London Design Festival 2026 Preview

London- and Toyko-based design studio Tangent runs this programme of cultural exchange, where traditional Japanese artisans working in centuries-old techniques pair up with international designers. The most recent meeting of minds happened in Tokai, central Japan, and the results are being shown at the V&A as one of the festival’s Special Projects.

Pictured are industrial designer David Caon and ceramicist Yohei Ito’s console and lamp, made from a single cylindrical module with a luxuriantly lush green glaze. Caon and Ito have named them Fushi, the Japanese name for the joint in a bamboo stem.

Based in Clerkenwell, the Scandinavian design gallery Dagmar balances vintage finds with reissues of 20th-century classics. At the London Design Festival, it is unveiling a new capsule collection by Swedish designer Carl Malmsten, a devotee of local materials and traditions who leaned on a network of small workshops to make his work. The Dagmar pieces are a collaboration with one of those original workshops, the fourth-generation O.H. Sjögren, and include the Samspel sofa and Cirkus chair (pictured); the gallery will show them alongside rare original pieces from names including Hans Wegner, Finn Juhl and Ib Kofod-Larsen.

Mayfair design gallery Monologue’s LDF show distorts reality thanks to a 1.9m-diameter stainless steel circular mirror that will dominate the space and shift perceptions of everything around it. Architecture and interiors studio Paraforma designed the mirror, which was made by Italian metal specialists Mingardo, while the reflected design contributions include a Joe Colombo daybed from Tacchini, Venetian glass specialist 6:AM’s Lina Totem floor lamp and Henry Svendsen’s Bent stainless steel chair.

Normally used as unremarkably descorated guest accommodation for Chelsea College of Arts, The Atterbury Flat has been transformed into a joyful ‘living showcase’ for more than 100 objects and artworks, designed and made by students and graduates from UAL (the umbrella university for six of the capital’s creative higher education institutions).

The project has been spearheaded by lecturer Zoë Tynan-Campbell and is a formidable reflection of UAL’s calibre of creative talent, from the custom wallpaper by Camberwell College of Arts’ Xu Shi used across one of the bedroom ceilings to 3D-printed botanical lamps by London College of Communication’s Yichun Lu. Tynan-Campbell says that the flat “is an exercise in what happens when you radically trust your students”.

This group show at Caledonian Road gallery Blackdot has an underlying theme of subverting ordinary objects, whether through a shift in materials, an injection of humour or an unexpected form. Its 36 participating artists and designers work across disciplines including jewellery, textiles, ceramics, furniture, glass and lighting, so this is a chance to step into a strange and wonderful world where not all is as it seems. Look out for Eden Frymel’s plush Loopy lamps with their friendly snaking forms, and Ana Luisa Braun Rodrigues’ armour-like jewellery, made from the rare reflective plant capim dourado from her native Brazil, and fish scales.

Every year, lifestyle brand Toast champions the work of emerging international makers, supporting them with online retail and presentations like this one at South Kensington’s multi-gallery venue, The Lavery. The New Makers initiative is now in its eighth year, and this year’s cohort includes jeweller Egle Sitkauskaite, ceramicist Hannah Watts and Jacob Marks, who makes objects from pine resin – once a widely used material, now being reappraised as a sustainable saviour. Makers receive the full proceeds from the sale of their pieces.

The Lavery is one of Brompton Design District’s key hubs, so stay on for some of the other events. Mexican designer Rafael Prieto’s sculptural chairs will be on show in the private dining room, while The Speaking Oasis, an official festival project, explores how traditional palm weaving might find a place in contemporary design.

Varuna Kollanethu’s Old Street gallery Ruup & Form is known for exploring the space where art meets craft, and for championing material-led makers. Its autumn show, which opens at the start of LDF, is the first solo gallery exhibition of the Chinese-Korean, London-based artist Woo Jin Joo. She describes her practice as “myth-making”, inspired by folklore and shamanism, and bringing together media including freehand machine embroidery, textiles, ceramics, sculpture and drawing. There will be sculptural seating from which to have a quiet encounter with the artist’s work, including shaggy three-dimensional creatures made from viscose thread.

Unlocked’s converted industrial warehouse plays host to Material Matters for the first time as part of Shoreditch Design Week. The show brings together designers, brands and thinkers with an interest in how materials inform the built environment, with an emphasis on innovation.

Renewable, nature-based materials and finding new uses for waste have been front and centre since the show’s inception and continue to be so – Alexie Sommer and Quentin Delion’s Useful Totem, for example, is a collection of stacking tableware made from pre-loved glassware, recycled cork and waste wood offcuts – but you can also expect big-picture, thought leadership initiatives. As part of Hand, Code, Matter: A New Flow for Spatial Design, Shenzhen-headquartered architectural practice Matrix Design is showing off its Lovspark AI-powered spatial design tool – a potential answer to the question of how hand-making and AI might work together to retain the essential spark of human character. Eight recent architecture graduates used the tool to create spaces, and the results will be on show.

At LDF, Fritz Hansen celebrates something less often considered in design: the contribution of sound to the way we experience a space. The starting point is the Danish brand’s collaboration with Technics – a Fritz Hansen-branded SL 40CB turntable and complementary Kaiser Idell Luxus lamp in matching burgundy lacquer. To celebrate the launch, there will be a sound-led installation, with vinyl that can be played on the new turntables across four different spaces. Visitors can also explore several new Fritz Hansen editions, including a smaller wall version of the Kaiser Idell and new finishes for the Superellipse table.

A day-long symposium dedicated to a subject dear to DA/UK’s heart, Reading Magazines: 300 Years of Magazine Evolution assembles a group of publishers, historians, and academics to explore what it means to make magazines today. Speakers include Magforum’s Tony Quinn, creative director Scott King and Erotic Review editor Lucy Roeber. The venue is the St Bride Foundation, the Fleet Street cultural and educational venue with a focus on the printing and publishing industries.  

The work of American artist and furniture designer Christopher Kurtz is surveyed in this solo autumn show at Mayfair’s Sarah Myserscough Gallery. Its title, Badlands, references the prehistoric landscape of the South Dakota Badlands – hostile terrain that Kurtz aligns with his own practice. Alongside his design objects – a cabinet fronted by trompe-l’oeil drapery carved from timber, twin, sledge-like chairs suspended from a tangle of thick rope – the show will include an installation of 3,000 ‘skipping stones’, made from offcuts of timber accumulated over 20 years of studio work.

Bocci’s purple portable light is the starting point for this pop-up installation in Soho, by the colour-centric designer Bethan Laura Wood. Inspired by the film Labyrinth, Wood has designed a series of totems, each one topped by a purple Bocci 14p light. The lights are made from neodymium glass, known for its ability to subtly change colour according to its surroundings, so expect a shifting atmospheric quality as you wander dreamily through this maze.

Masur birch is a rare timber with a distinctive look – like a burr timber, but with a more small-scale, flame-like decorative grain. Its delicate good looks have inspired east London design gallery Béton Brut’s latest launch, on show at LDF. A collaboration with modernist furniture manufacturer Isokon, the Masur Edition sees four 1936 designs by Marcel Breuer reinterpreted in masur birch veneer, giving them an opulent new spin that challenges the idea that modernist materials should be at their most reductive and functional. At the gallery, they will be in dialogue with vintage furniture and contemporary designer David Horan’s ‘vegan vellum’ work in washi paper.

Max Radford Gallery “seeks to platform work sitting in the grey areas between design and fine art in all its guises.” Here the gallery is pitching up at rug specialist Christopher Farr’s Spitalfields studio to present limited-edition and collectible pieces old and new. They will be backdropped by rugs with an artistic sensibility: pictured is Gary Hume’s Door Rug 4031 paired with Carsten in der Elst’s sculptural sandstone Graywacke Offcut chair.

New Zealand design brand Resident presents a survey of its collection at this Angel pop-up showroom, marking 15 years in business. Explore classics alongside some new additions to the portfolio, among them the Avant chair by Note Design Studio, Michael Young’s pebble-like Drift lighting and Tim Rundle’s Radio dining chair and stool. The space will also act as a cultural hub for the design community, with designer workshops, networking events and an experimental film festival (with some very comfortable chairs, no doubt).