London Design Festival 2020: Virtual Design Destination

A new digital venture by Copenhagen-based Adorno is London Design Festival’s newest Design Destination

London Design Festival (LDF) takes place 12-20 September 2020 and includes major trade shows known as Design Destinations. These ‘destinations’ are described by LDF as the ‘commercial pillars’ of the Festival. The September programme includes the debut of Copenhagen-based Adorno’s new Virtual Design Destination with the inaugural theme The New Reality. 

The Virtual Design Destination presents curated collections of interior design products from fifteen countries: Iceland, Finland, France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Turkey and Romania. Curators for each country were briefed to focus on design that reflects aspects of the global lockdown experience. 

Each IRL object presented in The New Reality has been digitally modelled and placed in a virtual environment designed to reflect the origin country’s design scene. Visitors are invited to attend daily guided virtual tours led by the country curators on a revolving schedule. While the style and presentation differs, the three-dimensional Virtual Design Destination is similar to Maison et Objet’s interactive digital presentation of participating brands’ physical stands and represents a global push to recreate IRL brand and product scenarios online since the COVID-19 lockdown began in March 2020.

Tapestries, textiles and rugs in the exhibition include work by Kiyoshi Yamamoto (Norway), Inés Sistiaga (Spain), and the Himalayan wool and linen hand-knotted Volta carpet by Atelier Vetra (The Netherlands). We asked makers from two countries, Poland and Lithuania, to give us more detailed information of the woven work they’re presenting.

Based in the city of Łódź, a former textile-manufacturing hub in Poland, Tartaruga Studio’s Spot rug is from their Wasteworld collection of handmade flatweave kilims. Woven from 90% recycled wool yarns recovered from mass carpet production, each kilim is unique due not only to the unpredictability of the colours of recovered yarns, but to the delightful nature of the craft of hand-weaving. ‘Our production waste is now reduced almost to 0%. This means that waste from weaving one of our big kilims fits in one hand. We use only plant-based or non-toxic dyes. Our kilims are designed to be used individually or you can put all of them together as a composition.’

Lithuanian artist Severija Inčirauskaitė-Kriaunevičienė’s Repeated I & II is a collection of carpets created from yarns recovered from used knitwear. The collection’s name refers to the rhythmic repeats of the patterned knitwear but also to the reuse (‘repeat’) of used knitwear to create new design objects. The composition of each carpet differs depending on the colour of the recovered materials and the graphic solution. ‘I can also create unique carpets where a client’s worn clothes or favourite textiles they can’t bear to part with can be made into personalised, custom carpets.’

Adorno’s strapline is ‘The curated digital gallery for collectible design’. Those eager for a sneak peek experience of the exceptional quality of Adorno’s virtual reality experience can explore their 3D commercial collection Walden created in partnership with Alice Stori Liechtenstein, Curator of Schloss Hollenegg for Design. The real life 12th-century Schloss Hollenegg castle in Austria hosted the Walden exhibition, and while a historic setting isn’t the backdrop for the Virtual Design Destination, visitors can be assured that the stunning visual quality and experience of Walden will continue in the fifteen virtual interactive dioramas Adorno has created for London Design Festival. 

Register to attend the Virtual Design Destination by Adorno.