5 Under 40 Awards are presented by New England Home magazine and spotlight the hottest emerging talent in New England’s residential design categories: architecture, interiors, specialty design (furniture, textiles, lighting, accessories, and other home products), and landscape design.

These rugs will be auctioned off in person at the gala on Sept 18th with all the proceeds going directly to Barakat a Cambridge, Massachusetts–based charity that works to strengthen education and literacy in Central and South Asia. The 5 Under 40 rug auction has been the #1 fund raiser for Barakat over the past decade and has helped build schools, pay teachers, provide transportation and health care to thousands of girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Selected by an exceptional committee of regional design leaders, 5 Under 40 award winners are the people to watch, producing some of the most beautiful and innovative work available today.

Click here for tickets to the 5 Under 40 Awards Gala!

To place a proxy bid on one of the 5 rugs below, call Ken Gurley at the Boston Landry & Arcari showroom at 617-399-6500 or email kgurley@landryandarcari.com.

Alison Hammatt
Alison Hammatt Home

In designing my rug, I was inspired by both my grandmothers – Leola Fornell and Marian Clarke Droll. My grandmother, Leola, was born and raised in Sweden and moved to the United States in her thirties. She decorated her home in Detroit, MI with Swedish rag rugs. She made Swedish straw Christmas ornaments by hand. And she spoke with a loving heart about Sweden and her childhood and life there. My rug is a flatweave with relatively symmetrical floral motifs, inspired by midcentury Swedish rug design to honor Leola, my “Farmor.”

The color story of my rug celebrates my grandmother, Marian. She was born and raised in Muncie, Indiana and raised her four daughters in Grosse Pointe, Michigan – in a home that is still in my family today. She was the most elegant and gracious woman I have yet to meet. She decorated her Georgian style Grosse Pointe home in pinks, rouges, blushes, and other warm tones. I started with those colors in designing this rug, to honor my “Grams.” I added the greens and blues to be sure to weave in my story, as well – something I know both Farmor and Grams would have wanted.

Becky Garrity
Becky Garrity Interiors

This rug draws inspiration from the timeless elegance of the Art Deco period, blending modern minimalist repetition with rich, earthy tones. Subtle silk accents highlight the structured, symmetrical design, while the monochromatic, nature-inspired palette evokes a sense of quiet sophistication. The result is a composition that feels both timeless and grounded — the perfect anchor for a thoughtfully curated space.

Jen Stephens
Matthew Cunningham Landscape Design

I often draw inspiration from old things that have strong historic and cultural connections to place, which is probably why I’ve fallen in love with classic persian rugs, often called Serapi in the trade. Renowned for their expertly crafted geolinear patterns and rich colors, I decided to abstract a classic serapi pattern into a formal garden plan. Woven at twenty scale using over 800,000 hand-knots, the rug depicts a fifty-acre estate radiating out from a central medallion lake, surrounded by textural meadows, rambles in the quarter panels, and a tree-lined canal border.

Julien Jalbert
Knickerbocker Group

I’ve always been fascinated with geometry, and the hexagon has stuck with me as an awe-inspiring natural occurrence. Its frequency in nature is astounding, from turtle shells to surface tensioned bubbles, insect eyes to honeycombs, the hexagon is a true force of nature. As an inhabitant of the hexagon, bees have truly commandeered this powerful polygon and harnessed it to their advantage. We take this magnificent creature for granted, without bees the food industry as we know it would suffer, so this rug design is an homage to the small and busy worker that helps keep us well fed.

Thomas Fraley
Gregory Lombardi Design

Color, contrast, texture, and form are at the forefront of my planting-forward approach to project design. I routinely draw inspiration from my travels to regions in opposition to New England—Southern California, the Caribbean, the Desert Southwest, or elsewhere. Each location expands my design vocabulary in shaping rich and dynamic environments for my clients.

I'm captivated by the exotic vegetation and fearless use of color in the Caribbean. Drawn to the convergence of form, color, and natural phenomena in that region, I created a rug inspired by a painting completed after my first trip there—a trip that challenged my notions of what landscape can be and allowed me to experience authentic place-based joy. It also marked a shift in my outlook, where looking beyond regions and borders for inspiration, embracing global influences, and resisting overly provincial thinking leads to more vibrant, rewarding, and fulfilling outcomes in both work and life.

5 under 40 2025 Winners shown left to right: Becky Garrity, Alison Hammatt, Thomas Fraley, Jen Stephens, and Julien Jalbert