Discover 10 Highlights From the London Design Festival
From site-specific commissions and historic reissues to cross-cultural collaborations and daring new voices, this year’s festival delivers a spectrum of projects that capture where craft, design, and innovation are headed next
September has become one of the busiest months on the global art and design calendar, with The Armory Show and Collectible commanding attention in New York, Frieze and Design Miami’s debut In Situ edition unfolding in Seoul, and Paris Design Week running in tandem with Maison & Objet. London also joins the fray with its own marquee event: the London Design Festival. Now in its 23rd edition, the citywide celebration draws thousands of leading makers, designers, and brands, and continues to serve as a barometer of craft and innovation.
The program spans ten districts, each with its own identity. Along the River Thames and at institutions such as the Design Museum and the V&A Museum, large-scale installations anchor the festival but shouldn’t overshadow the wealth of exhibitions and emerging voices to discover around the city. Lee Broom has unveiled a luminous site-specific commission at Southbank Centre while Mayfair galleries are presenting collectible one-offs, Brompton showrooms debut new products, and Shoreditch studios are signaling where craft is headed next.
Below, Galerie highlights the best of the London Design Festival.
1. Faye Toogood & Noritake: Rose
Faye Toogood debuted an English garden–inspired collaboration with heritage Japanese ceramics house Noritake. Awash in vivid hues of pink and green, the collection transforms archival Noritake forms into expressive canvases shaped during the polymath British designer’s residency in Japan. The presentation features 17 original hand-painted works by Toogood and a limited edition of 111 platters meticulously executed by Noritake’s master artisans. Installed in her Camden studio, the exhibition also includes sketchbooks, artworks, and sculptures that trace the project’s evolution, shown alongside new season clothing and furniture, including additions to Toogood’s Gummy collection.
2. “Beacon” by Lee Broom
For his first London Design Festival Landmark Project, Lee Broom created a monumental lighting work at the entrance of Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall. Supported by Brokis and Materials Assemble, the site-specific installation reinterprets the Victorian Dolphin Street Lamps of the South Bank as a vast chandelier composed of recycled glass. Its illuminated choreography, timed to Big Ben’s hourly chimes, transforms the piece into a living part of the city, while material innovation ensures its future as standalone fixtures after deinstallation.
3. Abid Javed: Abiogenesis: Vol. 1
Abid Javed, founder of the studio Objet Mito, brings a rare perspective to the field, drawing equally from his training as a molecular scientist and his practice as an artist. At Design Shoreditch’s House of Icon, he debuted Abiogenesis: Vol. 1, a sculptural lighting series inspired by the language of molecular biology. Handmade ceramic table lamps with detachable shades seem to evoke forms in flux, echoing the early stages of cellular life and surrealist thought. With their fluid silhouettes and gentle illumination, the works explore transformation, modularity, and the fertile territory between science and art.
4. “Unbound: A Salvino Marsura Retrospective” at Béton Brut
Béton Brut is presenting the first major retrospective of Salvino Marsura, the Italian iron-artist whose six-decade career bridged sculpture, furniture, and lighting. Installed within the gallery’s Hackney Wick home, the show juxtaposes Marsura’s organic metal forms—roots, tendrils, stalactites—with motifs of shackles and chainlink, reflecting his intrigue with nature’s unruliness and humanity’s impulse to contain it. Rare works from his Treviso forge appear alongside Béton Brut’s vintage pieces, underscoring how his practice merged expressive form with everyday function while probing deeper questions about freedom, constraint, and the human condition.
5. “Crockery by Max Lamb + 1882 Ltd.” at Gallery Fumi
In Max Lamb’s latest outing with Gallery Fumi, the British designer collaborates with 1882 Ltd. to transform slip-cast earthenware into hulking chairs and stools that read like primal sculptures. “I wanted to explore its potential not just as a sculptural material, but as a material capable of supporting the human form,” Lamb says. He eschewed digital 3D models entirely, hand-chipping at solid blocks of plaster with a stonemason’s chisel to preserve each nick and gouge in clay. Fired at 1,140°C after a three-week drying period, the dense, angular forms undergo a demanding production process involving 23 potters at 1882 Ltd., where every stage—casting, demolding, drying, firing—carries a high risk of failure and requires exacting control.
6. “A Softer World” at The Lavery
Curated by TIWA Select founder Alex Tieghi-Walker, this intimate showcase beckons reflection on how design can foster care, connection, and sensitivity in an increasingly rigid world. The group show features a range of installations that reimagine domestic and cultural narratives through a softer, more intimate lens. Among the highlights are Rooms Studio, founded by Tbilisi designers Nata Janberidze and Keti Toloraia, who reinterpret Georgian heritage through the lens of contemporary design. Their hand-crafted furnishings in wood, stone, and metal merge ancient and Soviet motifs with Western influences. Charlotte Taylor, meanwhile, reimagines the gallery as a bedroom that showcases work by 30 female designers. Each explores layered narratives of female authorship in the home, referencing the femme fatale and the interior-as-character to reframe the domestic as both stage and agent.
7. Molteni&C: New Collection and Gio Ponti Objects
Molteni&C unveiled its 2025 collection at its Brompton Road flagship, introducing designs by Christophe Delcourt and GamFratesi alongside longtime collaborators such as Yabu Pushelberg and Galerie Creative Mind Vincent Van Duysen. Highlights include the sculptural Emile seating system, the Theo and Tibeau beds, and a reedition of Afra and Tobia Scarpa’s iconic Monk Chair from the Heritage Collection. The event also launches Molteni&C’s first Gio Ponti Object Collection with an exclusive global preview.
8. “Max Radford Gallery x Ercol: Grain Pile” at Clerkenwell Fire Station
At Clerkenwell Fire Station, Max Radford Gallery partnered with British furniture maker Ercol to showcase new work by London-based talents Andu Masebo, Eddie Olin, Joe Armitage, Jaclyn Pappalardo, Isabel Alonso, and Lewis Kemmenoe. Each designer mined Ercol’s archive and collaborated directly with its factory, creating pieces that reinterpret the company’s modernist legacy through contemporary practice. From Masebo’s stools assembled from rejected parts on the production line to Alonso’s Windsor-inspired tables, the collection demonstrates how Ercol’s craftsmanship and resources can catalyze experimentation while grounding the results in material integrity and British design heritage.
9. “Terence Woodgate & John Barnard: Lightness of Form” at Carpenters Workshop Gallery
Nearly everything about Terence Woodgate’s rigorously composed furniture is engineered to vanish from view. Joints are often seamless, edges are resolved with surgical clarity, and surfaces appear weightless. Developed in close dialogue with John Barnard—the pioneering Formula 1 engineer who introduced the first carbon fiber chassis—the British designer’s latest furnishings are made entirely in carbon fiber. Razor-thin tables and a streamlined chaise fuse Barnard’s material breakthroughs with Woodgate’s conceptual rigor, toeing the line between sculptural presence and engineered utility with exacting clarity.
10. Cassina: Staging Modernity by Cassina
To mark the 60th anniversary of its Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, and Charlotte Perriand collection, Cassina is presenting an installation that reframes modernism through an ecological lens. Iconic furniture pieces from the original Modernist masters are paired with natural elements and animal motifs, prompting reflection on how the “machine for living” has expanded to include ecology and a renewed sense of nature’s role in daily life.