Lucas Muñoz Muñoz Explores Cycles of Reuse at Design Mumbai’s THE Park Hotels Café
As one of Europe’s most thought-provoking contemporary designers, Lucas Muñoz Muñoz continues to redefine the boundaries between craft, concept, and environmental consciousness. Working between Madrid and Eindhoven, Lucas operates at the intersection of art, design, and engineering, creating site-specific material transformations that challenge our understanding of value, consumption, and permanence.
Ahead of this month’s Design Mumbai 2025, Lucas has been commissioned to design THE Park Hotels Café, a temporary hospitality space that reimagines waste and obsolescence as sources of creative potential. In his hands, discarded materials are not debris but dialogue, carriers of memory, time, and transformation.
In this exclusive Design Insider interview, Lucas speaks with clarity and candour about his fifteen-year journey from his early experiments with enPieza! to his acclaimed project MO de Movimiento in Madrid. He reflects on the philosophy of collaboration that underpins his practice, his deep engagement with reuse and repair cultures, and the enduring tension between design’s poetic and pragmatic dimensions.
Lucas Muñoz Muñoz
Lucas, could you begin by introducing yourself and your practice? You’ve described your work as “fundamentally collaborative,” where materials interact as humans do, through direct, honest expression of their capacities. How does this idea of collaboration define your identity as both craftsman and conceptual designer working between Madrid and Eindhoven?
I’m Lucas Muñoz Muñoz, a design trained artisan and researcher based in Madrid. My practice explores site specific material transformations that generates spaces and also small collections and unique pieces that take a critical look into our material environment.
Your early career began with enPieza! in Madrid before studying Contextual Design at Design Academy Eindhoven. How did that combination of experimental making and conceptual inquiry shape the way you now move between art, design, and engineering?
Right after graduation, my first atelier collective project, enPieza!, allowed me to experiment and acquire many hand skill resources and techniques. From welding to wood craft or construction brick and mortar knowledge. After that the two years master studies at DAE exposed me to an international and inter-generational community that helped in enriching and polish my rough skills and also added a strong theoretical and critical backbone. It was during the following 7 years at Sectie C in Eindhoven that I managed to experiment in many directions without caring much about the market and its forces. This some 15 years trajectory confirmed an archive of ideas and vision that is at the foundation of every project I challenge now.
OFIS – Tubular Armchair
You were commissioned to design THE Park Hotels café for Design Mumbai 2025. What appealed to you about creating a hospitality space in such a layered, fast-evolving city, and how did you begin translating your interest in material cycles into this project?
There is a dynamic of very temporary spaces that have to perform with glam at events such as design weeks, or shows, that imply material and energy deployment to fulfil a few days needs. From an ecologically sensible standpoint this is a huge potential waste. For us is a creative challenge that asks what kind of proximities can be activated, and in what form, in a way that this function can be materially performed with a visual appeal and a low footprint.
You’ve said that the café was conceived around cycles rather than trends. Hotels continually renew themselves, replacing rooms, furniture, and finishes, leaving behind objects once considered modern or iconic. How did this observation become a creative framework for the café’s concept and material narrative?
Together with THE Park hotels we found an opportunity emerging from their hotels growing and evolving dynamic. A space right next door to Design Mumbai is to be renovated and therefore there is a massive amount of material that is going to be removed because it doesn’t fit the future hotel style, is too old or there simply is a better option to come in instead. We are looking into this with a creative eye and, believe me, the material has its difficulties, nonetheless I’m certain we’ll find a suitable strategy to make it perform the “cafe-space” dance for a few days.
Central to the project is the idea of restoring dignity to discarded objects. Can you describe the process of sourcing from THE Park Hotels’ storerooms, and perhaps share an example of how a forgotten piece might find a second life within the café?
The process so far is based on chats and image and info exchange. I’m in constant contact with the team there and together we are mapping available material possibilities. I don’t have a specific example right now of a transformation, but if you take a look to my body of work it is mainly based on finding a second life to forgotten pieces.
MO de movimiento. Photo: Gonzalo Machado
Mumbai’s culture of repair, reuse, and resourcefulness seems deeply aligned with your practice. In what ways did working in this environment influence your thinking about obsolescence, craftsmanship, or the social meaning of materials?
Totally agree, there is even a specific word in India for this: jugaad. I did a project in Delhi some ten years ago and already then I felt the strong cultural and social roots this ingenuity has in the subcontinent. Deploying this dynamic there is like going to play football in a Brazilian backstreet, I feel I’m at the place where reuse is more alive than anywhere else and the fact that is so ever present makes it somehow a prototype of a potential future relation to materials, matter and consumption.
You often challenge conventional sustainability narratives, suggesting that true care for materials goes beyond checklists or marketing language. How do you reconcile that philosophy with the commercial demands of hospitality design, where elegance, durability, and renewal are constant pressures?
Actually it should not be that difficult if the right systems are activated. With this I mean that design can be future-conscious and already create objects and spaces that can afford many life’s, arrangements, reparations and re-interpretations. Open-systems are always more resilient. Also the idea of elegance is something that is expressed at its most in those spaces that have had many lives, just take a look to palaces, mansions, etc. the DNA of those spaces has been exposed to many changes and evolutions and that makes them more interesting and long lasting.
Your award-winning restaurant project, MO de Movimiento in Madrid, transformed a former theatre using reclaimed materials and local craftsmanship. What did that experience teach you about circular design, and how has it informed your more recent collaborations, including the café for THE Park Hotels?
That project was the first opportunity I was handed over to activate more than 15 years of research into one singular space. We worked very hard then in order to transcend from our rudimentary notions of sustainability and circularity into a more holistic understanding of its nuances. Thanks to a great team of advisors, leaded by Cristina Freire, through that project I incorporated a set of sensibilities to my otherwise very crafty approach. This has evolved through other projects since then and is to mutate again with this last opportunity together to THE Park Hotels and Design Mumbai.
MO de movimiento. Photo: Gonzalo Machado
Your 2016 collection Temporal, exhibited at Machado Muñoz Gallery, visualised national consumption data, like “59.55 kilos of asphalt produced per second”, as sculptural furniture. What inspired you to translate abstract statistics into tangible form, and how do you see that project contributing to public awareness around consumption and material value?
That was a very thoughtful and strong collection and, despite the fact that at that time I had already prototyped some ideas on that spirit, with Temporal I opened a whole new area of exploration within my work. More than a specific spark of inspiration, this collection was the result of an ongoing conversation with myself about the capacity of objects to embody meaning, and also the massive amount of material interactions that are happening at any given time without anybody being capable of even being slightly aware of it. Somehow it is something that escapes our capacity for understanding, that’s why when we talk about those we use analogies like football fields. I wanted to bring it into the immediate and domestic and the time factor was key for this.
OFIS (Objects From Interstitial Space)
The O.F.I.S. series, ‘Objects From Interstitial Space’, reimagined industrial materials like ventilation tubes as furniture and lighting. What attracts you to these overlooked, infrastructural elements, and what happens when they are brought into domestic or emotional environments?
It is a question which was already part of my 2014 Foundations collection. Why the same material has a different value if it is used behind the walls or in front of them. Why such a design and engineering effort to optimise a material to perform a technical function has no recognition while a more artistic and improvised one receives media attention. O.F.I.S. follows on some philosopher Slavoj Zizêk lectures I was following at the time and the idea of interstitial spaces.
Your FACTOTUM collection at Alcova Miami continued this philosophy, using only locally sourced industrial leftovers produced within a single week. Why is this improvisational, site-responsive approach so central to your practice, and what did it reveal to you about authorship and collaboration in design today?
I believe in challenge as a creative dynamic, in creating the rules and context for playfulness to take place. It is quite risky in projects terms and it also leaves for the last minute the results of the process, nonetheless it also allows for unexpected results. Some of the techniques improvised in Miami with my team are now directions to explore at the studio in a more quiet way. If I do not posit these challenges to my team and me I will not find myself in the unique trouble they embody. Somehow it’s a celebration of the capacity of our hands to think ,and the capacity of any given place to have the potential to supply material for any required purpose.
FACTOTUM Alcova, Miami. Photo: Frank Stelitano
Alongside your studio work, you’ve taught at institutions such as Design Academy Eindhoven and Universidad de Navarra. How does teaching inform your practice, and what critical, ethical, or material values do
you hope to instil in your students?
I’m not teaching anymore at present, or at least not in a continuous basis. After 20 years teaching I find now is the time to put all the energy in the studio. Nevertheless, I still collaborate with certain institutions for sporadic interventions like DAE or Den Haag. The academic environment is a bubble where thinking and prototyping futures should be at its most, and this is interesting. Somehow I feel that the kind of work I have been doing for almost two decades in an intuitive manner, is today part of the sensibility of the time. When teaching younger generations, I have the feeling that everyday we are articulating the same questions and curiosities. This said, certain universities and students are more profound than others.
Across your projects, from the data-driven Temporal works to the socially engaged MO de Movimiento, humour, rawness, and logic coexist with deep critique. How do these qualities help you communicate complex ideas about consumption, sustainability, and value in ways that remain engaging and human?
Humour, logic and rawness are the strongest tools we have developed as communicative species. Humour can express levels of complexity that otherwise are too sensible to tackle, logic addresses common sense and this becomes foundational to any interesting point of departure, rawness on the other hand is anti superfluous and seeks to speak by itself, and for a good material dialectic this means the capacity of the idea behind to be perceived.
Looking ahead, what questions or territories are you most eager to explore next? Do you anticipate continuing to work through cycles of reuse and context, or are there new conceptual or geographical directions that you’re drawn to investigate?
I’m collaborating with some farms and I feel there is a lot to be explored in that less urban intersection of man and nature. Working with and for non human beings, and at contexts where scale and size is not a restrictive factor, is something that triggers my enthusiasm. I’m afraid reuse and context will always be my way of inquiring about a place.
Design Mumbai returns for its second edition from 26–29 November 2025, bringing together leading international and Indian designers, brands, and thinkers to celebrate creative exchange and sustainable innovation across the built environment.