The downtown decorative-arts studio Sunfish, operated by the newlywed couple Kevin Hollidge and Julia Eshaghpour, has rapidly carved out a distinct space for itself by refusing to be pinned down to a single look or approach. Over the past few years, the studio has emerged as a go-to destination for custom furniture pieces that carry a distinct fine-art pedigree. Their portfolio features ambitious projects ranging from a mahogany headboard meticulously painted with birds-of-paradise to a sweeping ceiling mural for musician Lizzy McAlpine that depicts delicate vines trailing against a midnight sky.
Since its founding in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sunfish has released seven distinct furniture collections. These releases have not only highlighted the couple’s increasingly joyful and expressive aesthetic—which frequently pairs Pierre Chapo-esque timbers with the hand-painted, exuberant vitality of a Henri Rousseau painting—but also their restless ambition to speed unimpeded through design’s rich catalogue of historical materials and manufacturing methods.
That material exploration recently led the couple down an unexpected path: straw marquetry. They were first introduced to the technique when a friend lent them a book dedicated to the work of Art Deco legend Jean Dunand. Sunfish’s introduction to straw marquetry was of the absolute highest order, encountered within one of the most celebrated and extravagant interiors of the 20th century: the 1920s San Francisco penthouse of American industrialist Templeton Crocker. Perched high atop Russian Hill, the penthouse was designed by Jean-Michel Frank with vital assistance from Dunand and a constellation of other French decorative icons.
Crocker’s penthouse was a budget-be-damned Gesamtkunstwerk that granted Frank absolute freedom to experiment with rare and radical materials. He applied squares of raw parchment directly to the walls, fabricated tables from sharkskin, hung heavy chainmail curtains, laid down lush fur rugs, and engineered a system that streamed water over a 12-foot crystal fountain. Furthermore, he hired Dunand to deck out a breakfast nook in deep black lacquer adorned with pink and silver fish.
In the study, Frank took the concept even further by covering the walls and ceilings in shimmering, hand-applied lengths of natural straw, creating an environment where the room appeared to softly glow from within. A matching divan, featuring a frame completely covered in straw, was outlined in gilt and upholstered in brilliant yellow silk. Hollidge and Eshaghpour were instantly captivated by Frank’s sophisticated deployment of straw. The material possesses a unique optical quality, becoming more or less lustrous depending on how firmly it is rubbed—a process that brings out the straw’s natural silica—and it can be dyed in an array of subtle hues to achieve complex tonal variations.
While straw marquetry is currently experiencing a mini-resurgence—popping up in the fantastical Parisian flat of interiors stylist Vincent Darré, inside luxury boutiques, at independent design fairs, and even filtering down to mass-market retailers like Williams Sonoma, where dyed green stalks are splayed in a starburst pattern across the barrel of a bedside table—for Hollidge and Eshaghpour, the medium felt like an entirely intuitive extension of their ongoing studio practice.
"We use a lot of imagery and hand-painted elements in our furniture, and with straw marquetry, we saw an opportunity to take that and merge it with the actual materiality of the pieces," Eshaghpour explained during a visit to Sunfish’s East Village studio. The workspace is a brick-walled bunker situated in the basement of a residential building, serving as the grimy operational hub where the couple handles heavy carpentry and other lightly toxic fabrication tasks.
In October, the duo will debut an eight-piece collection that demonstrates the full scope of their material experimentation at Tribeca’s Assembly Line Annex, marking Sunfish’s first major new body of work since the spring of 2025. Titled Entwined, the upcoming collection prominently features Herculean-knot and coiled-snake motifs. It was almost entirely constructed using straw marquetry, utilizing strips dyed in a sophisticated tonal palette of flaxen and warm brown hues. These delicate strips are arranged in a meticulous paint-by-numbers blueprint across the surface of each individual piece.
The resulting catalog includes furnishings that would have looked entirely at home inside an American millionaire’s Art Deco penthouse, yet possess a contemporary utility that makes them equally desirable for a modern Brooklyn apartment. The collection comprises a daybed, a full-length cheval mirror, a room divider, a bespoke jewelry box, a dining table, and several other complementary objects.
Logistically, however, this new collection marks a departure for the studio, as it is not being produced entirely within Sunfish’s compact East Village quarters. Hollidge and Eshaghpour have long since outgrown the space, both in physical square footage and in professional ambition. For the first time, they are collaborating with a family-run workshop in China to oversee the intricate production of the marquetry, while building the structural plywood frames and sapele scaffolding in-house.
Visiting their studio, it is easy to understand why outsourcing the highly specialized marquetry work to seasoned artisans proved appealing. "We’re going to leave this place in the winter," Hollidge laughed, standing amidst a sea of circular saws, piles of lumber, and wearing dusty Mephisto shoes. "But it’s cheap, so it’s allowed us to grow."
From the very beginning, the couple’s innate talent for marrying the functional vocabulary of furniture design with fine-art flourishes was clearly evident. My initial encounter with their work occurred in 2023 at a New York Design Week event hosted inside Beverly’s on the Lower East Side, where Sunfish had designed a custom exhibition stage for a new Sophie Lou Jacobsen collection. Beneath Jacobsen’s elegant, knobbed glass vases, Sunfish had constructed an imaginative staging platform comprised of glazed terracotta brick shelves, sawdust-topped display tables, tiled consoles, and a plywood room divider painted with an explosion of springlike abundance: plump pomegranates, watchful birds, blooming flowers, and shimmering fish.
While most of those initial pieces could easily have emerged from any number of young, craft-focused design studios operating throughout Lower Manhattan, the room divider offered a charming and understated harbinger of where their creative trajectory was heading. Over the subsequent three years, their output expanded wildly to include a coffee table featuring tiered shelves of persimmon-dyed cherry held aloft by solid cubes of red clay; a redwood-framed dining chair with a caned seatback rising nearly eight feet into the air; a copper room divider adorned with botanical vines chemically patinated to a brilliant, living green rather than painted; tiles fabricated entirely from leather; a coffee table constructed from ceramic sardines; and a chess board meticulously honed from the dense horn of a water buffalo.
"I think over time, as Sunfish has grown, we’ve become more interested in expanding our material breadth," Eshaghpour noted. "Each collection, we try to add a new material or a new way of working."
With their latest endeavor, the Sunfish team sought not only to incorporate a novel material into their repertoire, but also to instill a deeper conceptual intention into the objects. Although they have consistently utilized figurative motifs throughout their career, they wanted the imagery underpinning Entwined to carry personal weight and historical resonance. They found their inspiration during the planning of their recent wedding.
While shopping for wedding bands one afternoon, the couple stumbled upon an antique jewelry store tucked away in the West Village. "The woman who runs the shop was showing me this coiled-snake engagement ring, which I didn’t know anything about," Eshaghpour recalled. "Apparently, it was popular in the Victorian era to have snake jewelry because Prince Albert gave a coiled ring to Queen Victoria, and it became known as a symbol of devotion and eternal love. I thought that was interesting because I’d always thought of snakes in biblical terms—associated with deception, sin, and treachery."
The decorative knots that recur throughout the new collection serve as another recurring motif open to dual interpretations, functioning simultaneously as a sign of unbreakable bonds or a symbol of emotional consternation.
These subtle reversals of perception became emblematic of what has colloquially come to be understood as the studio’s defining ethos. "Planning the wedding, I felt like I was always asking, ‘What is the tradition? Where can we subvert expectations and also honor our past or history?’" Eshaghpour explained. It is precisely this critical lens that informs their approach to furniture design, prompting them to carefully examine how a material or technique has been utilized historically before researching innovative ways to inject their own signature Sunfish flair.
Located just a few subway stops away from the gritty intensity of the East Village studio is the bright, airy Chinatown loft where Hollidge and Eshaghpour live, representing the domestic yang to their workspace’s yin. Upon entering the loft—where one wall is painted a buttery yellow, another is paneled in warm oak and trimmed with a pistachio-colored banner, and the architectural details are further embellished with illustrated twisting vines the couple foraged from a nearby garden—it becomes entirely possible to envision Sunfish ultimately constructing a complete Gesamtkunstwerk of its own. It points toward a future defined by a distinctive 21st-century interior where every micro-detail is deliberately considered, every material is rigorously selected, and every creative choice flows from an unyielding curiosity that leads outward to destinations unforeseen at the outset.
