Samsung just swept the Red Dot Design Award 2026 with a perfect 16-for-16 win rate, but it's the Bespoke AI Laundry lineup that's turning heads. The washing machines and dryers earned the competition's highest honor - Best of the Best - for transforming utilitarian appliances into design objects that belong in your living room. In exclusive interviews with Samsung Newsroom, the design team behind the award reveals how they convinced engineers to rethink everything from pump placement to paint application, all while making laundry day feel less like a chore and more like curated living.
Samsung doesn't do half measures. At the globally recognized Red Dot Design Award 2026, the Korean tech giant submitted 16 products and walked away with 16 wins - a perfect batting average that included two Best of the Best distinctions. But while the OLED TV S95H grabbed headlines for its visual prowess, it's the Bespoke AI Laundry appliances that reveal Samsung's bigger ambition: making home appliances disappear into your décor.
"Samsung's uni-body design concept serves as a key strategy for establishing a consistent brand identity across appliances," Jinsun Park from Samsung's Living Design Group told Samsung Newsroom. "Regardless of the form factor, users can experience a consistent aesthetic, with the appliances adding to the overall atmosphere as furniture."
That's not marketing speak. The Bespoke AI Laundry line applies identical design language across separate washer-dryer units, vertically stacked one-body models, and all-in-one combo machines. Walk into a laundry room outfitted with any configuration, and you'll see the same unified front finished in a single color, material and finish - what designers call CMF in shorthand. It's the Apple Store approach applied to washing machines, and it required Samsung's design team to pick fights with their engineering colleagues.
The Bespoke AI Combo presented the biggest challenge. Designed for space-constrained homes that can't accommodate separate dryers, the team needed to pack full standalone dryer performance into a washer-sized footprint. "When designing the auto dispenser, we worked closely with the R&D team to carefully refine pump placement and assembly structures, securing an additional milliliter of capacity within the densely packed layout," Park explained. Every milliliter mattered when you're wedging heat pump technology, condensation systems, and AI sensors into a machine that still needs to look seamless when built into cabinetry.
The lint filter became another design battleground. Engineers wanted easy access for maintenance. Designers demanded it stay hidden to preserve the clean aesthetic. The compromise? Front-access placement that works even in tight cabinet installations, with gaps and joints minimized to near-invisibility. It's the kind of obsessive detail that wins design awards but goes unnoticed by users - which is exactly the point.
Once the hardware achieved furniture-grade looks, the team turned to the interface problem. As laundry machines gain AI smarts and expand their function lists, they risk becoming as complicated as enterprise software. Samsung's answer sits behind a 7-inch full-touch display that looks more smartphone than appliance control panel.
"The key was to find the right balance between providing more information and maintaining simplicity, as adding more features can make the product harder to use," said Yunkyung Kang from Samsung's UX Design Group. Her team deployed 2D and 3D visual elements - images, animations, status indicators - so users grasp what's happening inside the drum without reading manuals. Toss in a load, and the screen shows fabric type detection through animated graphics. AI recommends wash settings via visual cues that feel intuitive, not instructional.
But Samsung's design innovation extends beyond what users see and touch. Sungjun Kim from the CMF Design Group described how the company overhauled its manufacturing process to align with its ESG commitments. Traditional appliance coloring required multiple stages: spraying, painting, deposition. Each step generated waste and consumed energy while exposing factory workers to chemical processes.
"In response, we adopted film-laminated metal and coil-coated (pre-painted) metal methods, which involve directly printing on steel sheets and applying films," Kim told Samsung Newsroom. The new approach - internally called No Spray technology - produces multiple components from a single pre-colored sheet. Waste drops. Energy consumption falls. And the resulting textures actually look more premium than spray-painted finishes, delivering realistic metal aesthetics that reinforce the furniture positioning.
It's also more repairable. By removing unnecessary elements and standardizing the design across form factors, Samsung extended product lifespan while making repairs simpler. When a component fails, technicians don't need to match custom paint jobs or hunt for model-specific parts. The uni-body approach that creates visual consistency also builds sustainability into the product lifecycle.
The Red Dot recognition validates Samsung's "Expressive Design" philosophy - the human-centered approach that guided all 16 winning submissions. Beyond the Bespoke AI Laundry and S95H TV, the winner's circle included the Galaxy Z Fold7 foldable, Galaxy XR headset, Bespoke AI Refrigerator Family Hub, and even the Portable SSD T7 Resurrected. Each product embeds Samsung's belief that technology should adapt to human spaces and behaviors, not the other way around.
For the laundry team, that meant rethinking what a washer can be. It's no longer a noisy box tucked in the basement or hidden behind closet doors. With the Bespoke AI Laundry appliances, Samsung argues washers and dryers deserve prominent placement in modern homes - visible, tactile design objects that happen to clean clothes with AI precision.
The approach signals where Samsung sees the smart home heading. As AI capabilities proliferate across appliances, the visual design becomes the differentiator. Consumers expect intelligence and connectivity as baseline features. What they'll pay premium prices for is technology that elevates their living environment while reducing cognitive load. Show, don't tell. Animate, don't instruct. Integrate, don't intrude.
Competitors took notice. The home appliance category at Red Dot 2026 saw submissions from European luxury brands and Chinese upstarts, all chasing the same furniture-as-appliance positioning. But Samsung's perfect submission record and dual Best of the Best wins demonstrate execution advantage. Talking about design philosophy is easy. Convincing engineers to sacrifice millimeters for aesthetics, retooling factories to eliminate spray painting, and training AI models to communicate through animations - that's the hard part.
Samsung's Red Dot sweep confirms what the company's been building toward: a future where AI-powered appliances earn their place in living spaces through thoughtful design, not just technical specs. The Bespoke AI Laundry recognition validates the furniture-grade approach while setting a benchmark for sustainable manufacturing through film-laminated metals and simplified assembly. As smart home devices multiply, Samsung's betting that consumers will reward the brands that make intelligence invisible and integration effortless. For an industry that's spent decades hiding appliances in closets and basements, that's a washing machine worth putting on display.
![[Interview] When a Washer Becomes Furniture: Meet the Designers Behind the Red Dot Design Award 2026](/cdn-cgi/image/width=1200,quality=85,format=auto,fit=cover/https://charming-card-d91ad3487b.media.strapiapp.com/large_file_b34bb2f403.png)
