Specifying the Studio: 6 Award-Winning Products Architects Choose for Themselves

Architects spend careers specifying for others. This list flips the script: tools that make your own practice more productive and more creative.

Sam Frew

Architizer is thrilled to announce that the 2026 A+Product Awards is open for submissions! The clock is ticking — get your products in front of the AEC industry’s most renowned designers by submitting today.

Design has always relied on its instruments, from the pencil to the PC. We use tools to help shape ideas into reality, and in that sense, nothing has changed for centuries. What has changed, however, is the expectation placed on practitioners. Today, this pressure is more demanding than it has ever been. Architects and designers are asked not simply to design, but to demonstrate process as well as outcome, to persuade while they plan and to create experiences that excite long before a structure is ever realized.

Naturally, curious and resourceful as they are, architects and designers have sought solutions to alleviate the load and meet those demands. Thankfully, they have found them. A new kind of support system exists, and ecology even, of tools that assist beyond workflow into how ideas are exchanged and how studios are run. To many, this is the new infrastructure of successful practice, allowing for clear communication, fluidity and, crucially, space for imagination. These tools free creatives to focus on what they do best: designing our world.

The following A+Product Awards winners exemplify this new ecology, each one serving as proof that fortune favors not just the bold, but the well-equipped.

Gunlocke Briefing Tables

By Gunlocke

Popular Choice Winner, Furnishings, Contract Furniture, 2025 A+Product Awards

Meetings are part of the architect’s everyday life, and the furniture that supports them can have a decisive impact on how conversations flow. Gunlocke’s Briefing collection addresses this directly, replacing the traditional head-of-table hierarchy with geometries that give participants equal sightlines and focus. Designed with hybrid collaboration in mind, the tables integrate power and data into their surfaces, turning them into practical platforms for communication and focused work while ensuring that every seat at the table is heard and valued as much as the next.

Wanderlust

By Jill Malek

Jury Winner, Finishes, Walls & Wall Coverings, 2025 A+Product Awards

Many designers spend all their time and energy focusing on how their clients’ spaces feel; they forget about their own, and with that, surface treatments are often dismissed as secondary requirements. Yet, the spaces we inhabit are potent tools for guiding our emotions and inspiring creativity.

Jill Malek’s Wanderlust collection translates the textures and colors of distant landscapes into large-scale murals, turning walls into carriers of narrative rather than neutral backdrops. Tailored to each space and produced on commercial-grade substrates, the works insert cultural and geographic references directly into interiors. When wanderlust is employed in an office environment, it creates a sense of place and memory while inspiring and energising the viewer.

D5 Render

By D5 Render

Popular Choice Winner, Technology, Design Tools, 2025 A+Product Awards

Visualization has become inseparable from design practice, but speed and clarity are often at odds. D5 Render closes that gap, offering real-time, photorealistic results that keep pace with the design process itself. By integrating directly with major modeling platforms and cutting rendering time to minutes rather than days, it allows teams to test, adjust, and present ideas without delay. The ability to co-create in the cloud means that visualization is an active part of collaboration, giving designers the one tool that there is never enough of, time. By making imagination instantly shareable and allowing creativity to progress at a pace, D5 Render helps the creative process flow.

Bind

By Vibia

Jury Winner, Lighting, Recessed & Mounted Lighting, 2025 A+Product Awards

We almost always split lighting into technical and decorative, but Vibia’s Bind system treats the two as inseparable. Modular tracks and fixtures allow designers to shift easily between accent, diffuse, and ambient light, and in doing so, they create atmospheres that respond to programme as much as to form. Because the system integrates with existing architectural elements, it serves as a framework that enables experimentation while maintaining control. In the broader ecology of practice, Bind becomes an active and flexible medium for design.

Vectorworks Architect 2025

By Vectorworks

Jury Winner, Technology, Design Tools, 2025 A+Product Awards

The challenge with many digital tools isn’t necessarily capability but continuity — moving from sketch to model to documentation without losing clarity or intent. Vectorworks Architect 2025 tackles that need with a fully integrated workflow, allowing drawing, modeling and visualization to operate as one. The benefit is less about speed alone than about consistency: a design idea can be explored, tested and communicated within a single environment, reducing the friction that often accompanies hand-offs between platforms. In practice, it adds resilience to the designer’s process, keeping creativity intact while maintaining the precision that delivery demands.

Ekodome Geodesic Dome Systems

By Ekodome

Jury Winner, Best of the Year, Commercial Design, 2025 A+Product Awards

Rarely do designers work from one space. The office, home, and site are regularly in rotation as places to set down and get things done. It can be messy and haphazard, with frequent jumping back and forth. Increasingly, temporary structures are being recognized as an unmatched solution for tidying those transitions. Ekodome’s modular geodesic systems show how they can operate as functional sites for designers.

Durable frames and insulated panels allow the domes to perform in extreme climates, while their modular assembly makes them adaptable to almost any context. Architects expand the possibilities of where and how projects can take place. In the ecology of practice, Ekodome ensures that even when there is no coffee shop to be found, a desk can be placed, and work can continue without interruption. Collapsing the distance between home, office and site, and turning transience into continuity.