Tulip Martini Design (currently in development)
I have always believed the future should feel like the future.
Not in a cold way. Not the version of the future where advancement arrives at the expense of the soul, where the glass is there because glass is modern, not because glass does something to the person standing in front of it.
The future at its full capacity is advanced, efficient, effective, and completely, unmistakably for humans. All of it. At the same time. Not one at the expense of another.
That belief is where Soulful Futurism starts.
I worked across ready-to-wear fashion, couture, branding, product, spatial and environmental design for years before I had a name for how I was thinking. Different mediums, different countries, different clients. And underneath all of it was this standard I kept holding things against. A feeling I was always working toward. I knew when I hit it and I knew when I didn't.
Something would stop me on a walk, a rock catching the light in a certain way, the movement of a puddle, a material I had seen a hundred times suddenly landing differently. Not everything. Most things do nothing. Every now and then something registers and you stand there longer than makes sense and then keep walking.
I spent years trying to understand why some things do that and most things do not.
The answer is never the thing itself. It is always the decision behind the thing. Here is the core of it.
As the world grows—eight billion people, nine, ten—it has to become more efficient. More effective. More capable of sustaining all of life at a scale we have never had to manage before. That is not optional. That is necessary. Soulful Futurism does not argue against it.
What it argues is that efficiency and the human soul are not in opposition. They are not competing priorities where you sacrifice one to achieve the other. True progress is both reaching their maximum potential simultaneously, in harmony. The most advanced version of a thing and the most human version of a thing are not different versions. They are the same version, arrived at through the right process.
The measurement of a genuine progress is not speed. Not scale. Not how well the system runs. It is whether the human soul is advancing alongside it. Whether people feel more alive inside the world being built. Whether the moments that connect a person to their own experience of being here are becoming more common, not less.
If advancement is not serving the human soul it is not advancement. It is a system running efficiently toward nothing that matters.
Progress must serve the human soul. That is the whole standard.
Now here is the thing I believe that most designers will not say out loud.
Form follows function is the foundational principle of modernism. It is the first sentence of the first chapter of nearly every design education on earth. I think it is wrong, or at least it stopped being true the moment technology gave is the ability to build almost anything we could conceive.
When you start with function you already have the answer before you begin. The faucet looks like a faucet in your head. The chair looks like a chair. The category looks like the category. The preconception closes the door on possibility before your hands touch anything. Then we call the result innovation.
Form creates function. Not the other way around. Start with form, genuinely, without a destination, and you find functions that never existed for that shape before. You produce something the category has not seen because you were not looking at the category. The most original things I have made came from forgetting what I was supposed to
be making.
Which brings me to what I call romance as method.
The cathedrals of antiquity understood this before the principle existed. Hundreds of years of builders working on a single form, romanticising the method across generations, holding a standard that most contemporary design does not come close to. Those buildings will stop people. Not because they are old. Because the decisions behind them were made toward something beyond efficiency. They were made towards awe. Toward the deepening of human experience inside a physical space.
That is the standard I am working toward. In objects that are a fraction of the size. And in spaces, buildings, and vessels of equal scale.
Before any form is resolved I write the love letter the object is trying to send. Not a brief. Not a mood board. A love letter, completely committed to one idea the way a good love letter is committed to one person. If I cannot be brutally romantic about the approach, if the story feels thin or borrowed, something is wrong with the direction.
The romance is not decoration on the design. The romance is the design.
Studying the market produces more of the market. I would rather write the love letter and let the form follow from that than study what already exists and produce a considered version of it. That instinct is not arrogance. It is the only way I know how to make something that has not been made before.
What all of this points toward is everyday awe.
Not the Grand Canyon. The rock on the walk. The building you pass every day that you still turn to look at. The glass in your hand that feels like it was made for your hand specifically. Those moments are not accidents. Someone made a decision that produced them. You just did not see the decision. You only felt the result.
That is the whole goal. At every scale. In every medium. Objects and spaces where you only feel the result. Small & large moments of awe designed into the fabric of ordinary life until the experience of being alive is quietly, irreversibly better.
Deepen life. Deepen being. Not through grand gestures. Through the accumulation of decisions made toward the right standard.
I Co-founded White Piano Group because I wanted to design the way I actually see.
Not the way a brief tells you to see. The way I see. Through the lens. Toward this standard. Soulful Futurism is not what the studio aspires to. It is what you receive when you work with us. It is inherent to the process. You cannot come to us without getting it.
This Substack is where I write about what that means in practice. The objects. The ideas. The decisions behind things that stop people when they should have no business stopping them.
The goal is not the monument. It is everyday awe.
At least, it certainly end there.
