Five luxury highlights from this year's London Design Festival

Normally, at this time of year, the London Design Festival takes over the capital with a packed timetable of design fairs, trade shows, pop-ups and showroom events, to launch the next season of new products. This year, things are a little different, but the festival still goes on, both online and in real life, albeit in a comparatively boutique form. Here are five of this year’s design highlights.

Lee Broom’s Maestro chair

Fresh from his Hanging Hoop Chair making an appearance in Beyoncé’s recent music video (and subsequently becoming a fixture in her home), designer Lee Broom has debuted a new chair, his first in 10 years. Inspired by midcentury design pieces and classical music - an integral part of his creative process - the Maestro chair has a seamless, circular frame made from three hand-bent metal tubes, calling to mind the coils of a brass instrument.

The chair comes in either matte black, mirrored chrome or satin brass, with the seat and back upholstered in velvet, wool or leather. A visual presentation of the chair in the window of Broom’s showroom in Rivington Street, Shoreditch will run for the duration of the festival.

The Design Museum exhibits lockdown-designed furniture

Currently mourning the loss of its founder Sir Terence Conran, who died on Saturday, the Design Museum in Kensington is honouring his pioneering spirit by staging an exhibition of furniture made, essentially, remotely.

The project, titled Connected: Made Together, Apart, is a collaboration with the American Hardwood Export Council and British furniture makers Benchmark, and challenged nine designers - including Heatherwick Studio, Ini Archibong, Jaime Hayon and Studiopepe - to create a table and seating that reflects their new ways of living and working at home as a result of Covid-19. Each designer was paired with a craftsperson at Benchmark’s workshop in Berkshire, and had to communicate with them digitally in order to bring their pieces to life. 

Tom Dixon at King’s Cross

The number of ‘design districts’ at this year’s festival has been limited to four - Brompton, Shoreditch, Mayfair and King’s Cross. The main event of the latter will be Tom Dixon’s Octagon exhibition, divided between eight different spaces at his Coal Office HQ in Coal Drops Yard. New pieces include the Mass collection of tables made from solid brass, an upholstery collaboration with Bute Textiles, and the Cork collection of charred-cork pieces, which will furnish a pop-up cocktail bar.

Paul Cocksedge at Carpenters Workshop

As part of the Mayfair Design District, Carpenters Workshop Gallery is exhibiting new work by the designer Paul Cocksedge, who has created eight limited-edition tables using industrial sheets of glass.

In each case, the glass has been heated, stretched and then ‘slumped’ over a base made from a natural or industrial material such as rock, concrete, wood and steel, and reacts differently each time, so each is a one-off piece. Pictured is the Rock coffee table, where the glass gives the effect of water running over a boulder in a river.  

Heritage design and colour-matching from Poltrona Frau 

Italian brand Poltrona Frau is looking to traditional craft techniques and classic designs with its Future of Heritage collection, which includes an updated version of its Vanity Fair leather armchair (marking its 90th anniversary this year), and a new design by Hong Kong-based designers AB Concept, the Viola chair, with a curved wooden frame and a woven back made from 60 saddle-leather laces.

The brand has also worked with colourist and textile designer Giulio Ridolfo to come up with a new chromatic chart named ColorSphere, which identifies matching groups of colours to help customers create complementary combinations at home. The new pieces are on display at the company’s Fulham Road showroom. 

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