January 12, 2026

In this issue:   This week’s issue captures an industry caught between celebrating its past and systematically dismantling the physical infrastructure that created it, as manufacturers increasingly mine archives and revive authorized legacy designs while simultaneously shuttering historic plants, most notably HNI’s planned closure of Gunlocke’s 124-year-old Wayland, New York facility. Alongside this central tension, the news reflects accelerating consolidation and optimization across the sector—from Okamura’s restructuring and DIRTT’s facility exit to European expansion plays by Holmris B8—while Adam Sandow continues assembling a vertically integrated media, data, and specification ecosystem that now touches nearly every stage of the A&D workflow. Macroeconomic signals remain mixed and largely unsupportive, with manufacturing and construction jobs declining, office demand recovering selectively in top-tier markets, and data center growth offering little practical upside for contract furniture makers. Design and workplace coverage reinforces the same theme of authenticity over excess, with renewed emphasis on craft, wellness, and human judgment in an AI-shaped workplace, even as AI’s real impact appears more evolutionary than disruptive. Taken together, the issue underscores a clear contradiction: the industry is finding new commercial value in history, provenance, and narrative at the exact moment it is losing the factories, labor, and lived continuity that made those stories real.