Founded in 2024 by design curator Emma Vanbeckevoort and Geert Jan Van Cauwelaert, Antwerp Design Week quickly found its audience among both design professionals—eager for a meaningful annual networking platform—and the general public, who rarely encounter the latest developments in contemporary design in their day-to-day lives.
For the second year in a row, the ADW headquarters is based at Gallery 12. Despite the word “gallery” in its name, it is not a traditional commercial gallery, but rather a cultural platform and exhibition space created by the architecture studio AIM Architecture. The venue brings together contemporary art, design, architecture, fashion and cultural events. It is located at Kattendijkdok-Oostkaai 12 (the second part of the name has nothing to do with the apostles, but why not).
The building itself is remarkable, in a late Art Nouveau style (though in my view it leans closer to Art Deco), constructed in 1906 as an office for a shipping company with a spacious warehouse, designed by Liège-based architect Xavier Hanson. Gallery 12 was realised by the founders of AIM Architecture, Wendy Saunders and Vincent de Graaf.
In 2026, the architecture studio developed its own exhibition for the festival, inviting Chinese art journalist and designer Yoko Choy as co-curator (the studio has had a branch in Shanghai for 18 years and maintains strong ties with Asia). The exhibition is titled The Hall. Within one large “hall”, works from different fields are brought together — design, art, fashion and jewellery.
Rather than following a single theme, the exhibition is structured as a dialogue between different disciplines and authors from a wide range of geographical regions, creating a layered composition of objects that interact within the space of the historic building. Silicone masks by Belgian designer Christophe Coppens (the author of ten installations at KMSKA) are placed alongside chopsticks by Japanese designer Yui Takada.
It is always interesting to see who is behind the organisation of a festival. We visited the company XLBoom — a Belgian brand founded in 1997 in Antwerp by Ann De Cock and Geert Jan Van Cauwelaert — which operates at the intersection of product design and decorative objects.
The company defines its position through the concept of “smart living objects”, where everyday items are seen not only as functional tools but also as elements of interior visual culture. Within this approach, an important role is played by collaborations with contemporary designers, as well as a rethinking of Belgium’s design heritage, which XLBoom reinterprets in a contemporary context.
The most expressive manifestation of this strategy can be seen in two collections — Gusto and Cordoba — which can be understood as two poles of the brand’s design thinking: experimental and historically reflective.
The Gusto collection, created by designer Alain Gilles in the 2020s, is an example of a contemporary sculptural approach to glass. The starting point was the image of a coupe glass placed on a piece of ice that is gradually melting. This metaphor defines the object’s core sensation — the capture of a moment of material transformation.
The object appears not as a finished form, but as a frozen process in which glass is simultaneously stable and fluid. The stem of the coupe becomes particularly expressive, where an effect of brown colour enclosed within white emerges. This visual result is achieved through multilayered glass and the combination of tinted masses with lighter or opaline layers.
In perception, this creates the illusion of an inner core contained within a transparent medium, enhancing the sense of depth and optical density of the material. Gusto can be seen as an object in which the function of serving dessert recedes into the background, giving way to the idea of “frozen movement” and the material poetry of glass.
In contrast, the Cordoba collection operates in a different register, presenting a reissue of an original design by Belgian modernist Zéphir Busine, created in the 1960s for Manufacture de Boussu. In this object, XLBoom turns to the modernist tradition grounded in clarity of form, proportion, and the rejection of decorative excess.
For Busine, an artist and multidisciplinary creator, a synthetic approach to art is characteristic, in which glass becomes an extension of his search for pure form. Cordoba embodies this logic through an extremely refined silhouette and calm geometry, where every element is subordinated to overall harmony.
The contemporary reissue enhances the material perception of the object through variations in glass: a transparent crystal version emphasises purity and luminous depth, while amber and grey variants reveal the sculptural character of the form through colour and the density of light.
As a continuation of the family and cultural lineage of XLBoom, it is worth noting that the founders’ daughter, Marie Van Cauwelaert, is developing her own professional trajectory in the field of gastronomy and has opened the restaurant Spice Bank in Antwerp, located in the building of the former National Bank of Belgium.
Her project organically extends the same sensitivity to space, materiality and scenography that characterises the family’s design practice. At Spice Bank, she develops an independent culinary language of contemporary author-driven cuisine, where food is treated as part of a spatial and aesthetic experience, and the interior becomes an equal participant in the gastronomic act.
In this sense, the restaurant functions as a parallel form of cultural practice, carrying forward an attentiveness to form, atmosphere and the tactile perception of environment.
