Fast-fashion retailer Zara is best known for its ability to almost instantaneously deliver runway trends straight to your closet at prices that won’t break the bank. As such, the brand’s homeware branch, Zara Home, isn’t typically a go-to source for creating an haute home. But that’s about to change with a new collab: a furniture line designed by all-star architect Vincent Van Duysen.
Van Duysen’s designs mark a higher price point for the otherwise-affordable home brand, with sofas starting at $6,300, desks starting at $2,500, and rugs starting at $500. To reflect this loftier asking, the new line—which also includes lamps, cocktail tables, side tables, and love seats—is being branded as ZARAHOME+. While no brick-and-mortar Zara Home stores exist in the U.S., the products will be available to order online, as well as in the many shops in Europe.
ZARAHOME+ is hardly the first big-ticket collab for the Belgian architect, whose lengthy résumé includes products for Flos, B&B Italia, and Paola Lenti, not to mention a post as the creative director of Molteni&C. But for Van Duysen, who celebrates 35 years in the profession as well as his 60th birthday, the collection serves as a return to some of his earliest ideas.
“I started with my first home that I moved into when I came back from Belgium after my studies in Milan,” Van Duysen tells ELLE DECOR. “That particular house was first published in ELLE Decoration UK. Ilse Crawford was the one who discovered me.”
The space and its furniture felt very natural, classic, and straightforward—an aesthetic purity that played well with Zara’s design focus. The collection also takes inspiration from longtime muses like Jean-Michel Frank, Alvar Aalto, and Luis Barragán. Those ideas are even reflected in the Zara Home collection’s color palette, which primarily consists of soft neutrals.
The overall concept was simple, per Van Duysen: Create pieces that could exist in any home—no matter how large or small—and that would stand the test of time. “I cut out all of the excess to create the purest forms, whether that was a sofa, a carpet, or a side table,” he says.
These latest drops will be available on Zara Home’s website starting June 30, with another Van Duysen collection focused on dining to launch in October. Until then, the first round of furnishings seems to already have made an impact on their designer. “Each time we did the layouts and reviewed the prototypes, it felt like coming home,” he says. “It was really beautiful. It really confirmed the essence of where it all started and what I want to share with the world.”
