Dear readers, I’m Sara Core, part of the international design house PletoStudio . My work lies at the intersection of intuition and structure — guiding you into the deeper waters of design, where aesthetics meet soul and where material becomes emotion.
We live in an age of immaculate surfaces and frictionless experiences. But something within us longs for touch, texture, and truth. That’s where Neo-Folklore Design emerges — not as a trend, but as a quiet revolution. It’s about remembering where our hands came from. About the smell of clay, the rhythm of weaving, the imperfection of a wool thread that somehow feels more real than the machine-made.
Neo-Folklore is not a return to the past. It’s a retranslation of heritage through contemporary language — combining raw tactility with minimalist form, natural palettes with sculptural balance. Designers featured in Dezeen, AD Magazine, and Designboom increasingly speak this language of “warm minimalism,” where craft, ancestry, and emotion merge into modern geometry.
What fascinates me most is how the emotional core of folklore survives inside form. A lamp shaped like an ancient vessel, a table echoing the rhythm of ritual gatherings — these are not decorative gestures. They are fragments of cultural DNA, distilled into objects that still breathe.
At Pleto Studio, we explore this philosophy every day. Our sculptural lighting pieces are made from living materials — wool from the Carpathians, cellulose, kaolin, bio-composites. Every piece carries the fingerprint of a maker, the energy of transformation. In the studio, design becomes a form of listening — to texture, silence, and history.
Neo-Folklore, for me, is about emotional sustainability. It’s not only ecological; it’s existential. It teaches us to slow down, to choose objects that feel, to fill our homes with pieces that hold stories rather than trends. The handmade, the imperfect, the natural — these are the new luxuries.
So perhaps the real question is not how we decorate, but how we connect. Between past and present. Between nature and design. Between our senses and our spaces.
In a world that rushes, Neo-Folklore whispers: stay human.
With light and feeling,
Sara Core
Trends & Style Editor at Pleto Studio
