Christine Espinal published by Daylon Hicks
Spatial design is simply the art of making spaces feel like something. It's the reason a coffee shop makes you want to stay for hours. Every room, every hallway, every park bench placed just right someone made a deliberate decision about how that environment should feel and function. Christine Espinal has built her entire practice around that idea and placing the importance around storytelling.
She is a Los Angeles-based spatial furniture designer who brings interior imaginings to life, from the start all the way to the finished room. She trained at FIT and was a foundational member of Lichen, a beloved Brooklyn-based interior design and furniture shop. Her piece, Mesa Tres, was a standout piece that said everything about how she thinks. Peaks and valleys of plywood come together in a multifunctional form with curving recesses for books or records and the whole thing works just as well flipped on its side.
From there, her work kept expanding and growing in creative ways. She co-designed the Puddle Sconce with Alvaro Ucha Rodriguez, combining her resin experiments with his lighting expertise. The result is a light green resin oval mounted over a stainless steel sconce, warm light spilling out from the center, making the material itself part of the glow. It's the kind of object that makes you stop and look twice, which is exactly the point.
Everything she makes connects back to a single memory, summers in the Dominican Republic, at a house on a peninsula, where she sculpted the shoreline sand into castles trimmed with shells. Nature, to her, is the original spatial designer, every element with purpose that raises emphasis on the importance of longevity. That early lesson about empty space that it can become anything is still the foundation of every room she builds to this even.