Ukraine is currently in the spotlight. However, despite the possibility of a war, it continues to demonstrate the same intense creativity that a group of talented Ukrainian designers expressed at Superstudio in 2018. Among them, Victoria Yakusha with her brand Faina...

Faina has recently won the Dezeen Award 2021 (the prize awarded annually to remarkable architectures, design objects and interiors) for the category bars and restaurants and was chosen as the best emerging design studio of the year...

Ukraine is currently in the spotlight. However, despite the possibility of a war, it continues to demonstrate the same intense creativity that a group of talented Ukrainian designers expressed at Superstudio in 2018. Among them, Victoria Yakusha with her brand Faina.

Faina has recently won the Dezeen Award 2021 (the prize awarded annually to remarkable examples of architecture, design and interiors) for the category bars and restaurants and was chosen as the best emerging design studio of the year. The collection exhibited during the Superdesgin Show 2018 was conceived in 2014 as an artistic consideration on the Ukraine Revolution (that same year the pro-Kremlin President Viktor Janukovyč was removed from office) to restore dignity to the nation.
The style of the brand is unmistakable: the objects combine curvy and primordial shapes with a minimal and contemporary design, looking anciently modern. Dezeen has awarded the restaurant Istetyka in the historical centre of Kiev, for which the studio has designed more than the aesthetics of the place, completely inventing the image of the brand together with a true food philosophy.
Four years have passed since the 2018 Superdesign Show, and Faina has continued to stay true to itself and its style: the ancient and primitive shapes of culture and nature are conveyed through the choice of local materials (willow, clay, felt, linen and wood) that allows for knotted and rough surfaces that give objects a sense of the “unfinished”, both natural and ancestral. Faina retrieves the fascinating craftmanship of local masters and workshops, answering the call to equal, simple and sustainable design. “We did hear eternity and the voice of Mother Earth, and we chose materials. We didn’t search for shapes, yet we remembered them as if we had already known them” says the designer Viktoria Yakusha, who studies cultures from the fifth to the third millennium BC. Thanks to this analysis, she has restored the sacredness and magic of objects, conveying them in her 2020 armchair “Domna”, that takes its cue from the curvy lines of a ceramic artifact from the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, that archaeologists compared to the original feminine form of the divine mother.
Based in Kiev, a second studio is in Brussells, and a brand-new design gallery in Antwerp has recently opened.