Surface Design Show 2022 Trends – What to Look out for

Taking place at London’s Business Design Centre, Surface Design Show (8-10 February 2022) will again provide architects and designers with an exciting and inspirational range of surface designs and materials.

Speaking before the event opens, trend forecaster and curator of the Show’s Surface Spotlight Live feature, Sally Angharad enthused, “The design directions I have highlighted see new surfaces that blur the boundaries of material properties and celebrate original characteristics. With greater focus on offering multiple solutions in one, we see solid materials interact with light and mixed material designs that give the customer greater choice. It is particularly exciting to see biodegradable and recycled ingredients driving aesthetics, with a move towards unique colourways and textures. Once again the Show will set the scene for the next year in terms of design ideas.”

The trends that Sally has highlighted are Soft Lines, Pattern Inlays, Translucent Layers, Bio Magic and Dappled Colour.

Soft Lines – Gentle relief surfaces evoke a sense of calm featuring tonal shifts and subtle line work for a pared back aesthetic.

Tattoo by Italian wallpaper designer and manufacturer Zambaiti Parati (stand 302) is an embossed wallpaper with beautiful soft tactile lines that echo natural stone.

Raven (stand 301) is Europe’s leading Japanese tile specialist. Yuki is a glazed porcelain tile from Master Ceramicists, INAX of Japan. The YU-KI name is from YU meaning glaze and KI meaning seasons. The standard white colour represents winter snow, the red represents summer sun and the black represents the night sky of a mid-autumn day. The gentle curved Yuki border form is naturally created by using split bamboo, one of the most familiar materials for Japanese people.

Pattern Inlays – Patterns and motifs are introduced in intricate ways, taking inspiration from marquetry techniques, with modular shapes creating a design.

Cora Wood Experience (stand 200) has teamed up Pininfarina to create Miraggio a new wooden floor collection that combines different technologies and materials and features complex geometric patterns inspired by natural elements. The idea behind the collection was to create continuous flooring that blurs the borders between the exterior and interior spaces, uniting them with a unique design, mixing the wooden surfaces with ceramic elements.

Wonderwall Studios (stand 127) creates premium panelling from salvaged wood, giving discarded timber a second lease of life. Pheonix is perhaps its most avant-garde design, conceived of furniture-grade hardwoods with geometric and organic patterns that collide.

Translucent Layers – Hard materials explore translucency to maximise on light and space using geometric shapes and interlocking structures.

Jodhpur Blue (stand 327) has a range of stunning translucent stone sheets. Made using a thin layer of stone with a transparent resin backing to create a beautiful stone sheet that can be back lit to enhance the stones features and characteristics.

Amron Architectural (stand 340) is a trusted supplier and manufacturer of products for the architectural and design industry worldwide. Providing innovative solutions from the workplace to award winning restaurants, used within their schemes are chains by Kriscadecor. This architectural solution uses intricate chains to create semi-transparent textures and shapes from elegant waves to parallel structures.

Bio Magic – Biodegradable ingredients continue to offer sustainable solutions with developments in colour dyeing and recycling processes bringing new alternatives to the table using food waste.

Johnson Tan, one of 32 ‘New Talents’ at Surface Design Show, has created surfaces using food shell waste including eggshells and coffee which creates a delicate, subtle and translucent material.

Also found within the New Talent section is Biotic by Studio Lionne Van Deursen, an ongoing research project and material archive. Microbes are used to grow a biological material which is made of bacterial cellulose. This is made using yeast and bacteria in a fermentation process. During this process bacteria spin nano fibres of cellulose and produce a layer on the surface. When this layer has dried, it becomes a solid material that has comparable properties to leather.

Wildman & Bugby (stand 218) brings ecology leather to the show in the form of a sustainable 100% genuine leather made using Olivenleder a biodegradable tanning agent. The leathers within this collection are tanned with the patented wet-green technology. Using the power of nature, the olive leaf extract used for the tanning agent is exclusively made from the fallen leaves of the Mediterranean olive harvest.

Dappled Colour – A rise in recycled materials sees more one-off design aesthetics emerge where repurposed materials define the colour palette, embracing dappled patterns and flecks of contrast instead of solid colour.

The Good Plastic Company (stand 320) produces sustainable panels from 100% recycled plastic, each panel is made from a single type of plastic so it can easily be recycled, extending the economic life of the material. There is a huge choice of colours and styles with many having a striking dappled colour effect.

WasBottle from Benecore (stand 412) is a 100% recycled HDPL panel designed to produce tabletops, shelves and partition elements and claddings for interiors. Each panel is unique thanks to the randomness of the recycled material showing variations in colour which creates a vibrant dappled texture.