Roham Shamekh’s R O O T S at Design Miami 2025: Sound, Sculpture and the Rise of Sensory Collectible Design

Art & Culture · Miami

Reading time: 7 min

A hand-carved ceramic sofa that looks grown rather than made. A soundscape tuned to the frequency of the Earth. At Design Miami’s 20th edition, the Tehran-born, Dubai-based designer Roham Shamekh made the case that furniture’s next frontier is not form but feeling.

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Of the eighty-plus exhibitors at Design Miami 2025, few invited the visitor in as completely as Roham Shamekh. R O O T S, the Tehran-born, Dubai-based designer’s debut in the fair’s Curio programme, asked to be looked at, listened to and, most memorably of all, felt.

Staged during Miami Art Week as Design Miami marked its twentieth anniversary under the theme “Make. Believe.”, R O O T S comprised four works: a hand-carved sofa in ceramic and epoxy resin, two fluid organic side tables, and a painting anchoring the whole. But the objects were only half of it. Visitors were handed headphones and an iPad, and the composition that played through them was as much the work as the furniture was.

It was, by some distance, the quietest thing in Miami that week. That was the point.

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What is Design Miami Curio?

For readers arriving without the context: Curio is Design Miami’s platform for immersive, narrative-driven installations, running alongside the gallery booths that make up the bulk of the fair. A Curio presents an argument. Designers, architects, curators and emerging galleries are invited to build a focused environment: a cabinet of curiosities, a thesis, a room with a thought in it.

The 2025 edition, curated by returning Curatorial Director Glenn Adamson, ran at the Miami Beach Convention Center from 2–7 December 2025, alongside Art Basel Miami Beach. Superhouse took Best Curio Presentation for American Art Furniture: 1980–1990; Paris debutant Galerie Signé won Best New Voice.

Into that context — a twentieth-anniversary fair, a curatorial theme about belief and making — Shamekh brought a sofa you were meant to sit on with your eyes closed.

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Roham Shamekh – Courtesy of Nikita Berenzhoy

Who is Roham Shamekh?

Understanding R O O T S requires understanding the path that produced it, because Shamekh’s work is unusually autobiographical for a furniture designer.

Born in Tehran, he was working across photography, painting and sculpture by the age of fifteen. At eighteen he left his family behind; he arrived in Dubai in his early twenties, and in 2016 established the eponymous studio he still runs there — a practice he describes as anti-conformist, sitting at the intersection of collectible design, experimental art and what he calls soulful living.

His signature piece to date is the Ovo Man Chair, a form he has returned to and reworked in numerous variations. Recent collections — Pharrell’s Echoes, Terminator — established the preoccupation that R O O T S now pushes furthest: the idea that a physical object can carry, and transmit, an intention. Shamekh works across tattoo painting, floral motifs, generative AI and spatial design, and he is markedly uninterested in the borders between art, design and architecture.

That biography matters here. A body of work about roots, displacement and belonging reads differently coming from someone who left one country at eighteen and built a practice in another.

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Inside the installation: a room built for slowing down

The booth was conceived less as an exhibition than as an environment — reflective, hushed, closer to a sanctuary than a sales floor. Visitors were invited to slow down, breathe, listen.

At its centre sat the headphones and iPad, delivering a bespoke composition that formed the emotional spine of the piece. Drawing on forest ecosystems and elemental patterns, the soundscape layered low, mid and high frequencies to mirror the vibrational qualities of the natural world.

The low end is where Shamekh’s thinking becomes most specific. The composition tunes toward the Schumann resonance — the roughly 7.83 Hz electromagnetic pulse in the cavity between the Earth’s surface and the ionosphere, long associated in wellness discourse with grounding and stability. Mid- and high-frequency harmonics were layered above it, intended to stimulate creativity and emotional openness.

(A note on the science: the Schumann resonance is a genuine, measurable geophysical phenomenon, an electromagnetic signature of the planet itself. Shamekh works with it as a compositional and conceptual device, a way of tuning an artwork to the Earth rather than a clinical claim, and that is what makes it such a rich starting point for a composition.)

The effect was disorienting in the best sense: an environment at once ancient and futuristic, and genuinely difficult to leave.

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The collection: four works, one organism

Made in Shamekh’s Dubai studio, R O O T S comprised four pieces.

The hand-carved sofa — ceramic and epoxy resin, finished in white — was the anchor and the argument. It does not read as manufactured. It reads as excavated: a form that appears to have surfaced from the ground rather than arrived from a workshop, its silhouette echoing root systems that twist and thicken and push outward beneath the soil. The whiteness is doing real work, stripping out any distraction of colour or grain and leaving only the movement of the form itself.

Two side tables continued the same grammar — surfaces that ripple and reach, tendril-like, searching for purchase.

A painting completed the narrative, extending the collection from three dimensions into two and restating its themes: belonging, origin, memory.

Shamekh’s framing is that these are not four objects but one organism. Design, in his account, is a living system rather than a static output, and each piece is a limb of something larger — a network in which human experience, environmental memory and sculptural form cannot be cleanly separated.

The metaphor holds because roots are a genuinely good metaphor. They never stop extending. They interlace with the roots of other organisms. They constitute a communication network we cannot see and only recently learned to read. Drawing the parallel to human ancestry, the invisible ties, emotional, historical and cultural, that bind us to people we will never meet, is direct, vivid and fully earned.

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Design as activation

“After R O O T S, sitting will never feel the same. It is soulful design as activation, art as alignment, and wellness as awareness — a new frontier where the senses become gateways to the soul. My work invites us to ground, to listen, and to remember that the future of design is not what we build, but what we awaken.”

— Roham Shamekh

It is a large claim, and one that R O O T S earns in full.

What R O O T S demonstrates is that collectible design can be experiential and remain wholly design. That is a live and exciting question. The sector has spent a decade moving toward the sculptural, making objects that function and that carry real presence alongside their use. Shamekh goes a step further: he adds a temporal, sensory layer that exists while you are inside it. The sofa remains after the headphones come off, and so does the memory of the sound.

That it constitutes a new frontier is clear from how completely the two halves depend on each other. The vocabulary Shamekh uses, activation and alignment, is precise about what the work does: the Schumann resonance grounds the low end, mid and high harmonics open the listener up, and the carved ceramic gives all of it a body to inhabit. Language and object describe the same event.

The objects hold up on their own too, which is the test that matters. Take the headphones away and the ceramic sofa is still one of the most arresting things anyone made in 2025. The sound deepens it further.

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Why R O O T S mattered at Miami Art Week

Miami Art Week in December is a week of tremendous energy. Fairs, activations, parties, queues, all of it running at full tilt. What made Shamekh’s Curio work land was the register it chose. It was a room you entered to stop.

That is not merely a mood observation; it’s a strategic one. As sensory design, environmental consciousness and emotional resonance increasingly shape what collectors want, presentations that offer depth alongside impact are becoming the ones people remember. R O O T S delivered exactly that depth during the busiest week in the design calendar, and it was all the stronger for it.

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Frequently asked questions

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Final thoughts

Design Miami’s twentieth edition asked its exhibitors to make believe. Shamekh answered with a room, a frequency, a hand-carved ceramic sofa, and an instruction to sit down and close your eyes.

The future of design may well be “not what we build, but what we awaken”. That is a thesis the industry will be exploring for years to come, and R O O T S made the argument with total conviction and superb objects.