The London Design Festival celebrates and promotes London as the design capital of the world. This year, the event was held at venues and institutions across the city, from September 21-24,2017. Here, we bring you our top picks from the festival. The Reflection Room:

Australian artist Flynn Talbot created an interesting installation for the Prince Consort Gallery within the walls of Victoria and Albert Museum. The idea was to create a walkway through which people would be able to experience the history of the gallery. Previously, the art gallery used to be a storage space for over 30,000 textiles. Talbot used about 56 successive series of panels made of two materials - a thin, stretchable membrane made of PVC (believed to be the material of the future) and LED lights in warm red and bright blue, which lined the edges of the space. The installation's main intention was to let people experience a variety of colours, and enjoy a truly sensorial experience.





The Reflection Room



MINI Living (powered by Mini Cooper), with its pioneering Urban Cabin concept, wanted to tackle the problem of urban housing head-on. In an era of hyper-urbanisation and increasing pressure on housing supply in the inner city, it proposed turning the sharing economy into an architectural construct for an increasingly nomadic creative class. Externally, architect Sam Jacob's design is inspired by London's rich history of geometric facades, while the interior is conceived as a flexible, imaginative space that pays homage to British eccentricity, further rooting the local fragment within specific traditions. It is deigned to be a place of exchange, bringing people together and replicating important elements of urban life: a shared kitchen refers to the importance of food markets, and a micro-library responds to the decreasing number of public libraries.





MINI Living Urban Cabin



Villa Walala:

Marking the 15th year of the London Design Festival, textile designer Camille Walala created a ‘soft textured building-block castle’ complete with various colours, textures and digitally printed patterns, as this year's landmark project. Situated at Liverpool Street Station, the inflatable castle was designed to add fun to the daily routine of commuters who pass the square each day, or for those who relax on the steps facing the station at lunchtime. Walala designed prints which she also extended to cover the surrounding paving and adjacent steps in a mix of monochrome stripes, and colourful diagonals. The installations were inspired by the Memphis Design Movement, the Ndebele tribe and Victor Vasarely, Hungarian-French artist and leader of the op-art movement. Walala’s idea to de-stress individuals by transporting colourful patterns and textiles to a large scale where everybody can see and feel them, is ingenious. You can see her enthusiasm for typography, positivity and affinity for bold patterns and colours in a number of her projects.





Studio Proba:

Founded by Alex Proba, Studio Proba is a New York-based design studio focusing on product, graphic, environmental, and furniture design and artwork. For this year's festival, the studio created The Puzzle Rug: a concept made to evoke the childlike curiosity inherent within all of us. It suggests that art is not just for the walls, it's for everywhere. The Puzzle rug is designed in Brooklyn and handmade in India, with hand-tufted, hand-dyed wool and silk. The design is made with a single splat of colour as an abstract form, complimented by a background colour. One can also customize the colours based on personal preference.







Gateways by Turkishceramics:

One of the main partners of this year's event, Turkishceramics partnered with London-based designer Adam Nathaniel Furman to create Gateways, a ceramic installation consisting of four gates designed to draw people to wander through. Placed at Granary Square with Central Saint Martins as a backdrop, the colourfully-tiled gates showcased the best ceramic products Turkey has to offer.





Gateways



100% Design - Jet Class Furniture

This year, London Design Fair featured a lot of brass and metals with brush finishes. This was seen quite distinctly through the collection displayed by Jet Class Furniture. Their collection this year was like jewelry, with each piece being glamorous and luxurious. The colours were a combination of bold patterns or bright colours with neutral tones and gold.





Darc Room: The Lighting Exhibition

The Darc Room is an exciting new lighting-focused exhibition launched in London this year as a part of the Design Festival. It was a lighting experience made of bespoke installations created in association with the publishers of Mondo Arc and Light Collective. This event took place in the Victoria House basement, which proved to be the perfect canvas for the multiple light installations.







On Reflection

In East London’s Shoreditch neighborhood, the artist Lee Broom transformed his studio into a dark and moody living room, fully decorated in black and charcoal grey, and blending Art Deco with Bauhaus influences. The room is seemingly reflected in a giant mirror. However, on the far wall, what appears to be a mirror at first glance isn’t what it seems. The mirror is instead a large window opening onto another, specular room. Visitors only realise this when they get closer, and notice that their own reflection is absent in the mirror. The illusion is even more realistic on closer inspection, as texts and monochrome geometrical artworks have been flipped to look as though they had been mirrored. Entirely clever!



On Reflection