London Design Festival 2025 Preview

Tortus is a Copenhagen ceramics brand founded by potter Eric Landon, whose wheel-thrown modern stoneware vessels look best when they are arranged en masse, their same-but-different forms creating a compelling rhythm. At this year’s LDF his work is coming to Studio Pottery London in Victoria’s Eccleston Yards, one of the capital’s most centrally located pottery studios.

Ceramics brand Feldspar’s debut furniture line is a bit of a homecoming for its co-founder Jeremy Brown – he studied furniture-making before getting diverted to a career in fine bone china. These two disciplines come together in some of the pieces for the new collection (each one unique), which mix china with storm-felled wood from near the brand’s Dartmoor base, while others are purely timber, evocatively reflecting their organic origins. See it at Lyndsey Ingram, the Mayfair gallery specialising in postwar and contemporary work.

A series of freshly launched pieces will be on show at the London outpost of &Tradition, but centred around one design in particular. Rombe is an elegant shelving system – “both a stage and a structure for storage” – that marks the first time that London studio Industrial Facility has collaborated with the Danish brand. Envisaged as a flexible system that could be equally at home in the kitchen or living room as a library or home study, here it’ll be on display in &Tradition’s handsome Queen Anne townhouse overlooking St James’s Park. The artworks and other objects populating the shelves are curated by 8 Holland Street, whose studio-gallery is adjacent.

This four-storey Victorian warehouse in Shoreditch – the permanent home of British brands Cozmo, Tamart, Minimalux and Lightmass – was one of the festival’s highlights when it opened last year, and for 2025 there will be a mix of 20 invited special guests participating. Cozmo’s Comfort Lab will include the new Hug sofa by Pearson Lloyd while Tamart is transforming the first floor into a sociable lounge bar that will feature its new Highgate bar stools and Clore lounge chairs, upholstered in Liberty fabrics. Minimalux launches its Nil light here – a perfect lollipop of graphic reduction – while British jewellery brand Point Two Five will showcase its collections on the stairs, culminating in a new collaboration with Studiomama.

Mosaic tile titan Bisazza has been missing from the Brompton Design District for a while due to the extensive renovations to its 60 Sloane Avenue building – but now it’s back. Italian architect Carlo Dal Bianco has redesigned the space with typical baroque flair, with gold mosaic tiles and crystal chandeliers, but the brand has always been one to move with the times and give mosaics a contemporary spin. The space features a London-centric collaboration with eBoy (aka Kai Vermehr, Steffen Sauerteig and Svend Smital) whose pixel art translates perfectly to the medium of mosaics; and Silenzio, the latest in Bisazza’s ongoing partnership with Fornasetti.

Sensory design and the philosophy of knitting wellness into every environment are two of the industry’s most pertinent topics. Hackney-based JPA Design is hosting a one-day open studio event that gives visitors the chance to learn more about its work via a multi-sensory installation, Afterglow Frequencies: ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’ environments use light and soundscapes to create moods that are revitalising or restful, while therapeutic sound bath sessions by Simone Salvatici will leave weary festival-goers refreshed.

JPA Design often works in the aviation industry, with clients that include Cathay Pacific, and an accompanying exhibition spotlights its innovations in this area, including a concept design for a retrofitted private jet cabin that shifts the conversation from ‘replace’ to ‘reuse’.

As part of the William Morris Design Line centred around Morris’ old stomping ground of Walthamstow, colour researcher and trend forecaster Laura Perryman is opening her studio for three days of participatory events. Perryman, founder of Colour of Saying, will host bookable sessions across the long weekend as well as free-for-all open studios on Saturday and Sunday.

Friday’s session is flower-farm foraging to see how nature’s colour can inspire palettes; Saturday focuses on the historical foundations of colour; while Sunday’s session looks ahead, with an exploration of how the circular economy and environmentally conscious practices might affect future colour (book all here).

Cassina’s Staging Modernity show at this year’s Milan Design Week – at the Teatro Lirico Giorgio Gaber, complete with theatrical performance – was a spring highlight, and the Italian brand has brought something of that same spirit to London. The underlying story is the same, a 60th birthday celebration of Cassina’s production of the groundbreaking modernist furniture of Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand.

In the London show, the first four models from the collection that launched in 1965 will be shown on pedestals in the windows in their special anniversary colours of red, blue and green (and made with circular materials), interacting with creatures that include a fox and a crane. Alongside these icons will be the newest additions to the Cassina portfolio.

Vitra and Artek’s cavernous Shoreditch communal showroom will present new launches for both brands over LDF. For Vitra, there will be updates to products originally designed by Charles and Ray Eames, including new colourways and a more sustainably minded approach to timber sourcing, plus a new sofa version of Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec’s Slow range, known for its knitted fabric stretched over a frame. Artek, meanwhile, continues a year of celebrations in honour of its 90th birthday: on show will be new iterations of design classics plus the fruits of a recent collaboration with fellow Finns Marimekko.

Eighty percent of a product’s environmental impact is determined at the design stage, and this show by industrial design agency Morrama is a call for change and a challenge to fellow designers to start thinking differently. Five exemplar projects will illustrate circular design ideas, from Morrama’s work with Wild’s refillable deodorant (which has an aluminium casing and a compostable refill, pictured) to Batch.Works’ and Moramma’s build-your-own kids’ headphones for Kibu. A talks programme runs alongside, culminating in a sit-down with the design team on Sunday 20 September.

MA students from Kingston University’s product and furniture design course have spent the past year creating objects from surplus leather – all part of an initiative by The Leathersellers’ Foundation, which distributes the offcuts and surplus hides to universities. Bill Amberg – a name synonymous with leather in the capital and beyond – has acted as a mentor to the students, and for LDF is hosting a show in his Park Royal Studio that presents the results of the project. Come and see how the next generation of designers has interpreted this most timeless of and versatile of materials, from the Rolling chair by Ting Wan Hsu (pictured), who borrowed metalworking techniques to create fluid forms, to Aleks Cwikla’s knitted leather vessels.

Ceramicist and artist Emma Louise Payne has curated an open-house show at her five-storey London atelier in Lancaster Gate. The Objects We Live By “explores how design shapes, inhabits and becomes part of our everyday lives,” with a presentation that’s more home-like than gallery, with objects arranged in their natural context. That doesn’t make the work itself any less beautiful or extraordinary, though: alongside Payne’s own ceramics (her London Plane collection of slip-cast porcelain, as well as custom-made lighting and tiles that are part of the fabric), there will be a new collection of hand-tufted rugs from Granite + Smoke (pictured above left), marbled sycamore tables by Brogan Cox and Nat Maks aka Natascha Maksimovic (pictured above right), furniture and lighting by David Irwin, and more.