The Living Room exhibition at Luna and Curious boutique in Shoreditch, part of the London Design Festival (LDF), showed that British design could be both useful and beautiful. Curated by Jonathan Krawczuk and Alyn Griffiths it married witty design with quality manufacturing and craftsmanship using traditional materials. A very small exhibition compared to many of the other events at LDF it was a snapshot of all that is good about British furniture making, ceramics, glassware, soft furnishings and prints – taking the traditional and giving it a hefty tweak.
On first entering, I felt like I was in a farmhouse kitchen. There was a Windsor chair, a three-legged stool, a wooden side table with a teapot on it and a console table with sturdy turned oak legs and a limestone top, that had it been bigger could grace many a style-conscious kitchen.
The Mrs B Console was designed by Russell Pinch and made by Benchmark. The angular turning on the legs was a modern echo of traditional wood turning techniques. The Matthew Hilton-designed Kimble Windsor Chair in ash and walnut used a traditionally simple shape to show off the beauty of the wood. It is one of a range of four, each named after the villages neighbouring High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, where the Windsor Chair originated. And keeping that tradition alive, the chairs are built by Ercol, the last of the traditional High Wycombe furniture manufacturers.
The Store jars from Established and Sons could have been inspired by power station chimneys. The charcoal grey matt finish on the outside of the jars resembled slate but was in fact porcelain, the other jar in the trio was faced with copper. Their appeal lies in the simplicity of the shape and colour with the mix of textures – rough on the outside, gloss on the inside and tactile cork lids. Looking up there were more chimneys – lights by Benjamin Hubert for Viaduct made in Wales using a slip-casting process. And again there was a mix of textures: the exterior painted with a terracotta slip, the interior with a glossy white finish.
Doing a 180 degree turn I was facing a living room arranged around Young and Norgate’s beautifully crafted American Black Walnut and matt bronze aluminium sideboard. (Yes the sideboard is back in a big way.) Among the exhibits on the sideboard was a Decanterlamp by Lee Broom. It is what it says – a lamp base made from wine and port decanters stacked on top of each other, lacquered white and topped off with a white drum shade. Ingenious, simple and very beautiful.
The sense of fun that I love so much in British design was provided by Polly George’s Mr and Mrs Jones plates, part of a collection of crockery featuring tiny sculpted heads of the happy couple. It’s the kind of plate you need at breakfast: it just makes you smile.
After all that standing around looking at things and taking notes, I had to sit down! The Tweed Pi pouffe brings that 1960s and 70s living room staple bang up to date. Made by Fun Makes Good (great name) and designed by their founder Eleanor Young especially for the exhibition, it was covered in shades of blue in Harris Tweed – not a fabric I’d usually associate with soft furnishings but if Nike can make trainers out of Harris Tweed then why not have a pouffe made from it? – and added geometric patchwork pieces in leather and other materials.
My visit was completed with a short geography lesson on the British Isles courtesy of a hand-pulled screen print by Bold and Noble – The British Isles Type Map – which cleverly forms a map of Britain and Ireland from the names of major towns and cities, the size of the typeface corresponding to the size of the town. Not only did my friend and I discover that some towns were bigger than we thought they were, I learned that there was a town in Scotland called Brora. I had thought it was just a shop that sold cardigans.
