Madrid Exhibition Transforms Museo de San Isidro Into a Living Room for Design.

Mother Dweller I by Fenna Kosfeld.

Facetas by Berto.

Ewan Lamm with Citadel by Ultramar Studio.

Soft Cutlery by Laia Amigó.

Castilla by Kilzi.

Portrait of La Bermeja with her blownglass flower .

Portrait of Gonzalo Guzmán.

Portrait of Otra x Santa Living.

Left: Sistema by Plutarco. Above: Scavo by Studio Valerie Name.

There’s something compelling about placing contemporary design objects inside a 16th-century Renaissance courtyard and asking visitors to consider them as future archaeological artefacts.

Presented as part of Madrid Design Festival 2026, Domus Nova exhibition at the Museo de San Isidro brought together 44 objects by 33 studios and designers, installed within the museum’s rarely visited Renaissance patio in the historic centre of Madrid. Curated by architecture and design publication Manera Magazine, with curatorial development and staging by Barcelona-based interior design duo Santa Living (César Carcaboso and Josep Vicens), and supported by Spanish furniture brand The Masie, the show proposed the idea that the objects we choose to live with are material records of how we inhabit the present.

The exhibition’s subtitle—Diseño para habitar el tiempo presente (Design for Inhabiting the Present Time)—set the tone. Rather than spectacle, Domus Nova is interested in proximity, touch, weight and the trace of making. These are pieces that don’t seek to impose themselves but to accompany daily life, championing closeness, use and permanence over the disposable. Displayed within a museum dedicated to the origins of Madrid—spanning archaeology and Roman-era artefacts through to the city’s founding as a kingdom—the exhibition drew a direct line between past and present, inviting visitors to read these contemporary works as small-scale archaeologies of today.

The Masie’s furniture pieces did double duty, functioning both as display supports and as exhibited objects in their own right, deliberately blurring the line between functional furniture and cultural object. It’s a smart curatorial move that reinforced the show’s central premise: the home as a living system of relationships between objects.

The participating designers and studios spanned an impressive range—from Lucas Muñoz Muñoz and Los Objetos Decorativos to Plutarco, among many others. Highlights include Laia Amigó’s Soft Cutlery, a series originally made from candy that has been reinterpreted in glass, maintaining its soft, vulnerable appearance while questioning the rigidity of everyday utensils. The collaboration between Otra Objects and Santa Living produced Massif Set, a low table and stool ensemble that reinterprets the Asian tea ritual through an almost brutalist, tribal sensibility.

The exhibition occupied a courtyard that, despite sitting in Madrid’s historic centre, remains largely off the usual cultural circuit—making the experience all the more intimate and unhurried. The sound of water from the central fountain, the worn granite columns and the increasingly generous late-winter light created a setting where contemporary design felt less like something to look at, and more like a way of being in the world.

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Domus Nova by Madrid Design Festival 2026. Photo: Germán Saiz.

Domus Nova by Madrid Design Festival 2026. Photo: Germán Saiz.

[Images courtesy of Manera. Product images courtesy of designers. Installation photography by Germán Saiz.]