A 24-year-old Polish designer whose work reimagines furniture and lighting through history, craft and cultural identity has received one of the European Union’s leading awards for emerging design talent.
Maria Gil won the Next Generation Design Award at the 2026 DesignEuropa Awards in Ljubljana on 22 September. The awards are organised by the European Union Intellectual Property Office, or EUIPO, which oversees EU trade marks and registered designs and describes DesignEuropa as its flagship initiative recognising excellence in European design.
Gil, who is from Warsaw and now lives and works in Milan, was recognised for a body of work spanning furniture and lighting. EUIPO says her designs explore the relationship between cultural identity, design history and contemporary innovation.
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The award is aimed specifically at younger designers shaping the future of the field rather than established names receiving career recognition. The same Ljubljana ceremony saw French designer Philippe Starck receive the Lifetime Achievement Award.
From Warsaw to London and Milan
Gil’s route into design took her beyond Poland relatively early.
She studied Product and Furniture Design at the University of the Arts London and later spent time at Milan’s Accademia di Brera through the Erasmus programme. EUIPO says her period in Italy deepened her interest in design history and eventually encouraged her to revisit her own Polish cultural inheritance.
That connection became particularly visible in her graduate project, Post War Drobe.
The piece imagines an alternative version of Polish postmodern design, asking how that movement might have developed under different historical circumstances. According to Rzeczpospolita, Gil constructed the wardrobe using reinforcing bars and fabric as part of an attempt to reinterpret Poland’s design history rather than simply reproduce it.
Her other works include the sculptural Multiplight and Fan lamps and the brightly coloured All-Seeing Chair, created for fashion brand House of Errors. The projects move between experimental seating, lighting and furniture while drawing on references ranging from disappearing craft traditions to the behaviour of light through metal.
Gil told Rzeczpospolita that she makes the prototypes for all her designs herself, using that process to test boundaries and find new solutions.
International recognition at 24
Her work had already begun attracting attention before the EU award.
Projects by Gil have been shown in cities including London, New York and Milan, while her work has appeared in design and lifestyle publications including Dezeen, Vogue Living, ELLE Decoration and the Financial Times. Milan-based POLI.design, where she is currently studying on a specialised master’s programme in furniture design, described the DesignEuropa result as another milestone in her developing career.
The scale of the 2026 competition also gives the award broader context. Rzeczpospolita reported that this year’s DesignEuropa Awards attracted a record 1,600 submissions from 52 countries. The Next Generation category is reserved for designers aged 29 or younger and is intended to recognise creativity and vision early in a career.
EUIPO’s official winners material places Gil alongside winners from Latvia, Germany, Spain and France, with awards covering small companies, industry, public choice, emerging talent and lifetime achievement.
For Gil, however, the award is particularly closely tied to the kind of work she has been developing: designs that do more than solve a practical problem.
Speaking after her win, she said the recognition showed there was room for experimentation and innovation in design and for objects to carry meaning beyond their basic function.
At 24, with exhibitions in three major international design centres and an EU-backed award now added to her record, Gil has moved quickly from graduate experimentation into European recognition — while continuing to make Polish design history one of the materials she works with.
