Kim Markel

Kim Markel is a furniture designer whose ethereal Glow collection is formed from translucent post-consumer and post-industrial tinted resins.  The satiny, insubstantial hues of her chairs, stools, and other objects made from reclaimed plastics refract light as though extracted from a daydream or memory. Markel credits childhood cartoons, Jelly shoes, and lollipops with informing the Glow collection’s palette and formal decisions — objects which she sees as imbued with “a sense of unbridled reality and strange magic.” 

At the same time, her fascination with ancient processes, material recipes, and decorative techniques draws from diverse sources, including the 1st century Roman architect Vitruvius’ writings, Rococo ornaments found in ecclesiastic architecture, and intricate Meissen porcelains. She sees her work as “an evolving conversation between ideas, technique, and materiality: an idea for an object, the development of a unique technique to make it, and then creating a material for it. All three pieces of the puzzle evolve as they inform one another.”

Markel received her bachelors and masters degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, subsequently working in public policy and environmental sustainability for eight years before transitioning into design. She began working on furniture fabrication at the U.S.’s largest foundry, Polich Tallix, before developing her first collection as a designer in 2016. Markel has taught sustainable design practices as a professor at Parsons School of Design/The New School since 2019. Markel’s furniture and sculptural objects have been exhibited at venues including the Birmingham Museum of Art, Toyoma Prefectural Museum of Design, and the Yksi Expo in Eindhoven. She is recipient of the Architizer A+Award for Furniture Design and her work is featured in Architectural Digest, Dwell, Elle Decor, The New York Times, and Wallpaper.