Review: Brompton Design District
We hope that you have already had a minute to watch our highlights video from London Design Festival. Each year we look forward to visiting the Brompton Design District events to discover the innovative and thought provoking designs being exhibited.
Within the London Design Festival, the Brompton Design District is vibrant and inspiring. It’s described as a ‘partnership between leading international brands, much loved independent retailers, neighbourhood restaurants and cultural institutions’. With over 40 partners in locations such as the V&A and Harrods, the Brompton Design District is a world renowned design event.
This years large installation at the V&A did not disappoint, how could it fail with the V&A grand architecture as a muse?! Flynn Talbot’s atmospheric light installation reflected the sun rise and sun set of Flynn’s birthplace, Australia. We managed catch up with Flynn during the festival to learn a bit more about the piece and his thoughts on events like London Design Festival, watch our interview here.
Faye Toogood give her London Design Festival audience a wonderful exhibition. Faye Toogood invited 50 of the leading creative forces in the country – drawn from a wide range of disciplines, from furniture design to art and photography – to take part in her unique collaborative project. The principle behind The Trade Show was a simple one: Faye gifted each of the participants with one of her signature Spade chairs (created specifically for this project in a special limited-edition sandcast-aluminium), and in return they gifted a carefully selected piece of their own work which they felt Faye would enjoy or found symmetry in her design ethos. These pieces formed the core of the exhibition at the Garage gallery in Brompton Design District – the selfsame location where Toogood launched her debut furniture collection in 2010.
6A Architects gifted several items from their Dessert Islands collection 2015. They stated ‘Making is a process. Narrative is also a process. And both turn the everyday usefulness of an object into a kind of storytelling. We chose Dessert Island Bowls because, like the chair, they are a special turn over an everyday object which would suit Faye’s playful and crafted sensibility.’
David Hughes, Photographer, gifted Untitled 2017, commenting ‘I would say this archival inkjet print, like Faye’s work, has a raw elegance. A tale from the unexpected.’
The wonderfully oversized brochure for Trade show explains more about Faye’s Space Chair: ‘The Spade chair was one of her first designs, produced as part of Assemblage 1 in 2008 and here in sand-cast aluminium. It has reappeared in many of her installations and is perhaps the design that is most closely associated with her work, capturing her interest in form, materials and references that carry meaning and narratives.’
We thoroughly enjoyed Mint’s exhibition and were pleased to see the students we discovered at New Designers and New Designers One Year On finding success as part of London Design Festival 2017. You can read more about Mint’s exhibition here.
Conversas by Arturo Álvarez. Arturo Álvarez is a lighting designer from Spain. Handling shapes, volumes and light sources fluently in a simple and elegant way, Alvarez masterfully mixes them to bring a new vision of creative lighting.
Carman Machado, Carman Machado Textiles. Carman’s textiles are created using coast netting which she finds in the UK and in Puerto Rico, Carmen wanted to create a textile which was delicate and beautiful but also robust and weather proof.
Manchester School of Art 3D Design graduate Sam Lander’s work intrigued us at New Designers! After looking at how architecture utilises concrete as a building material Sam questioned how concrete could be used within design, experimenting with incorporating expandable foam and resin in order to elevate the brutalist material and create a tactile composite
It was a absolute pleasure to be able to speak with Ineke Hans at her exhibition at 4 Cromwell Place. The Last London Salon: Furniture & The Future was a thought provoking exhibition which displayed the results of Ineke’s in-depth discussions with groups of industry leading designers, looking at the future considerations for designers. We had the chance to interview Ineke so watch out for our upcoming video!
Did you go to the Brompton Design District during LDF? What was your highlight? Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter @DesignInsider1
Contact Brompton Design District