Designing With Straw in the East Village

Designing With Straw in the East Village The downtown studio Sunfish used it to create an entire collection of furniture and décor. Photo: Frankie Alduino The downtown decorative-arts studio Sunfish, run by newlywed couple Kevin Hollidge and Julia Eshaghpour, is not known for one specific look or approach. Instead, over the past few years, Sunfish has established itself as the go-to for furniture pieces with a fine-art pedigree, creating custom work such as a mahogany headboard painted with birds-of-paradise or a ceiling mural for the musician Lizzy McAlpine featuring vines trailing against a night sky. The seven furniture collections Sunfish has released since its founding early in the pandemic have not only showcased the couple’s increasingly giddy aesthetic — which often mixes Pierre Chapo–esque woods with the hand-painted exuberance of a Rousseau — but also their desire to speed, unimpeded, through design’s rich catalogue of materials and methods. They were introduced to a new one — straw marquetry — when a friend lent them a book on Art Deco legend Jean Dunand. Straw marquetry uses flattened, often dyed stalks of rye or wheat to create images (much like wood marquetry), and Sunfish’s first encounter with it was an example of the highest order, embedded in one of the great interiors of the 20th century: the 1920s San Francisco penthouse of American industrialist Templeton Crocker, designed by Jean-Michel Frank with help from Dunand and a slew of other French decorating icons. Perched atop Russian Hill, Crocker’s penthouse was a budget-be-damned Gesamtkunstwerk that allowed Frank to go absolutely wild with materials. He applied squares of parchment to the walls, built tables from sharkskin, hung chainmail curtains, laid down fur rugs, streamed water over a 12-foot crystal fountain, and hired Dunand to deck out a breakfast nook in black lacquer with pink and silver fish. In the study, Frank covered the walls and ceilings in shimmering, hand-applied lengths of straw, making the room appear to almost glow. A matching divan, its frame also covered in straw, was outlined in gilt and upholstered in yellow silk. Hollidge and Eshaghpour were captivated by Frank’s use of straw, which becomes more or less lustrous depending on how hard it’s rubbed (bringing out the material’s natural silica) and can be dyed to achieve different hues. The technique is having something of a mini-resurgence — popping up in the fantastical flat of interiors stylist Vincent Darré, in luxury boutiques and independent design fairs, and even at Williams Sonoma, where dyed green stalks are splayed in a starburst across the barrel of a bedside table. For Hollidge and Eshaghpour, straw marquetry felt like an intuitive extension of their practice. “We use a lot of imagery and hand-painted elements in our furniture, and with straw marquetry, we saw an opportunity to take that and merge it with the actual materiality of the pieces,” Eshaghpour told me earlier this month. We were standing in Sunfish’s East Village studio, a brick-walled bunker of a space in the basement of a residential building where the couple do carpentry and other lightly toxic work. In October, they will debut an eight-piece collection that shows what they’ve made of their material exploration at Tribeca’s Assembly Line Annex — Sunfish’s first new work since spring 2025. Called Entwined, the new collection features Herculean-knot and coiled-snake motifs and was almost entirely made using straw marquetry with strips dyed in a tonal palette of flaxen and brown hues and arranged in a kind of paint-by-numbers blueprint across the surface of each piece. It includes the kinds of furnishings that would have been at home in an American millionaire’s Art Deco penthouse but that I would also very much like for my own apartment in Brooklyn: a daybed, a full-length cheval mirror, a room divider, a jewelry box, a dining table, and more. The collection, however, isn’t being made entirely in Sunfish’s East Village space, which Hollidge and Eshaghpour have long since outgrown, both in size and ambition. Instead, they’re working for the first time with a family-run workshop in China to oversee production of the marquetry, and they’re building the pieces’ plywood frames and sapele scaffolding in house. Visiting their studio, it’s easy to see why outsourcing some of the more specialized work to experienced artisans was appealing. “We’re going to leave this place in the winter,” Hollidge laughs, standing in dusty Mephistos amid a sea of circular saws and lumber. “But it’s cheap, so it’s allowed us to grow.” From the beginning, the couple’s talent for marrying furniture’s useful vocabulary with fine-art flourishes was evident. My first encounter with their work was in 2023, at a New York Design Week event inside Beverly’s on the Lower East Side, where Sunfish had created an exhibition design for a new Sophie Lou Jacobsen collection. Underneath Jacobsen’s elegant, knobbed glass vases, Sunfish had built a stage of glazed terracotta brick shelves, sawdust-topped tables, tiled consoles, and a plywood room divider painted with springlike abundance: plump pomegranates, watchful birds, flowers, and fish. Most of those initial pieces could have come out of any number of young, craft-oriented design studios in Lower Manhattan. But the room divider? That was a charming and low-key harbinger of things to come. Among their creations over the past three years: a coffee table with tiers of persimmon-dyed cherry held up by cubes of red clay; a redwood-framed dining chair, its caned seatback rising nearly eight feet; a copper room divider with botanical vines chemically patinated, rather than painted, a brilliant green; tiles made from leather; a coffee table made from ceramic sardines; and a chess board honed from the horn of a water buffalo. “I think over time, as Sunfish has grown, we’ve become more interested in expanding our material breadth,” says Eshaghpour. “Each collection, we try to add a new material or a new way of working.” With their latest one, the Sunfish team wanted not only to add a new material but also to set a new intention. Though they’ve always worked with figurative motifs, they wanted the imagery in their new collection to hold a deeper meaning. They found it in their recent nuptials. One day, as the couple was shopping for wedding bands, they stumbled upon an antique jewelry store in the West Village. “The woman who runs the shop was showing me this coiled-snake engagement ring, which I didn’t know anything about,” says Eshaghpour. “Apparently, it was popular in the Victorian era to have snake jewelry because Prince Albert gave a coiled ring to Queen Victoria, and it became known as a symbol of devotion and eternal love. I thought that was interesting because I’d always thought of snakes in biblical terms — associated with deception, sin, and treachery.” (The knots that recur throughout the new collection are another motif that can be read as either a sign of strong bonds or a symbol of consternation.) Those small reversals of perception became, for Sunfish, emblematic of what is perhaps colloquially known as “their whole deal.” “Planning the wedding, I felt like I was always asking, ‘What is the tradition? Where can we subvert expectations and also honor our past or history?’” says Eshaghpour. It’s the same lens through which they view their practice, looking at how a material or technique has been used historically and then researching how to add their own Sunfish flair. A few subway stops away from Sunfish’s studio is the bright and lovely Chinatown loft where Hollidge and Eshaghpour live, the yang to their East Village yin. When you see it — with one wall painted the color of buttercup and another paneled in oak and trimmed with a pistachio banner, illustrated with twisting vines the couple gathered from a nearby garden — you begin to imagine Sunfish might one day be capable of constructing a Gesamtkunstwerk of its own, a defining 21st-century interior where each detail has been considered, each material carefully selected, and each decision the result of an endless curiosity that leads to a place you might never have envisioned at the start. Rafael Prieto’s New Furniture Is Made of the Building Across From His Studio Karim Rashid’s Very Pink New Jersey Home The Designer Inspired by Bees and Her Grandmother’s African Combs See All Designing With Straw in the East Village Your product is saved! You’ll receive emails when your saved products go on sale. Manage preferences.