The annual London Design Festival remains one of the more intriguing design fairs for its embrace of young, sometimes unknown designers as well as established stars. At this year’s edition, the 15th iteration of the fair, which runs through Sunday, there is an international array of talents displaying their work in exhibitions and installations across the city. And, as always, objects of desire are plentiful. Here are 16 of the most covetable.
For its newly revived Crystal Palace program of visionary lighting—on view at Somerset House as part of the festival’s new Design Frontiers program—Swarovski collaborated with Tord Boontje (a star of the inaugural Crystal Palace collection in 2002) to develop Luminous Reflections. The collection of four lighting designs incorporates the company’s first un-faceted crystals–fluid, organically-shaped components that evoke the reflections of light on water. Shown here, the Lustrous Aura chandelier, approximately $71,848.
The Italian designer Achille Salvagni (who has his own gallery in Mayfair) is known for his sumptuous interpretations of 20th century modernism, as shown in his new, limited-edition Papillia side chair (around $14,370), with a cast metal frame and velvet upholstery. .
Galerie Kreo‘s exhibition of works by the Dutch designer Hella Jongerius includes this side table (around $21,000) that Jongerius made by layering glazes on colored porcelain tiles. These interactions of color are also examined in a concurrent and comprehensive exhibition of her work, “Breathing Color by Hella Jongerius,” at London’s Design Museum through September 24.
1882 Ltd., a company that marries the know-how of the British ceramics industry with the ideas of contemporary designers, has unveiled its Flare collection of bone china—a collaboration with PINCH, a London-based company that is likewise known for its finely crafted, modern-but-classic furniture. Shown here, the Jug, approximately $203.
A highlight of the Brompton Design District is Peter Pilotto & Friends, which will be open at 3 Cromwell Place until October 13. Here, the fashion duo Peter Pilotto and Christopher De Vos transformed a townhouse into a chic, colorful pop-up that shows their clothing against a backdrop of furniture, rugs, and other pieces by designer friends like Martino Gamper, Bethan Laura Wood and Max Lamb. Shown here, Wood’s colorful daybed is draped with a Pilotto-designed throw, while Pilotto and Gamper collaborated on customized versions of the latter’s well-known Arnold Circus stool.
Oscar Diaz’s salt and pepper mills ($65 each), made of wood with brass handles, are part of Ready Made Go 3, the third collaboration between the magazine Modern Design Review and the Ace Hotel London Shoreditch. The collection also features objects by Michael Marriott, Soft Baroque, James Shaw and Ian McIntyre, all of which will be used—and sold at—the Ace.
At Gallery FUMI, the exhibition “GLASS.MEKANO” presents furniture by Thomas Lemut, in which strips of glass are joined mechanically to create elegantly austere pieces like the lamp (price on request) shown here.
The photographer-designer Martyn Thompson‘s “Memory” collection of fabrics, on view in the Brompton Design District, features shadowy imagery taken from his photographs and woven on a jacquard loom, as in the limited-edition tapestry shown here ($3500).
In a glamorous blend of modern technology (including lasers and 3-D printing) and classic British silversmithing, the designer Christopher Jenner created the Epicurean collection of functional objects in collaboration with the British silver brand E&Co. The collection includes pieces like an ice bucket, a cheese knife, and this set of crystal cruets in a silver stand ($650).
Frances Palmer, a Connecticut-based potter whose lyrical ceramics incorporate references to English creamware and Japanese porcelain, among others, has brought her vases and bowls (from left to right, $750, $895, and $850) to the uber-chic London home shop Pentreath & Hall for a design week pop-up.
At The New Craftsmen, a Mayfair space that offers objects and furniture from contemporary British makers, Alex Sickling’s “Staffordshire Dogs” (around $210 for the pair) are a sweetly modern interpretation of the ubiquitous 19th century figurines.
At the newly re-energized British company Established & Sons, the designer Sebastian Wrong, a founder who has returned as the company’s design director, continues his collaboration with the artist Richard Woods on their famed Wrongwoods line of furniture—the latest of which is the Palm Springs table (around $4233) shown here.
The designers Brit Moran and Emiliano Salci of Dimore Studio and Dimore Gallery are known for their slightly louche glamour, and their exhibition at the Mayfair gallery Mazzoleni does not disappoint. Their room settings, like the living room shown here, are packed with for-sale design treasures and art from Mazzoleni, but hidden behind walls with brass-detailed portholes that offer a voyeuristic glimpse inside.
Assemble, the Liverpool-based, Turner Prize-winning architectural collective, and its Granby Workshop have been producing intriguing ceramics, and their latest effort, Splatware, is no exception. The plates (around $43) and cups (around $30) are made by combining clays of various colors in a hydraulic press, to very happy effect; the collection is available on Kickstarter.
The designer Michael Anastassiades, who is known for his expressive minimalism, teamed up with Carl Auböck, a fourth-generation member of the renowned Viennese atelier, to produce this mysteriously beautiful coffee grinder (around $2000), which is available in copper or brass at Sigmar London.
The Italian designer Matteo Cibic’s whimsical outlook is evident in “Dermapoliesis,” his project for SEEDS, also showing this year in the Brompton Design District. Cibic posits the creation of “a universe inhabited by not-entirely-intelligible figures that do not resemble us,” like Dermapolka, a limited-edition ceramic and glass piece (around $1285)
