September has proven to be a busy and fruitful month. First we were awash with colour in Somerset House with Dulux for the Colour Futures 2016 launch, and then we were straight off to the beautiful, albeit boggy, Syon House for this year's Decorex exhibition.
The theme for 2015, The Future of Luxury, could be read as both a question and a statement. And we made as much of the latter with a monochromatic stand designed to allow the details to truly sing. Here's just what we meant by...
The 21st Century has proven to be an enriching and progressive period for Surface Design.
Our collective awareness of – and now individual ability to produce – beautiful and bespoke surfaces has reached an all-time high. With this derives developments in quality, availability and choice, which allow a broad spectrum to measure the levels of luxury that these new surfaces offer us, and which transcends the value of the materials used to create them.
Advances in laser, CNC, embroidery and digital 3-D printing technologies have opened up whole new horizons for surface construction and manipulation – now more widely available, quicker and easier to use. As such we are afforded the luxury of time and peace of mind; quality is assured alongside genuine innovation.
As if to positively counter this technological uprising we have also seen a re-emergence of the craft of traditional processes such as silkscreen printing, stitch-work and moulding. The time taken in learning and honing these skills, coupled with the precision and detail they create makes for highly covetable surfaces that have a time-earned quality and inherent sense of premeditated longevity.
Alongside this wealth of manufacturing development and hybridity we have bore witness to a social sharing phenomenon that has increased the ability to circulate our images of beautiful things to a mass international audience and delectable surfaces are a common and aesthetically pleasurable trend; we see beautiful surfaces and we share them. As this seemingly subconscious action continues to spiral and spread we find more and more, sharing again and again as we go, and with it a collective consciousness develops; one in which, as the end user, we can appreciate and seek out the unique and bespoke.
The manufacturers and makers we selected for the show offer a cross-section of some of the most current and distinct luxury surfaces around right now and they included:
Tex-tile, Giles Miller Studio, Olivia Aspinall Studio, Dzek, Studio Moon, Anthony Roussel, Float Design Glass, BIC carpets, Cut-tec, Studio Custhom and Soloman and Wu.
