Since design’s eighteenth-century advent, the worlds of art and design have made a habit out of convergence and deviation. In this contemporary moment of convergence, art has become increasingly relational and dematerialized, and design has moved into the space now vacated by art – a space of rarified objects. Focusing on the contemporary, limited-edition furniture spawned by the art-design phenomenon and its contextual culture of hyper-luxury, this paper explores how these objects function as tastemakers, informing and influencing how contemporary style can be understood and how stylistic themes are established – how meaning is conveyed through design’s interconnected dimensions of form, materiality and style. Based on close observation of an entirely new aesthetic evidenced in these objects, this paper puts forth an emerging thematic typology which foregrounds the concepts of time and contemporaneity.