Art, designer Mark Grattan admits, was the one subject he excelled at in school. “I was able to lean into it because my mother was a teacher, and my father was an artist as a hobby. Those two things together were a great recipe for the support I needed,” he remembers.
Grattan’s early interest drove him to apply to Pratt Institute’s pre-college program. “It’s the only place I found myself wanting to be,” he says. Luckily, he got accepted to Pratt for the summer, and the ambitious teenager left his native Hudson, Ohio for New York to not only develop his practice, but also “to get to know what was on the outside of where I grew up,” he says.
Mark Grattan’s Layered collection with HBF Textiles
Brooklyn enthralled him—he completed his undergraduate degree in industrial and product design at Pratt, too—and the borough continues to intrigue. After roving between New York, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City, where he helped lead the now-shuttered studio VIDIVIXI, he lives atop a Brooklyn brownstone that he is currently transforming into an intimate showroom.
Although he’s been employed by others in the past, including a New Jersey woodshop and a Downtown Brooklyn lighting designer, Grattan thrives independently, dedicating himself to projects that elicit passion. “My work is quite opinionated, and it has a voice. That’s because I’m so against doing the things I don’t want to,” he says.
Most of Grattan’s time is spent turning out furniture influenced by tropical modernism, contemporary Italian design, and the Art Deco movement. His pieces have been sought after by the likes of Solange Knowles and Tracee Ellis Ross, and he was the winner of Ellen DeGeneres’ HBO Max show Ellen’s Next Great Designer. His creations also grace the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Smithsonian.
Initially, when Casey Baxter, vice president and general manager for HBF and HBF Textiles, approached him about designing fabrics, he was skeptical about the endeavor. Grattan didn’t think it was in his wheelhouse. But buoyed by Baxter’s belief in him, he was pushed to create the Layered collection.
Creativo, a checkered velvet melding cut and uncut surfaces, was born out of Grattan’s fruitless searches for a similar material. Decadent—a punchy zebra pattern—was lifted from an assemblage of rugs he was tackling, while Wright pays homage to his beloved woodworking craft.
His designs may not “make sense on paper but when it all comes together, it’s such a beautiful surprise. I’m always looking for a contradiction,” Grattan says. That same wonder fueled his inaugural textiles journey, too, revealing “a whole other side of furniture that I haven’t been a part of.”
The HBF collaboration is one highlight of a long career he is grateful for. “I’ve never had to improvise that much,” he says. “I’ve never had to go with my plan B.”
This article originally appeared in HD’s September 2025 issue.
