Clerkenwell Design Week 2025
The Think Furniture mob descended on Clerkenwell Design Week like the spaceships in Arrival (2016) and left garlanded in the glitter of inspiration from so many dazzling brands. When you work in a city that
Is peppered with grey, brutalist drama the pleasure you get from sweeping from showroom to showroom where design is paramount, is like sating all the senses at once.
The fact that our trip somehow also involved Desk Yoga at Nordic Design House, shows the sheer breadth of activities on offer.
Tables For Business exquisitely combined marble into their table tops, offset with backlit LED lighting to give the room a sublime crepuscular glow. The marble / wood meet-cute provided an unexpected aesthetic high point while the subtle burnt oranges were resplendent of woozy sunsets back in our native Margate.
Over in KI’s new showroom there was a structured evolution to their storage systems, allowing free rein for colours to pop out from the white palette so designers could go mercurial on the schemes. Running your hands over the flushness of the finishes and invisible hinges was akin to eskimo kisses on the eyelids, both enchanting and calming.
Design Fields also came with a twist on the pod landscape dispensing with the conventional shaped entry and instead running with more satisfying geometric patterns. Kabin’s space was a veritable oasis of tranquillity, perhaps not the place where you might channel your inner Steve Jobs, more a retreat where you could place your hands in a steeple and plan your next genre defining move.
Descending down into the Crypt we happened upon Deadgood’s super size me bean bag which we gratefully flopped into like a tired fish on a trawler boat. Seriously it was so comfortable, it was like sinking into a thick shagpile carpet from the 70’s, we could barely raise our head until an invisible hand urged us on to the next juicy design destination.
Hitch Mylius continued to hit triple bullseyes with their Ripple Sofa systems, the parabolas they hit pleasing every part of the eye.
At 15 Clerkenwell Close we headed down to the basement, courtesy of Steve Pearce, and drifted into a cornucopia of our favourite brands all seamlessly meshing together to produce a room that was straight out of a cutting edge Apple TV film where Michael Fasbender lives in a flawless reverie with Cate Blanchett -just blue-skying. Case Furniture was also there with a solid showing of new outdoor ranges, CDW piquing both interior and exterior dreams.
Team Think ended our thrilling zoetrope of a design day by choosing our favourite brick wall at the delicious Your Workspace sun terrace, relaxing with pizza and beers and recalling the whirlwind of images and then transferring them it into cognitive discussions on the beauty of furniture design.
“Everything is designed. Few things are designed well”, the designer Brian Reed once famously said. Everything at CDW was designed well! No dull notes , it was a pure symphony from start to finish.
