London Design Festival 2025 | Chiara Colombini

London Design Festival 2025

The London Design Festival turns the city into a vast creative playground. The 23rd edition took place on 13th-21st September 2025, bringing together a wide range of designers and makers, across numerous exhibitions throughout the city.

At the heart of the festival, Brompton Design District remains one of its most anticipated hubs. After eighteen years under Jane Withers, Alex Tieghi-Walker takes the lead. Founder of New York gallery TIWA Select, he champions an artisanal sensibility, rooted in gesture and material.

The 2025 edition, A Softer World, made this stance explicit. “Craft has this innate feeling of softness, gentleness, and domesticity. That’s something I really wanted to bring into the theme – seeing softness as a strength, not a weakness,” he explained. For this, he invited curators such as Rooms Studio, Tione Trice and Charlotte Taylor to invest residential and atypical spaces.

Charlotte Taylor’s exhibition “Soft World, Sharp Edges”, staged in a single bedroom, brought together the work of thirty women designers, including Amelia Stevens, Garance Vallée, Bel Williams, Grace Prince, Olivia Bossy, Laila Tara H…

The installation reframed the gallery as a domestic stage, peeling back the polished veneer of the home to reveal layered realities of design, authorship, and cinematic tension.

Ceramicist Emma Louise Payne opened the doors of her childhood home for “The Objects We Live By”. The five-storey Sussex Square townhouse featured work by David Irwin, Studio BC Joshua, Brogan Cox and Nat Maks, Gather Glass, Daniel Mullin, Atelier Thirty Four and Granite + Smoke, alongside Payne’s own ceramic creations.

Each room hosted a designer’s work – showing the pieces not as abstract objects, but as a part of daily life. Pieces slipped into the kitchen, the corridor, the living room, without pedestal or spotlight. They were lived with rather than contemplated, prompting reflection on how objects shape our gestures, movements and perceptions.

Family ties continued with Tamart. Founded by London-based architect Amos Goldreich in tribute to his parents – modernist architects and polymaths Tamar de Shalit and Arthur Goldreich – the studio draws from an archive of more than 10,000 original plans and documents.

Its debut furniture collection features newly reimagined and reinterpreted mid-century furniture and lighting designs, inspired by or taken directly from custom-made originals specified for residential and hospitality architectural projects by Tamar de Shalit and Arthur Goldreich thought their careers spanning from the 1950s-1980s.

Each piece in the collection is made in the UK and Europe from sustainably sourced materials.

In Shoreditch Town Hall, House of Icon showcased a mix of established brands, such as Another Country, together with a range of emerging and independent designers. We particularly appreciated the work of UK based Lucie Reuter – solid wood furniture created for assembly with no visible screws; Istanbul based Grob Design – the Milan coffee table combining wood and metal; and Thai designer Thanapond Sukthana of Jaajr Studio.

Jaajr Studio’s Luna Luna lamp is inspired by the spiral motif of traditional dressmaking. The lamp features multiple levels of fabric, creating an effect of shadows wrapping around the form when the light is on. The piece evokes the flow of time: growth, movement, renewal. A work rooted in craft, yet open to universal symbolism.

And in a different register, but with equal intensity, Lightmass installed their lighting collection in the basement of the Wax Building.

The brand, founded by designers Raw Edges, showed lights which moved beyond illumination, becoming part of the architecture. Ultra-light structures stretched feather-like webs, in dialogue with space. The collection radiated a spellbinding energy.

We closed our journey at Heathfield & Co, one of our cherished UK partners. Seeing The Haze collection in person – and in particular the Vira and Sole pendants – was a highlight of London Design Festival.

We were equally drawn to the new range of linen fabrics, allowing many possibilities of customisation through made-to-measure lampshades.

Heathfield are particularly known for their fabric lampshades – the company being founded over 40 years ago when Andrew Watson, searching for property development opportunities, came across a lampshade makers workshop in Bromley, London. Inspired by the craftsmanship, he scrapped his plans to renovate the building, choosing instead to save the business and preserve the heritage of the craft.

London Design Festival 2025 showed us again that design does not merely decorate. It transforms space.

Cover picture credit : Courtesy London Design Festival and Paul Cocksedge via Wallpaper

Shop the Look

CATERINA TABLE LAMP

Mattina Moderna

VIRA PENDANT LIGHT

Heathfield & Co

FOOT STOOL

Project 213A

APOLLO 14 WALL LIGHT

Pholc

LA MER AU SOLEIL

Roberto Ruspoli

MODULATION FLOOR LIGHT

Axel Chay

London Design Festival 2025

The 2025 edition, A Softer World, made this stance explicit. “Craft has this innate feeling of softness, gentleness, and domesticity. That’s something I really wanted to bring into the theme – seeing softness as a strength, not a weakness,” he explained.

For this, he invited curators such as Rooms Studio, Tione Trice and Charlotte Taylor to invest residential and atypical spaces.

Charlotte Taylor’s exhibition “Soft World, Sharp Edges”, staged in a single bedroom, brought together the work of thirty women designers. The installation reframed the gallery as a domestic stage, peeling back the polished veneer of the home to reveal layered realities of design, authorship, and cinematic tension.

Ceramicist Emma Louise Payne opened the doors of her childhood home for “The Objects We Live By”. Each room hosted a designer’s work – not as distant art, but as a part of daily life. Pieces slipped into the kitchen, the corridor, the living room, without pedestal or spotlight.

They were lived with rather than contemplated, prompting reflection on how objects shape our gestures, movements and perceptions.

Family ties continued with Tamart. Founded by architect Amos Goldreich in tribute to his parents – modernist figures Tamar de Shalit and Arthur Goldreich – the studio draws from an archive of more than 10,000 original plans and documents. Its debut furniture collection reinterprets mid-century wooden pieces with rigorous clarity.

Modernism here retains its purity and timelessness yet finds voice in the present: a heritage continued, a chapter renewed.

At House of Icon, we appreciated the delicate work of Thai designer Thanapond Sukthana. Her Luna Luna Lamp, inspired by the spiral motif of traditional dressmaking, embodied continuous transformation. The piece evoked the flow of time: growth, movement, renewal.

A work rooted in craft, yet open to universal symbolism.

In the basement of the Wax Building, Lightmass – founded by designers Raw Edges – showed lights which moved beyond illumination, becoming part of the architecture. Ultra-light structures stretched feather-like webs, in dialogue with space. The collection radiated a spellbinding energy.