Design-Milk

Xiao Lin spent her formative years in the United States and China, and some of her most cherished memories are those rooted in place, from the front door of the family home to the rooms inside. “I remember the kitchen where meals were made and how everyone seemed to gather there, drawn by warmth as much as hunger,” she says.

Lin went on to earn a graduate degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, and then she traveled early in her career. Whether she was in Beijing or Amsterdam, she realized that even the most resonant spaces are never truly finished until the occupants make them their own.

In 2022 Lin founded her own firm, STUDIO XIAO, in East Hampton, New York. She specializes in residential and commercial projects. As she develops a concept, she is guided by her belief that a building should be felt before it is seen.

Her signature structures are pure in form and responsive to the natural surroundings rather than separate from the landscape. For Lin, a complete edifice is one that is really a compelling composition of mood, sound, and light, paired with her favorite materials.

Lin makes ceramics in her free time, and she enjoys how the elements unfold. “The firing and glazing bring their own surprises, outcomes you never fully planned for,” she notes. “There is a looseness that architecture, with all its predetermined processes, rarely gives you.”

Today, Xiao Lin joins us for Friday Five!

1. Birth Name Stone Seal

There is something quietly ceremonial about pressing stone to paper, the pause before, the resistance of the surface, then the reveal. This seal carries my name in traditional Chinese, carved by hand into stone, a tradition passed between generations of craftspeople who understood that the act of marking is also an act of meaning. Each impression is never quite the same.

2. Carved Horn Head Massager

Cut from a single piece of horn, the object changes with use: the tines growing smoother where fingers have pressed, the body acquiring a patina of touch. The contrast between the rougher hollows and the burnished exterior tells you exactly how it has been held, and by whom. It is a record of sensation written on the surface.

3. My Grandmother’s Sandalwood Mala Bracelet

My grandmother wore this daily, and the wood knows it. The grain has softened where her wrist met the beads, the fragrance of the sandalwood still present, faint, warm, insistent. It is my most treasured possession. Wearing this, I carry both her and her memories.

4. Handmade Ceramic Incense Holder

This piece thinks like a building. The long rectangular channel holds the incense at one end while the gently inclined base collects the ash as it falls, everything considered, nothing wasted. It has the quiet logic of good architecture: a clear diagram of function made beautiful through restraint.

5. Physical Architecture Model

We still make these by hand and in a practice increasingly mediated by screens, there is something irreplaceable about building a thing in space to understand a thing in space. Touching the roof, lowering your eye to the level of a room. The model doesn’t simulate the building, it thinks alongside it, a way of processing what drawing and rendering alone cannot resolve.

Works by STUDIO XIAO’s Xiao Lin:

Haven House
A walnut bookshelf in the primary bedroom follows the irregular roofline exactly, its rounded corners and rolling ladder holding the asymmetry of the room with ease.

Oyster Cove
A floor-to-ceiling plaster fireplace is the living room, its matte cloud-grey surface receding as the fire draws the eye. A wood-framed lounge chair and organic coffee tables ground the space in tactile warmth against the cool mineral backdrop.

Cove House
Renovated for clients drawn to mid-century sensibilities, this East Hampton residence is re-clad in elongated brick and corrugated aluminum. Materials echo the site’s existing masonry walls while sharpening the roofline’s geometry. Inside and out, a recurring slatted detail ties the facade, deck, bench seating, and pergola into a single cohesive language. The sunken pool, edged with a waterfall, drops to meet the lower level, dissolving the boundary between built volume and landscape.

Tier House
Perched high on a hillside, this residence is conceived as a quiet, fortress-like form from the street that gradually opens as you move inward. A solid front fence and rock garden create a slow, deliberate procession toward the recessed entry.

Gleason Renovation
A television room reimagined as a place of stillness. The back wall is anchored by a built-in sofa and bed with integrated lighting, a pull-out trundle tucked neatly beneath. Cabinetry folds into the window sill, unifying the wall as a single composed surface. Furnishings chosen with quiet intention turn the room into a sanctuary.

Photography by Xiao Lin.

For the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC), design has never been only about what gets made. It is also about what gets understood. The organization does not sell a chair, table, or finished product; it advocates for a material, a supply chain, and a way of thinking that begins long before an object lands in a showroom or on a collector’s shelf. As Clerkenwell Design Week returned for its 15th edition under the fitting strapline Where Design Belongs, AHEC’s involvement spoke to a larger belief: creativity thrives when designers, makers, manufacturers, and audiences are given the tools to understand materials more deeply.

For David Venables of AHEC Europe, the value of a design festival is not simply visibility. AHEC is not a conventional brand chasing exposure. “We don’t advertise,” he explains. “We create content.” Without a consumer product to launch, AHEC instead uses design platforms to start conversations about forests, provenance, species diversity, material literacy, and the overlooked systems that determine whether design is merely fashionable or genuinely forward-thinking.

Clerkenwell Design Week is particularly suited to that mission. Compared with the scale and spectacle of larger fairs, Clerkenwell offers a more intimate, navigable, and conversational platform. Spread across EC1’s dense network of showrooms, historic venues, installations, talks, and temporary activations, it allows ideas to circulate at a human scale. For 2026, that ecosystem continued to expand with the introduction of the Clerkenwell Design Week app, a new digital companion designed to help visitors navigate the festival, discover brands, access talks programming, and store their visitor badge directly on their phones. New destinations such as The Luxury Edit at Haberdashers’ Hall, Church of Design, and The Charterhouse further extended the festival’s footprint, while international showcases from Spain, Italy, Austria, Denmark, and others underscored its growing global reach.

AHEC’s support of Clerkenwell sits precisely at the intersection of this growth and the festival’s grounded identity. Venables describes the energy around Clerkenwell as “really exciting,” noting that creative platforms, even in a city as culturally rich as London, are not always given enough support. For an organization devoted to material education, CDW offers rare access not only to established architects and designers, but also to emerging talent, manufacturers, specifiers, journalists, and the broader design community moving through the district with curiosity rather than haste.

That sense of participation is especially clear in AHEC’s involvement with the Clerkenwell Design Week Awards. Rather than sponsor a trophy as a branding exercise, AHEC saw an opportunity to transform the award itself into a material lesson. The result was a series of sculptural wooden awards designed by an emerging maker Henry Marks, produced in American cherry, and made from lower-grade timber that would often be excluded from more conventional markets. Each award was different, carrying its own grain, knots, color variation, and evidence of growth. Each will also continue to change over time as cherry darkens and deepens with exposure to light.

For Venables, that evolution is part of the point. The award is not a generic object to be tucked away in a cupboard, but a living demonstration of what wood can do when it is allowed to behave like wood. It offers recipients a tactile encounter with a natural material whose value lies not in uniformity, but in difference.

At Clerkenwell, that message lands in a context already built around exchange. The festival’s showroom community has long been one of its defining strengths, anchoring the event in a real neighborhood rather than a temporary exhibition hall. AHEC’s contribution enhances that atmosphere by bringing the conversation back to the material origins of design itself. In an era saturated with launches, trends, and visual spectacle, its presence is a reminder that design’s future may depend as much on education as invention.

To see more highlights from this year’s programming, visit clerkenwelldesignweek.com.

Photography by Sam Frost Photography.

What’s the purpose of bird feeders? Like most human innovation altruistically aimed at aiding nature and other sentient beings, the benefits have almost always been mutually beneficial. In this case, a feeder helps ensure our avian neighbors are well taken care of, while also allowing us to glimpse them from a far more intimate, up-close vantage point. It is also a chance to discover the full range of species that live nearby, inhabiting our gardens and the woodlands farther afield.

Optimizing this dual function is the new and improved Bird Feeder 2, recently released by specialized tech brand Kiwibit. The simply packaged device—reminiscent in look and shape of the gable-roof sheds we might otherwise find in our backyards—packs a punch when it comes to integrated tech, ease of use, adaptability, and durability.

The most significant update is the fully integrated AI-powered camera, which allows even the most enthusiastic twitchers to keep track of the various species that have stopped by, even when they are away—on the other side of the planet, even. Wi-Fi connectivity, up to 2.4 GHz, and 4.4W built-in solar panels—not unlike those one might mount on an actual roof—ensure there is no interruption in monitoring. One can watch, listen, and control the dispensation of different food supplies contained in two separate containers. The roof simply lifts up for these 1.5-liter receptacles to be filled. The camera has a 132-degree perspective, and the integrated AI technology immediately identifies species. It can pinpoint up to 10,000. The 4K HD-resolution camera also has night vision and records for up to 24 hours before rolling over.

The Kiwibit Feeder has an especially durable plastic shell with IP65-rated waterproofing and a temperature tolerance down to -4 and up to 122 degrees Fahrenheit. It is engineered to be quickly and sturdily mounted to poles, attached to walls, or strapped around trees. With this latest, comprehensively imagined contraption, there is very little stopping hobbyists from fulfilling their dearest desires.

To shop the Kiwibit Bird Feeder 2, visit kiwibit.com.

Photography courtesy of Kiwibit.