that way made them feel less like products and more like characters.
Coming from interior design backgrounds, how did you develop your approach to making objects? Can you share a bit about your process and whether you work with fabricators or handle certain elements yourselves?
A lot of it started from wanting things that didn’t exactly exist. When we were working at interior design firms, we’d constantly run into the same issue — we couldn’t find the right piece for a specific corner, or under a certain table, or with the right kind of angle. We were looking for things that felt honest, that had the right balance of raw and refined. So we started sketching them.
Then we began making small ceramic pieces with holes in them, connecting them with bits of metal to see what worked — what looked good, and why. We do a bit of everything ourselves: ceramic, metal, patina, upholstery, wiring, installing. Some pieces are fully made in our studio; others we produce with local fabricators we’ve known for years. It’s really collaborative.
We’re both control freaks in different ways, but we like when you can still see the hand in something. A clean weld, a small imperfection — those marks tell the story of how the piece was made. We’re not trying to erase the human touch. We aren’t producing sets of identical cups; every piece someone brings home is slightly different, and that’s the beauty of it.
The collection incorporates new materials for you like slate, wood, and vintage silk alongside your signature patinated metal and ceramics. What were you most excited or challenged by in working with these expanded materials, and how did they push your practice forward?
We’ve always been drawn to contrast — mixing materials that shouldn’t necessarily belong together. With Soft Grounds, we wanted to push that further. Slate was new for us and immediately felt right — it’s heavy and quiet in a way that metal isn’t. Wood brought warmth and structure, while vintage silk introduced a softness we hadn’t explored before.
The biggest challenge was restraint. We didn’t want the pieces to feel overdesigned; we wanted the materials to talk to each other naturally. Sometimes the piece tells you what it wants to be, and you just follow it. This collection taught us a lot about letting go and trusting that balance.
We’re always looking for new ways to challenge ourselves. It’s not that we get over a material quickly — we just have hundreds of sketches sitting in our notebooks waiting to come to life. The best way to keep growing is to keep experimenting, trying new material combinations, and seeing which ones stick.
