London Design Festival celebrates and promotes London as the design capital of the world. Now in its fifteenth year, the Festival was celebrated at venues and institutions across the city between 16-24 September last week..
History of London Design Festival
Conceived by Sir John Sorrell and Ben Evans in 2003. Building on London’s existing design activity, their concept was to create an annual event that would promote the city’s creativity, drawing in the country’s greatest thinkers, practitioners, retailers and educators to a deliver an unmissable celebration of design. The launch of the first Festival took place at Bloomberg on 25 March 2003, with a huge show of support from design, education, government and London organisations.
The House of Wallpaper by Graham and Brown.
As part of London Design Festival 2017. I visited Graham and Brown’s wonderfully imagined and very beautiful ‘House of Wallpaper’ A drawing of which you can see above. It was designed by the Architects SSH
The UK’s largest wallpaper manufacturer brought their creative story and company history to life in The House of Wallpaper, a Soho townhouse transformed by SHH Interior Design to showcase Graham and Browns wallpaper design studio, archive pieces, new collections, installations and innovations.
Archive pieces used as modern inspiration…
History of the company…
In house designer, such beautiful hand drawn illustrative work….
I wish I had taken more pictures of the exterior of the house. It was decorated with real flowers, a breathtaking sight in stark contrast to the traffic and pollution of Greek Street.
I was taken on a tour of the house that started with the new collections for next year. I was shown the inspirational mood boards that start the design process. Each of the four wire collection boards looked like art installation’s in their own right, they would have looked perfectly at home in the Tate Modern!
Trends 2017/2018
Below is the inspiration for the wallpaper of the year.. ‘Pierre’
As someone who is travelling to Morocco next week, this one took my fancy!
Stroma
I loved this one too so clean and fresh but with an origami twist…this is a trend based on 3 dimensional structures with several layers and folds.
The resulting papers: Souk and Stroma…
Even the stairs were inspiring me to get out the wallpaper paste!
Wallpaper of the year
Called Pierre, it depicts hand painted magnolia flowers on a white gold metallic background in real life it is beautiful! The pink colour is called ‘Penelope pink’ You can now buy paint to match from Graham and brown too.
I must say that as a fan of thunder birds in my childhood, the name conjured up wonderful memories of Lady Penelope in her pink Rolls Royce!
Looking to next year’s trends, Magnolia flowers are set to take the lead with floral; with fashion catwalks seeing more wallpaper style florals being placed on to key clothing pieces.
To top off a perfect visit, I then stayed to listen to one of my design heroes speak. It was none other than Wayne Hemmingway (Red or Dead) along with his wife and son. They sat and chatted with us about all things design and told us some family stories too. They looked uber cool and were the nicest down to earth people you could ever hope to meet!
Why not pop over to the Graham and Brown website and see if you can find some Inspo for your home too?
You can read more of my Interior design posts Here:
I hope you have a great week and dont forget to follow me on instagram to see follow me on my visit to Morocco?