Mahal Kita Flowers
Chosen by Charlene Prempeh, founder of creative agency A Vibe Called Tech
Mahal Kita means ‘I love you’ in Tagalog, a Filipino dialect, and this floral studio is a sincere love letter to the founder’s parents amongst a catalogue of tongue in cheek floral spectacles, merchandise and flippant Instagram quips that have turned Antony Burger and Elias Hove, a Margate design duo, into darlings of the art world. Projects with Belstaff, The Brand with no name (previously Haeckles), White Cube gallery and The Garden Museum have all demonstrated a distinctly wild sensibility that is on show at a new presentation at Margate Post Office in December. Pitched as an ‘English floral build’, this broken, plastic, greenhouse installation bursting with distorted flowers, marks either an end or a beginning of an era. Either way, it’s glorious.
Now You See Me: An Introduction to 100 Years of Black Design by Charlene Prempeh is out now
LifeStraw Sip
Chosen by Li Hu and Wenjing Huang, founders of OPEN Architecture
As we travel internationally, sometimes finding safe drinking water becomes an issue— safe for the locals does not always mean safe for foreigners. LifeStraw Sip, the world’s first reusable stainless steel water filter straw capable of removing microplastics, bacteria and parasites from drinking water, is a great product to us. It can also help when you simply want to remove microplastics from water encountered during daily excursions. Light, practical, and good-looking, we like this product for safe hydration on the go.
Walla Crag Venus by 1882 Ltd and Giles Deacon
Chosen by Patrick Grant, author and founder of Community Clothing
1882 Ltd are doing so many fantastic collaborative projects, but I have picked The Walla Crag Venus, partly because I’ve known Giles Deacon for a very long time and have always admired the intelligence and craft in his work, and partly because I think it’s brave, and quite funny, to do what is essentially a figurine with all the nan connotations. It’s beautifully sculpted and the decoration, with Giles’ instantly recognisable brushwork and perfectly sparse use of colour, is joyous.
Less by Patrick Grant is out now
Studio Frith’s redesign of the Erotic Review
Chosen by Jack Godfrey Wood, co-founder Heirloom design collective
The redesign for this year’s print relaunch of art and literary magazine Erotic Review is sorcery-level craft! Designed and art directed by graphic designers Studio Frith, it manages to take erotica out of smutty computer rooms and back into a more artful, contemplative and joyful place with imagery chosen by a curator – Fatoş Üstek for the first issue – as well as essays edited by Saskia Vogel and Lucy Roeber. This first cover image was created by photographer Polly Brown and the second cover was by Loie Hollowell.
The Lucinda bench by Kate McCormack
Chosen by Sebastian Conran, product designer
My pick is the Lucinda garden bench from Habitat. You’ll find it outside the Design Museum in London, where Barbie-pink exhibition-goers and gothic Tim Burton fans sit side by side, sipping lattes and munching sandwiches. Designed by Kate McCormack, a rising talent in furniture design, the range blends storytelling with sleek functionality. Its slatted silhouette casts shifting shadows, reflecting the cycle of a day, while the modular pieces invite bold combinations.
Lucienne Day’s Silk Mosaics 1975-1993 at Margaret Howell, London
Chosen by Genevieve Bennett, head of design, Liberty Interiors
Textile designer Lucienne Day’s mosaics perfectly encapsulate the richness and adaptability of shot silk textiles at their finest. Exhibiting unexpected abstract forms, Day’s weaves capture the innate optimism attached to the Bauhaus post-war period, highlighting vibrant colour pairings in all their glory. I loved the exhibition of these pieces at the Margaret Howell flagship store in London, how anyone could wander into the shop and view this carefully curated collection in such an intimate space.
Communion table by Giles Tettey Nartey
Chosen by Andu Masebo, artist and product designer
One of the best things I have ever seen made out of wood, Communion is a communal pounding table – used for grinding grains into flour – made in American maple and designed as a reimagination of the practice of making [West African vegetable dish] fufu. It was first shown at Milan Design Week in April and then again at the V&A in September for the London Design Festival, when it was accompanied by interpretive dance to a packed out room.
Fashion Neurosis podcast with Bella Freud
Chosen by Rebekka Bay, creative director of Marimekko
My newest podcast obsession – only launched in October this year – is Fashion Neurosis with Bella Freud. Each week she invites a guest to ‘lie on the couch’ to explores the connection between fashion and identity. The podcast explore the universal themes of life with guests ranging from fashion icons to cultural figures in sport, art, music and literature. I strongly believe that fashion is a mirror of the society we live in, our culture and the zeitgeist. In this podcast, it becomes the lens through which Freud and her guests examine our inner lives, relationships, and society.
Fleabane Vase by Toni de Jesus
Chosen by Adam Nathaniel Furman, artist and designer
I love ceramicist Toni de Jesus’s Fleabane Vase. I love how he references the importance of flowers in Queer symbolism. The decorative, the floral, has always been a very strong thread in British queer visual culture, but rather than isolating us, it has tended to connect us to wider decorative traditions which are much loved. Jesus’s vases are also just exquisitely crafted and beautiful, charting their own unique aesthetic sensibility, and I very much hope to own one myself one day!
Under Construction: Takeshi Hayatsu & Collaborators at Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University
Chosen by Andrew Nairne, director of Kettle’s Yard
This ambitious exhibition brilliantly celebrates a decade of projects led by architect Takeshi Hayatsu, working with architecture and landscape students. With a superb sensitivity for materials and craft, Takeshi’s practice feels both ancient and ground-breaking. Having set up his own practice in 2017 (after training in Japan and London and working for Haworth Tompkins and 6a Architects) his projects are both inspiring and generative. Among those he now works with are the innovative 121 Collective, made up of his ex-students. There is a rare modesty about his work, with its focus on the local, the hand-built and a collaborative approach to sustainability. Yet the implications are global. We see the potential for a new generation of architects, like scattered seeds, to be catalysts for change.
Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music, British Library, London
Chosen by Tudinh Duong, creative technologist and founder of digital agency Made by ON
This exhibition at the British Library brought 500 years of musical history to life through interactive design and multimedia storytelling. Of particular note was the inclusion of the equipment used by the visionary digital entrepreneur Jamal Edwards to launch SBTV, and his era and genre-defining YouTube channel – a poignant tribute and examination of how the internet revolutionised music. This project captured the profound cultural impact of Black British music while demonstrating how artistry and innovation propel each other forward.
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Magdalene Odundo at Thomas Dane Gallery, London
Chosen by Sheila Loewe, president of The Loewe Foundation
This little gem of an exhibition was perfectly sized, bringing together six of Dame Magdalene Odundo’s beautiful vessels and a trio of exquisite sketches. The tight presentation allowed for deep contemplation of Magdalene’s work, which shows a profound understanding of clay and its boundless capacity for material story telling. This was Magdalene’s first exhibition in London in over two decades and rounded off what had already been a great year for admirers of her work, following closely on from her solo exhibition at Houghton Hall in Norfolk. What strikes me most about her work, is the ability to bring together disparate influences from around the world, balancing both historical and contemporary techniques in a poetic exploration of anthropomorphic forms that remains distinctly her own. Small, yet strong and perfectly formed, the exhibition left me feeling enriched.
OHMNI clothing by MIA
Chosen by Pali Palavathanan, founder and creative director of Templo brand agency
My absolute favourite design this year has to be OHMNI clothing by the musician and artist MIA. The range, which includes trousers, T-shirts and dresses as well as outerwear and accessories, is made using copper and nickel ‘Faraday’ fabric which shields the wearer, deflecting electromagnetic waves. All of the items of clothing in this range are designed to prevent phone tracking and surveillance by imaging drones.
Prejudice and Belonging, Ethiopia Pavilion, the Venice Art Biennale
Alan Maskin, owner and principal, Olson Kundig
Artist Tesfaye Urgessa represented Ethiopia in his country’s inaugural exhibition at the 60th Venice Biennale of Art. His show, Prejudice and Belonging, was beautifully installed in the Biennale’s first Ethiopia Pavilion, located in the Palazzo Bollani. Tesfaye’s large-format, figurative paintings depicted people in rooms engaging in unrecognisable activities — figures surrounded by both ancient and modern objects. It was extraordinary to be mesmerised by his compositions and details that recreated the familiar sense of being a foreigner in a different culture, trying to construct a logic when there isn’t a backstory. I still can’t stop thinking about them.
Meanwhile Garden, Colchester
Chosen by landscape designer Mark Rogers, director of Hortus Collective
A new public space gifted back to Colchester, this is a reimagined derelict plot, once a bus depot, now a vibrant community space. Made on a shoestring – by Darryl Moore Design, Beth Chatto Plants and Gardens, Matt + Fiona and the Essex Young Designers – the garden demonstrates a resourceful approach to landscaping, utilising the site’s rubble as a substrate, bringing a little wildness into the town centre with a resilient dry garden, which the pollinators love. The furniture has been designed in collaboration with local school children, giving them a voice in the shaping of their neighbourhood and a sense of ownership of the space.
The airXeed Radiosonde weather sensor
Chosen by Minnie Moll, chief executive of the Design Council
When it comes to design inspiration, we need look no further than Mother Nature. That’s exactly what Shane Kyi Hla Win and Danial Sufiyan Bin Shaiful from the Singapore University of Technology and Design have done with the creation of the airXeed Radiosonde. Inspired by the shape of maple seeds, they have developed a reusable alternative to single-use weather sensors. The design spins as it falls, landing safely. By using balsa wood and 3D-printed components, they have minimized materials and incorporated helicopter technology to guide it back to base for reuse. Electronic waste is a design challenge, and we need more ingenious solutions like this to address it.
Coalescence by Paul Cocksedge, Old Royal Navy College, London
Chosen by Simon Terry, brand director of Anglepoise
I have always been a big fan of Paul Cocksedge; he is a magician for products and materials in a similar way that Thomas Heatherwick is for buildings. I was always inspired by what he did years ago with polystyrene cups – creating a fantastic, show-stopping pendant that looked expensive, from the cheapest of materials. I saw his work Coalescence at the Old Royal Navy College, London, in 2024 and it was stunning. It’s made from over 2,500 pieces of anthracite excavated from the UK’s last remaining coal mine and visualises the exact volume of anthracite, a high-carbon and lustrous coal, that would be consumed by a single light bulb left burning for a year. Amazing that something so dark as a material could appear so light and luxurious. Also an interesting commentary on fossil fuels and energy.
A-POC Able collection
Chosen by Lewis Dalton Gilbert, curator and creative director of A Vibe Called Tech
When fashion designer Issey Miyake passed away in 2022, the world mourned his loss with an incredible outpouring of love, celebrating his profound influence. The greatest testament to his legacy thrives through the continuation of his brand, particularly the expansion of the A-POC (A Piece of Cloth) range, the revolutionary 1998 concept of minimising textile waste by crafting garments from a single piece of cloth. Now reimagined as A-POC Able under designer Yoshiyuki Miyamae, the line debuted in the UK this year, introducing weightless knit jackets and trousers made from tubular cloth.
Sculptor Jonathan Muecke
Chosen by Jonathan Olivares, creative director of Knoll
Like American artist Harry Bertoia, sculptor Jonathan Muecke studied design at Cranbrook Design School, Michigan, and his works carry his attitude across sculpture and furniture. Muecke’s existing body of work has been produced in his workshop in Saint Paul Minnesota and sold through design galleries or made on commission for private clients. It’s one part spatial and one part material: forming our perception of space with volume and shadow and engaging the properties of a single material.
Edge Effects at the Whitechapel Gallery, London
Chosen by Cassandra Ellis, colourist and founder of Atelier Ellis
Edge Effects, lead by artist Johanna Tagada Hoffbeck at the Whitechapel, thrilled me this year. Based on the 12 principles of permaculture, Johanna and her collaborators guided year 4-10 students in the local area to observe and interact with overlapping ecological communities. So many layers of gentle thinking. Beautiful baskets made from foraged local materials were shown alongside meditative sketches of historical and local herbs. Children observed and drew trees in order to be immersed in nature. A protective structure of hand-dyed reclaimed fabric made a temporary shelter. And my favourite – ‘ikebana’ works made from paper cups, natural dyes with local seeds and grasses. These perched in the gallery windows, morphing, waving and winking at the light. A space filled with knowledge, material intelligence and a beautiful use of colour, I felt a wonderful shift towards what children (and adults) can see and do rather than what they can’t. A timeless, beautiful but urgent exhibition.
Philip and Kelvin LaVerne furniture
Chosen by Tony Freund, editorial director and director of fine art, 1st Dibs
Gallerist Evan Lobel’s booth at this year’s Salon Fair in New York was filled with works by Philip and Kelvin LaVerne, the father and son artisans who crafted uniquely decorative metal furniture from the 1960s through the 1980s. The display moved me in a way the LaVernes’ creations had never done before. Wandering through the panoply of tables, chairs, case-pieces and sculptures realised in distinctively patinated bronze, with their rippling surfaces and decorative scenes of Ancient Greece, the Far East and lands beyond, helped me to finally understand the peculiar genius of this dynamic duo.
Alchemy: The Art of Philip and Kelvin LaVerne by Evan Lobel is out now