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15 Scotland based designers present 40 new design objects for the hybrid home including furniture, lighting and collectible craft. New materials, innovative processes and playful designs result in product launches from an emerging generation of new designers including Urpflanze, Jeni Allison and Walac, alongside established brands such as Bespoke Atelier, Hilary Grant, and Instrmnt Applied Design. Running from 18 - 26 September and part of Brompton Design District at London Design Festival, The Future of Home curated by Local Heroes conveys the sense of curiosity and discovery found in Scotland’s dynamic design culture.
At a time when we are experiencing an increased fluidity between our home and our workspace, a new exhibition by Edinburgh-based curatorial studio Local Heroes will showcase 40 new products for the hybrid home as part of the Festival. Running from 18 - 26 September, The Future of Home offers a fresh and sophisticated collection of items for modern interiors from a new generation of designers. A wide variety of products, from furniture and lighting to textiles and collectible craft have been brought together aimed at creating spaces of comfort and style that also reflect the hybrid needs of flexible working. Designers who found themselves at a standstill in 2020 used that time to innovate, speculate and dream and the results are a vision of a future where interiors are as fun, beautiful, comforting and tactile as possible.
Marking five years since the first Local Heroes exhibition, Local Heroes' director Stacey Hunter has worked with 20 designers from 15 Scottish design studios and brands to develop the special collection. The Future of Home exhibition responds to Brompton Design District’s theme ‘From here on…’ – set by Jane Withers Studio – and invites visitors to explore a snapshot of contemporary design from Scotland that reflects a reignited optimism and youthful exuberance. Situated just a stone’s throw from the V&A in a dedicated 140 square metre showroom at 6 - 7 Thurloe Place in South Kensington, The Future of Home will appeal to people who consider their interior environment to be a canvas for self-expression. Beautiful forms and nuanced colour palettes sit alongside brilliant invention and highly skilled processes such as intarsia and scagliola. One-of-a-kind lighting sculptures offer collectors a distinctive midpoint between decoration and practicality.
The showroom presents multiple viewpoints on form, material, and beauty; Instrmnt Applied Design’s armchair - a collaboration with independent furniture makers Hame – is an exercise in minimalism using wind-felled sycamore sourced from the Wemyss Estate on the East Coast of Scotland. This has been paired with stainless steel and salvaged linen. It contrasts beautifully with a plant inspired chandelier by Urpflanze rendered in brass and laser-cut green acrylic and a brutalist inspired mixed aggregate and pigmented cement console table by Nicholas Denney Studio.
Myatt–McCallum are blurring the relationship between interior and exterior with concrete furniture that flows joyfully into unique forms. Jeni Allison’s blankets play with and test the boundaries of digital and manual knitting processes, blending the master craftsmanship of intarsia with cutting edge 3D modelling in her Digital Drape series. James Rigler presents the Glasgow Triptych; a series of monumental, austere forms with a distinctive black-and-verdigris surface They use the language of grandiose buildings, splicing this with humble object types: a shelf, a candlestick and a table. Walac’s shelving system elevates the storage of books and treasured objects into The Art of Stacking. A new range of wallpaper from Bespoke Atelier continues the studio’s radical No Rules philosophy, where patterns have been intentionally designed not to repeat. Instead, all parts of the roll work together to form a seamless wallcovering.
The natural materials used by many Local Heroes designers are sourced in the UK such as Jeni Allison and Hilary Grant’s 100% lambswool blankets. Chalk Plaster’s gypsum-based Scagliola side tables have been created with wild pigments collected from the coastline of Fife with every location offering its own distinctive palette of colours and tones. Simon Harlow’s walnut, poplar and beech furniture demonstrates how a chair can be a dining chair, a lounge chair, an office chair – even a workstation in its own right, and a boldly graphic sculptural object. Hard linear engineering for longevity and strength goes together with handmade processes, as seen in Mirrl’s latest solid surface material fossil. It was developed as a way to use the waste material from the production of the original eponymously named Mirrl surface. This is finely chopped and becomes the inclusions that gives the new material its unique fossil-like appearance – and which carry their own histories.
A bespoke stained glass piece by Pavilion Pavilion welcomes visitors to the gallery as they pass through the threshold. Once inside, a series titled The Isles of Reclaimed Wonderment – a collaboration between Walac X Juli Bolaños-Durman, transforms found glass collected, rescued and gifted over the years into a combination of fantasy and functionality in their one-of-a-kind lighting sculptures. A large rug featuring an innovative and unusual topography is the result of a collaboration between Studio Sam Buckley and Milan’s cc-tapis. It has been hand-tufted in Nepal by expert Tibetan artisans. Hilary Grant returns to London with the St Ives wall hanging and blanket in a nuanced colour palette inspired by St Ives’ artists movement of the 1940s. The layered use of colour and shape, characteristic of this artistic period, is reimagined by the Orkney based knitwear studio.
“This exhibition is a showcase of refreshingly original, bold design for people who see their homes as a canvas for self-expression. The showroom is also a survey of design research in practice. It brings together an international group of designers, artists and makers who all work and live in Scotland. New ideas are being tested and tried out – and cultural contradictions are welcome in this landscape which conveys the sense of curiosity and discovery found in Scotland’s dynamic design culture,” says curator and Local Heroes Director Dr. Stacey Hunter:
A platform for critical discussion, dissemination and acquisition, The Future of Home is positioned towards buyers, collectors, and future collaborators. The showroom will host specially programmed elements throughout the festival including a preview of knitwear by Jeni Allison, designer and designer talks and a free (but ticketed) curatorial tour.
This exhibition is made possible with the support of the National Lottery through Creative Scotland.
Listings Information
Local Heroes: The Future of Home
18 - 26 September (Industry View 23rd September)
Brompton Design District
6 - 7 Thurloe Place, South Kensington, London SW7 2RX
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