Feature
Greenwich Scene Time
Each year the London Design Festival (LDF) seems to grow in scope and aspiration. Now in its ninth year, 2011’s fest featured presentations by 280 designers and their partners and almost three hundred events about work covering twenty-five design disciplines. As well, the LDF boasted twelve commissioned design projects installed at museums and venues all over Britain’s capital. If the artistic side of your right brain is boggled by all those digits, also consider that the festival ran for only nine days, from September 17 to 25. Even the most die-hard design enthusiast needed to make hard choices on what to see.
A must stop was the Victoria and Albert Museum. The festival’s leading venue featured special exhibitions and lectures for the third year running, and was indeed the main spot to meet and pick up information. The V&A’s cynosure this year was its seminal exhibition Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990, showcasing the masters of art and design from an era that defied definition and opened the gates to the freedom designers at LDF can now enjoy.
London streets and galleries were studded with interactive interventions and installations, from the usually off-limits South West tower of St. Paul’s Cathedral—where architect and designer John Pawson placed a work called “Perspectives”—to a show of handcrafted furniture, lighting, and textiles at the Old Truman Brewery in East London.
From this wealth of offerings, we picked three rising British design stars to profile.
Hubert’s “Coracle” lounge chair, with its leather straps woven on a metal frame, has magnetized cushions that can be rearranged to suit the sitter.
Benjamin Hubert
British designer Benjamin Hubert collaborated with the groundbreaking design firm De La Espada for his latest collection, presented at the Tramshed, an exhibition site that marked its second year in the LDF. Offered the opportunity to develop a new furniture range, Hubert shied away from mass production and produced a collection based on handmade, artisanal craftsmanship, a practice that has become rare given the ever-growing evolution of cutting-edge high tech manufacturing methods.
Hubert worked with craftspeople ranging from stone masons to leather toolers. They utilized tactile materials so that the hand of the maker is evident and celebrated throughout Hubert’s designs. In the new line of marble pendant lights called “Quarry,” for example, the marks of the carving tools are clearly visible. When lit, the veins in the stone are dramatically revealed.
Hubert kept to an earthy color palette of creamy beige, crisp whites, and slate grays in many of his seating pieces. Designs such as the “Cargo” chair—which features automotive-grade leather wrapped on an ashwood frame—and the “Coracle” lounge chair—which is composed of woven leather straps on a metal frame, and comes with cushions that are magnetized so that they can be moved to suit the sitter, yet will stay in place—have sleek, refined forms, yet maintain a handcrafted look.
The most original item in Hubert’s new collection may be the “Gabion” dining table. It features an ash top set on a basket-like metal pedestal. The “basket” is filled with cantaloupe-sized granite balls.
With striking pieces like these from Hubert and the others, in the design realm Britannia is clearly making waves.
