From furniture and fashion, to interiors and cultural storytelling, this year’s Pan-African Designers of the Year nominees are expanding the conversation around what African design can be.
Across disciplines, a generation of creatives draws from heritage, architecture, craft, memory, and contemporary culture to create work that is both rooted and distinctly forward-looking.
For the 2026 House & Garden South Africa Designer of the Year (DOTY) Awards, three designers have been recognised in the Pan-African Designers of the Year category: Locha Design’s Tshidzo Mangena, Shelley Mokoena, and Thebe Magugu.
Their practices span across different creative worlds, but each is engaged in a similar pursuit: exploring African identity through a contemporary lens, while challenging expectations of what that identity should look like.
Locha Design – Tshidzo Mangena
Industrial designer and Locha Design Studio founder Tshidzo Mangena has built his practice around an idea he describes as Afro avant-garde – an approach that questions conventional ideas of African design and imagines what the continent’s design language could become.
Instead of relying on familiar references to heritage, Mangena combines cultural thinking with technology, experimentation, and sculptural form. His furniture incorporates traditional woodworking alongside CNC machining and 3D printing, producing in pieces that feel simultaneously futuristic and connected to place.
For Mangena, African design is not something to be preserved in place. It is something to be continually questioned, reinvented, and pushed forward.
Shelley Mokoena
For designer Shelley Mokoena, African identity finds expression through restraint.
The founder of fashion label Connade, Mokoena approaches design through proportion, texture, structure, and negative space – a sensibility shaped in part by her early studies in interior design. Rather than treating minimalism as a departure from African design, she sees simplicity as something deeply embedded within the continent’s visual and material traditions.
Connade's sculptural silhouettes and largely monochromatic palette reflect this philosophy. Mokoena describes her work as existing somewhere between the sculptural and surreal, the ancient and contemporary, creating clothing that is less about excess and more about atmosphere and feeling.
With Connade, Mokoena is helping to broaden perceptions of African design – demonstrating that it can be quiet, architectural, and minimalist without losing its cultural weight.
Thebe Magugu
Few South African designers have created as expansive a creative universe as Thebe Magugu.
Best known for his eponymous fashion label, Magugu's practice has moved beyond clothing into art, interiors, hospitality, and cultural exchange. His work is grounded in an interest in African history, identity and memory, often bringing these references into conversation with contemporary design. His own brand describes this as an exploration of cultural honour, novelty, and a constantly evolving sense of identity.
In 2026, this multidisciplinary approach took a significant step forward with the opening of the Thebe Magugu Suite and Magugu House at Cape Town's Mount Nelson, developed in collaboration with StudioLandt.
The interiors translate elements of his fashion language into space, from pleated upholstery to wallpaper inspired by the landscapes of Lesotho and lighting referencing the Basotho Mokorotlo hat.
Three perspectives, one evolving design language
What connects this year's Pan-African nominees is not a shared aesthetic, but a shared willingness to reconsider what African design can be.
The 2026 House & Garden South Africa Designer of the Year Awards will take place on 30 September at Steyn City, where the winner of the Pan-African Designers of the Year category, alongside the winners of the other DOTY categories, will be revealed.
