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LDF17: designjunction2017 Expands to Five Sites

2017 saw designjunction return to King’s Cross with five locations: Cubitt House and Cubitt Park, the Canopy, Granary Square and The Crossing. 200 furniture, lighting, accessory, material, and technology brands exhibited alongside pop-up shops, installations, and interactive features. These are a few of our favorite finds – first up, Ham’s mural on the side of the Canopy featuring newly launched designs from the brand, whose founder we interviewed back in August.

Grace Souky’s Domestic Collectables is a series of 12 tableware objects that explore the connections between users and everyday objects, the different ways people interact with things around the ritual of food. “Each element fits in more than one place and serves more than one purpose,” says Grace, “resulting in a fun and playful experience that seeks to engage while exploring all possible combinations.”

Inspired by a Thomas Hardy poem entitled Old Furniture, David Irwin’s oak and ash collection for Another Country references 19th-century British classics such as the Windsor chair with the intention of creating pieces that will last for decades and be handed down for generations.

Ted Jefferis, the craftsman behind TedWood, hand makes bespoke furniture to order. The son of a classic boat builder, he studied furniture design and continues to explore the relationship between furniture and its surrounding interior space.

Victoria is a marble tea set – teapot, a milk jug, sugar bowl, cake stand, teacup and saucer and dessert plate – designed by Bethan Grey for Editions Milano. The collection’s relief pattern is hand-carved from Arrabescato marble by Italian craftsmen and paired with brushed brass.

The latest addition to David Irwin’s Working Girl collection for Deadgood is the Lounge Chair and Sofa, which, according to Deadgood, “adhere to the honest construction methods used throughout this collection and feature a soft seat and back pads supported by exposed webbing over a durable powder coated steel frame.”

Textiles designer Eleanor Pritchard worked with Matt Cockrem to solve the dilemma of how to display fabrics on a trade show stand with this elegant construction. “We were playing with ideas of perception, depth, and composition; with simple fabric shapes suspended in a series of steel frames,” she says. “From the sweet spot, marked with an X the viewer could ‘catch’ a perfect 1 x 1 meter square ‘flat’ composition – then as soon as their viewpoint changed the whole composition splintered into layered disparate geometric shapes. It was great fun to make and wonderful to see how it caught the imagination.”

Granby Workshop’s experiments in homeware continue with the launch of Splatware – born out of a desire to mass-produce one-offs. By combining colored clay sprayed with ceramic oxides, and pressing it into an industrial RAM Press, the designers are able to create consistent forms with unique patterns.

London-based Hampson Woods design and make wooden products made from local trees, often from arborists in and around London who specialize in clearing the fallen trees that would otherwise be chipped.

Loved by stylists the world over, Japanese brand MT Masking Tape made their designjunction debut, with a stand that made it very clear what they were selling.

And last but not least, this stunning installation by Adam Nathaniel Furman was made in collaboration with Turkishceramics. “Ceramics have always been, and continue to be, both the most historic, resonant and traditional, as well as the most fresh, perpetually surprising, delightful and exciting of architectural materials,” says Furman. “There is no other architectural treatment that has remained as fresh and relevant and cool as ceramics has from a thousand years BC, right through into the 21st Century.”

Katie Treggiden is a purpose-driven journalist, author and, podcaster championing a circular approach to design – because Planet Earth needs better stories. She is also the founder and director of Making Design Circular, a program and membership community for designer-makers who want to join the circular economy. With 20 years' experience in the creative industries, she regularly contributes to publications such as The Guardian, Crafts Magazine and Monocle24 – as well as being Editor at Large for Design Milk. She is currently exploring the question ‘can craft save the world?’ through an emerging body of work that includes her fifth book, Wasted: When Trash Becomes Treasure (Ludion, 2020), and a podcast, Circular with Katie Treggiden.