Ghislaine Viñas

The designer brings her bright outlook to workplace interiors and products.

- Katie Okamoto

Defying convention is in Ghislaine Viñas’s nature. She’ll routinely lie on the floor to discover the hidden quirkiness of things and shift her perspective or, in her words, “turn things upside down and give them a twirl.” Born in the Netherlands, the designer grew up in South Africa and today lives and works in New York City. “Not having a real sense of where you’re from makes you more flexible in so many ways,” she reflects. “It gives you this feeling that you can bounce around more easily.” Her readiness to try new things helps explain Viñas’s success.

Ghislaine Viñas Interior Design, her ten-person firm, is having quite a year. At ICFF in May, it launched a rug collection with Aronson. This month, the firm will unveil two major projects at NeoCon: the new Scandinavian Spaces showroom in Chicago’s Mart and Viñas’s first textile foray, a collaboration with HBF Textiles. The latter takes inspiration from sea creatures— “tiny, fascinating, clownlike creatures,” in her words. Best known for residential interiors, her firm is working on a growing number of commercial projects in the U.S. and abroad, affording the practice more expertise and acumen in the workplace domain.