For the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC), design has never been only about what gets made. It is also about what gets understood. The organization does not sell a chair, table, or finished product; it advocates for a material, a supply chain, and a way of thinking that begins long before an object lands in a showroom or on a collector’s shelf. As Clerkenwell Design Week returned for its 15th edition under the fitting strapline Where Design Belongs, AHEC’s involvement spoke to a larger belief: creativity thrives when designers, makers, manufacturers, and audiences are given the tools to understand materials more deeply.
For David Venables of AHEC Europe, the value of a design festival is not simply visibility. AHEC is not a conventional brand chasing exposure. “We don’t advertise,” he explains. “We create content.” Without a consumer product to launch, AHEC instead uses design platforms to start conversations about forests, provenance, species diversity, material literacy, and the overlooked systems that determine whether design is merely fashionable or genuinely forward-thinking.
Clerkenwell Design Week is particularly suited to that mission. Compared with the scale and spectacle of larger fairs, Clerkenwell offers a more intimate, navigable, and conversational platform. Spread across EC1’s dense network of showrooms, historic venues, installations, talks, and temporary activations, it allows ideas to circulate at a human scale. For 2026, that ecosystem continued to expand with the introduction of the Clerkenwell Design Week app, a new digital companion designed to help visitors navigate the festival, discover brands, access talks programming, and store their visitor badge directly on their phones. New destinations such as The Luxury Edit at Haberdashers’ Hall, Church of Design, and The Charterhouse further extended the festival’s footprint, while international showcases from Spain, Italy, Austria, Denmark, and others underscored its growing global reach.
AHEC’s support of Clerkenwell sits precisely at the intersection of this growth and the festival’s grounded identity. Venables describes the energy around Clerkenwell as “really exciting,” noting that creative platforms, even in a city as culturally rich as London, are not always given enough support. For an organization devoted to material education, CDW offers rare access not only to established architects and designers, but also to emerging talent, manufacturers, specifiers, journalists, and the broader design community moving through the district with curiosity rather than haste.
That sense of participation is especially clear in AHEC’s involvement with the Clerkenwell Design Week Awards. Rather than sponsor a trophy as a branding exercise, AHEC saw an opportunity to transform the award itself into a material lesson. The result was a series of sculptural wooden awards designed by an emerging maker Henry Marks, produced in American cherry, and made from lower-grade timber that would often be excluded from more conventional markets. Each award was different, carrying its own grain, knots, color variation, and evidence of growth. Each will also continue to change over time as cherry darkens and deepens with exposure to light.
For Venables, that evolution is part of the point. The award is not a generic object to be tucked away in a cupboard, but a living demonstration of what wood can do when it is allowed to behave like wood. It offers recipients a tactile encounter with a natural material whose value lies not in uniformity, but in difference.
At Clerkenwell, that message lands in a context already built around exchange. The festival’s showroom community has long been one of its defining strengths, anchoring the event in a real neighborhood rather than a temporary exhibition hall. AHEC’s contribution enhances that atmosphere by bringing the conversation back to the material origins of design itself. In an era saturated with launches, trends, and visual spectacle, its presence is a reminder that design’s future may depend as much on education as invention.
To see more highlights from this year’s programming, visit clerkenwelldesignweek.com.
Photography by Sam Frost Photography.
