A recap of Clerkenwell Design Week 2022
From 24 – 26 May, Clerkenwell was once again awash with activity for its 11th edition with visitors gathering from far and wide to celebrate the latest in design.
2022 installation by Interface
This article first appeared in Mix Interiors #220
With a distinct sustainability theme across the festival, over 150 showrooms opened their doors for three days of talks, workshops and festivities, and more exhibitions and installations than ever before. As we hurtle towards a pre-pandemic sense of normality, it was a pleasure to see the crowds spilling onto Great Sutton Street once again.
Let’s start at the end, which saw Mix take over Senator and Allermuir’s impressive London showroom with the Mix 30 under 30, celebrating the Class of 2022 with their colleagues and our partners Senator, Allermuir, Amtico and Hunters. Thank you to everyone who joined us for what was a fantastic recognition of young talent in the industry – and the biggest celebration yet!
A veritable smorgasbord of new products made a debut at Clerkenwell Design Week, including the Pearson Lloyd-designed Revo workplace seating collection for Profim. Endlessly configurable (and recyclable) the collection includes sofas, benches, screens, and stools in softly contoured, organic shapes. Aesthetically, Revo was inspired by the concept of ‘squaring the circle’, creating a gentle geometric language that makes the collection distinctive, but also allows it to be assembled in a huge number of different ways.
Patricia Urquiola for Andreu
World
Andreu World also presented new, circular designs – Alfredo Haberli, Patricia Urquiola, Benjamin Hubert and Philippe Starck. The showroom has been completely renovated to accommodate the new collections as well as exploring with new typologies of furniture in collaboration with Gensler.
This year’s festival featured a record-breaking nine exhibition venues, including the new Contract exhibition as part of Project at St James’ Church. Showcasing emerging commercial interiors brands as well as leading manufacturers new to EC1, we have high hopes for Contract next year – leaving a little uninspired with the 2022 offering.
Inside Interface’s new showroom, a series of events delved into regenerative design and how interior designers can help deliver a Net Zero built environment, as well as designing for cognitive and sensory wellbeing. Special guests including architect Michael Pawlyn and Oliver Heath were invited to discuss sustainability and wellbeing, and how these can co-exist to create beautiful spaces. Just outside the showroom in St John’s Gate, Interface displayed a showstopping art installation which represented the company’s sustainability journey from petroleum-intensive manufacturer to leader in climate conscious design and manufacture, which was made from the 100 per cent recycled ECONYL® yarn used in Interface’s carpet tiles.
Nowy Styl and Kusch +
Co’s showroom
The district was overflowing with new and revamped showrooms – including the refreshed Ege showroom on Britton Street. With a talks programme including guests TOG’s Nasim Koerting, Accor’s Arun Rana and colour trend predictions from Crown Paints, Ege closed CDW with possibly the most popular event of the festival – with over 700 registering for their Hed Kandi closing party.
Nowy Styl and Kusch+Co’s new shared showroom has opened in the capital, inspired by the Tate Modern gallery, bold colours and a closeness to nature. Upstairs, a bright and transparent space forms a non-distracting background, bringing the design of the furniture to the fore, while downstairs has warmer and more subdued interiors – reminiscent of residential and hospitality design. Visitors checked out Kusch+Co’s latest product V-Care, which has just won the prestigious Red Dot Design Award 2022 for its unique design.
Formica Group, the world’s original manufacturer of laminates, has also announced the launch of its European flagship showroom on Clerkenwell Road. Visitors enjoyed Formica’s own time tunnel – charting the company’s history in surface innovation, and a samples zone that includes the newly launched ‘Colours’ and ‘Woods’ ranges for 2022.
Other new showrooms include natural stone specialists, SolidNature and RAK Ceramics, both opening new spaces in Clerkenwell in time for this year’s festival. SolidNature celebrated their opening with an installation by Squire & Partners encouraging visitors to explore, touch and play – featuring the stone tapestry table the design practice first created for Surface Design Show.
Elsewhere on Clerkenwell Road, Arper opened the festival with a bang, celebrating in typical refined style at their annual Opening Night Party. On display were the latest collections: Mixu, designed in collaboration with Gensler, as well as new iterations of the iconic Kinesit Met and Aston Club chairs.
At their award-winning showroom Autex Acoustics showed off their latest range, Acoustic Timber – a beautiful high performance acoustic treatment designed to imitate timber with impressive sustainability credentials. The Mix team were lucky to squeeze into their fabulous rooftop closing party – Autexfest – which was full of surprises and left us all with sore heads on Friday morning!
Formica Collection
As always, the Tarkett showroom remained a central hub for visitors to CDW – this year hosting a series of thought-provoking workshops and talks around the theme of REIMAGINE. Discussions included a panel with Note Design Studio and The Office Group offering insight into the design process for Douglas House and Summit House, and an inspiring ‘Made to be Remade’ talk with research agency Franklin Till – with whom Tarkett collaborated to create this issue’s cover. Continuing their REIMAGINE theme, Tarkett also hosted a craft exhibition, with local designers creating the extraordinary from everyday items.
Next door at The Gallery, IVC Commercial and Unilin hosted a series of talks with Material Matters podcast’s Grant Gibson. Guests included the team from Oktra discussing the hot topic of home vs office – and whether the ‘homeification’ of the office is a tool to encourage employees back to work, or the start of a lasting trend towards comfortable and compassionate working environments.
At the Orangebox showroom, Perkins&Will took over the entire ground floor of the building for this year’s Unboxed project, exploring the theme of the ‘Co-Universe’ and transforming the space into a series of flexible areas for coworking, quiet focus and meetings. Talks included a panel discussion with the creativeteams from both Perkins&Will and NoChintz, discussing the vision of the project and the innovation needed to overcome the challenges faced when designing the future workplace.
KI returned to Paxton Locher House on Clerkenwell Green, with a stunning floral display by McQueens Flowers woven into their latest products including the popular Colonnade series. Highlights from the KI talks programme included insight from the Myers Briggs Company, discussing the impact of hybrid working on office design based on their recent primary research – keep an eye out for their findings in the next issue of Mix. Next door, Karndean’s new showroom offered a boutique, friendly welcome – showcasing their new collections including the Knight Tile collection.
TOG and Note at Tarkett
Around the corner at Old Sessions House, Baux and Form Us With Love created the BAUX Acoustic Lounge – an impressive installation to introduce its first foray into the ceiling market with Acoustic Ceiling Tiles. The new panels are made from Wood Wool; a material that has been installed in ceilings to improve acoustics for generations.
At the Humanscale showroom, the ergonomic experts launched NeatCharge, an innovative cable free charger for mobile devices that can be integrated into task furniture and soft seating. Elsewhere, the über-sustainable Smart Ocean and Liberty Ocean chairs were proudly on display, utilising material from discarded fishing nets pulled directly from the ocean. The nets are transformed into plastic pellets and then used to manufacture the chairs; the materials for each product are listed on Declare Product Database.
Humanscale also teamed up with Square Mile Farms, who put urban farms into the heart of cities where people live and work. Two of their urban farms provided Humanscale visitors with fresh, healthy zero travel miles produce. At the end of the three days the farms were harvested – providing herbs for end of festival drinks.
Conversations at Clerkenwell returned to Spa Field: the Fieldwork Architects-designed Talk Space providing a colourful setting for a series of equally colourful daily talks from the likes of Tom Dixon, Adam Nathaniel Furman and ‘Materials Matter’- a discussion on responsible design and the importance of materials, in the fight towards a circular and sustainable future featuring guests from Benchmark, UltraFabrics and BAUX.
Conversations at CDW
Phew! With over 400 events and 150 showrooms to visit across a mere 72 hours (allowing a few hours for sleep, of course) we did manage to see more inspiring talks, showrooms and workshops than ever before, and certainly too many to mention here with the restraints of print. In short: a triumphant return for the much-loved festival.
