What Czech Design Looks Like Now

Czech design has always been comfortable with contradiction, and DesignBlok is the best week of the year to watch that play out. It returns from 7 to 11 October 2026, with more than 300 exhibitors across four venues. This is The Julius edit: the exhibitions, designers and objects that tell the clearest story.

It’s precise, but rarely solemn, and it respects craft while enjoying the chance to disrupt it. Glass, porcelain, wood and metal arrive with centuries of knowledge attached, then become something their first makers would never have predicted.

DesignBlok is the best moment to watch that conversation happen. The 2026 edition takes Light as its theme, across the Trade Fair Palace, the Industrial Palace at the Prague Exhibition Grounds, the Museum of Decorative Arts and sites at Prague Castle. Rather than completing a fair, follow the ideas that connect its strongest presentations.

Begin with the room Václav Havel worked in

At the Prague Castle Riding School, Design for Václav Havel reunites objects and interiors made during Havel’s presidency and the reshaping of Prague Castle after 1989. Its centrepiece is Bořek Šípek’s presidential office, back at the Castle for the first time in more than twenty years.

Šípek gave the new presidency a visual language far removed from bureaucratic neutrality. His furniture and objects were expressive, sometimes eccentric, and unmistakably human: an apt setting for a playwright turned head of state. Seen together, they make a quiet argument that public design can communicate values before anyone speaks.

The exhibition continues beyond DesignBlok, reopening with free admission from 21 October 2026 to 17 January 2027. If you’re interested in where Czech design, politics and national identity meet, this is the essential stop.

See the familiar object properly

At the Museum of Decorative Arts, Retro Lamps: Forgotten Stories of Czechoslovak Design turns to mass-produced lighting from the 1950s to the 1980s. These were never rare objects kept behind glass. They stood on desks, beside beds and above family tables, and their familiarity made their designers almost invisible.

The exhibition returns names to the objects: Helena Frantová, Josef Hůrka, Stanislav Indra and Štěpán Tabery. It’s an intelligent answer to the festival theme, since light appears here as domestic memory rather than spectacle. The pool cast by a reading lamp. The shape of an ordinary evening at home.

It stays open until 17 November, which makes it one of the best DesignBlok experiences if you arrive after the festival itself.

Watch Maxim Velčovský change scale

Maxim Velčovský has spent much of his career making Czech porcelain misbehave. Familiar forms become commentary: a classical bust, a disposable cup, an object tied to folklore or domestic life. His work is recognisable because the joke is never only decorative, and it usually reveals something about consumption, memory or national habit.

For DesignBlok 2026, his exhibition Veranda occupies the Trade Fair Palace. Elsewhere in the festival, Křehký Collectibles introduces his new Pure Cups in three sizes, alongside Stanley Wong’s Literary Vase and works by Viktor Tabiš, Johana Hnízdilová, Tereza Orviská and Artyom Nurvan. Together they show two sides of collectible design: the established author still testing an idea, and younger makers moving easily between useful object and small artwork.

Enter Eva Eisler’s silence

Eva Eisler’s Circle of Silence is installed in the deconsecrated Chapel of the Holy Cross at Prague Castle. Seven river stones, a circle, light, sound and moving water make a work about time, memory and natural order.

Eisler moves between jewellery, architecture and installation with unusual restraint. Her work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, and by the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. In 2026 she entered the Czech Grand Design Hall of Fame.

The chapel gives her language of proportion and material exactly the right resistance. This isn’t a display to scan on the way to the next one. Stay a while.

Look closely at what is still being made by hand

High Craft, presented with Vogue CS at the Prague Castle Riding School, gathers Czech designers and manufacturers who combine traditional making with contemporary production. This is where the phrase ‘Czech craft’ becomes specific: the quality of a join, the weight of glass, the finish on a metal surface, the evidence of time spent by hand.

The adjoining Křehký presentation is worth seeing for a related reason. Křehký has long treated objects as carriers of stories rather than accessories arranged by trend. Its 2026 Collectors’ Edit is a useful way in if you want to understand what makes a piece collectible before deciding whether to take one home.

One emerging name to remember

Among the younger exhibitors, Rozálie Vlachová’s Lichen collection uses porcelain to observe the quiet persistence of organic growth. It belongs to a generation of Czech work that loosens the country’s material traditions rather than rejecting them, letting irregularity, research and environmental attention shape the object.

DesignBlok’s emerging designers and Diploma Selection deserve your time precisely because they haven’t settled into a signature yet. The work may be less resolved. It’s also where the next direction shows up first.

Beyond the festival

DesignBlok lasts five public days. Czech design does not. Qubus on Rámová Street remains the sharpest introduction to the wit of contemporary Czech glass and porcelain, while the House at the Black Madonna sets today’s work in the longer story of Czech Cubism. DOX by Qubus in Holešovice is strong on contemporary jewellery and collectible objects. For lighting, Lasvit, Bomma and Brokis show how Bohemian glassmaking moved from the vessel into ambitious international interiors.

The useful question isn’t what to buy, but what to notice: where the material resists, where the maker leaves a trace, and where an old Czech technique has been made to say something new.

DesignBlok opens to the public from 7 to 11 October 2026, with the professional programme from 6 October. Several of the exhibitions run well past it, into November and beyond, so a later autumn stay loses less than you would think. Ask our front of house team to plan the venues around your interests. The Julius Prague makes a calm base between them, and a considered example of how design feels when it’s meant to be lived with.