Laura Dominici (b. 1993) is an Austrian object designer trained at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, the city where she works. She describes her practice as building a slow world: an alternative to a life organised around efficiency. Her methods are deliberately time-consuming, and that slowness isn't a side effect — it's the method.
Water runs underneath everything she makes. Not water as landscape: water as pleasure. Holidays, idleness, the specific happiness of having nothing to do. Pools, towels, locker keys, neck rolls. The furniture of leisure, taken seriously.
Since 2024 that research has had a second author. Lazy Swim is her ongoing collaboration with Basil Schu, a Viennese artist whose work explores how societies read and shape landscape. It began with Pool Bench — stainless steel and pool noodles — at the first COLLECTIBLE New York, and has grown into Pool Seat, Pool Rug, Locker Key, Squishy Towel and the Towel Stools. The series borrows the shapes of a pool as a vocabulary, and uses them to reach something Proustian: the way an object can hand you back a memory you weren't looking for.
Their work has been shown at Alcova Milano, the Venice Design Biennial, COLLECTIBLE New York, Parallel Vienna, the London Design Festival and Dutch Design Week.