Perhaps my favourite part of an event like Decorex is peering past the polish to meet the hands behind it. Pretty is easy to come by; story is not.
This year’s Decorex Joburg, held at the Sandton Convention Centre, was full of creatives proving that good design is never just a vase on a shelf. It speaks in colour and craft, shape and form, heritage and the quiet accumulation of time.
That philosophy sat at the heart of this year’s “Soft Life” theme, chosen by Decorex Africa’s executive creative directors, Alan Hayward and Garreth van Niekerk. “Soft life is just a rejection of hustle culture,” Alan told me. “It’s really about searching for meaning, and we try to search for that meaning in design.”
For Alan and Garreth, the theme narrows a global exhaustion into something local and useful. “Decorex is a very positive space. It talks about people that are making things. It talks about small businesses. It talks about large businesses that employ lots of people... whether it’s something that’s very beautifully made for decoration or something that’s very structural and very important for the home to make your lives better,” Alan noted.
Rather than chasing trends or speculating about the future, the exhibition asked a simpler question: how can design help us live more beautifully, more meaningfully and with a stronger sense of identity?
With that in mind, here are six stands from Decorex Joburg 2026 worth remembering.
Nosso
Brazil-born Julia Franco moved to South Africa 14 years ago while working in fashion. After friends repeatedly asked her to bring home décor back from Brazil, she realised there might be a business hidden inside those requests. That business became Nosso.
At Decorex, Franco’s stand overflowed with colourful hand-painted ceramics, sculptural glassware, paintings and wooden objects sourced from Brazilian artists and makers. Yet for her, every piece begins with the story behind it. “In Brazil, especially, it’s passed down through generations,” she said. “It’s like a legacy carried on through art.”
When I asked which object meant the most to her, she pointed to a painting on an untreated plank of wood. She recalled asking the artist why he never sealed the timber before painting. “He said, ‘If I treat the wood before painting, you wouldn’t understand what I’m trying to say. What I’m trying to show is that things can be recreated. Time will pass. The art is not the painting. The art is the movement of the wood.’”
For Franco and Nosso, it turns out, the story is the art. The rest is just varnish … or, in this case, the lack of it.
Hutch
On the 100% Design floor, the installation at Hutch had people stopping mid-stride to gasp at Warren Turnbull’s woodworking. A self-taught woodworker, Turnbull first fell in love with the craft during his classes in high school, and has spent the last five years turning standard furniture into sculptural, one-of-a-kind heirloom pieces. The Kota table, especially, seemed to be stopping hearts.
Crafted in Turnbull’s one-man studio, the table is part furniture, part sculpture. One end curves into a gentle loop reminiscent of a musical note, framing a recess designed to house a record player.
“This piece was inspired by my wife,” Turnbull said with a smile. “She’s a musician, and the LP player integration is built into the fact that you can use this to listen to what you love, to explore what you love as well.”
For Turnbull, craftsmanship is inseparable from longevity. “This is not for the fast furniture market. It’s for people who want a talking piece in their house that can be passed down from generation to generation. I also only make one of a kind, so only one of these pieces will ever be made.”
Blaw Design
Sometimes a front door does far more than welcome guests. At Blaw Design, Pretoria-based founder Hanno Myburgh treats every entrance as the opening line of a home’s story.
The piece that stopped me in my tracks was a towering brushed-brass door whose oversized handle had been sculpted into the form of a tree branch. “It’s someone’s first entry point into their house, the first impression they get,” Myburgh explained. “[Our customers] really just want that part of their house to be unique.”
Founded in 2013, the company works directly with architects, interior designers and homeowners to bring that uniqueness to life. “That’s really what we do and what we enjoy doing. We often sit with our clients and designers to fine-tune those designs to make it exactly what they want,” he noted. “It’s not only bespoke, but it’s adaptable as well, because we make it. We cut and we plane every piece that goes into the door.”
Artesense
Sometimes a hobby stays a hobby. For Durban-based fibre art studio Artesense, it became a business.
Founder Yvette Mommsen began by making macramé plant hangers before gradually training a team and expanding into large-scale woven artworks for homes and hospitality spaces.
“I just loved the craft,” she says. “We learnt how to do it, trained one person to begin with, and then we just expanded from there.”
Their Decorex installation proved just how far that journey has come. Knots replaced brushstrokes across oversized wall hangings, sculptural lamps and woven chandeliers. Among the highlights was a dramatic crimson lamp with cascading strands of yarn and a textured landscape tapestry in cream, ochre and grey. “Our landscape tapestries are almost like paintings,” Mommsen explained, “but using rope and yarns and fibres and textures.”
Artesense recently launched its own lighting range alongside a new online store, adding a fresh chapter to a decade of work that began with little more than a length of rope and a plant to hang.
Olympic Colour Café
“Doing your home brings a lot of fear … so people’s choices become the safe choice,” Sejal Purbhoo, the managing director of Olympic Paints, said to me. Which is another way of saying most of us are one anxious decision away from painting everything beige.
Purbhoo spent a decade working in software engineering before joining the family business, a background that shaped his latest venture: Olympic Colour Café.
Rather than selling tins of paint, the concept guides homeowners through every stage of redesigning a room, from colour consultations and mood boards to wallpaper, flooring, furniture and installation.
“It’s the full package,” Purbhoo said. “Then you enjoy the experience without worrying about the selection or the installation.”
His engineering mindset continues to drive innovation. It has already produced an AI-powered colour-matching tool and a paint bucket with a built-in roller tray lid. “I always have this thing of how we can make the whole process easier, the whole process more convenient.”
It’s a reminder that good design is sometimes less about creating something new than removing the friction that stops people from creating in the first place.
olympicpaints.co.za/olympic-colour-cafe
Thekga Movement at the Sanlam Private Wealth Ventures Foundation
If Decorex Joburg had a quiet centre, it was here. Not a product, not a price tag, just five young designers being handed the thing that usually takes a career to earn: a chance.
The Sanlam Private Wealth Ventures Foundation partnered with Tracey Lynch, creative director of Clout/SA and curator of the Nando’s Design Programme, to create a mentorship platform that helps young designers build sustainable creative businesses. “It helps them understand what’s required to create a business that can not only sustain their creativity, but also generate revenue and eventually employ others,” Lynch explained.
From more than 150 applicants, five finalists were selected to develop their ideas alongside established manufacturers. One piece, however, stopped Lynch in her tracks and eventually became the award-winning design: a rug from Boitumelo (Tumi) Mphahlele, founder of the Thekga Movement, a social enterprise built around removing and repurposing the invasive water hyacinth that has colonised much of South Africa’s waterways. Thekga trains local women near the Blesbokspruit wetlands to harvest the plant and weave it into baskets, and, in this case, something else entirely.
“I always say that it was a calling,” Tumi said, one that draws together the three things she’s most passionate about: entrepreneurship, biodiversity and water conservation.
The rug, called First Ground, takes its shape from Adam’s Calendar, one of Africa’s oldest stone structures in Mpumalanga. “We were challenged to reimagine African luxury, and for me it meant going back to our roots, going back to where we come from,” Tumi explained. Water hyacinth runs through the piece to mark cardinal points, connecting the wetland it came from to the heritage site that shaped it. “I do not believe that problems and opportunities and sacred spaces operate in silos.”
For Tumi, the win is bigger than the rug itself. “Thekga is beyond me, it’s not about me, it’s about the women that believe in me ... who are environmental stewards in as much as they are crafters and they are weavers.”
instagram.com/thekga_ecoliving
Wanted
