WeHeart present: 100% Design Highlights

This year celebrating their 16th birthday, Earls Court’s 100% Design London is the creative trade show from which the London Design Festival was spawned – and, even today, is a hub of creative talent from around the world. Last week we had the chance to spend a few hours checking out all that was on show, and here’s a little taster of some of our highlights…

A collective of young, London based creatives – who met at Central Saint Martins – The Decorators dip in and out of the waters of architecture, psychology, landscape, interiors and graphic design, and we loved their interactive installation, in which a personalised tote bag was created from a ‘Design Psychology Test’, determining how much a of a designer you really are. Whilst we weren’t overly enamored with the outcome – 50% normal… please! – we loved its originality and how it so successfully engaged with the visitors…

London’s Decode debuted a new collection – we loved this beautiful hand blown glass lampshade by Samuel Wilkinson, the display also showing his collaboration with Hulger – the quite brilliant Plumen Bulb – which was just about everywhere last week…

We love the elegant simplicity of this collection from Cornwall’s Mark – the Dylan Freeth designed Iso Table was launched at the event…

The ‘101% Designed in Brussels’ programme – intended to highlight, internationally, the most innovative and promising designers from, well, you guessed it… Brussels – had a cracking stand with some lovely pieces from the likes of Lhoas & Lhoas, Loudordesign Studio and Nathalie Dewez…

Part of an exhibition of projects from TEN Collective that are accompanied by plans and instructions for making them, Nina Tolstrup’s outdoor kitchen can be fashioned from products sourced from hardware stores and was out pick of the bunch…

Brand specialists, graphic designers, illustrators and creators of bespoke retail spaces, Kent based Creative Trust appear to have experience in just about every creative angle, along with making their own range of recycled cardboard furniture – on display here in their custom cardboard stand, which for us, was one of the stand design highlights of the event…

We love this multi-functional, solid timber piece that serves as a stool, coffee table or shelf, designed by Brisbane’s Fukutoshi Ueno – in collaboration with fashion designer Akira Isogawa. The super-cool little box is available in flat-pack and comes in 3 beautiful kimono-inspired designs…

Being from ‘oop North’ ourselves, we’re always beaming from ear to ear when we see inspirational design talent from north of Watford, so it was great to see a whole exhibition of brilliant work from the North East, all highlights from the forthcoming Design Event North East Festival. Our picks were Dan Civico’s flat-pack, self build ChairKit_, Afid Design’s Jimi Coat Stand and Sarah Blood’s beautifully kitsch CariBoo!…

We loved the industrial chic of Nick Fraser’s exposed pipework coat rack…

Part of a rather lovely Czech design stand, we were a little bit taken with the simple sneaker styles of Botas 66 – as were we by some of the equally lovely collateral they had knocking around, some of our graphic design highlights of the week…

Staying with graphic design briefly, the 100% Norway stand was chock full of their rather attractive brochure, the contents of which were of course on display on one of the event’s bigger stands. There were all the typically elegant Scandinavian chairs, but Siren Elise Wilhelmsen’s utterly compelling, knitting clock really stood out – counting the 24 hours of each day, the clock knits itself a 2 metre long scarf over the course of a year…

Thelermont Hupton launched a new range of decorative ‘Utter mouth’ pots but it was their provocative stand design complete with CCTV mirrors and ‘Handjob’ coat hooks that stole the show…

There was something that we really liked about the decidedly ‘over the top’ opulent flamboyance of Johnny Egg’s new collection of bespoke, hand crafted, über-kitsch “statement pieces”…

With a diverse portfolio – that includes product, graphic, interior design and event curation – Shoreditch based Scene are a creative force to be reckoned with. We particularly loved their egg timer inspired Time Shelves and their rather lovely geometric Poly Light…

All in all, although 100% Design is somewhat of a commercial trade behemoth, it was truly inspiring to see so much fresh talent around and we’re absolutely certain that we’ll be seeing a great deal more of this years exhibitors in time to come…

WeHeart is one of mydeco’s guest bloggers during London Design Festival. They won Best independent blog during the Design Democracy Blog Awards. You can read all of WeHeart’s posts here: http://mydeco.com/blog/tag/weheart/

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