A decade into his architecture career, Justin Donnelly, ’02, was working on large industrial projects when he reconnected with Monling Lee, a friend from architecture school at the University of Maryland. The pair discovered a shared longing to escape some of the rigidity associated with their day jobs.
“Architecture can be rather austere when you are focused on functionality, and we wanted it to be more fun and creative,” Donnelly says. He and Lee decided to partner on a slightly tangential venture. “We chose furniture because we could put our hands on the material—squish it and weld it,” Donnelly says. “We wanted to see our designs come to life and put it in our houses.”
In 2018, Jumbo was born. Donnelly and Lee have filled the New York-based design studio with unexpected shapes, bright colors, and plenty of whimsy. They’ve created pool floats in the shapes of pasta and a squiggle-shaped pitcher designed to resemble an inchworm. Then there’s the squat Foldont Chair, which doesn’t fold, and the large, curvy Fortune Chair—modeled on the cookie and offered in tasty colors such as crispy brown and licorice. “Instead of smart and sophisticated, we wanted to make things that were like ice cream or jelly, creating a softening of the heart,” Donnelly says. “It’s a lot about instant desire. People want to touch it, even lick it.”
SITTING PRETTY: The Neotenic Collection lounge and lamp; the Foldont chair; and the Fortune chair. (Photos from top: Jumbo NYC; Chris Campbell; Marius Chira/DWR)
They’re aiming, he says, to evoke the modern aesthetic sensibilities of “cute, interesting, and zany,” as described by cultural theorist and University of Chicago English professor Sianne Ngai in her book Our Aesthetic Categories, published in 2012, when Ngai was a professor at Stanford. Take Jumbo’s Dumb Chair—inspired by mattresses dumped on the streets of New York. Donnelly and Lee squished together mattress toppers, drilled a steel bolt through the foam, and sprayed it all with hot fluid-applied rubber, “which allows you to see all the squishing of the foam inside,” Donnelly says. “It’s cute, it’s delightful.”
In 2025, the Fortune Chair was an Interior Design magazine Best in 20 winner and Azure magazine’s AZ People’s Choice Award for Single-Piece Furniture. And Donnelly and Lee are coming full circle: Under the Jumbo label, they developed the architectural and landscape design for an Alexandria, Va., wastewater pumping station. It went online in July. They’re currently designing a waste transfer facility for Alexandria. “We designed the buildings with a shape dictated by the functional requirements,” he says. “Then, we got to be creative and experiment with beautiful facade materials, recapturing the fun of architecture.” But no licking these, please.
Tracie White is a senior writer at Stanford. Email her at traciew@stanford.edu.
