London Design Festival closed this weekend, and the most quietly radical room in the city wasn’t in a museum — it was inside a rug studio on Calvin Street. For Progressive Permanence, gallerist Max Radford invited his roster of emerging furniture designers into the Shoreditch studio of Christopher Farr, the rug producer founded in 1988, and paired their work with archival textiles by bona fide 20th-century giants. The result: a Louise Bourgeois text-rug hanging behind an orange polyurethane-mesh chair, Bauhaus weaving behind brutalist stone, and the strongest possible argument that today’s craft-led designers belong in the same conversation as the masters.
Radford — who founded his eponymous gallery in 2020 to platform London talent combining craft with artistic experimentation — chose each rug because “we love them as individual textiles, but also love how they sit with the works from our roster.” The pairings ran September 15–20 at Christopher Farr, 18 Calvin Street, London.
The showstopper pairing: LS Gomma’s “XR Mesh 2-seater (orange)” — a chair in polyurethane rubber and industrial metal mesh — set against Louise Bourgeois’ “Has The Day Invaded The Night? Has the Night Invaded The Day?”, a monochrome text work from 2009 inspired by insomnia. Street-furniture materials, gallery-grade company.
Lewis Kemmenoe’s “Quilted Fragments” chairs — timber offcuts crafted into wooden patchworks — sit on Gary Hume’s minimalist green “Door Rug 4031”, which depicts hospital doors. Offcut craft meets deadpan minimalism, and somehow it sings.
Carsten in der Elst’s “Graywacke OffCut Chair” — a brutalist assemblage of discarded stone blocks — paired with “Plate 111”, an abstract geometric tapestry of colour by Bauhaus artist Gunta Stölzl. A century apart, speaking the same language.
Elsewhere in the show: a new smocked-textile bench by Tessa Silva offset by a painterly sun rug from fashion designer Romeo Gigli, and LS Gomma’s “Grid Play” lamp with Gigli’s “Big Bang” rug. “The rugs create spaces in which they are in dialogue with the furniture, rather than simply being surfaces for them to sit on,” says Radford. “We believe these works will be the masterpieces of the future.”
Sources: Wallpaper*, Christopher Farr, Interior Design
