Eindhoven from the sky
July 24, 2025

Dutch Design Week 2025: Interior Design’s Best & Brightest Return to Eindhoven

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Summary

Dutch Design Week returns to Eindhoven from October 18–26, 2025, celebrating 25 years of design that challenges form, function, and social relevance. With over 2,600 participants and a growing emphasis on interiors, this year’s theme—“Past, Present, Possible”—positions design as both reflection and proposition. Installations span modular systems, material experimentation, and spatial storytelling, offering interior designers a rare mix of rigor, provocation, and inspiration.

Reflection Questions

How does presenting work in progress—rather than a finished product—change the way we experience and evaluate interior design?

What can interior designers learn from how Dutch Design Week blends physical context with conceptual frameworks?

In what ways does material circularity influence how you think about form, fabrication, or future use in your own work?

Journal Prompt

After reviewing your notes or photos from Dutch Design Week (or a recent design event), write about a single piece or space that stayed with you. What did it say—explicitly or subtly—about the role of interiors in shaping emotion, behavior, or social connection?

Dutch Design Week returns to Eindhoven in the Netherlands from October 18–26, 2025, marking its 25th anniversary. The nine-day event brings together over 2,600 designers from across disciplines, with a growing number of exhibitions and other physical events focused on interiors, materials, and systems that shape the spaces we live and work in.

This year’s theme, “Past, Present, Possible,” encourages participants to look both to the future and back in time as they explore the city during Design Week. It frames design not just as form but as reflection and proposition. Read on to learn more about the programme.

Dutch Design Week 2025: A Renewed Focus on Interior Thinking

The city of Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week

While DDW spans a wide range of disciplines, many of the strongest projects are rooted in the logic of interiors. Works address scale, tactility, and the emotional weight of space. Materials are tested, reused, or reimagined. Spatial storytelling is a common thread.

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Installations range from full-scale interventions to research-led prototypes. Some are speculative, others immediately practical. Many sit at the intersection of design, art, and policy—clear in intent, but open in interpretation.

Design here is often messy, unfinished, and provocative but always grounded in a larger narrative about how we live and what we value.

Highlights for Interior Designers in Eindhoven

The city of Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week

This year’s programming includes several projects that speak directly to interior designers. Raw Color’s collaboration with IKEA, for example, uses color as both a system and a sensorial tool. It reframes modular furniture within emotional and environmental parameters; as you will see throughout the week, “place” is not secondary but neither is human influence.

At Klokgebouw, the annual graduate showcase brings together work from top Dutch and international design schools. This showcase offers early insights into how the next generation of designers is thinking about space and function. Elsewhere, a conceptual installation called The Mental Gym explores design’s role in mental health environments by blending architecture, narrative, and sensory cues to rethink what healing spaces might look like.

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Visitors will also find work that blends interior, product, and systems thinking in compelling ways. The Embassy of Food brings attention to how food systems shape and are shaped by physical space, while The Rewear Chair examines circularity through a single object and its material lifecycle. In these projects, the boundaries between design disciplines are blurred. What matters is not the category but the clarity of intent and the relevance of response.

What You Should Know About Dutch Design Week Before Heading to Eindhoven

The city of Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week
  • Strijp-S is the core of the event abd is home to Klokgebouw, VEEM, and Microlab Hall.
  • Sectie-C and Strijp-R offer smaller, more experimental work.
  • Design Tours are available, but most exhibitions can be visited independently.
  • Many installations are free to access. Plan for at least two days to see a representative cross-section.
  • Comfortable shoes are essential. So is a bit of flexibility; some of the best finds aren’t on the programme map; speak to locals if you want to find the absolute best locations for inspiration while in Eindhoven.

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While You’re in Town…

The city of Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week

Outside the festival, Eindhoven itself boasts a number of design-relevant destinations worth visiting. Kazerne blends hospitality and exhibition programming in a single site. Piet Hein Eek’s studio combines production, retail, and architecture in a single compound. The Van Abbemuseum presents contemporary art with a thoughtful curatorial lens, and the Design Academy Eindhoven’s graduation show remains one of the most consistently insightful exhibitions in Europe. To participate in or learn more about Dutch Design Week 2025, head to the organization’s website here.

Written by the DesignDash Editorial Team
Our contributors include experienced designers, firm owners, design writers, and other industry professionals. If you’re interested in submitting your work or collaborating, please reach out to our Editor-in-Chief at editor@designdash.com.

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