Much of Justin Donnelly’s childhood was spent tinkering around in his grandfather’s basement machine shop. As chief engineer for NASA’s unmanned space program, his grandfather’s house was “filled with NASA paraphernalia, all the models of the satellites and rockets,” Donnelly recalls. “I never imagined a future as an industrial designer at that time, but looking back now, it makes sense.”
In 2017, Donnelly founded Brooklyn, New York-based design practice Jumbo with Monling Lee. The duo had overlapped at the University of Maryland’s architecture school, but it wasn’t until a friend reintroduced them that they discovered their synergistic talents. Donnelly, then an architect learning how to craft furniture in a woodworking co-op after hours, was fascinated by structure, while Lee showcased her flair for texture and vivid palettes on Colorindex, the website that organically blossomed from her popular Instagram account fusing personal style and built environments.
At the 2018 edition of Sight Unseen’s Offsite show, Jumbo turned heads with Neotenic, a stout tubular steel lounge chair and matching lamp. “Both of these designs are knocked off all the time, which for us is a real mark of success,” Donnelly says. Since then, Jumbo has dreamed up glossy black seating for Alexander Wang’s flagship store in New York and pasta-shaped pool floats in collaboration with the Standard Hotels that made a literal splash at Art Basel Miami Beach.
The Fortune chair, shown in tomato, by Jumbo for Heller
Food has always been a source of inspiration for Donnelly and Lee. Consider the curving Fortune chair conceived for Heller in 2024, which connects to one of Lee’s early culinary memories in the U.S., where she immigrated to from Taiwan at the age of 13. Dining at an American-Chinese restaurant with her family for the first time, she was captivated by the cellophane-wrapped fortune cookie. “The shape was simple, but it was folded in a way that suggested movement, and inside it held a secret message that was written just for me,” remembers Lee.
The Fortune chair is fashioned out of a recycled plastic polyethylene blend, reflecting Jumbo’s affinity for inorganic materials. “For us, a physical project is most successful when it looks and feels like a computer rendering, when the real thing appears slightly unreal,” explains Donnelly.
Currently, Donnelly and Lee are tackling an architectural commission in Alexandria, Virginia, as well as fabricating a large-scale public sculpture out of Corten steel and developing a playground equipment line that takes cues from Isamu Noguchi. All are united by a sense of surprise.
The objective is for each Jumbo creation to “suggest something other than it is, conjuring up nostalgic associations, humorous connotations, and sometimes, if we are lucky, even political sentiments,” says Lee. “Product design is a lightning rod channeling our innermost wants and desires.”
The Foldont chair, shown at Sight Unseen in 2023
This article originally appeared in HD’s August 2025 issue.
