Similar flexibility is found in Apparata’s A House for Artists (2021) in London. The bold triangles, circles and squares that punctuate its five-storey concrete facade contain generous living spaces with soundproof, full-height double doors that can open up to changing individual flat sizes on a daily or long-term basis. This flexibility facilitates shifting living arrangements and challenges the idea of the isolated nuclear family unit, proposing instead co-living arrangements that offer conviviality and shared childcare and domestic labour. Furthermore, the buildings’ artist-inhabitants benefit from lower rents and access to free onsite workspaces in exchange for running the local arts programme.

While Gerber’s shelving elegantly celebrates industrial aesthetics, modularity does not have to be machine-like. Omi Collective’s Omi Series 2 stool (2025), for instance, explores the idea of an “African way of seating” through three two-legged solid timber stools that can be joined together with a steel rod. Their indigo colour and chunky carved profile reference both Asante stools and Shona and Tonga headrests – objects with practical, symbolic, and ritualistic functions.

While rituals’ importance have been overlooked in modern Western cultures, there are designers who celebrate their significance. Ettore Sottsass’ Yantra di Terracotta (1969) ceramics are an early example of this. Inspired by his visits to California’s counterculture and his journeys on the south east Asian hippie trail, Sottsass created a series of small, totem-like monochrome sculptures in geometric forms designed to imbue spiritual reflection in what he saw as an overly commodified domestic realm. More recently, Mexican designer Liliana Ovalle has talked of her wish to make small domestic altars, as seen in her foldable photo-etched brass Altar in a Corner from 2006, which enable users to “honour memories, hopes, and bonds” in the home.

Sottsass and Ovalle’s works speak of different approaches to cross-cultural design, bringing together different aesthetics and practices that express the rich connectivity of our spherical planet’s cultures and the importance of freedom of movement between people and places. There are no borders or boundaries within circles or spheres, but there is a bounded edge which reminds us of our collective and interdependent existence.

There have long been designers who have explored such shared cultural inter-existence. British Nigerian designer Yinka Illori imbues his designs for chairs, cushions and architectural structures with colours, shapes, and patterns combining a postmodernist playfulness with his multicultural heritage. Focusing on local making traditions, French designer Fabien Cappello, based in Mexico City since 2016, has become increasingly drawn to the city’s material economy. This has resulted in projects such as Objetos de Hojalata (2022), a collection of functional objects including buckets and watering cans made out of sheet metal by local manufacturers. The American designers Stephen Burks and Malika Leiper, who is originally from Cambodia, also regularly explore bringing together different cultures. This includes Kuba Sugi (2025), a collection of sculptural forms which coalesce the Congolese kuba cloth tradition with Sugi, a Japanese red cedar. Created in collaboration with crafts practitioners in both Kinshasa and Japan’s Nara Prefecture, the collection of colours, patterns and forms speak of Burks and Leiper’s identification of shared concerns of stewardship – be it of ceremonial traditions, crafts or materials – in two seemingly disconnected cultures.

Raised in a family of beekeepers, French designer Marlène Huissoud recognises just this: From Insects (2014) is a vase made from blown propolis, a natural mixture of saliva and beeswax, that is designed to hold flowers, which in turn produce the pollen that bees then pollinate. Having such objects in our homes reminds us of the ecological and seasonal cycles on which we are all dependent. Similarly, Fernando Laposse works with farmers in the south of his native Mexico to create designs from a range of plant fibres – including sisal, loofah and avocado – that show the connectivity of the ground which materials come from to the furniture that then fills our homes.

Circularity, then, is a quality that shapes much of our lives, both in and outside of the home. It reminds us of the boundedness of domestic living and the surprising freedom of such containment; as a place where we construct and communicate our identities, the home is where we bring together multiple identities, both our own and those of others. Ultimately, it is in the home that we can bring together the different objects, rituals, and ways of living that come from the multiple cultures, ages, and relationships that make up our lives, whatever shape they take.