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The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds more than two million works in its collection — Egyptian sarcophagi, Greek black-figure pottery, Tang dynasty ceramics, Italian Renaissance bronzes, French Art Deco silver. It is, on the simplest possible reading, the largest accumulated archive of human aesthetic ambition in the Western Hemisphere. In 2023, Eichholtz signed a multi-year partnership with The Met to translate that archive into furniture. The result, now in its third season, is The Met x Eichholtz — a body of work that may be the most ambitious cultural collaboration any furniture house has ever attempted.
Imagine designing furniture with the entirety of The Met's collection as your moodboard.
What the partnership actually is
The Met x Eichholtz is not a one-off licensing deal. It is a long-term creative partnership in which Eichholtz's in-house design studio spends serious time inside The Met's galleries — looking, sketching, photographing, talking with curators — and then translates what they find into furniture, lighting, and accessories that are designed to live in contemporary homes. The collection's stated approach is to draw inspiration from the museum's "vast holdings spanning continents, centuries, and cultures," and that breadth is visible in every season.
The collaboration launched globally in 2023 with an initial 90-piece capsule. Subsequent seasons have added depth, with the third-season drop bringing the total offering to nearly 200 pieces across furniture, lighting, accessories, sculpture reproductions, rugs, and wall art. The pace of the program is unusual for a furniture house — most brands collaborate on a thirty- or fifty-piece capsule and call it a year. The Met x Eichholtz operates at a different scale because the source material does.
The design approach
What separates The Met x Eichholtz from the long history of museum merchandising is the choice not to reproduce. There are no Met-branded reproductions of antiquities in the collection. Instead, designers immerse themselves in the museum's holdings and emerge with furniture that reads like the artifacts that inspired them — proportions, materials, surface treatments, ornamental restraint — without being literal about it. A vase nods to ancient Egyptian alabaster work without trying to be Egyptian. A column-form side table acknowledges Greek architecture without pretending to come from the Acropolis. A wall art panel layered with hand-applied inlay is in conversation with both Renaissance marquetry and twentieth-century studio craft.
Edwin Eichholtz, the company's creative lead on the program, has described the process as "exploring The Met as an archive of historic design" and reimagining museum artworks as "modern designs that inspire connections between history and contemporary life." That sentence does a lot of work. The whole point of the program is to make pieces that are unmistakably contemporary in function and unmistakably classical in feeling.
What is in the collection
Across the three seasons released to date, The Met x Eichholtz has produced pieces in essentially every category Eichholtz makes:
- Furniture — occasional tables, console tables, side tables, dining pieces, sculptural columns at multiple scales, hospitality-scale trolleys, and a small number of seating pieces.
- Lighting — table lamps, floor lamps, sconces, pendants, and chandeliers drawn from The Met's collection of decorative arts and architectural ornament.
- Wall Art — hand-inlaid panels, framed pieces, and decorative wall objects designed in dialogue with the museum's textile and decorative-arts archives.
- Accessories — vases, bowls, hurricanes, candle holders, decorative objects, picture frames, trays, and boxes that bring the collection's vocabulary into smaller, more affordable expressions.
- Sculpture — a handful of sculpture reproductions and original sculptural objects rooted in the museum's collection of figurative work.
How designers are using it
One of the more interesting things about The Met x Eichholtz is how flexible it has proven to be in the hands of practicing designers. Because the source material is so broad — antiquity, Asian decorative traditions, European decorative arts, modern and contemporary craft — the collection refuses to settle into a single look. A traditional designer can pull pieces that read as classical antiquity. A more contemporary practice can pull pieces that read as restrained modernism. A maximalist can layer several together for an unmistakable Met x Eichholtz moment.
For hospitality projects, the collection has been particularly successful in lobby and amenity-floor work, where the pieces' museum-quality presence does heavy lifting that less considered furniture cannot. In residential work, designers are reaching for the collection's accessories most often — the vases, the wall art, the candle holders — as the elements that make a room feel intentional without dominating it.
Pieces to know
If you are walking the Las Vegas showroom and want to spend time with The Met x Eichholtz specifically, several pieces are worth seeking out. The Vase Bennington and Vase Amphora are anchors of the accessories program — sculptural enough to stand alone, restrained enough to layer with other things. The Wall Art Inlay Menes (set of 2) brings the collection's commitment to hand-applied inlay work into a format that drops into almost any room. The Trolley Harrold is the kind of hospitality-scale piece that elevates a lobby, an amenity space, or an unusually generous home bar. And the Wall Object Liao (set of 2) demonstrates the collection's willingness to translate Asian decorative traditions into work that reads as both ancient and unmistakably modern.
What is next
The Met x Eichholtz is structured as a multi-year program, with seasonal drops continuing as the partnership progresses. Each new season expands and refines the vocabulary of the existing collection rather than replacing it — a longer arc than the typical capsule collaboration, more like the way a real archive grows. We will continue to bring each new season into the Las Vegas showroom as it releases, and to write about the new pieces here as they arrive.
If you are designing a project that would benefit from a serious anchor piece — a column, a wall art moment, a hospitality-scale trolley — The Met x Eichholtz is almost certainly worth a closer look. Browse the full collection here, or come see it in person at the Las Vegas showroom.
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