The Monocle Minute
On Design

This week we sink deep between the leather cushions of the London Design Festival. From MillerKnoll’s new shop in Clerkenwell to Faye Toogood’s squashed collaboration with Italian firm Poltrona Frau and Paul Smith’s visual remix of three Alvar Aalto classics, Monocle has been on hand, and on stool, to see what the UK capital has to offer. At the head of the table, Grace Charlton speaks to the UK’s return to creative form.

In between the terracotta brickwork of the Chelsea College of Arts and the imposing Tate Britain sits a prismatic temporary installation called “Vert”. Standing tall in the school’s Parade Ground, the three-way collaboration between Munich-based design studio Diez Office, the American Hardwood Export Council and city-greening specialists OMCºC is a biodiversity project, intended to point out the ease with which such structures can positively impact the urban landscape by lowering temperatures and providing habitats for animals and insects.

Constructed from red oak glulam, an engineered hardwood, there is also biodegradable netting suspended from the structure’s peaks to allow climbing plants to grow across its triangular frame. The greenery doubles as shade for the installation’s hammock-like seating. “What we’ve done here is an experiment,” says Stefan Diez of Diez Office. “We envision this structure to be a part of the cities of the future. The red oak we’re using is a beautiful material – and on top of it, we’re growing plants that create a huge amount of biomass and vaporise a significant amount of water, which cools the city down.” After being unveiled this past weekend as part of the London Design Festival, the installation is set to remain in place for another four weeks. Over the course of a single summer the climbing plants have the potential to fully cover the structure, cooling the surrounding air by as much as 8C and visually enriching the landscape.

Visit ‘Vert’ at the Parade Ground of the Chelsea College of Arts, 16 John Islip Street, London

MillerKnoll – the design supergroup formed by the merger of two major names in mid-century furniture – is on a roll, opening new showrooms across the globe. The latest is in the UK capital and opened just in time for the London Design Festival. Situated in Clerkenwell, it’s the first major MillerKnoll outpost outside the US and features dedicated contract showrooms, retail space for Knoll and Herman Miller, as well as Maharam (MillerKnoll’s textile company). Far from simply being a one-stop shop for the group (other MillerKnoll brands Muuto, NaughtOne and Hay are also located nearby), efforts have been made to ensure that the space captures the group’s ethos.

“It offers a physical manifestation of MillerKnoll, bringing our well-loved brands together under one roof – while also telling the story of each individual brand through distinct design elements and exhibitions” says Debbie Propst, president of global retail for MillerKnoll. It’s a sentiment that Jonathan Olivares, senior vice president of design at Knoll, agrees with: “Pieces are chosen and placed in a succession of interior settings, which create visual poems using Knoll's vast and exceptional colour, materials and finish choices.” The approach ensures the physical spaces reflect the values built into the products themselves – an admirable ambition for any showroom.

Visit MillerKnoll at The Sans, 20 St John’s Square, London.

The London Design Festival’s “Off The Shelf” pavilion has been installed on the site of Olympia, a former exhibition space, which is currently undergoing an extensive renovation. Curated by arts organisation Company, Place, it was designed by London-based Rio Kobayashi in collaboration with Webb Yates Engineers, and includes artworks by Cynthia Fan. Here, we learn about the pavilion’s design with Kobayashi and Webb Yates Engineers’ co-founder Steve Webb.

Tell us about the inspiration for the pavilion.
Rio Kobayashi: I grew up in the middle of the Japanese countryside in a home my parents built themselves. My mum is Austrian and my dad is Japanese so the house was a mixture of Japanese and European tastes. They both travelled around the world when they were young and collected a lot of objects, which were always placed on our shelves at home. I designed a timber structure to reflect that, with shelves for curiosities. It looks a bit like a Japanese temple with small details painted and inspired by the posters and patterns of the [20th-century Austrian creative group] Wiener Werkstätte. We also included ways of capturing the rain and chimes to make the wind visible.

Steve, you worked very closely with Rio on the design. How did you make his vision stand up?
Steve Webb: We both work in timber and stone quite a lot. We [Webb Yates Engineers] make big buildings and Rio makes beautiful furniture and this is somewhere in between. We wanted to avoid the usual criticisms of pavilions commissioned for design festivals so we used natural materials and came up with a way of making the shelving system from off-the-shelf timber pieces and small offcuts. These are post-tensioned together – a technique typically used for making really huge structures, which relies on friction and compression to hold a structure together without drilling, glueing or cutting. The idea was that we keep the products in their biggest, purest possible form. All of it was held down by stones placed on the shelves to act as a ballast, which meant we didn’t have to dig foundations.

What’s next for the pavilion?
RK: I like the fact that it can be dismantled and I can then make some furniture out of it. There’s a beauty to that.
SW: I love the idea that there’s a Venn diagram of aesthetic design and engineering where solutions land in that overlap. We want to create structurally and physically intelligent designs but also very beautiful designs using natural materials. We’ve done that.

Visit the ‘Off The Shelf’ pavilion at the Olympia Marketing Suite on Maclise Road, London. For more from the likes of Rio Kobayashi and Steve Webb, tune in to‘Monocle On Design’.

​​For the London Design Festival, UK designer Faye Toogood and Italian firm Poltrona Frau have taken over the Poltrona Frau flagship store on Fulham Road with an installation celebrating Toogood’s Squash collection, first presented during Milan Design Week earlier this year. The showcase, called “A Squashed Space”, is unapologetically bright and fun. The furniture is unpretentiously spread across the showroom and consists of a low armchair, foot stool, coffee table and various mirrors, including a full-length one that casually leans.

The material of the moment is leather, which features extensively in every piece, carefully utilising Poltrona Frau’s expert craftsmanship. Seats are tightly upholstered while asymmetrical mirrors are framed in mineral blue, brown tan and lipstick red. The collection sits against a backdrop of colourful leather drapes and is testament to Toogood’s determination to loosen perceptions of formality in furniture while maintaining quality and a high-end aesthetic.
poltronafrau.com, fayetoogood.com

Visit Poltrona Frau at 147-153 Fulham Road, London.

Finnish firm Artek is landing in the UK capital for the London Design Festival with a new collaboration that blends fashion and furniture. Three Artek creations by Alvar Aalto have been infused with designer Paul Smith’s visual style.

The iconic Stool 60 has been reimagined with a vibrant ultramarine blue on the underside, while Screen 100 and Coat Rack 109 feature strips made of five different types of wood, a reference to Paul Smith’s famous striped patterns. This collaboration is a playful take on a British institution’s iconic style, combined with the crisp elegance of Scandinavian furniture.
artek.fi, paulsmith.com

See Artek’s collaboration with Paul Smith at Tramshed, 32 Rivington Street, London, until Saturday 21 September.

Design studio Pearson Lloyd has been a steady contributor to London Design Festival in recent years, staging exhibitions in its studio in the city’s east. This year’s edition, titled “Well Made”, brings together an array of artists, designers and educators who were tasked with questioning the notion of good design by celebrating unheralded projects and objects. The 60 contributors selected items that they considered perfect examples of design, including everything from a potato peeler and a plastic bag to 3D-printed shoes and chopsticks. “It’s very nice to have a show that isn’t typically design-led,” says Luke Pearson, who curated the exhibition with Tom Lloyd. “It’s ubiquitous design, not fetishised design.”

Though 40 of the contributors were selected by the pair, 20 were chosen through an open call. “We could have had 250 contributors for this exhibition,” says Pearson, adding that by showcasing perspectives from different disciplines around the world, visitors are invited to consider their own notions of what constitutes a well-made object. The exhibition serves as a reminder that sometimes the best-made objects are those that we come into contact with in both unexpected and everyday ways.
pearsonlloyd.com

Visit ‘Well Made’ at 1-3 Yorkton Street, London, until Sunday 22 September.