The London Design Festival grows bigger every year, yet it continues to be engagingly understated, decentralized, intriguing and eclectic. The sprawling and fantastic Victoria and Albert Museum, as the festival’s fulcrum for the third year running, was a real winner with talks, events and exhibitions, as well as installations by Amanda Levete and the Bouroullec brothers (the brothers’ multi-coloured Kvadrat construction in the Raphael cartoon gallery provided a fake landscape to play on in an otherwise quasi-ecclesiastical space). This year, my preferred area was the Brompton Design District in South Kensington, which offered a chance to see the city’s best design boutiques and a variety of small, curated, offbeat shows by emerging designers in empty spaces.
Here, in a carpeted ground-floor flat, I saw a quirky exhibition that centred on…