Twelve emerging designers who stole the show at London Design Festival
While big brands largely steered clear of major launches at this year's London Design Festival, the next generation was out in force. Below, we meet some of the most promising young furniture and lighting designers coming out of the UK.
Whether banding together to host group shows, occupying shops and hotels, or showcasing their work from the back of a van, emerging designers dominated this year's London Design Festival (LDF) programme.
"I was just blown away," said Duncan Riches, event director of the Shoreditch Design Triangle. "I can't remember a time, certainly for the last decade, when we've had that many emerging designers approach us and say: 'we're ready to go'."
In Shoreditch, London's Max Radford Gallery and Scottish export Slancha curated group shows of early-career designers, while former Royal College of Art (RCA) students joined forces to host a mini graduate show at the House of Icon.
"They're all getting together and saying: collectively, we can do more powerful things," Riches told Dezeen.
Collectives like Design Everything and Object 74 found power in numbers and ways to show for free – or for a much reduced price – by turning a van into a mobile gallery and taking over the offices of architecture firm ACME.
Meanwhile, in the Brompton Design District, curator Alex Tieghi-Walker handed over the reins to younger designers, with exhibitions spotlighting 36 female creatives and design talent from London's African diaspora.
"I don't want this to be necessarily the same voices that Londoners are hearing over and over again," Tieghi-Walker told Dezeen in an interview ahead of the festival. "I want visitors to the Brompton Design District to be exposed to as many stories, as many perspectives as they can."
Read on for our pick of 12 emerging designers who stole the show at this year's LDF.
Shoreditch design duo Akasaki & Vanhuyse took over the Tokyobike store near Old Street to unveil its Tableau chair, an elegant construction using wooden planks of exactly the same width, embellished only by the timber's different grains and colourings.
As part of their partnership, Japanese architect Kenta Akasaki and French industrial designer and Nendo veteran Astrid Vanhuyse work across product, tech, furniture and interior design, while selling products like its WA table lamp and vintage design finds from Japan and Europe direct to consumers.
"They're almost like a mini example of Barber Osgerby in terms of them saying: 'we're not going to do one thing, we're going to do a variety of things and we're going to reach bigger audiences by doing that'," Riches said.
Odd Universe seemed to be everywhere at LDF this year. As part of Design Everything's mobile exhibition A Seat at the Table, the design studio presented its Dezeen Awards longlisted project Peepers – a characterful stacking stool-slash-side table made entirely from recyclable aluminium.
The multifunctional seat was also used to form a pop-up bar in Shoreditch's Grade II-listed former town hall for House of Icon, as part of a collaboration with designers' favourite local watering hole A Bar with Shapes for a Name.
Meanwhile, in the basement of the historic building, studio founders Jutta Goessl and Philip Schütz (formerly a senior product designer at Snøhetta) previewed prototypes for an upcoming metal furniture collection set to be released next year, as part of an exhibition of queer design by 2LG Studio.
Max Radford Gallery has been championing the work of former set designer Jaclyn Pappalardo since the gallery's first-ever show in 2021.
Since then, Pappalardo has gone from strength to strength, featuring in a range of high-profile exhibitions across the capital, including the inaugural show at Aram Gallery and Andu Masebo's birdhouse exhibition, as well as being part of the 2024 cohort for IKEA and H&M's design incubator Aterlier 100.
At this year's LDF, the Italian designer has reunited with Max Radford Gallery for the much-lauded Grain Pile exhibition, where she presented a cherrywood drinks cabinet, and returned to her roots by turning a disused film prop into a lounge chair for the Unbroken exhibition.
Manchester export Jake Robertson has developed a low-intervention approach to working with waste materials, allowing their natural qualities to guide the final look of his pieces.
The results are playful and slightly offbeat, as seen in his aptly titled "Pendant lamp with holes" – made using a scrap piece of aluminium from one of his previous projects.
At LDF, the light was on show alongside his "get what you're given chair" as part of the Car Boot exhibition by Slancha, an Edinburgh-born, London-based design gallery spotlighting independent designers and makers from across the UK.
Since featuring in Poor Collective's Powershift exhibition, London woodworker Darren Appiagyei has grown into a steady fixture in the city's design festival circuit, going on to deliver one of the standout contributions at this year's London Design Biennale.
For LDF 2025, he presented a series of hand-turned wooden vessels, embellished using his signature technique of burning intricate dotted patterns into their surface using a pyrography machine.
The pieces formed part of the Mirroring Dialogue exhibition in the Brompton Design District, spotlighting work by designers from London's African diaspora.
Richard Henley originally hails from the world of set design, having worked on everything from the Wicked movie to runways for Alexander McQueen.
Now, he has turned his eye to product design with this cinematic lamp, on show as part of the 2LG Studio's Green Carnation exhibition at Shoreditch Town Hall.
Informed by Henley's time spent living in Southeast Asia, the piece is made of translucent mulberry paper hand-crafted by traditional umbrella makers near Chiang Mai, Thailand, which the designer painted with ink and fitted onto a bamboo frame.
Jacob Marks is one of the founders of Design Everything – a non-profit collective that, for the last two years, has organised free-to-enter exhibitions for emerging designers that run outside of the official LDF programme.
This year, that involved 36 emerging designers, including himself, creating seats for a touring exhibition that travelled around London in a Luton van and hosted a series of talks on the business and future of the design industry.
Separately, Marks also showcased a range of products, including handles, lights and mirrors made from pine resin instead of plastic as part of the Material Matters show.
Fresh off graduating from the celebrated MA Design Products course at the Royal College of Art (RCA), Mexican designer María Bravo was chosen as one of eight contributors to the Beyond Foam exhibition at London's Aram Gallery, exploring a 3D-printed replacement for polyurethane foam upholstery.
Her take on the theme resembles a caterpillar with padded segments that can be stacked and adapted into different seating constellations.
Bravo also rallied together 20 of her classmates to put on a mini-graduate show at Shoreditch Town Hall under the theme Slow Moments, where she exhibited a modular bed that can be reorganised and adapted to serve diverse needs over time.
After cutting her teeth at Henley Halebrown and Ab Rogers Design, trained architect Lucie Reuter is now working on a much smaller scale – that of a single joint.
Her precision-engineered aluminium fixing, which she calls a T joint, can be used to assemble furniture completely without Allen keys or screwdrivers.
To prove the concept, Reuter has created a series of timber seats and shelving, exhibited as part of Design London Shoreditch, that consist of only two materials with zero screws, bolts or glue, meaning they can be easily separated and recycled at the end of their life.
Traditional bamboo scaffolding informed this floor light, created by Indian designer Adit Abhey Poonia for his final project at Central Saint Martins and displayed at LDF as part of Slancha's Car Boot exhibition.
Its skeletal framework is wrapped in maruishi paper and cotton twine instead of the dried animal parts used historically by Indian construction workers.
"Originally, they would use buffalo veins to tie the structure together," Slancha co-founder Findlay MacDonald told Dezeen. "Apparently, they're really strong, and they would dry them and the way they cured would hold the pieces together."
Originally from Down Under, where she was named one of Australian Design Review's 30 under 30, Sasa Barnes moved to London in 2023 and has since struck up a fruitful collaboration with designer Charlotte Taylor.
At LDF, the duo unveiled a chair and bed from their Act Collection at Brompton's Soft World, Sharp Edges exhibition, both of which can be adapted according to the mood of the owner.
While the chair features a decorative rotating panel in its backrest, the bed can be accessorised with a mirror and a television on stilts, with a lamp and side table attachment still to come.
Before pivoting to design, Britney Lee studied mechanical engineering at Stanford. Now, the Californian native is disavowing the "culture of control and optimisation" she experienced in Silicon Valley in favour of a more improvisational approach.
Lee makes all of her timber and metal furniture herself, allowing the material to guide the final outcome.
The results of her labour were on show as part of the RCA graduate exhibition Object 74 and at the Slow Moments display, where she exhibited a chair made of fallen timber from London's plane trees, set like diamonds in a metal band.
London Design Festival took place from 13 to 21 September. See our London Design Festival 2025 guide on Dezeen Events Guide for information about the many other exhibitions, installations and talks that took place during the week.
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